The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia

The Ethics of Postcommunism History and Social Praxis in Russia Sergei Prozorov The Ethics of Postcommunism Also by...

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The Ethics of Postcommunism History and Social Praxis in Russia

Sergei Prozorov

The Ethics of Postcommunism

Also by Sergei Prozorov FOUCAULT, FREEDOM AND SOVEREIGNTY POLITICAL PEDAGOGY OF TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE: A Study in Historical Ontology of Russian Postcommunism UNDERSTANDING CONFLICT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU: The Limits of Integration

The Ethics of Postcommunism History and Social Praxis in Russia Sergei Prozorov Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies University of Helsinki, Finland

© Sergei Prozorov 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22413–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22413–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my parents

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

x

1 Universal Postcommunism: Kojève and Agamben on the End of History To Uryupinsk The End of History and the Study of Postcommunism The Workless Slave Profane Messianism Subtractive Negation The Intellectual Towards a Post-historical Ethos

1 1 3 9 14 18 22 28

2 A Time Like No Other: Russian Politics after the End of History The Long Farewell to the 1990s Timelessness, Chronos and Kairos The Lingering of the Political The End of Time and the Time of the End Inoperosity Postcommunist Playland Post-transitionalism and its Double The Realm of Pure Synchrony Why Russia No Longer Celebrates November 7 The Legacy of Alexander Rutskoi Poetry and Politics in the Ethics of Postcommunism

38 38 40 45 50 54 59 63 69 75 79 84

3 The Janitor Generation: The Ethics of Disengagement in the Late-Soviet Period The Refusal of Work in Soviet Counter-Culture Ivanov, or Beside the System What is a Pure Performative? Para-Soviet Praxis vii

89 89 97 101 107

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Contents

Identity and Potentiality in Para-Soviet Milieus Between Law and Love The Paradox of Perestroika

112 119 130

4 From a Shining Void: The Dialectic of Bespredel in Postcommunist Social Praxis The Empty Cage The Premonition of Civil War Bespredel The Barge Hauler’s Aporia A Prayer for the Irreparable October 1993 Emptiness All Around How to Play with Lost Objects From Identity to Habit

137 137 143 147 154 163 171 176 183 190

5 The Invisible Victory: Experimentum Linguae and the Appropriation of Anomie The Anomie of Law Cratocracy As Not The Secret Wisdom of the Dancing Girls Free time and the Politics of Decreation The Generic Community Being in Love Conclusion

198 198 203 209 217 224 230 236 245

Notes

249

Appendix

253

Bibliography

255

Index

263

Acknowledgements The author and publisher would like to thank Boris Grebenshikov for the permission to reprint fragments of his lyrics, and Irina Voronezhskaya and Ekaterina Rubekina for their kind assistance in procuring the same.

ix

Preface

It has become a cliché to proclaim that after a decade of decline ‘Russia is back’. Irrespective of whether one refers to the recovery of Russia’s economy or its assertive foreign policy, the success of its sporting teams or the wealth of its oligarchy, Russia has apparently made a striking comeback. Yet, what is this Russia that is back and what is it back to? Almost without exception, today’s accounts of Russia’s comeback routinely describe it as a return to the past, either to the Cold-War era, whereby the consolidation of the Russian state under Putin is likened to the revival of the Soviet order, or, a little less preposterously, to the 19th-century Europe of Great Powers, in which the Russian state served as the bulwark of conservatism and oppression. Paradoxically and disappointingly, Russia’s comeback in the present comes down to our return to the past. While the inadequacy of these readings of Russia’s present through the lenses of past epochs is evident, the question of how the postcommunist condition is to be understood is rather more difficult. After all, the prevalence of analogies with the 19th and the 20th century is itself a result of the overwhelming disappointment over the hopes for Russia’s swift liberalization and democratization in the early 1990s, the hopes that were fueled by Francis Fukuyama’s famous reading of the demise of Soviet socialism in terms of the end of history. After a brief period of enthusiasm about Russia’s ‘transition’, the economic crises, societal degradation and political instability of the 1990s quickly made the ‘end of history’ thesis the object of a rather crude ridicule. As if embarrassed by their brief flirtation with the grand claims of idealist philosophy of history, many observers of Russian politics increasingly opted for the most trivial theoretical accounts, for which the knowledge of the past provided helpful narrative resources in the form of clichés, stereotypes and straw figures. Yet, in doing so, the critics of Fukuyama unwittingly confirmed what they so vocally denied: if the only way to make sense of the present is by resorting to the interpretive frameworks of the past, doesn’t it mean that the historical process has actually come to an end and no new knowledge is therefore possible, as our present merely repeats the past or catches up with the past of others? x

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On the other hand, when the traditionalist determinism of postcommunist studies is criticized, this criticism is usually advanced in the name of the contingency and indeterminacy of the postcommunist condition. The present is thereby restored to a historical status, yet only at the cost of a profound impossibility of saying anything meaningful about it, because, as we know from Aristotle, the indefinite does not really yield to a definite discourse. Postcommunism is then perpetually described in terms of emergence, flux and transformation, even as it is increasingly evident to any interested observer that very few things were actually transformed in Russia in the past decade and whatever flux there is has by and large become a dreary routine. Thus, the rejection of the end of history leads us either to the self-imposed confinement of our discourse within the historical dimension, which leaves us with nothing to say about the present, or to the reaffirmation of the flux of historical becoming that similarly voids our discourse of any content. In this manner, the end of Soviet socialism is either presented as a non-event that does nothing to disturb the validity of past-oriented discursive frameworks or as a hyper-event whose sheer contingency escapes any capture by discourse aside from a permanent reiteration of the radical openness it inaugurated. Either way, for all the plethoric talk, there is little to say about the postcommunist condition. What makes this discursive vacuity so problematic is the evident, though frequently ignored, universality of this condition. However remote one’s experiences and concerns might be from today’s Russia and the former Second World at large, the processes in contemporary world politics, from the vicissitudes of economic globalization to the paroxysms of the ‘war on terror’, find their conditions of possibility in the event of postcommunism and are barely intelligible to us as long as this event remains obscure. This book attempts to bring the experience of Russian postcommunism into the discourse of political theory by re-engaging with the ‘end of history’ thesis from an alternative philosophical perspective. While much of the criticism of Fukuyama’s liberal reinterpretation of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel is entirely valid, its effect has been the rather hurried abandonment of the problematic as such, as if a flawed answer somehow deprived the question itself of any legitimacy. In contrast, this book shall demonstrate that a critical re-engagement with the Hegelo–Kojèvian conception of the end of history, which we shall undertake on the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, does not merely restore this question to the forefront of contemporary debates in political theory but also provide a singular point of entry into the problematic of postcommunism, which

xii Preface

was the original context of Fukuyama’s resumption of the Kojèvian discourse. Thus, our interpretation of Russian postcommunism as a posthistorical condition has nothing to do with Fukuyama’s complacent declaration of the triumph of liberal democracy, whose tonality was in fact entirely heterogeneous to Kojève’s original articulation of the argument in the 1930s. Indeed, the research for this book began in November 2006 after the Litvinenko assassination, and the manuscript was completed during the Russian–Georgian war of August 2008, neither of the two events carrying any trace of liberal-democratic progress, let alone authorizing any jubilation. As we shall argue at length in the following pages, the end of history does not consist in the triumph of a particular teleological vision, but rather in the suspension of the teleological dimension of social praxis as such, so that any understanding of the end of history as a ‘victory’ of a particular form of social order is entirely inappropriate. Yet, rather than leading to a societal catastrophe, this suspension restores social praxis to its originary inoperative status, whose elucidation is central to the work of Giorgio Agamben, which has been the main philosophical inspiration for this study. The emphasis on the ‘inoperosity’ of the postcommunist society permits us to invert the state-centric presupposition that guides contemporary Russian studies, in which it is the state (reformist or conservative, liberalizing or authoritarian) that dominates the society that is passive, inert, submissive and indifferent. While most studies of postcommunism approach social life in Russia in these negative terms, which results in either resigned pessimism about Russia’s democratization or passionate, if vacuous, calls for social mobilization against the authoritarian regime, we shall analyse these gestures of passivity, withdrawal or exodus as affirmative modes of social praxis that have been instrumental in bringing about the end of the Soviet order and making impossible the consolidation of the postcommunist order on the basis of any ideological platform. By focusing on these apparently negative gestures that have been particularly characteristic of the late- and post-Soviet counter-culture, we shall reconstitute the paradigm of the post-historical ethics of postcommunism, which disengages from the formal edifice of the political order and develops autonomous forms of life at a distance from it. Our study combines a reinterpretation of Agamben’s political philosophy in the postcommunist context with a detailed analysis of the lyrics of Boris Grebenshikov, whose rock poetry from the late 1970s onwards has been exemplary of this orientation. We shall present a genealogy of this

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ethics in the late-Soviet social practices and trace its development from the early 1990s to the present, demonstrating the transformation of what began as a mode of resistance to the Soviet order into an ethics of a generic community with neither an identity nor a destiny that is proper to the post-historical condition. While today’s Russian politics rather reminds one of the Kojèvian image of the post-historical society of ‘snobbery’, our Agambenian reinterpretation of the end of history demonstrates a radical alternative to the contemporary autocratic nihilism, which is not to be advanced as yet another grand historical project but rather finds its condition of possibility in the very end of history, which at first glance destines us to the eclipse of all progressive politics. The first stage of research for this study was funded by the project ‘New and Old Russia in the Transition Discourses of Finnish–Russian Relationships’, as part of the ‘Russia in Flux’ research programme of the Academy of Finland. The study was completed during my fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, whose unique intellectual atmosphere, fostering cutting-edge research and genuinely interdisciplinary interaction, made it the perfect place for writing a book like this. I am grateful to Director Juha Sihvola and the administrative staff of the Collegium for their hospitality and efficiency in running this singular institution. Early versions of some of the chapters have been presented at various conferences and research seminars, and as guest lectures. I am thankful to my colleagues, whose comments and criticism were of great help in improving the final version: Alexander Astrov, Andreas Behnke, Pertti Joenniemi, Artem Magun, Vyacheslav Morozov, Heikki Patomaki, Fabio Petito, Helena Rytovuori-Apunen, Yevgeni Roshin, Edward Swiderski and Alexander Wendt. I am particularly grateful to Mika Ojakangas, who read the manuscript in serial installments and offered numerous illuminating insights throughout the writing process. I am also thankful to Yevgeni Roshin for drawing my attention to the singular building near his summer cottage in Karelia, whose photograph is featured on the cover of this book. This image of an old country house simultaneously in the process of construction and decomposition resonates strikingly with my approach to the ethos of postcommunism as a dwelling place that has no other substance than the ruins of the previous order that may nonetheless be reappropriated for free and innovative use that transforms this desolate site into a home. My greatest thanks go to my wife Marina and our son Denis for sharing with me the ethos of happy life, from which the work on this book so often kept me away.

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1 Universal Postcommunism: Kojève and Agamben on the End of History

To Uryupinsk Uryupinsk, an entirely unremarkable small provincial town located in Russia’s Volgograd region, has become the privileged toponym of the backwater province to most Russians. This nationwide notoriety is owing to a Soviet-era joke, whose significance far exceeds the ungainly enterprise of ridiculing provinciality. During an examination in the obligatory discipline of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) at a Moscow university the professor confronts a hapless student with question after question that the latter cannot answer. Increasingly annoyed, he asks what appears to be the simplest possible question that would enable him to let the student go with the lowest passing grade: ‘When did the latest Congress of the Party take place?’ ‘What party?’, the student inquires. ‘What do you mean, what Party? Our party, the Party of Lenin!’, responds the surprised professor. ‘Who is Lenin?’, asks the uncomprehending student. Losing his patience, the professor raises his voice: ‘Lenin, the Leader of the Great October Socialist Revolution!’ For the first time in this conversation, the student loses his deadpan expression and actually appears interested: ‘Oh, has there been a revolution? When did that happen?’ The exasperated professor cannot believe his ears and asks where the student comes from. ‘I am from Uryupinsk’, replies the student proudly. The professor silently observes the student for a while and then brusquely waves his papers off the table, stands up and says: ‘Enough! I am giving it all up and moving to Uryupinsk’. While today the last line of the joke has become a widely popular saying, indicating one’s desire to give up a stressful career in the metropolis and lead a quiet life in the provincial town, its original context is rather 1

2


more interesting. In the figure of the professor we may easily recognize an epitome of the Soviet intellectual, an oxymoronic ‘closet dissident’, who actively participates in the reproduction of the Soviet system while secretly denouncing it in the manner that conceals the dependence of his livelihood on its smooth operation. After all, what would the professor actually teach in Uryupinsk, where the news of the Revolution has not reached and where therefore there is no need for professors of the history of the Communist Party, however critically they might be disposed towards it? Yet, rather than engage in the familiar criticism of the critical intellectual, derided since Hegel onwards as a ‘beautiful soul’ that makes his living off the system that he denounces, we might do well to focus on the student from Uryupinsk, a creature far more uncanny than it might appear at first glance. There is a curious asymmetry between the professor and the student. Unlike the professor, who at the end of the joke is revealed as an opponent of the system despite participating in its apparatus of ideological indoctrination, the Uryupinsk student is clearly not anti-Soviet in any way but rather remains blissfully ignorant of the very existence of the CPSU and its history. Whereas the professor’s secret hostility to Soviet socialism does not prevent him from a superlative grasp of its ideological discourse, the student’s unawareness of the fact of the October Revolution deprives his praxis of all negativity and resentment – he does not refuse to talk about the Communist Party, but quite simply has nothing to say about it. Finally, while at the end of the joke the professor drops his ritualistic invocation of the Soviet ideology and declares his desire to move to Uryupinsk, the student actually leaves Uryupinsk for Moscow, entering the social realm that is absolutely unknown to him and, as the joke illustrates admirably, successfully spreads his message, or rather embodies it in his very praxis. Yet, what is his message, what is the Uryupinsk student the apostle of? Evidently, it is nothing other than the possibility of human existence at a radical distance from the dominant ideological regime, at which it is no longer meaningful either to support it or to oppose it, to oppose it in the guise of supporting it or to support it by means of one’s very opposition to it. And yet, the Uryupinsk student’s gesture certainly exceeds that of a simple abstract negation of the ideological discourse, as his very hometown testifies to the existence of a concrete locus of such negation that is not at all abstract but is rather one’s dwelling place, even if it is a frankly unremarkable town in the middle of nowhere. While it would be easy to read this joke scathingly as a mockery of the provincial town where the news of the Revolution has not yet reached, a backwater town stuck hopelessly in the past, the fate of the Soviet Union actually

Universal Postcommunism

3

inspires a diametrically opposite reading of Uryupinsk as the indicator of the imminent future, in which the Soviet project of mastering, redirecting and completing history would recede into utter oblivion. Rather than being a godforsaken precommunist locality, Uryupinsk is in fact a concrete site of postcommunism. The student from Uryupinsk did not come to Moscow to study Soviet history but rather to announce its end. Yet, his terse gospel does not at the same time announce the beginning of anything new, of any new era that would succeed the abortive Soviet history, of any new positive vision of history that one could be taught and examined in. Rather than merely prophesying on the demise of communism, the student may be conceived as an apostle of the end of history as such.

The End of History and the Study of Postcommunism The Uryupinsk student is certainly not the only one to equate the postcommunist condition with the end of history. It is hardly a coincidence that one of the most influential theoretical responses to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the resurgence of the Hegelo–Kojèvian thesis on the end of history, propagated most forcefully in Francis Fukuyama’s seminal End of History and the Last Man (1992). Even as today Fukuyama’s reading of the demise of Soviet communism as a confirmation of Hegel’s (1979) original announcement of the culmination of the historical process in the Napoleonic state has lost its erstwhile popularity in the Western academic discourse, it ironically remains one of the most popular works of contemporary political thought in Russia, featured as compulsory reading for most university courses in political theory. While this continuing popularity may testify to the penchant of Russian political thought for grand narratives and eschatological schemes, it cannot be denied that Fukuyama’s work best actualizes its potential for controversy precisely in the postcommunist context, if only because it is the very event of postcommunism that justified the revival and a book-length treatment of an almost two-century-old philosophical notion. Yet, the discussion of Fukuyama’s thesis both in and out of Russia quickly rendered the concept of the end of history purely metaphorical, obscuring some of the most topical questions that this thematic raises. What does it mean for history to come to an end and what consequences could its ending possibly have for our lives, which presumably go on in the post-historical age? More specifically, if it was the end of Soviet communism that brought history to an end, how are we to

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interpret the postcommunist condition? To what extent is it possible to speak of postcommunism in terms of a ‘transition’ to liberal democracy, capitalism or what not, if there is no longer a teleological dimension to human existence and the dialectical process has been fulfilled? How may we approach political praxis after the expiry of all historical tasks? It is evident that most analyses of postcommunist Russian politics since the early 1990s diverge from Fukuyama’s complacent vision of the posthistorical state of humanity. Yet, this obvious divergence should not lead to the facile abandonment of the problematic of the end of history as overly speculative or abstract but rather to renewed philosophical efforts at grasping the specificity of the postcommunist condition. Indeed, one of the surprising features of the studies of Russian postcommunism is the lack of philosophical reflection on the demise of Soviet socialism and its consequences for contemporary politics in post-Soviet states. The failure of the reforms of Perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the USSR have been automatically taken to confirm the Sovietological theories of ‘totalitarianism’, even as these very theories have been notoriously unhelpful in both predicting and explaining the course of events in the Soviet Union since 1985. On the other hand, critical theory, from neo-Marxism to poststructuralism, has contributed very little to the analysis of postcommunist transformation and has generally exhibited little interest in late- and post-Soviet politics, eager to avoid any association with the utterly discredited socialist experiment. With a few notable exceptions (see e.g. Kharkhordin 1999, 2006; Volkov 2002; Derlugian 2005; Yurchak 2006; Wydra and Woell 2007; Magun 2008), the field of postcommunist studies has thus been virtually insulated from the theoretical and methodological debates in philosophy and social sciences from the 1970s onwards, which led to the prevalence of positivist hypothetico-deductive models, particularly characteristic of the theories of the liberal-democratic transition, and the naïve empiricism of area studies. In previous studies I have defined the field of postcommunist studies in terms of a continuum between transitionalism and traditionalism (Prozorov 2004a, chapter 1). Transitionalist theory, which benefited most from Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, proceeds from the a priori introduction of the teleological model of transition to a variably defined ‘liberal democracy’ and subsequently assesses the country’s progress, viewing every deviation from the teleological model as an indicator of deviance or the failure to internalize the model in question. In contrast, traditionalism, fortified in the early 1990s by the controversy over Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1993), makes an ontological postulate of the existence of the


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Russian ‘tradition’ or ‘civilization’, from which it infers the impossibility for Russia to internalize the liberal-democratic model. This assertion leads the traditionalist discourse to various conclusions, from a resigned premonition of Russia’s relapse into authoritarianism to a sophisticated programme of social engineering that attempts to domesticate or embed liberal democracy in the Russian realities and thereby make the democratic transformation sustainable. In the more limited academic domain of Russian studies this continuum has been actualized in the seminal debate in Slavic Review about ‘grounding’ transitology between the practitioners of comparative politics and area studies, that is, the advocates of theoretical models of transition and the adherents of the cultural specificity of the postcommunist ‘area’ (Schmitter and Karl 1994; Bunce 1995; Karl and Schmitter 1995). While the connection between Fukuyama and the liberal-teleological transitionalism is evident, it is also possible to approach Huntington’s thesis as itself a version of the end of history: does not the image of a permanent and ultimately irresolvable confrontation between particularistic cultural entities connote that history has lost all teleological dimension and that global progress is henceforth unthinkable? From this perspective, the facile journalistic argument that in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, history has apparently resumed its dialectical course after a brief interbellum in the 1990s is unfounded. Instead, if anything, the attacks and the subsequent war on terror might demonstrate the identity of Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s positions: the end of history is the clash of civilizations (Zizek 2007b). Similarly, in the context of Russian postcommunism the traditionalist approach necessarily presupposes the persistence of the civilizational core of the Russian tradition beneath the veneer of superficial change. Thus, in the logic of traditionalism the fact that history must be studied to understand Russian postcommunism does not exclude the possibility of this history having come to an end, which is precisely what makes it available for study. Traditionalism may therefore be conceived as merely a more pessimistic version of the ‘end of history’ hypothesis, which criticizes Fukuyama’s liberal reinterpretation of Kojève’s reading of Hegel as arrogantly complacent, abstract and determinist, yet does not challenge its fundamental claims. This proximity between transitionalism and traditionalism might account for the curious manner of critical reception of Fukuyama’s thesis during the 1990s, in which the familiar accusations of a purely speculative approach that ignores actual historical realities were mixed with an irritated dismissal of Fukuyama’s argument as self-evident, ardently asserting what is quite obvious to everyone. It is

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difficult to avoid the impression that Fukuyama’s announcement of the end of history was ultimately dismissed not as an unbalanced affirmation of novelty, but, on the contrary, as telling us nothing new (cf. Zizek 2008, 421). And yet, while the critical discussion of Fukuyama’s work may have illuminated once more some of the philosophical problems of Hegelianism, it arguably did little to enhance our understanding of postcommunism. Insofar as Fukuyama’s work simply reframes Alexandre Kojève’s original argument in the context of the demise of Soviet socialism and the apparent victory of the liberal-democratic ‘West’ in the Cold War, the validity of its claims is either guaranteed or undermined a priori by one’s degree of commitment to the Kojève’s reading of the Hegelian dialectic. Moreover, we must not forget that to the extent Fukuyama shares Kojève’s thesis (1969), he must take seriously the assertion that history ended not with the end of the USSR but with the battle of Jena and the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit (see Kojève 1969, 31– 35), which entails that the end of communism was merely an episode in the post-historical process of the rest of humanity acceding to the stage already reached in the post-revolutionary Europe of the early 19th century (cf. Fukuyama 1995, 31). Yet, the very understanding of postcommunism as nothing but a case of evolution, easily predictable on the basis of Kojève’s original reading, deprives the experience of postcommunist transformation of any interest or value in its own right, paving the way for the advance of sterile ‘transitionalist’ theory that, particularly in comparison with the grandeur of Hegel’s dialectics, is both impoverished philosophically and barely plausible empirically, given that the actual political developments in the post-Soviet states seemed to be driven by the ambition to disprove transitionalism once and for all. Thus, however controversial Fukuyama’s book might have been in relation to the contemporary domain of political theory, in its relation to the studies of postcommunist politics the ‘end of history’ thesis merely inaugurated a brief hegemony of a complacent liberal ‘transitology’, increasingly out of touch with the realities of postcommunist social praxis. Ironically, while it was the revolutionary political change in the Soviet Union that motivated Fukuyama’s resumption of the Kojèvian discourse, the consequences of this resumption for the analysis of postcommunism were rather less than revolutionary, effacing the specificity of these events and their universal significance in the ‘normalizing’ gesture of incorporating them as a mere episode in the already post-historical process. Yet, as this is no fault of Fukuyama, whose conclusions are valid within the framework he adopts, perhaps the


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understanding of postcommunism will be enabled by a critical engagement with this framework itself, that is, with rethinking the very idea of the end of history as formulated in Kojève’s reading of Hegel. This book undertakes such a reinterpretation of the end of history taking its point of departure from Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. Agamben is best known for his widely influential critique of the ontopolitical paradigm of sovereignty that has been the subject of a vibrant debate in political and international relations theory (Deladurantaye 2000; Franchi 2004; Mesnard 2004; Mills 2004; Norris 2005; Calarco and DeCaroli 2007; Passavant 2007; Ross 2008). Nonetheless, the popularity of his more recent critical works, for example, Homo Sacer (1998) or State of Exception (2005), has resulted in the unfortunately one-sided reception of his philosophy in the English-speaking academia, whereby Agamben’s critique of sovereignty and biopolitics is often approached in isolation from his more affirmative philosophical vision, developed since the early 1970s in a critical dialogue with, among others, Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, Habermas and Foucault. From his early work on aesthetics (1993a, 1999d) and the ontology of language (1991, 1995, 1999a) to his more explicitly socio-political writings (1993b, 1998, 2000, 2005a) Agamben confronts the same philosophical problems of thinking human existence as irreducibly potential, thus freeing it from confinement within any particular identity or historical destiny, which exhausts this potentiality by actualizing it in a determinate form. Agamben’s philosophy is thus an extremely ambitious attempt at liberating the potential of existence from every form of presupposition, including the negative presuppositions of contemporary nihilism (1991, xiii; 1999a, 47) whereby existence becomes manifest in its own ‘whatever being’ or ‘being-thus’ – the key concepts of Agamben’s thought that we shall discuss in the following chapters. In the framework of this endeavor Agamben has maintained an explicit dialogue with the Hegelo–Kojèvian problematic of the end of history, Kojève’s work becoming a regular reference in Agamben’s texts from the 1982 book Language and Death onwards (see Agamben 1991, 49–53, 99– 101). While Agamben does not offer a full-fledged alternative theory of the end of history, such a theory may arguably be reconstituted through a detailed engagement with his work in the context of postcommunism, which, though never addressed explicitly by Agamben, nonetheless provided an impetus to his foregrounding of Kojève’s thesis in the early 1990s (1998, 60–62; 2000, 109–111). Following Agamben’s own practice in his reading of the Benjamin–Schmitt debate in the State of Exception (2005a, 52–64), we shall therefore contextualize the relatively slim

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‘exoteric dossier’ of Agamben’s critique of Kojève in the wider ‘esoteric dossier’ (ibid., 53) of Agamben’s critique of the Western ontopolitical tradition and his affirmation of a profane messianic politics. For Agamben, the problematic status of liberal democracy at the very moment of its alleged triumph indicates that the very concept of the end of history must be developed further, beyond its designation of the triumph of a particular contestant in a competition of teleological visions, towards the destruction of the teleological dimension as such (Agamben 2000, 109–118). Thus, as we shall see below, the idea of the end of history that we develop on the basis of Agamben’s work has little to do with the eschatological reading espoused by Kojève and Fukuyama, whereby the end of history is the final stage of the unfolding of the historical process, which finds its fulfillment in the post-historical totality of the ‘universal homogeneous state’. Instead, Agamben resumes, in his own original way, Walter Benjamin’s project of mobilizing the heritage of Judaeo–Christian messianism for a profane revolutionary act of arresting the development of history rather than bringing it to its fulfillment. In this manner, the discourse on the end of history stops being a presentiment of grandiose transformation, but rather invites an inquiry into the mundane aspects of human existence in the condition of the suspension of the historical process. The deployment of Agamben’s approach will also spare our study of the postcommunist condition from the question that necessarily arises from reading Fukuyama but which is entirely redundant from the perspective of Agamben’s messianism: has history ‘really’ exhausted its developmental possibilities after the demise of Soviet socialism? Instead, the central thesis of this book is that the end of history is not an event that takes place in accordance with its own inherent logic outside our experience but is rather a possibility that is permanently available to social praxis in the here and now, to anyone in any context. In other words, history does not end by fulfilling its logic but is rather brought to an end in the social practices that suspend its progress. As we shall argue below, it is such suspension that marks the event of postcommunism and it is the inquiry into the possibilities of social praxis in the aftermath of this suspension that makes postcommunism an ethical problematic, provided we understand ethics in the original Greek sense of the ‘abode of man’, the mode of dwelling in the present. Yet, before delving into the analysis of postcommunism as a post-historical condition, we must first discuss the key modifications that Agamben’s approach introduces into the Hegelo–Kojèvian discourse on the end of history. In the remainder of this chapter we shall offer a critical reading of Kojève’s argument


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that introduces into the well-known scene of the Master–Slave dialectic a third figure that, much as the student from Uryupinsk, disrupts the dialectical process by a simple interruption of the activity to which he is subjected.

The Workless Slave The historical dialectic, traced from its origin to its fulfillment in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, derives its movement from work, the concept crucial to understanding both Kojève’s authoritative interpretation of Hegel’s Master–Slave dialectic and Agamben’s criticism of Kojève. In Kojève’s reading of Hegel, work, that is, negating action on the part of the Slave that transforms the natural world into the human, ‘historical’ world, is what ‘realizes and perfects’ (Kojève 1969, 23) the historical progress that is initially put into motion by the fear of death that turns the original human encounter into a Master–Slave relation: ‘It is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is “incarnated” Spirit, he is historical “World”, he is “objectivized” History’ (ibid., 25). In working for the Master – who only enjoys the products of the Slave’s work that he consumes and does not produce anything himself, remaining paradoxically ‘enslaved’ in the very world in which he is Master – the Slave represses his desire for the immediate consumption of the fruits of his activity and thus ‘cultivates and sublimates his instincts’, thus ‘civilizing and educating’ himself (ibid., 24). Unlike the Master, who remains a static, fixed and stable figure throughout the historical process that he initiates, the Slave’s being is entirely contained in transcendence and becoming through negating action: Only the Slave can transform the world that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free. And the Slave achieves this only by through forced and terrified work carried out in the Master’s service. To be sure, this work by itself does not free him. But in transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself too and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. [ . . . ] Therefore, it is indeed the originally dependent, serving and slavish consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness and is thus its ‘truth’. (Kojève 1969, 29–30)

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In Kojève’s argument, the historical process is brought into motion by the originary ‘fight to the death for recognition’, in which it is the Master that first negates his natural being by risking his life and overcoming his antagonist, who is thus reduced to the role of the Slave. However, this act of risking death completes the Master’s participation in the historical process, which he subsequently traverses without losing his identity with himself. The entire dialectical process in the aftermath of the originary encounter is driven by the work of the Slave that actively negates given Being and thus creates the human world that he will inherit at the end of history, when his re-engagement in the struggle for recognition will enable him to defeat the Master and attain in the universal homogeneous state the freedom that he is deprived of throughout the historical process. This rigorous distribution of roles in the Master–Slave dialectic certainly makes for a highly elegant translation of the ontological triad ‘identity-negativity-totality’ (ibid., 200–209) into phenomenological terms. Yet, what if we imagine, for a moment, a figure of the Slave who has stopped working without at the same time taking up the fight for recognition? This figure is evidently distinct from the Master who has never worked at all and thus remains the embodiment of the origin of historical progress that survives in the present only to maintain the forced character of the Slave’s work and thus satisfy Kojève’s definition of work as ‘repressed desire’ (ibid., 48). Yet, the ‘workless’ Slave is also distinct from the ‘autonomous Self-Consciousness’ of the Slave that has overcome (aufgehoben) itself through work and mastered history by producing the world in which he can become autonomous. The Slave that has thus transcended his own condition does not work because he no longer has to, given the disappearance of the Master–Slave relationship. In contrast, a Slave that simply suspends his work is a figure that cannot be recuperated by the dialectical scheme, that is, it is neither identity (by virtue of having worked before), nor negativity (by virtue of ceasing to work in the present), nor totality (by virtue of ceasing work prior to the fulfillment of the dialectical process and refraining from confronting the Master). To be sure, the cessation of work does end history understood as the struggle for recognition but not in the sense of its fulfillment but rather in the sense of simple termination of the dialectical process, whereby history is not so much brought to an end as stopped in its tracks. While Kojève understands the end of history in terms of its mastery by the reconciled humanity, Agamben’s approach seeks to deactivate this figure of mastery itself, thereby postulating something like the end of the ‘end of history’, which resonates with the idea of the


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‘second death’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis (see Lacan 1997, 270–291; Zizek 1989, 133–135). While the ‘first death’ refers to physical death that is a part of the natural process of generation, degeneration and regeneration, the ‘second death’ destroys this quasi-natural process itself, that is, extinguishes the very symbolic order, within whose coordinates the first death could find its place. Similarly, while the Kojèvian end of history is in principle graspable within a historical perspective (as the emergence of an incontestable telos of historical development owing to the Slave’s victory in the struggle for recognition), the understanding of the end of history as an interruption of the Slave’s work dismantles the very terms in which the ‘first end’ could be intelligible – the figure of the workless Slave fatally jams the very machine of dialectics that was originally entrusted with bringing history to completion. In other words, the second, proper end of history consists in the annulment of any end of history in the teleological sense. History ends only when it is conceived as teleologically endless, devoid of any task in terms of which it could be fulfilled. While the Hegelo–Kojèvian discourse conceives of the end of history simultaneously in the two senses of ‘end’ as stoppage and purpose, whereby history ends by attaining its end, the Agambenian approach rather conceives of the end of the historical process in terms of the affirmation of the non-existence of any end proper to it. This image of the second end of history is strikingly different from the Kojève’s in no longer presupposing anything like a ‘universal homogeneous state’ that is the ‘final term’ of history, produced as a result of the Aufhebung of both the Master and the Slave (Kojève 1969, 9). Instead, this abrupt end carries no finality whatsoever, nor can it be presented in terms of the completion of some intelligible process. The ‘jamming’ of the dialectical machine of history is not governed by the desire for recognition, as the Slave’s very worklessness entails that he no longer either fears the Master or wishes to gain his recognition. Yet, what could possibly be its guiding principle, that is, what does one abandon work for? Agamben is singular among modern political thinkers to explicitly posit such a principle in terms of happiness (Agamben 2000, 8. See Mills 2004). In his critique of the sovereign-biopolitical paradigm of Western politics, constituted by the inclusive exclusion of bare life as a ‘negative foundation’ of the political order, Agamben conceives of ‘happy life’ as a ‘form-of-life’ in which it is no longer possible to isolate and exclude something like a bare life, as it is nothing but its own bare existence, a life that is nothing other than its own form (1998, 188). ‘This “happy life” should be, rather, an absolutely profane “sufficient life”

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that has reached the perfection of its own power and of its own communicability – a life over which sovereignty and right no longer have any hold.’ (2000, 114) In Kojèvian terms, this ‘happy life’ beyond any possibility of distinguishing between bios and zoe throws into question the very distinction between the natural and the historical world that grounds the dialectic of the historical process, in which Man negates the thetical identity of his natural existence by overcoming his fear of death and thereby enters the historical world as Spirit, the ‘synthetic’ being mediated by negating action (Kojève 1969, 217–219). The Slave who no longer seeks recognition and has abandoned his work cannot by definition be resigned solely to the natural world or, on the ontological level, to self-identical Being – in fact, he has irrevocably left it in his first encounter with the (future) Master, in which he did not risk his life and eventually entered the Master’s service (ibid., 225). Yet, neither does he dwell in the historical world after ceasing his work, by the very definition of historical progress as contained entirely in the Slave’s transformation of his world. Evidently, this figure of the workless Slave is highly problematic for Kojève’s analysis, which results in its curious treatment at the sole occurrence of its appearance in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: If per impossibile Man stopped negating the given and negating himself as given or innate – that is, stopped creating new things and creating himself as ‘new man’ – and were content to maintain himself in identity to himself and to preserve the place he already occupied in the Cosmos (or in other words, if he stopped living in relation to the future or to the ‘project’ and allowed himself to be dominated exclusively by the past or by ‘memory’), he would cease to be truly human; he would be an animal, perhaps a ‘knowing’ and surely a very ‘complicated’ animal, very different from all other natural beings, but not essentially something other than they. (1969, 220) What immediately strikes one in this sentence is the amount of conditional clauses that are cluttered together as the necessary consequences of Man’s cessation of work. Yet, it is not at all certain whether these consequences necessarily follow from the fact of the Slave’s ‘worklessness’ and thus authorize an unequivocal assignment of this figure to the status of a ‘complicated animal’. First, ‘being content to maintain himself in identity to himself’ does not necessarily follow from the termination


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of Work, insofar as we define it in Kojève’s own terms as forced negating action in the service of the Master. On the contrary, the cessation of work is precisely what disrupts one’s confinement within self-identity and liberates existence from essence: by definition, this cessation actually negates at least one self-identity, that is, that of the Slave qua Slave and hence has nothing to do with the affirmation of inert being against becoming. It is therefore entirely unwarranted to equate the cessation of Work with the end of action or praxis as such. The same problem concerns ‘preserving the place [man] already occupied in the Cosmos’ and ‘allowing himself to be dominated exclusively by the past’. Kojève excludes the possibility of free praxis that does not take the form of the future-oriented project but does not for this reason remain tied to the place ‘in the Cosmos’ or in the past, that is, the praxis that unfolds in the pure present no longer tied either to the past or to the future. This proscription of praxis in the pure present is a direct consequence of the very definition of freedom in terms of negativity (ibid., 111, note 6) and the subsequent equation of negating action with work. If man ceases to negate the given in the course of slavish work that is oriented towards the future, he, paradoxically, loses every possibility of attaining freedom, which, in turn, remains elusive throughout man’s entire existence, as his eventual liberation would, in the Kojèvian scheme, coincide with the end of history and the disappearance of man ‘properly so called’ (ibid., 160). Thus, unless we recognize the possibility of freedom in the present (i.e. the possibility for the Slave to cease being a Slave prior to the fulfillment of dialectic as a result of his work), freedom appears radically unattainable for the human being, its advent uncannily coinciding with the disappearance of its very subject. At the same time, Kojève recognizes the possibility of the stoppage of history before the moment of its fulfillment: ‘Personally, I accept the possibility of a stopping along the way. But I think that in this case Man would actually cease to be human’ (ibid., 220, note 19). Yet, this can only mean that such a stoppage necessarily throws this ‘newly natural’ being back to his purely thetical, self-identical being, in which he must once again replay the encounter that launched the Master–Slave dialectic. In other words, if history stops ‘along the way’, it must afterwards begin all over again from the very start rather than resume at the precise point of its stoppage. But this logically entails that with this ‘stopping along the way’ history has in fact ended, albeit not in the Aufhebung but in the pure termination of its dialectical logic. We may therefore assert that Kojève’s scheme must admit the non-dialectical end of history as an ever-present possibility within history. What remains problematic in

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Kojève’s account of this possibility is his overly hurried reduction of the workless Slave that actualizes this possibility to an animal that diverts attention from the end of history to the necessity of its resumption. If we remove the unfounded descriptions of this workless figure as selfidentical, content with his place in the Cosmos and dominated by the past, we shall immediately see that rather than throw the human being back towards his animal existence, the termination of work opens the possibility of the appropriation by the workless Slave of his present as the time of his freedom, rendered completely independent from any project. By ceasing to be historical, the workless Slave does not become merely natural but rather transforms his thetical essence into existence without in any way negating it. This workless being, who is nothing but his own existence (rather than his essence or his work), finds in this very existence the possibility of ‘happy life’ that is not attainable by any future-oriented project. In the following section we shall elaborate this idea of ‘happy life’ in terms of Agamben’s profane messianic politics of inoperative praxis.

Profane Messianism Perhaps, in this figure of the workless Slave we may catch a glimpse of the human being as such, neither man (autonomous Self-consciousness) nor animal (tied to his natural environment) but dwelling beyond both of these worlds (cf. Agamben 2004, chapters 19, 20). In contrast to Kojève, for whom ‘true Man can exist only where there is a Master and a Slave’ (1969, 43, emphasis original), this figure of the ‘human as such’ is enabled precisely by the indistinction between the two: as the Slave no longer works, he shares the constitutive characteristic of the Master (1969, 42), while the Master, no longer recognized by the Slave, is becoming indistinct from the latter. The obliteration of the difference between Master and Slave through the synthetic operation of universal recognition is in this reading replaced by their radical indistinction: it is not that Slave and Master have become dialectically overcome, but rather that their active interaction enters a standstill, in which there opens a space for human praxis that is neither fight nor work (Agamben 2004, 83. Cf. Benjamin 2002, 463, 865). This life, which is neither bios nor zoe, but rather the former contained entirely in the latter, is entirely disengaged from the struggle for recognition and only seeks happiness, which, unlike consumption (which presupposes the prior production of the object), is thinkable from the perspective of the general ‘absence of work’, or, in Agamben’s term that


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we shall rely on heavily in this study, inoperosity (inoperosita), that no longer requires either Masters or Slaves.1 For this reason, the end of history does not entail for Agamben the end of social praxis or politics but rather (similarly to Marx’s consignment of all precommunist history into ‘pre-history’) its beginning, insofar as his original notion of politics is entirely contained in the free use by the community of workless singularities of the common space of their coexistence: ‘The problem that the new politics is facing is precisely this: is it possible to have a political community that is ordered exclusively for the full enjoyment of worldly life? But, if we look closer, isn’t this precisely the goal of philosophy? And when modern political thought was born with Marsilius of Padua, wasn’t it defined precisely by the recovery to political ends of the Averroist concepts of “sufficient life” and “well-living?” ’ (2000, 114). While the Hegelo–Kojèvian prioritization of the struggle for recognition cannot but lead to the vision of the end of history in terms of reciprocal recognition under the aegis of the ‘universal homogeneous state’, for Agamben recognition is of little value and the end of history is rather to be thought in terms of happiness that restores humanity to its originary inoperosity – the fact that work is not proper to humankind has been firmly established precisely by the Hegelian dialectic, in which it is neither originary nor permanent. Rather than be fulfilled through the completion of the struggle for recognition, for Agamben history ends through the extension of inoperosity, which is originally restricted to the figure of the Master, to the entire social field (cf. Agamben 2008, chapter 8). Agamben’s vision of the end of history thus posits it as a suspension rather than a completion of the historical process and in this manner connects with Walter Benjamin’s political messianism, whose logic Agamben has developed in a series of studies from the 1980s onwards. In Benjamin’s famous expression, ‘from the standpoint of history [the Messianic Kingdom] is not the goal but the end’. (Benjamin 1986b, 312) This means that, to the extent that the end of history can be considered an accomplishment, it is not an accomplishment of history but rather of something utterly extraneous to it – unlike Kojève, both Benjamin and Agamben consider the advent of the messianic time in terms of a simple cessation of historical progress rather than the fulfillment of its internal logic: ‘nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic’ (ibid.) Happiness is precisely such an ‘extra-historical’ achievement and for this reason serves as the guiding idea of earthly practices that make the latter possible, even if an inoperative ‘happy life’ is itself entirely profane and not connected in any manner to the Messianic Kingdom. Thus, Benjamin’s statement that

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‘the order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness’ (ibid.) is understandable in the context of his claim that happiness is the ‘rhythm’ of messianic nature: [In] happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in good fortune is its downfall destined to find it. To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds an earthly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness. (Ibid., 312–313) It is important to emphasize that what is at stake in the messianism of Benjamin and Agamben is not at all the ‘secularization’ of the messianic discourse, that is, the transfer of its logic to the political sphere, but rather its profanation or, rather, the demonstration of its inherent profanatory potential. In Agamben’s reading, secularization ‘leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact. Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use.’ (Agamben 2007b, 77) Thus, the social praxis that we, following Agamben, shall term messianic and analyse in the context of postcommunism has nothing to do with the ambitions of theocracy (instituting the Messianic Kingdom on earth and thus making the profane realm sacred), but is rather irreparably profane, governed by the worldly ideal of happiness. And yet, the axiom governing this praxis is precisely the correspondence of the ‘earthly restitution’ it effects by the stoppage of history to the conditions that make possible the advent of the Messianic Kingdom: ‘Just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in an opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach’ (Benjamin 1986b, 312). For this reason, as we shall see, the key reference point of Agamben’s discourse on messianic politics is St. Paul, whose epistles serve as a paradigm of profane messianic praxis in the contemporary world (Agamben 2005b. See also Badiou 2003a; Taubes 2004). Just as


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Badiou’s (2003a) reading of St. Paul pays little attention to the substantive content of the Pauline ‘doctrine’ but rather seeks to reconstitute the formal structure of the universalist ‘truth procedure’ in Paul’s epistles, so Agamben’s reconstruction of Paul’s messianism is similarly oriented towards the elucidation of the possibilities of the messianic interruption of history in the earthly domain of the profane, the interruption that both comes as a result of the suspension of work and brings about a generalized worklessness akin to that inaugurated by the Last Judgment (see Agamben 2008, chapters 6, 8).2 Interestingly, in his interpretation of Hegel, Kojève also mentions the possibility of the messianic stoppage of history but dismisses it all too quickly as a purely ‘theological’, that is, non-philosophical disposition. For a non-philosopher, absolute wisdom, if it is attainable at all, is realizable only by a ‘being other than man, outside of time’ (ibid., 89). ‘The Religious man can attain his absolute knowledge at any historical moment whatsoever, in any real conditions; for this to take place, it is sufficient that God reveal himself to (or in and by) a man’ (ibid., 90–91. Emphasis original). Thus, insofar as it is not tied to the fulfillment of the dialectical process, ‘religious’ absolute knowledge, that is, the revelation of the ‘universal and homogeneous’ reality, can take place at any moment, no longer as the accomplishment of history but rather as the suspension of the very process by which it could be accomplished. While in Kojève’s analysis this option is discussed only to be dismissed, the parallel between the advent of the messianic kingdom (the revelation of God to, in or by man) and the profane ‘rhythm’ of happiness invites us to consider this option more carefully. If messianic praxis has no connection with the actual arrival of the Messiah but shares its ‘rhythm’ in bringing about a profane, ‘earthly restitution’, then it is entirely possible that history may be brought to an end ‘at any historical moment whatsoever’ in the manner that does not fulfill it but, on the contrary, suspends the very logic that drives it towards fulfillment. It is evident that this understanding of messianism is utterly devoid of all eschatological overtones that characterize the Hegelo–Kojèvian conception of the end of history as a secularized vision of the ‘end of time’, which necessarily presupposes the ‘disappearance of man’ (Kojève 1969, 147–158). If history ends not by the disappearance of time itself after the exhaustion of the dialectic, but in its abrupt stoppage without any meaningful finality, it logically follows that history can, in principle, always resume. This resumption will necessarily take the form of the resurgence of the struggle for recognition from its starting point of the originary encounter, the recommencement of the Slave’s work and thus

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the appearance of new historical tasks to be achieved by humanity. It is easy to see that in this setting the recommencement of history can only take the form of the violent attempt of the aspiring Master to reclaim his privileged position by repeating the originary scene of the ‘fight to the death’ that would force the Slave to resume his work. Insofar as history has been brought to its ‘second end’, its resumption is only possible by means of Terror, which alone may negate the workless slave’s negation of the historical process as such and once again transform his inoperative condition into work. While the unfolding of history takes the form of work and its resumption the form of terror, the praxis of bringing history to an end evidently escapes the distribution of roles in the Master–Slave dialectic and merits a more detailed consideration. To the extent that it remains a negation of the historical process, how does this messianic suspension of the dialectic differ from the negating action of the working Slave that constitutes this very process? What is the mode of praxis that does not seek liberation within history in the sense of the fulfillment of its end, but rather strives to attain happiness outside it and thus terminates the very dialectical framework in terms of which the end of history could be posited? This question is addressed in the following section.

Subtractive Negation The specificity of inoperative praxis that characterizes Agamben’s profane messianic politics may be grasped by engaging in detail with Kojève’s definition of historical action. In a footnote to ‘A Note of Eternity, Time and the Concept’ Kojève defines historical action as characterized by ‘the primacy of the future’ (1969, 136, note 25), that is, the primacy of a certain project of desire that negates the existing reality (thus transforming it into the past) and in this manner actualizes itself in the present. [A] moment is ‘historical’ when an action that is performed in it is performed in terms of the idea that the agent has of the future (that is, in terms of a Project): one decides on a future war, and so on; therefore, one acts in terms of the future. But if the moment is to be truly ‘historical’ there must be change; in other words, the decision must be negative with respect to the given: in deciding for the future war, one decides against the prevailing peace. And, through the decision for the future war, the peace is transformed into the past. Now,


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the present historical act, launched by the idea of the future (by the Project), is determined by this past that it creates. (Kojève 1969, 136, note 24. Emphasis original.) Every historical action must therefore be oriented towards the fulfillment of some future-oriented Project through the negation of the present reality into the past: ‘Time in which the Future takes primacy can be realized, can exist, only provided that it negates or annihilates’ (ibid., 136). On the contrary, the messianic suspension of history in the inoperative praxis of the workless Slave frees human action from the very horizon of the Project to which existence is subjected. Thus, the second end of history is only thinkable as the negation of the Project as such rather than its fulfillment. How does this action, which is certainly negative in some sense, differ from the revolutionary negation of the World of the master that is required of the Slave in Kojève’s logic? The given World, in which [the Slave] lives belongs to the human or divine Master, and in this World he is necessarily Slave. Therefore it is not reform, but the ‘dialectical’ or, better, ‘revolutionary’, overcoming of the world that can free him and – consequently – satisfy him. Now, this revolutionary transformation of the world presupposes the ‘negation’, the non-accepting of the given World in its totality. (Kojève 1969, 29) In Kojève’s argument, negation must necessarily take the form of the destruction of the World of the Master: ‘This idea can be transformed into truth only by negating action, which will destroy the World that does not correspond to the idea and will create by this very destruction the World in conformity with the ideal’ (ibid., 98). For Kojève, the Slave’s non-acceptance of the world, in which he is resigned to working in the service of the Master, necessarily leads him to a revolutionary destruction of this world, whereby he overcomes his initial fear of death and becomes a ‘free Worker who fights and risks his life’ (ibid., 57). The paradoxical formula ‘free worker’, which occurs very rarely in Kojève’s text (see also ibid., 230, note 25), attunes us to the problems with Kojève’s logic of destructive negation. If the Slave overcomes his fear of death and confronts the Master, does not he thereby cease to work and begin fighting? In this case, the Slave’s freedom is certainly realized in the destructive struggle, but in what sense can he then remain a ‘worker’ and, moreover, what is the meaning of this syntagm as such,

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given Kojève’s earlier insistence that it is only forced, slavish work that matters in the historical process? It appears that the figure of the ‘free worker’ inhabits the very zone of indistinction that in our account is populated by the workless Slave. Yet, this zone is immediately vanishing in Kojève’s text, as at the very moment the ‘worker’ frees himself from the forced nature of his work, he immediately becomes a fighter on a quest to destroy the world that subjected him to work. In the context of Kojève’s reading of the Master–Slave dialectic destruction is to be taken quite literally. While on the ontological level the dialectic is fulfilled through the Aufhebung of identity and negativity (thesis and antithesis, immediacy and mediation) that constitutes totality (synthesis, the mediated), on the phenomenological level of the existential dialectic, we find no parallel synthetic operation: ‘In truth, only the Slave “overcomes” his “nature” and finally becomes Citizen. The Master does not change: he dies rather than cease to be Master. The final fight, which transforms the Slave into Citizen, overcomes Mastery in a nondialectical fashion: the Master is simply killed and he dies as Master’ (ibid., 225, note 22. Emphasis original). Thus, on the phenomenological level the dialectic is necessarily fulfilled ‘in a nondialectical fashion’ through the annihilation of the Master. In this logic, the Slave negates his own being (identity) through the murder of the Master, a negating action that is no longer work but rather fighting, that is, the activity proper to the Master himself. The Kojèvian argument therefore turns out to be not very different from our Agambenian idea of the end of history as the suspension of work, insofar as it affirms the impossibility for the dialectic to be fulfilled dialectically, that is, through a total reconciliation of Master and Slave, whereby both become free and equal citizens of the universal homogeneous state. Instead, by murdering the Master, the Slave alone achieves the Aufhebung of Mastery and Slavery, insofar as his re-engagement in the struggle for recognition entails that he is no longer a Slave and the murder of the Master (as opposed to his enslavement) entails that there is no longer anyone to become the Master of (ibid., 231). Nonetheless, this non-dialectical destruction in Kojève’s scheme continues to take the form of the project, first a revolutionary project of destruction and subsequently a conservative project of the preservation of the post-historical state. Is there any way to negate the historical world of Mastery and Slavery other than through violent destruction that is aimed at the dialectical fulfillment of history in a manifestly non-dialectical manner? Alain Badiou’s distinction between destruction and subtraction as two forms of negation is highly fruitful in this context. In Being and Event


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(2005, 407–408), Badiou introduces this distinction in the context of his theory of the truth procedure to emphasize the irreducibility of novelty to the destruction of the existent: ‘[E]mpirically, novelty is accompanied by destruction. But it must be clear that this accompaniment is not linked to intrinsic novelty. Destruction is the ancient effect of the new supplementation amidst the ancient. A destruction is not true, it is knowledgeable. Killing somebody is always a matter of the (ancient) state of things; it cannot be a prerequisite for novelty’ (ibid., 408). In contrast to destruction, the subtractive procedure, presented by Badiou as the true source of novelty and thus the ‘affirmative’ element in every negation, consists in the production of something that is indiscernible within the negated situation, that cannot be rendered positive in its terms and thus avoids any engagement or incorporation in this situation instead of destroying it (Badiou 2005a, 371. See also Zizek 2008, 406– 412). The logic of subtraction characterizes all four elements of the truth procedure in Badiou’s meta-ontology: the event, whose belonging to the situation is undecidable, the indiscernible subset of the situation that is formed in practices of fidelity, the generic extension of the situation and, finally, the unnameable that cannot be forced in the situation without destroying the truth procedure (see more generally Badiou 2003b, 105– 120). By its very definition, subtraction establishes something new that escapes the regime that governs the negated situation and thus exists absolutely apart from its laws. In this sense, subtraction establishes a ‘minimal difference’ (Badiou 2007b, 56) between the negated situation and what is subtracted from it and thus remains impervious to its grasp owing to being non-existent in its terms. While destruction does nothing but perpetuate the dialectical process of negating action, subtraction suppresses the movement of the dialectic by virtue of its avoidance of any engagement with what it negates. Yet, despite its evasion of destruction, subtraction remains a negation of the situation, whose existence depends on the orderly arrangement of all of its elements, without which the situation collapses like the proverbial house of cards (Zizek 2008, 410). It is evident that while the fighting ‘free worker’ represents the logic of destruction, which Badiou explicitly relates to Hegel’s account of revolutionary Terror (Badiou 2007b, 53–54), the Slave that simply suspends his work, without thereby opting for the Master’s activity of struggle and destruction, embodies the ethos of subtraction. Rather than follow his suspension of work with the destructive activity, the inoperative subject subtracts itself from the Master–Slave dialectic as such, becoming indiscernible within it. By subtracting himself from the very relationship that

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sets the dialectic into motion, this figure that is neither Slave nor Master, a non-Slave that does not thereby become Master or a non-Master that does not thereby become Slave, embodies the kind of novelty that could never be recuperated by the dialectic – hence Kojève’s insistence on every ‘stoppage’ of history ‘along the way’ as nothing but a relapse into purely animal existence. In this manner, an entirely novel figure of the human being emerges in the absence of any destruction and brings the dialectical process of ending history to a standstill, thus achieving the second, proper end of history in the sense of the negation of every future-oriented project. Subtraction is thus a paradoxical act that consists entirely in its own withdrawal from the Master–Slave relation: in contrast to Kojève’s pathos of destruction, the Master is here negated solely by virtue of the inoperosity of the Slave.

The Intellectual Who is the workless Slave? How can we concretize this subtractive figure that terminates the dialectical process without engaging in the destructive negation of the existing world? In fact, we need not go further than Kojève’s own reading of the Master–Slave dialectic to identify this figure, as Kojève provides us with a perfect example of the inoperative slave in the figure of the intellectual. For Kojève the intellectual is neither the Philosopher, driven towards absolute wisdom, attainable only at the end of history, nor the ‘Wise Man’, as the latter by definition has no need for thought because he already knows everything and, in the terms of Kojève’s anthropology, ceases to be Man (1969, 85–88). In contrast, the intellectual, insofar as he abstains from changing ‘essentially and consciously’ (ibid., 87), irrevocably loses the possibility of obtaining absolute wisdom. Yet, this is precisely what makes this figure so interesting, as it appears to evade the dialectic of history altogether. The intellectual does not fight and is therefore not a Master, but, according to Kojève, this renunciation of struggle does not make him a Slave but rather reduces him to a merely particularistic ‘bourgeois’ existence (1969, 62–65). Yet, unlike the bourgeois, who does not have a Master but is nonetheless enslaved to property and Capital more generally, the intellectual not only does not fight, but also does not work, which places him precisely in the zone of indistinction between mastery and slavery, in which the progress of history is suspended. Nonetheless, in Kojève’s reading, the figure of the intellectual does not pose any threat to the continuous unfolding of history precisely owing to its evasion of the two activities that make history possible:


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[B]eing neither Master nor Slave, he is able – in this nothingness, in this absence of all given determination – to ‘realize’ in some way the desired synthesis of Mastery and Slavery: he can conceive it. However, being neither Master nor Slave – that is, abstaining from all Work and from all Fighting – he cannot truly realize the synthesis that he discovers: without Fighting and without Work, this synthesis conceived by the Intellectual remains purely verbal. (Kojève 1969, 68. Emphasis original.)

In his dismissal of the figure of the intellectual Kojève conjures the spectre of inoperative praxis that is central to Agamben’s messianism: ‘[A] society that spends its time listening to the radically “nonconformist” Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into inactive anarchy and disappears’ (ibid., 233, note 27). However, it is not at all evident why the society that takes the form of ‘inactive anarchy’ (the closest Kojève comes to Agamben’s concept of inoperosity) must disappear or perish. To be sure, such a society subtracts itself from the dialectical process and loses all hope of ever finding itself in a universal homogeneous state, which also means that its philosophers must renounce the ambition of absolute wisdom. Yet, if we no longer seek to fulfill history but rather seek to suspend it, if what matters is not the synthesis of Mastery and Slavery but rather their indistinction, perhaps the ‘verbal’ activity of the intellectual should not be dismissed so quickly. This is especially so because the image of the inoperative intellectual continues to haunt Kojève’s text, curiously with reference to none other than Hegel himself, whom we shall henceforth approach as a character of Kojève’s own narrative whose resemblance to the German philosopher may well be coincidental (cf. Grier 1996, 186–189, 195–197). While Hegel’s treatment of the figure of the intellectual is beyond the scope of this chapter and deserves a book-length treatment in its own right (see e.g. Losurdo 2004, chapters 6, 9), below we shall merely attempt to demonstrate that in Kojève’s account Hegel himself figures as an epitome of the very same intellectual that Kojève derided. In his 1934–1935 course, ‘The Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel’ Kojève ventures to correct the conventional understanding of Hegel’s dialectic as a method, arguing that the dialectic is an attribute of Being rather than a methodological artefact: ‘thought is dialectical only to the extent that it correctly reveals the dialectic of Being that is and of the Real that exists.’ (Kojève 1969,

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171) Thus, in contrast to the pre-Hegelian ‘vulgar’ science and philosophy, which oppose the knowing subject to the object to be known as something exterior to it, the Hegelian ‘scientific knowledge gives itself or abandons itself without reserve, without preconstituted ideas or afterthoughts, to the “life” and the “dialectical movement” of the Real’ (ibid., 172). Rather than being content with abstract knowledge of either the subject or the object that can never attain the totality it attests to, Hegelian ‘science’ proceeds from the inseparability of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of Being in the totality of Spirit as revealed Being. However, this position evidently reduces the Hegelian scientist to a figure of purely passive contemplation that, unlike the ‘vulgar scientist’, does not deform the object in its attempt at grasping the exterior Real, but rather ‘looks at everything that is and verbally describes everything that he sees’ (ibid., 175. Emphasis original). As opposed to the dialectical negation (‘deformation’) of the object in ‘vulgar science’, the Hegelian scientist who ‘entrusts himself without reserve to Being’ ‘has nothing to do, for he modifies nothing, adds nothing and takes nothing away’ (ibid., 175. Emphasis original). Thus, to the extent there is such a thing as a Hegelian method, it is best described as phenomenological (ibid., 176), that is, entirely contained in the experience of the dialectic of the Real and its revelation in discourse. ‘The Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes’ (ibid., 178). Thus, in Kojève’s argument, Hegel ‘was the first to abandon Dialectic as a philosophic method’ for a phenomenological description of the Real, which is itself dialectical, and, in this description, no longer has anything ‘to do’ with regard to its object (ibid., 179. Emphasis original. See also ibid., 190–191). As Kojève argues, the entire history of philosophy prior to Hegel was marked by the predominance of the dialectical method in the sense of discussion between opposed theses and their Aufhebung in a more comprehensive synthesis. Irrespective of whether the discussion in question takes place between actual adversaries (Plato), between the philosopher and the divine figure (Augustine) or between philosopher and himself (Descartes), the logic of the dialectic has been maintained up to Hegel, who is considered by Kojève as the first (and, of course, also the last) philosopher who no longer needs to perform the dialectical procedure as it has already been fulfilled before him: ‘he only has to have the “experience” of it and to describe its synthetical final result in a coherent discourse: the expression of the absolute truth is nothing but the adequate verbal description of the dialectic that engendered it’ (ibid.,


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184). We must recall, however, that the fulfillment of the dialectic is not the achievement of philosophy but rather the result of the work of the Slave and the fight of the Master, that is, it is the dialectic of the Real itself (its own methods being fight and work) rather than of the philosophical discourse, which, as a ‘superstructure’ (ibid., 190) simply ‘reflects’ its own situation in the movement of this dialectic (ibid, 184– 185). The progress of the philosophical dialectic cannot therefore bring history to an end, but rather itself comes to an end, when the dialectic of the Real that it reflects finds its fulfillment. Thus, Hegel is once again left without work, as both the philosophical discourse that precedes him and the dialectic of the Real that it reflects have come to an end: ‘real History is what does it [the integral synthesis of absolute knowledge], at the end of its own dialectical movement; and Hegel is content to record it without having to do anything whatsoever, and consequently without resorting to a specific mode of operation or a method of his own’ (ibid., 185. Emphasis original). Besides not participating in the fulfillment of history in any manner (much as the intellectual, who, as we recall, neither fights nor works), Hegel is also spared even the tasks of the Philosopher: ‘he does not need to hold dialogues with “the men in the city” or even to have a “discussion” with himself or meditate a la Descartes. [ . . . ] He can find [the truth] all alone, while sitting tranquilly in the shade of those “trees” which taught Socrates nothing, but which teach Hegel many things about themselves and about men’ (ibid., 186. Emphasis original). Thus, while the method of the Master is fight, the method of the Slave is work and the method of the philosopher is dialectic, there is no method that is proper to Hegel. Hegel achieves absolute knowledge by virtue of the others’ activities of fight and work in the past and the philosophical discussions that reflected these activities: ‘Hegel no longer discusses because he benefits from the discussion of those who preceded him. And if, having nothing more to do, he has no method of his own, it is because he profits from all the actions effected throughout history’ (ibid. Emphasis original). For the third time we encounter in Kojève’s text the syntagm ‘nothing to do’, the verb itself italicized in all three cases. Thus, inoperosity, which Kojève attempted to denigrate as the pathway to the self-destruction of the human society, makes a stunning comeback, embodied in no other figure than Hegel himself. It is notable that while history (i.e. the dialectic of the Real) is fulfilled in the activities of Masters and Slaves, the possibility of rendering it inoperative, that is, ending it, is only revealed to (and by) Hegel himself. As Kojève remarks elsewhere, Hegel is ‘Napoleon’s Self-Consciousness’ (1969, 70). It is not sufficient to bring about the end of history through one’s negating action, which must always be

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complemented by its revelation in discourse: ‘It is Napoleon’s existence as revealed to all men in and by the Phenomenology that is the realized ideal of human existence’ (ibid.). In other words, it is only Hegel, rather than Napoleon, who enjoys the benefits of inoperosity, of having ‘nothing to do’ and ‘no method of one’s own’, precisely insofar as his discourse announces the end of history and phenomenologically describes the fulfilled dialectic as the ‘absolute knowledge’ of the Wise Man. The reality of the Battle of Jena is insufficient to make the claim about the end of history true, as truth ‘is more than a reality, it is a revealed reality; it is the reality plus the revelation of the reality through discourse’ (ibid., 188). Thus, although it is the real dialectic that fulfills history, its end can only be revealed in the discourse of the philosopher-become-Wise-Man (i.e. Hegel rather than Napoleon), which alone can raise Being to the status of the Truth. However, it is this very revelation that cannot be arrived at through the dialectical method, as there logically cannot be such a thing as a post-historical dialectic. There can only be a posthistorical phenomenology of the kind practiced by Kojève himself in his well-known footnote to the Second Edition of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that (in)famously describes the post-historical existence of Man in terms of ‘Japanese’ snobbery (1969, 158–162. Cf. Grier 1996, 190–191). Thus, Hegel cannot reveal through dialectical discourse the completion of the dialectical movement that precedes him, but must rather effect it through his own praxis that has no method and ‘nothing to do’, which makes it strictly identical to that of the workless Slave or Kojève’s Intellectual. Just as it was impossible to fulfill the dialectic in the dialectical fashion on the phenomenological level as the Master necessarily had to die rather than reconcile himself with the Slave, it is impossible to do so on the ‘superstructural’ level of philosophical discourse. There is no way of knowing the end of history prior to Hegel’s cessation of work, that is, the abandonment of the philosophical dialectical method in favour of the passive description of the fulfilled dialectic of the Real. Indeed, just like the intellectual, whose ‘synthesis’ was, as we recall, ‘purely verbal’, Hegel ‘looks at everything that is and verbally describes everything that he sees’, doing nothing other than ‘reflecting the Real’ and indeed having nothing more to do. It is thus only Hegel’s own suspension of the dialectic that actually makes the end of history (i.e. the fulfillment of the dialectic) intelligible. This suspension is strictly correlative to what we have described as the subtractive negation of the Master’s existence by the inoperative praxis of the (former) Slave, the only thing missing from our description being Hegel’s claim to absolute


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knowledge, which is in turn conditioned by the establishment of the universal homogeneous state. Yet, if we suspend, for a moment, our belief in the fulfillment of the historical process in the Napoleonic state and, later, the Prussian state, which should not be too difficult, then the Wise Man and the Intellectual are revealed as absolutely indistinct. Kojève’s Hegel is then simply the philosopher who has renounced his work (dialectic) by declaring with unprecedented audacity the fulfillment of the dialectic in the Real itself, or, in other words, ended history by ceasing his own participation in it. In this manner, the Hegelian gesture, which is singular and unique if we believe that history was really fulfilled in the Battle of Jena, may be repeated infinitely by the ‘slaves’ who cease to work and ‘masters’ who, no longer having Slaves, cease to fight. Just as Kojève’s Hegel must have decided that the dialectical process of history is accomplished and no more tasks of negating action could be posited, so a contemporary philosopher like Agamben may decide that the historical process is devoid of any tasks for humanity to accomplish and is running on empty, which means that it can easily be stopped by the subject that dissociates itself from its imperatives of work. Once we renounce the claim to absolute wisdom and its political equivalent of the universal homogeneous state, the fulfillment and the termination of the dialectic of the Real become absolutely indistinct. In other words, the figure of the intellectual, hurriedly dismissed by Kojève but in fact identical to his description of Hegel’s own praxis, becomes the model for the social praxis that ends history not through the fulfillment of its dialectic but by rendering it inoperative. The intellectual or rather ‘intellectuality’ as such in its irreducibly collective existence is the privileged subject of Agamben’s ‘coming politics’. As opposed to Kojève’s Hegel, a solitary philosopher par excellence, for Agamben thought is always experienced as a common power, an experience that is only accessible as that of power insofar as it implies the common capacity for the use of intellectual faculties: ‘After all, if there existed one and only one being, it would be absolutely impotent’ (Agamben 2000, 10). In Agamben’s argument, thought, insofar as it belongs to the ‘one and only possible intellect common to all human beings’, is the mode of praxis that conditions the possibility of ‘happy life’ beyond zoe and bios: ‘intellectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life’ (ibid., 11). Sovereign power, the object of Agamben’s incisive criticism, operates through the dissociation between natural and

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historical life, akin to that performed in Kojève’s dialectic, in which the Master enters bios by risking his zoe, while the Slave does so by negating his zoe through work. In contrast, the messianic ‘form-of-life’ can only emerge through mending this separation and restoring human existence to its cohesive character of potentiality and freedom. In his discussion of Dante in ‘The Work of Man’ (2007c: 8–10), Agamben points out that common intellect is only conceivable as potential, as, unlike individual acts of thought, it can never fully pass into actuality but rather exists as potential in any individual act. The restoration of this potentiality cannot be achieved through work, in which the potentiality of existence is always exhausted in the actuality of its product. Instead, thought restores its potentiality by means of the subtraction of the human being from the dialectical process, which, as we have seen, is precisely the strategy of the intellectual, including the intellectual who pretends to be a Wise Man. We must emphasize that Agamben’s affirmation of ‘general intellectuality’ has nothing to do with the valorization of thought as itself a form of labour, a strategy observable, for example, in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), in which the tendency towards the predominance of ‘immaterial labour’ is interpreted as a direct pathway to the emancipation of the multitude, which uncannily resembles Kojève’s figure of the ‘free worker’ (see Prozorov 2007a, chapter 6). In contrast, Agamben insists on ‘[d]istinguishing between the massive inscription of social knowledge into the productive processes (an inscription that characterizes the contemporary phase of capitalism, the society of the spectacle) and intellectuality as antagonistic power and form of life’ (Agamben 2000, 11). The ‘immaterial’ or ‘intellectual’ character of labour changes nothing in the Master–Slave relationship, as long as thought remains mobilized for the slavish work, exhausting its power in the actuality of the product, consumed by the Master. It is therefore only the demobilization of thought from work and every future-oriented project that restores to it its own power. It is the specific character of this power and the possibilities of its appropriation and use in the postcommunist condition that we shall elucidate in this book.

Towards a Post-historical Ethos It is in its emphasis on demobilization and inoperosity as positive conditions of post-historical praxis, of a ‘life integrally assigned to happiness’ that Agamben’s vision of the ‘coming politics’ resonates with


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the experience of Russian postcommunism. The studies of the Russian postcommunist transformation since the late 1980s have, without exception and irrespectively of their theoretical orientation, noted the tendency for depoliticization of social life and the exit of the society from the realm of politics after a brief surge of popular politics during the period of Perestroika in 1987–1990. Moreover, the experience of postcommunist Russian politics, characterized by the widely discussed displacement of state authority by a bureaucratic–oligarchic matrix (see Prozorov 2004a, 2005a, 2007b), in which the public and the private are no longer distinct, accords with Agamben’s reconstruction of the problematic of the end of history in the manner entirely opposed to Fukuyama’s triumphalist liberalism, for which it is precisely the liberal (universal-homogeneous) state that fulfills the historical dialectic. On the contrary, Agamben insists that we should think ‘the end of the state and the end of history at one and the same time [and] mobilize one against the other’. (Agamben 2000, 111). [T]he battlefield is divided today in the following way: on one side, there are those who think the end of history without the end of the state (that is, the post-Kojèvian or postmodern theorists of the fulfillment of the historical process of humanity in a homogeneous universal state); on the other side, there are those who think the end of the state without the end of history (that is, progressivists of all sorts). Neither position is equal to its task because to think the extinction of the state without the fulfillment of the historical telos is as impossible as to think a fulfillment of history in which the empty form of state sovereignty would continue to exist. (Ibid., 110–111) While the ‘progressivist’ accounts of the end of the state that does not simultaneously end history celebrate the apparent proliferation of various non- or para-statist structures of ‘global governance’, the ‘postKojèvian’ theories rather view the contemporary liberal-democratic state as the appropriate form of managing the post-historical existence of humanity. It is easy to see that these accounts actually converge, insofar as it is precisely the ‘post-historical’ liberal state that is itself actively involved in the transformation of its governmental rationalities in accordance with the ‘progressivist’ recipes, from the devolution of state authority to private agencies to the subjection of state governments to the international normative regimes of global governance (see Dean 2002; Prozorov 2004b). Instead, for Agamben, the end of history,

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understood in terms of the termination of the dialectical process, must necessarily presuppose the crisis of the state or any other form of constituted order (Agamben 2000, 111). The search for a post-historical ethos of humanity becomes entirely heterogeneous to any statist project, but rather probes the possibilities of the human reappropriation of historicity, the taking hold of human time itself whereby the ‘anarchic historicity itself that – having been posited as a presupposition – destined living human beings to various epochs and historical cultures [comes] to thought as such’ (ibid., 112). In other words, the expiry of the series of historical epochs, to which there correspond historical figures of the (broadly defined) state, entails the appearance of the void at the heart of every state form, which no longer finds any grounding in the epochal tradition or culture but solely attempts to capture and contain the ‘anarchic historicity’, that is, the free use of time in social praxis. ‘The appropriation of historicity, therefore, cannot still take a state-form, given that the state is nothing other than the presupposition and the representation of the being-hidden of the historical arche. This appropriation, rather, must open the field to a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life – a politics and a life that [are] yet to be entirely thought’ (ibid., 112. Emphasis original). It is the contention of this book that this figure of politics and human life is not something yet to come, but is rather already present, albeit in a frequently misrecognized form, in the postcommunist social praxis in contemporary Russia and, furthermore, is certainly not restricted to Russia or the post-Soviet states alone. As the theme of the end of history was revived in political theory with the demise of communism, it logically follows that postcommunism is a privileged site for inquiring into the post-historical condition of humanity, not as anything particular or ‘culturally specific’, but rather as the most vivid example of a tendency that must be universal to be meaningful – it would indeed be absurd to suggest that history could end in, for example, Russia, Estonia or Moldova but not elsewhere. What is at stake is not simply analysing the problematic of the end of history in the context of the postcommunist experience or ‘testing’ Agamben’s hypothesis empirically, which would introduce the very ‘deformation’ of the object that, according to Kojève, characterizes ‘naïve science’, but rather attempting to grasp postcommunism itself as an experience, our experience, which remains without due reflection precisely because of its dangerous capacity to disturb the coordinates of our symbolic universe. In his study of the postcommunist condition, Richard Sakwa (1999, 3–4) has distinguished between ‘specific postcommunism’, the


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contemporary political condition of the states of the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact, and ‘universal postcommunism’, a condition that characterizes political thought and praxis globally: after all, we all live in the postcommunist times and the demise of Soviet socialism has carried serious implications for world politics in general and not merely for the populations of the ‘socialist camp’. Perhaps the reason why the contours of ‘universal postcommunism’ are so unclear is precisely the failure of political thought to come to terms with the experience of ‘specific postcommunism’, which it all too hurriedly filed away under the rubric of ‘liberal-democratic transition’. In this manner, the revival of the Hegelo–Kojèvian theme of the end of history has been trivialized as yet another indicator of the triumph of liberal democracy over its ideological adversary and the legitimation of the extension of the Western liberal-democratic model worldwide both theoretically and, as the surge in military interventions for the purposes of ‘regime change’ and ‘democracy promotion’ make clear, also practically. What was originally articulated as the end of history became reinscribed as the beginning of a new era of the unchallenged supremacy of Western democracy. Yet, it is surely a symptom of a lack of seriousness that the declaration of the ‘end’ of something is immediately recast, with ill-advised optimism, as a new beginning. The understanding of today’s condition of ‘universal postcommunism’ and the serious analysis of the problematic of the end of history must therefore begin with the re-engagement with the concrete experience of the demise of the Soviet order and the subsequent socio-political developments in Russia and other postcommunist states. This book takes a first step in this direction in its attempt to reconstitute the paradigm of social praxis that accompanied the demise of the Soviet order and persisted in its aftermath without becoming the object of serious political analysis. This mode of praxis that we, following Agamben, shall term ‘inoperative’ has at best been cast in negative or judgmental terms of ‘passivity’, ‘indifference’ and ‘inaction’ and deployed in the interpretations of what is widely perceived as the ‘failure’ of whatever is meant by ‘liberal-democratic reforms’ in Russia. The importance of investigating this mode of praxis in its own terms does not merely have to do with the fact that its habitual negation rests on a facile activist metaphysics that has grounded the disastrous projects of modern totalitarianism, but also because the very theme of passive politics is increasingly addressed in today’s political theory as the appropriate strategy of resistance to contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. For example, Slavoj Zizek (2006, 375–385) has proposed a ‘Bartleby-politics’

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of passive aggression and ‘impassive refusal’, a ‘gesture of pure withdrawal’, as a corrective to the meaningless and self-serving practices of ‘resistance’ in today’s neo-liberal terrain that are immediately recuperated by dominant governmental rationalities and therefore only serve, in their very frantic activity, to make things stay the same. Similarly, Alain Badiou, otherwise a champion of militant political action, proclaims in Thesis 15 of his Theses on Contemporary Art that ‘it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent’ (Badiou 2004, 121). By the same token, Jean-Luc Nancy’s innovative theorization of community proceeds from an explicit renunciation of any approach to community as ‘objectifiable’ or ‘producible’, insisting rather that it should be grasped as ‘inoperative’, ‘not a work to be done or produced’ (Nancy 1991, 35). Agamben’s work over the last 30 years has arguably been the most sophisticated attempt at confronting the possibilities of overturning the ontopolitical constellation that has governed Western politics through apparently purely negative gestures of withdrawal, refusal and passivity. Yet, the discussion of this aspect of Agamben’s work has so far unfolded in a purely theoretical context, in which the notion of inoperosity has been construed as utopian, apocalyptic or simply far-fetched (cf. Laclau 2007; Negri 2008). One of the tasks of this book is to correct this misunderstanding by combining a philosophical discussion of inoperative praxis with a detailed analysis of the site in which this praxis has manifested itself most spectacularly, being a crucial factor both in the demise of the Soviet order and in the eventual turn of events in the post-Soviet period. Although the primary philosophical inspiration behind this book is the work of Giorgio Agamben, the aim of this book is not to apply Agamben’s philosophical insights to the domain of Russian postcommunism to verify or refute them. Instead, we shall attempt to repeat, at a domain never addressed in Agamben’s work, his characteristic gesture, which consists in the radical destabilization of the horizon of intelligibility and legitimacy of the conventional modes of social praxis and a consequent ethico-political transvaluation, which, in accordance with Hölderlin’s famous phrase, finds ‘saving power’ where we are accustomed to see only danger. On a number of occasions in different contexts, Agamben (1993b, 1998, 2005a) has asserted the possibility of a radically different form of life on the basis of precisely the same things that he initially set out to criticize. Agamben paints a convincingly gloomy picture of the present state of things only to undertake a majestic reversal at the end, finding hope and conviction in the very despair that engulfs us. Our


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very destitution thereby turns out be the condition for the possibility of a completely different life whose description is in turn entirely devoid of fantastic mirages. Similarly, our reading of Russian postcommunism proceeds from a simple hypothesis: the event of postcommunism brings about the end of history in the sense of the messianic termination of the dialectical process, which entails the expiry of all teleological projects that subject human existence in the present to the task of bringing about a ‘brighter future’. Yet, rather than resign the postcommunist society to a meaningless existence, from which every sense of redemption is a priori evacuated, this very expiry creates the conditions of possibility for the appropriation of temporality by the postcommunist society that is no longer consigned to the sacrifice of the present in the name of a futureoriented project but rather reclaims the potentiality of its existence in a ‘happy life’ in the pure present. We must emphasize that this appropriation is only one possible response to the post-historical condition, which, as we shall see, also include existential disorientation and melancholy, self-righteous cynicism and proud mediocrity, retreat into crude consumerism or fake spirituality, brute pursuit of power and profit with no regard for its legitimation by tradition or ideology, etc. The event of postcommunism has certainly elicited such nihilistic and destructive reactions that have been addressed extensively in both journalistic and academic literature, albeit hardly ever in the context of the end of history. What remains obscure is the possibility of recasting the end of history as no longer a negative experience of expropriation and privation but rather a condition of possibility of a ‘happy life’ in the present that is no longer subjected to a future-oriented project. Yet, in full accordance with Hölderlin’s maxim, before we arrive at this possibility of happiness we must traverse the post-historical terrain of postcommunist politics with all the dangers that it poses. In the following chapter, we shall analyse the messianic ‘deactivation’ of the teleo-ideological field in postcommunist politics in the early 1990s and its suspension in this deactivated status during the Putin presidency and its aftermath. In Agamben’s formula, which occupies a privileged place in his textual corpus (1998, 51; 1999a, 160–174), the postcommunist political regime in Russia has remained formally in force but without any significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung). Originally articulated by Gershom Scholem in his reading of Kafka, this formula is generalized by Agamben as an adequate description of the state of exception, in which the application of the law is suspended and power is revealed in its brute facticity. Insofar as messianic time is to be understood as a radical generalization of the state of exception, it is inevitably characterized by this

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inoperosity of constituted power, whereby all positive content of politics has been stripped away. As we shall demonstrate, this ‘kenomatic’ state of the social order is an ineradicable feature of the post-historical temporality of Russian postcommunism, so that any mode of politics in today’s Russia, be it Putin’s ‘sovereign democracy’ or an Agambenian ‘coming politics’ of happy life, necessarily unfolds in the condition of the radical deactivation of the formal political sphere. As this sphere has been progressively evacuated of any meaningful vision of socio-political transformation, the process of the societal disengagement from politics, which began immediately after the ‘anticommunist revolution’ of August 1991, has been practically completed during the 1990s. Indeed, if the series of legislative acts introduced during the Putin presidency – which severely restricted the possibilities for opposition parties and popular protest voting, public demonstrations and the activities of nongovernmental organizations – met with little resistance or surprise, this was arguably because the society had long vacated the space of public politics. Yet, this situation is precisely the point from which we should begin to analyse the gestures of disengagement, withdrawal and exodus as modes of social praxis appropriate to the end of history, rather than end the discussion of the depoliticization of the Russian society on a note of resigned pessimism or a vacuous call to action. It is our objective in this book to offer a detailed description of what we shall call the paradigm of ‘inoperative praxis’ in the post-Soviet society. Given the concomitant process of the exit of the society from the sphere of politics and its expulsion from it by an increasingly authoritarian and technocratic administration, it is obvious that we cannot find such a paradigm in the ever-narrowing public sphere. In fact, this narrowing is itself one of the effects of the praxis of radical societal disengagement, resulting as much from the voluntary renunciation of political activity as from the coercive and restrictive ‘rules of the game’ imposed from above. Thus, we must look beyond the formal sphere of politics to the domain of popular culture, in which this movement of disengagement is both articulated on the level of content and exemplified stylistically. The remainder of the book is therefore devoted to a detailed analysis of the formation and transformation of the paradigm of inoperative praxis in the rock poetry of Boris Grebenshikov, a key figure in late-Soviet underground culture and one of the most acclaimed Russian singer-songwriters of the post-Soviet period. Our study of Grebenshikov’s poetry focuses on three periods in his work that correspond to the three distinct stages of the emergence of the post-historical ethics of postcommunism.


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In Chapter 3 we shall analyse the process of disengagement from the ritualized sphere of Soviet public life and the formation of the paradigm of passive resistance to the regime’s attempt at regulating or suppressing the rapidly rising counterculture, both brilliantly depicted and actually practiced by Grebenshikov’s group Akvarium during the late-Soviet period. This practice of disengagement, whereby ever greater sections of society dissociated themselves from the system to pursue autonomous forms of life, frequently at the risk of public denunciation and ostracism, if not persecution, had nothing to do with a ‘headon’ confrontation with the Soviet system, yet neither was it a mere retreat into private life. Instead, this praxis displaced the very opposition between the public and the private in furnishing new forms of life that were social despite lacking any public visibility. We shall argue that it was precisely the intensification of this disengagement during the Perestroika period that brought about the demise of the Soviet system, which was left out in the cold by the indifferent subjects at the very moment when Gorbachev’s reformist policies sought to mobilize the society for a new project of democratizing the Soviet order. In our analysis of Grebenshikov’s few explicitly political lyrics during the Perestroika period, we shall demonstrate that even these exceptional interventions into politics advocate not a confrontation with the system but a certain ‘return home’ that liberates one from a debilitating struggle between rival historical projects. The second phase in Grebenshikov’s writing, analysed in Chapter 4, relates to the experience of early postcommunism in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We shall analyse the way the lyrics of this period attempt to come to terms with the experience of the end of history and the tragicomedy of the collapse of the Soviet symbolic universe, and the concurrent degradation of social life. Of particular interest in this respect is Grebenshikov’s singular reconstruction of the Russian cultural tradition in the context of the 1990s that in the jargon of the time was called the time of bespredel (literally ‘limitlessness’, chaos, disorder). Far from being a straightforward retreat into religious or ethnic traditionalism in the condition of post-historical disorientation and symbolic destitution, Grebenshikov’s lyrics of this period are rather marked by a contextualization of the tradition within the scene of the postcommunist disaster, whereby theological themes of redemption are inextricably entangled with bitter social satire and absurdist humour. In contrast to the Russian officialdom, which, from the early 1990s onwards, has been preoccupied, often in a grotesque way, with designing a new ‘national idea’ to fill the postcommunist void but achieved

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little more than a wholly ritualistic celebration of tradition that deprives it of all living meaning, Grebenshikov’s irreverent play with tradition keeps the ‘sacred’ alive precisely by profaning it and sublimates the profane experiences of today by treating them on the same plane with the valorized cultural artefacts. On the whole, this period of Grebenshikov’s writing exemplifies the post-historical disorientation, experienced by many in the 1990s, which accounts for a remarkably diverse range of moods in the songs of this period, from a bitter condemnation of postSoviet realities to a blithe celebration of their absurdity. What remains the same is the underlying stance of disengagement, which is of course made problematic in this period by the absence of anything remotely resembling a system of ‘normal politics’, which one could either engage in or be disengaged from. Finding nothing of interest or use in the deactivated ideological landscape and the socio-political anomie during this period, Grebenshikov, just like most of the Russian society, remains caught in the undecidable openness of the postcommunist condition, surveying the scene of the post-Soviet catastrophe in a desperate search for the ways to actualize the possibilities of freedom both opened and thwarted by the condition of bespredel. This experiment of coming to terms with the post-historical condition of postcommunism reaches a conclusion in the third and current phase of Grebenshikov’s work, whose beginning might be dated to the late 1990s. In the lyrics of this period, analysed in Chapter 5, the frantic oscillation between the tragic and the comic dimensions of life amid the ruins of communism finds an elegant resolution that resonates strongly with Agamben’s vision of the ‘coming community’, inaugurated by the messianic experience of end of history. Grebenshikov’s poetry illuminates the possibility for the postcommunist society to find its ethos in the very negativity and inoperosity of the postcommunist condition that it both produced in its disengagement from the Soviet order and decried as chaotic and disorderly in the 1990s. The desolate and meaningless landscape of postcommunism, devoid of any socio-political vision of the future, itself becomes the dwelling place, in which social praxis may finally unfold in the absence of historical tasks, to which one’s present existence must be sacrificed. This ethos, a way of life in the postcommunist ruins, is thus found precisely in the very negativity that is revealed by the distance originally established and kept with respect to the late-Soviet system. This originary fissure, constitutive of postcommunism as an experience, is converted into a safe dwelling space to which the formal political sphere has no access and from which the sovereign is manifestly excluded. This appropriation of negativity


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qua ethos through the suspension of negating action entails a movement from teleology, which subjected humanity to historical tasks, and ontology, which subjected humanity to a foundation in the form of determinate essence or identity, towards ethics, which is only possible in the absence of determined identities and historical projects as a matter of human freedom. The book concludes with the discussion of the wider implications of the ethics of postcommunism for the critical discourse and praxis in contemporary global politics.

2 A Time Like No Other: Russian Politics after the End of History

The Long Farewell to the 1990s Contemporary Russian politics is conventionally grasped in terms of a simple antithesis of the Yeltsinite decade of the 1990s. From the moment of its triumphant ascendancy on the eve of the millennium, the Putin presidency posited as the condition of its legitimacy the overcoming of the 1990s in numerous ways: political stabilization, economic growth, the reassertion of sovereignty in foreign policy, the restoration of historical tradition, the reconstitution of the state, etc. Despite the fact that Putin emerged to the forefront of Russian politics only by being designated by Yeltsin as his choice for successor, the regime’s discourse of self-legitimation has invariably articulated the ‘Putin era’ as an outright negation of the 1990s as the ‘Yeltsin decade’. Responding to criticism of contemporary policies, the apologists of the current administration, many of them ironically belonging to the narrow circle of Yeltsin’s ‘spin doctors’, never fail to remark that the present situation is ‘at least better than in the 1990s’ (see Pavlovsky 2000). The advantage of the present regime over that of the 1990s is apparently visible in all aspects of socio-political life, from the impressive statistics of economic growth to the sense of societal consolidation, from the resurgence of patriotism and the revival of cultural traditions to the more assertive line in foreign policy. The key word in all accounts is nonetheless stability, a sense of new-found certainty and security, coveted so much in the chaotic period of early postcommunism. Conversely, the most damaging criticism of Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev, advanced, for example, in leftist or nationalist circles, relates precisely to the denial of this negation by pointing out that the ‘farewell to the 1990s’, proclaimed by the current regime, is at best illusory and that at worst the 38

A Time Like No Other

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regime persists, ever-more cynically, in the same political paradigm that characterized the 1990s (see Belkovsky 2005). In these arguments, the proverbial achievement of stability is reinterpreted as a cruel irony: not only is the Yeltsinite political regime maintained against all protestations to the contrary but, to add insult to injury, it has even managed to stabilize itself. The question of whether ‘Putinism’, whose reign extends beyond Vladimir Putin’s two presidential terms into his current tenure as prime minister under (or, rather, alongside) President Medvedev, is as heterogeneous to ‘Yeltsinism’, as its advocates claim, is perhaps the core issue of whatever remains of the political debate in Russia. Simplifying only slightly the existing political divisions in the country, we may claim that one’s support for or opposition to Putin depends on how this question is answered, that is, on whether one accepts the official selfdissociation from the Yeltsin period or entertains some doubt about it. Rather than make another contribution to this interminable discourse, in this chapter we shall focus on its central presupposition, which characterizes the positions of practically all its practitioners, that is, the disavowal of the 1990s. Whether one believes that the politics of the Putin administration marks an overcoming of the 1990s or remains tied to this period, the decade itself appears to receive an almost universal condemnation. Furthermore, this condemnation does not merely single out particular features of this period as objects of negation, but rather negates the 1990s in their entirety, negates this period as a time of pure negativity. Indeed, this radical negation is not restricted to the Russian society but increasingly pervades the Western representation of Russian postcommunism. In the 2007 feature in Time on Vladimir Putin as the ‘person of the year’, Stephen Sestanovich, a US State Department advisor for the post-Soviet states during the Clinton administration, succinctly summed up this attitude in the following manner: ‘The ’90s sucked’ (Ignatius 2007). In previous studies we have discussed this disavowal in terms of the dialectic of politicization and depoliticization that inevitably accompanies the revolutionary moment, of which the demise of Soviet socialism is certainly a prime example (see Prozorov 2004a, 2005a). In this logic, which may be traced back to Carl Schmitt’s (1976, 1985a) political ontology of sovereign exceptionalism and is presently operative across wide domains of critical political theory (Derrida 1992, 1996; Mouffe 1999, Zizek 2002), the ‘political’ moment of rupture within the existing order, a moment of radical undecidability and unprecedented novelty, is necessarily effaced and occluded by the hegemonic practices of the newly

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established order. In this manner, the post-revolutionary order legitimizes itself in terms of new-found stability and thereby disavows its own descent from the moment of foundation, in which stability was nowhere to be found. For our purposes in this chapter, we shall focus in more detail on the specifically temporal aspects of the difference between the 1990s and the contemporary period that remains tied to the 1990s by a complex ritual of disavowals and recuperations. We shall argue that the perception of the 1990s as a ‘negative time’ is correct ontologically, if not normatively, insofar as this period has been marked by a paradoxical temporality that is best grasped with the help of Agamben’s understanding of messianic time. Second, we shall propose that the Putin period does not break with this messianic temporality in spite of its diametrically opposite relation to its post-revolutionary nature. Instead, we shall demonstrate that both the Yeltsin and the Putin presidencies attempted to come to terms with the messianic moment of postcommunism as the end of history. Despite having done so in radically different ways, both projects have been marked by what we shall call deactivation of politics, its irreparable dissociation from the everyday social praxis and the consequent reduction of politics either to a ‘mediatic’ spectacle under Yeltsin or a sterile technocratic administration under Putin and Medvedev. We will thus conclude that the paradigm of postcommunist social praxis may not be possibly found in the inoperative domain of politics and must be sought elsewhere. This general presentation of the messianic temporality of Russian postcommunism serves as prolegomenon for the more in-depth analysis of the ethics of postcommunist social praxis in the following chapters, which is guided by the lyrical oeuvre of Boris Grebenshikov.

Timelessness, Chronos and Kairos In the contemporary Russian discourse on the 1990s, this decade is regularly characterized in terms of ‘timelessness’ (bezvremenie), a veritable black hole in between the collapse of the Soviet order and the reassertion of the Russian state under President Putin. Throughout the two terms of the Putin presidency, the Yeltsin era has increasingly been cast in the official discourse as a ‘wasted time’, a meaningless detour between the end of Soviet socialism and the newfound stability of Putin’s authoritarian capitalism. However facile, these readings are not entirely without credence, as it is possible to establish a historical connection between Putinism and the crisis-ridden Perestroika period. However unpredictable Putin’s rise to power might have appeared in


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1999, it was perfectly anticipated already in the late 1980s, when the media discourse on the immediate future of Soviet politics was dominated by hyperbolic fears or hopes for ‘black colonels’, who would restore order, drop the degenerate Marxist–Leninist ideology in favour of Russian nationalism and introduce a ‘modern’ economic system with an ‘iron fist’. Rhetorical hyperboles aside, this ‘authoritarian modernization’ scenario is precisely what took place in Russia in the late 1990s, although in that context it was a much less likely option in comparison with such alternative scenarios as the revanche of the Communist Party (CPRF) or the triumph of far-right populism of either Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Alexander Lebed. One can therefore link up Gorbachev and Putin eras in a straight historical narrative, beginning with failed attempts to reform the system from within and ending with a moderately successful restoration of order and welfare under a modernizing autocracy. In a retroactive projection, Russia could have simply moved from Gorbachev to Putin, bypassing the 1990s as the era that might as well have not happened. This is what is suggested in many semi-official narratives, for which the Yeltsin period is indeed reduced to a ‘nightmare’, which is of course a period of time that is withdrawn from the ‘normal temporality’ of existence, even if it leaves its lurid stain on it at the moment of awakening. Should we then drop the 1990s as a mere disappointing deviation, a period of meaningless lingering in political instability and a chronic crisis, a ‘waste of time’? Although such a move would be perfectly congruent with both the technocratic ideology of the present regime and the transitionalist orientation in Russian studies, it would be disastrous for any attempt to understand the postcommunism transformation and especially its universal significance, which we have highlighted in Chapter 1. In fact, it is precisely the strange temporality of the 1990s that permits to reassess this period in the light of contemporary tendencies in the Putin presidency. Such a reassessment has nothing to do with endorsing particular tendencies and policies of the Yeltsin presidency as somehow more ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’ than the present state of affairs. Yet, while the half-hearted valorization of the 1990s as an era of ‘reforms’ in some circles of the ‘liberal’ anti-Putin opposition appears to us to be entirely implausible, there remains something intangibly attractive in this period that could be the object of a Foucauldian gesture of ‘nonpositive affirmation’ (Foucault 1977a, 35–36), possibly the only possible form of affirmation available to us in the present condition of global post-political scepticism and a self-righteous cynicism that permeates the entire political spectrum in today’s Russia.

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The 1990s are indeed a time like no other. In the present context of political consolidation and economic growth this period is used as a derogatory metaphor for two, at first glance incompatible, modes of temporality. For some, the 1990s are the moment of ceaseless political activity, endless change and constant crisis, a period when time, as it were, accelerated to the point of unbearably rapid transformation, so that the present political stabilization is a ‘healthy’ symptom of a return to normality after a bad dream. For others, the 1990s are a period of ‘timelessness’ (bezvremenie), when nothing really happened or all that happened was in vain. For instance, the intense political struggle between the Yeltsin presidency and the leftist-nationalist opposition in the Congress of People’s Deputies during 1991–1993 or the Communistdominated Duma during 1995–1999 was manifestly a zero-sum game, which weakened both parties and entailed that every victory was, in a sense, a return to ‘square one’, a replay of the foundational moment of the end of the Soviet order. All political struggles of this period were paradoxically inconclusive, victory (which was usually Yeltsin’s) being frequently indistinguishable from defeat, as the old antagonism was immediately reinscribed in a new form. In this sense, the landmark events of the politics of the 1990s (the dissolution of the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1993, Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, Yevgeny Primakov’s ascent to and descent from power in 1998–1999) were manifest non-events, as all that was revealed in them was simply the perpetuation of the existing structure of the regime in an unstable and illegitimate mode. Rather than lead to the construction of a new liberal-democratic constitutional order on the basis of the ‘myth of origin’ of the anticommunist revolution of August 1991, Russian politics in the 1990s was marked by the perpetual replay of this foundational moment in a manifestly inauthentic mode that gradually eroded all societal commitment to the myth of August 1991 itself. These two diametrically opposed diagnoses should be read in conjunction: during the 1990s too much took place, but with no effect. The diagnosis of timelessness then refers not to the temporality but to the finality of the event. The 1990s were a period of momentous change without end in both senses of the word: the change lacked all purpose precisely in its being ceaseless and was ceaseless by virtue of the absence of any purpose to it. It is not surprising that this period was marked by a strange and discomforting temporality. In the Russian experience, the 1990s stand for the revolutionary moment of foundation, which is by definition ‘a time out of joint’, an uncomfortable time out of time, a time of timelessness that can only retroactively be posited as the ‘dawn’ of a new temporality


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or be otherwise recuperated in a regular chronology. As a momentary spark of violent rupture that dispenses with the old order and inaugurates a new one, revolutionary or, in Agamben’s formulation, kairological time is always, as it were, taken out of the ‘normal’ chronological context or ‘borrowed’ from it. The concept of kairos is central to Agamben’s (2005b) systematic recovery of messianic temporality from the Pauline epistles, and we shall return to it in a more detailed discussion in subsequent chapters. At this point, we need only specify the difference between two modes of temporality: chronos (linear homogeneous time) and kairos (the time of rupture or decision). As early as the 1978 book Infancy and History (2007a), Agamben attempted to challenge the continuous concept of time, which, in the priority it granted to the instant as an ever-vanishing present, fuses the circular conception of time qua eternity in the philosophy of Antiquity with the Christian linear conception of time. Instead, Agamben proposes the notion of kairological time, which marks the human appropriation of its temporal existence and thus frees the human being from its subjection to history. In this manner, the experience of temporality is no longer conceived in terms of servitude and work but rather as an experience of pleasure: Contrary to what Hegel stated, it is only as the source and site of happiness that history can have a meaning for man. In this sense, Adam’s seven hours in Paradise are the primary core of all authentic historical experience. For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man’s servitude to continuous linear time, but man’s liberation from it: the time of history and the kairos in which man, by his own initiative, grasps favourable opportunity and chooses his own freedom in the moment. Just as the full, discontinuous, finite and complete time of pleasure must be set against the empty, continuous and infinite time of vulgar historicism, so the chronological time of pseudo-history must be opposed by the kairological time of authentic history. (Agamben 2007a, 115) In this fragment ‘authentic history’ refers to nothing other than the messianic time, which brings the historical process to an end and makes it possible for human beings to appropriate their historicity (i.e. their being-in-time) as such, rather than remain enslaved to its logic. Yet, how is the messianic kairos related to the more familiar (if ultimately alienating) experience of chronological time? In The Time That Remains

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(2005b), Agamben cites the following definition of kairos from the Corpus Hippocraticum: ‘chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there is little chronos.’ (Agamben 2005b, 69) The continuous temporality of chronos thus contains moments of kairos within itself, while the latter is defined by the contraction and abridgement of chronos: the time in which there is little time left for anything. The notion of kairos as a moment of revolutionary rupture, of foundation in the absence of foundations, should thus be rigorously distinguished from any notion of transition: ‘[e]very transition tends to be prolonged into infinity and renders unreachable the end that it supposedly produces’ (ibid., 70). While any recourse to the idea of a ‘transitional period’ easily lends itself to the infinite deferral of the very end-point presupposed by it, kairological temporality rather consists in the attempt to grasp, in the here and now, what transition only promises as the eschaton. Thus, kairological time is nothing other than a disjunction performed within chronos that introduces within linear chronological time the possibility of a radical rupture, which is nonetheless by no means guaranteed or secured. From this perspective, we may conceive of the foundational moment of postcommunism as kairological time that is ‘borrowed’ from the linear, continuous and accumulative time of chronology, the actual settling of debts dependent on the contingent fate of the revolution in question. The failure of revolution would restore this ‘borrowed time’ to the old regime in the form of a pure negation of the revolution as a ‘time of troubles’ – witness the reconstruction of the failed rebellion of the anti-Yeltsin opposition in October 1993 in the official discourse as unspecified ‘events’ (sobytia) that do not merit even a superficial recollection and do not deserve a specific nomination. On the other hand, the success of the revolution inaugurates a new temporality, whereby the time borrowed from the temporality of the old regime itself becomes the source of value, functioning as the foundational moment of the new order rather than a violent rupture, whose consequences were radically undecidable. The mythology of the Bolshevik Revolution in the Soviet historiography is the best example of the reinscription of the kairological moment as a starting point of a new chronology. In no case, however, does revolutionary time re-enter the temporal economy without being radically transformed. Both the revolution, whose success the new court historians inevitably find to be ‘historically predetermined’, and the ignominious ‘events’ that similarly have always been already ‘doomed to fail’ are deprived in their chronological deployment of the very contingency that they introduce into the temporal fabric


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by their kairological status. Despite their necessary proximity, kairos and chronos thus remain absolutely disjointed, and the very same temporal sequence is perceived differently, depending on whether we analyse it as a moment within chronological time or as the rupture of kairos within chronology.

The Lingering of the Political The specificity of the Russian experience in the context of the opposition between kairos and chronos consists in the fact that the kairological moment of the political arguably lasted far longer than one might expect, that is, for the most part of the 1990s, and, as we shall argue below, might still be with us today in a strangely spectral form. In an earlier book (Prozorov 2004a) we have defined this phenomenon in terms of the lingering of the political, a paradoxical perpetuation of the foundational moment of postcommunism for almost a decade, when the revolutionary origin of the new regime remained visible, which hampered any efforts to depoliticize the regime by reinscribing founding acts in terms of stable foundations (cf. Schmitt 1985a; Lefort 1988; Derrida 1992. See also Prozorov 2005b). Empirically, this failure to depoliticize owed to the political weakness of the Yeltsin presidency, which throughout the decade remained embattled by the oppositional legislature, separatist tendencies in the regions, and the assault on the political autonomy of the state by the oligarchic business elites (see Prozorov 2004a, chapter 4). Incapable of imposing an authoritative discourse of the new, post-revolutionary chronology, yet showing impressive skills of political survival, Yeltsin’s regime unfolded in the extended kairos, in which numerous events took place without accumulating into a new postcommunist ‘history’, instead remaining tied to the foundational moment of the dissolution of the Soviet order. The overall effect of the lingering of the political was precisely this perception of ceaseless and meaningless activity of change, of a revolution that reflexively turned to revolutionizing itself, increasingly creating the impression that the Yeltsin regime was literally living ‘on borrowed time’. This undecidable temporality of early postcommunism made increasingly manifest the vacuity, if not the outright hypocrisy, of any claims about Russia’s ‘transition’ to democracy, capitalism or what not. Even if we continue to apply this facile kinetic metaphor, it was evident in the 1990s that Russia was not moving anywhere other than in circles, ceaselessly replaying the foundational moment of 1991, even as the memories of the Soviet system grew ever more distant and imprecise. With the starting point

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of the ‘transition’ receding into obscurity and the end-point appearing ever more chimerical, the best designation of the Russian politics of the 1990s is provided by the title of Victor Pelevin’s 2002 satirical collection of novellas and short stories ‘The Dialectic of Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere’. At the same time, this lingering state of political rupture was never a mere ‘waste of time’ in the sense of the absence of political content. We should rather say that the 1990s were oversaturated in terms of content and it is precisely this oversaturation that provides a clue to the strange temporality of the 1990s. As a time out of time, this period condenses a multiplicity of times, uniting in a single decade all that might have happened, all possibilities of Russia’s political development, and suspending them at the very moment when a single model of the future looked set to become irreversible. The 1990s were therefore also a time of trials, of trying out every possible pathway of future development at the same time, without a final commitment to any single one of them. Ironically, one of the reasons why the Putin project of state-led authoritarian modernization eventually came out on top is that most other options have already been tried out and exhausted in this suspended time: General Alexander Lebed’s military-style rightwing conservatism, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s carnevalesque street populism, Yevgeni Primakov’s bureaucratic ‘centrism’, Gennady Zyuganov’s communist revanchism with a nationalist flair, Anatoly Chubais’s technocratic market liberalism, etc. All of these potential outcomes of postcommunist transformation actually took place but were suspended, in all cases by Yeltsin himself, who, starting from his triumphant victory over Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, arguably did not himself stand for anything at all other than radical openness of the political and resistance to its closure. The Yeltsin period witnessed a series of brief hegemonies of alternative political orientations (e.g. the Lebed moment in 1996 or the Primakov ascendancy in 1998–1999), but as soon as these hegemonies threatened to redefine the Russian political space, they were effaced by Yeltsin’s intervention, which arrested the rise to power of the hegemonic figure in question. For example, the sacking of Alexander Lebed from the position of the Head of Security Council in the autumn of 1996 led to his gradual disappearance from national politics and his subsequent selfimposed exile as a regional governor in Krasnoyarsk. The dismissal of the Primakov cabinet in May 1999, which was wrongly expected to prop up Primakov’s chances as an oppositional presidential candidate, actually led to Primakov’s retreat into obscurity with the advent of Putin. The


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issue here is not the detailed dynamics of political struggle, which were different in every case, but the general tendency of the suspension of all finality in a radically open present. We must be careful not to equate this move with the authoritarian trampling down of opposition, which was entirely alien to Yeltsin’s political style – even the leaders of the armed rebellion of October 1993, which we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, were amnestied months after the event and were able to enjoy lucrative, one might even say typically Yeltsinite, careers in business and politics. Yet, while Yeltsin’s tolerance of the opposition might be considered exemplary, what Yeltsin refused to tolerate was the possibility of any single political orientation producing a hegemonic closure of the political space and initiating a post-revolutionary chronology. Against all accusatory attributions to Yeltsin of an autocratic style, we must then assert that Yeltsin’s rationality of rule was in a strict sense antihegemonic at the same time as it was sovereign in Carl Schmitt’s (1985a) sense. Recalling the decade of Yeltsin’s rule, we cannot help noticing that Yeltsin’s leadership in ‘normal’ political periods was close to disastrous, being marked by incessant court intrigues, the high influence of informal or ‘shadow’ interests and a generally poor state of administration. At the same time, Yeltsin was incomparably successful as a leader in times of crisis, which is perhaps less surprising given that the crises in question were of his own making. In full accordance with Schmitt’s dictum, Yeltsin only ever decided on the exception, leaving the capacity of everyday administration of the state to the competing interest groups in and out of the government. Starting from his masterful seizure of power in the aftermath of the failed coup of August 1991 to the equally brilliant transfer of power to Putin as a designated successor on the eve of the millennium, we observe a series of interventions that frequently came at the last moment, when it was thought that the opposition was firmly on its way to power. Failing miserably in establishing a meaningful socio-political order of his own, Yeltsin nonetheless also succeeded in preventing all other political forces from doing this, so that the political history of the 1990s may be viewed as a series of ‘averted catastrophes’ or ‘lost opportunities’, depending on one’s political orientation. What Yeltsin’s sovereignty guarded was not any specific form of order but the very possibility of trying out various courses of political development that, however, could always be played back, suspended or reversed with no consequence for the country. If politics resembled a theatre in the 1990s, it is because it was indeed a spectacle, in which political struggle took place intensely but somehow not seriously, as something that can always be suspended by an intermission or simply finished

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when the time of performance runs out (cf. Remizov 2000). In Guy Debord’s (1992) terms, the concentrated spectacle of the late-Soviet ritualized autocracy gave way to a strongly diffuse spectacle of radical pluralism, whose very dispersion devalued the authority of the political stances expressed in it: all sorts of things could take place in the Russian politics of the 1990s, albeit without any significance for the stabilization of the Yeltsin regime. Risking a vulgar psychological explanation, we might venture that this political style might well be an idiosyncrasy of a revolutionary that Yeltsin clearly was: having succeeded in the struggle against Soviet communism, which even the most radical dissidents comfortably viewed as requiring years if not decades, he remained too stunned by his own victory to attempt the construction of a new system. Instead, Yeltsin’s decade of rule may be viewed as a certain mesmerized fixation on the ruins of the Soviet order that from the outset disabled any productive activity. Having dared and succeeded in destroying a system with claims to world-historical significance, Yeltsin could only be expected to perceive any construction of a new system to be a project that was doomed from the outset – indeed, the sheer contingency of the demise of the USSR made the very idea of the Project, which, as we recall, is the prerequisite of Kojève’s definition of historical action, abortive from the outset. However, this sense of futility was definitely not Yeltsin’s alone: the radical nationalist and Communist opposition to Yeltsin throughout the 1990s was remarkably half-hearted (as was its support by the society), carrying a romantic air of a ‘lost cause’ even before its cause was properly articulated.1 This deactivation of political antagonism is best illustrated by the curious function of conservatism in the postcommunist ideological field in Russia (see Prozorov 2005a). It is relatively easy to understand the crisis of ‘substantive’ ideologies of both the left and the right in the postcommunist condition. Owing to its surface association with the Soviet regime, socialism in all its varieties was perceived to be strongly delegitimized in the early 1990s, which led its remaining representatives in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) to embrace various versions of Russian nationalism (from the Slavophile ethnocentrism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the Eurasian neo-imperialism of Alexander Dugin) and Orthodox Christianity. As Richard Sakwa (2007, 208–213) demonstrates, during the postcommunist period the CPRF has in fact been the leading conservative party in Russia. Similarly, after the first postcommunist parliamentary elections of 1993 revealed a humiliating lack of support for the neo-liberal reformism of Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice party, the Yeltsin regime sought to ‘ground’ or ‘domesticate’


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cosmopolitan liberalism within the ‘Russian tradition’, paving the way for the succession of quasi-centrist ‘parties of power’ (Our Home Russia: 1995–1999; Fatherland-All Russia: 1998–2001; United Russia: 1999–),2 whose syncretic ideology was frequently referred to as ‘liberal conservatism’ (see Polyakov 2000, Prozorov 2005a). Thus, aside from extreme anti-systemic parties of the left and the right, the Russian ideological field may be said to have imploded into a curious conservative hegemony. By the advent of Putin, being ‘conservative’ became a privileged mode of self-description in Russian politics, while conservatism as an ideological orientation lost any trace of substantive consistency, becoming capable of accommodating anyone, from a doctrinaire defender of neo-liberal globalization and American supremacy to an esoteric disciple of the communal life of the Russian countryside. In this manner, the ceaseless change of the politics of the Yeltsin presidency found its distorted reflection in the ideological spectrum reduced to endless variations of the conservative disposition. Yet, throughout the postcommunist period this disposition was ironically both hegemonic and entirely inoperative. On the one hand, the proponents of ‘liberal conservatism’ in the ‘parties of power’ quickly found out that their project was marred by the fatal contradiction between the regime’s claim to the conservation of the new ‘liberal’ or ‘capitalist’ order and the activist role of the government that was necessary for its very institution. As the construction of the new postcommunist order was hindered by the lingering of the kairological time of the political, it immediately became apparent that the very order that liberal-conservatives desired to conserve faces a more urgent problem of endowing itself with a minimal ontological consistency. The commitment to the liberal socio-economic order has thus been revealed to be wholly incompatible with a conservative disposition. On the other hand, the left-conservative project of the CPRF and its allies suffered from a similar lack of the object of conservation, as the very reality of Soviet socialism (or, for that matter, the Russian monarchy, the village commune or the Orthodox tradition) disappeared before its eyes in the chaotic waves of the postcommunist ‘transition’. While every form of conservatism only arises when its fetishized object is perceived as endangered and thus is in need of the artifice of conservation (see Prozorov 2005a, Remizov 2002a), in postcommunist left conservatism this originary aporia was intensified by the lack of consensus on what the object of conservation actually is, which led to the gradual mutation of the ‘left-conservative ideology’ into an interminable and esoteric debate between different versions of the ‘essence of Russia’,

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which is increasingly of interest only to its practitioners. In this manner, conservative ideology, whose attraction is usually sought in its defense of the most familiar and conventional, has itself become the locus of the production of quaint if not monstrous simulacra, from the Russian adaptation of American ‘white supremacism’ to the postmodern cyberpunk reconstructions of ancient Nordic paganism. Thus, while liberal conservatism faces the impossible challenge of conserving what is not yet there, left conservatism encounters a similarly daunting task of conserving that which is no longer there. In all their dazzling diversity, the ideologies of Russian postcommunism from the 1990s onwards are marked by the ironic combination of frequently dazzling creativity and an equally bewildering impracticality. Indeed, the former is clearly owing to the latter, insofar as the sense of resignation about the possibility to alter the postcommunist socio-political landscape may easily be transformed into a wild flight of creativity: if we perceive our ideological designs as a priori unrealizable, then there is no need for anything like a ‘reality check’ in the process of designing them. The half-hearted and deactivated political antagonism of the 1990s may thus be viewed as the condition of possibility for the gargantuan logorrhea of ideological and ideology-critical discourse, which is entirely disconnected from both social praxis and the political system, functioning rather as the simulacrum of the absent link between the two, that is, between society and the state. Much of postcommunist political discourse may therefore be warmly recommended as original, insightful and sometimes hilarious reading, yet one would gain little by turning to this discourse for the interpretation of the sociopolitical experience of Russian postcommunism. Instead, it might be productively read as both a symptom of and a remedy for the traumatic experience of the collapse of the Soviet order, whereby the frenzy of ideological production conceals the utter destitution of ideology in the post-historical condition.

The End of Time and the Time of the End The enormity of the collapse of the Soviet order was such that it could well be perceived as the ‘end of time’, which indeed calls for a certain suspension of action because everything has already happened. In this sense, the temporality of the lingering moment of the political resonates with the idea of messianic suspension as described by Giorgio Agamben in his reading of the Pauline epistles (2005b). The key concept of Pauline messianism is recapitulation (anakephalaioomai, Ephesians 1:10),


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a summation of the past in the messianic ‘now’, in which all time is fulfilled and in this manner comes to an end. Insofar as messianic time aims toward the fulfillment of time, it effectuates a recapitulation, a kind of summation of all things, in heaven and on earth – of all that has transpired from creation to the messianic “now”, meaning of the past as a whole. Messianic time is a summary recapitulation of the past even according to the meaning of the adjective in the juridical expression “summary judgment”. (Agamben 2005b, 75–76) Thus, contrary to frequent misunderstandings, messianic time is not the equivalent of a chronological ‘end of time’, the eschaton, which, as an ‘image devoid of time’ (ibid., 70), may never be grasped but can only be perpetually deferred as the endpoint of transition. Instead, it is an intense moment in the kairological present, in which all past is summoned up, becoming available for appropriation: ‘Just as the past becomes possible again in some fashion through memory – that which was fulfilled becomes unfulfilled and the unfulfilled becomes fulfilled – so too in messianic recapitulation do men ready themselves to forever take leave of the past in eternity, which knows neither past nor repetition’ (ibid., 77). Messianic time is therefore not oriented solely towards the future, but rather towards ‘settling accounts’ with the past, pronouncing judgment on it in the kairological moment of appropriating history: ‘whereas our representation of chronological time, as the time in which we are, separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent spectators of ourselves – spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left, continually missing themselves – messianic time as the operational time, in which we take hold of and achieve our representations of time, is the time that we ourselves are, and for this very reason, is the only real time, the only time we have’ (ibid., 68) This understanding of messianism permits us to differentiate messianic temporality from the eschatological notion of the ‘end of time’, which, in a secularized, ‘transitionalist’ manner, is retained in Kojève’s reading of the end of history, in which ‘man completely abolishes Time – that is, History – that is, his own truly and specifically human reality’ (Kojève 1969, 167). It is evident that the kairos of messianic recapitulation has little to do with eschatology, even though the postcommunist disaster was frequently perceived in apocalyptic terms in both political and artistic discourses of the 1990s. Agamben presents the difference between messianism

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and eschatology in terms of the distinction between the ‘end of time’, which the apocalyptic prophet that resembles the Hegelian figure of the Philosopher (see Kojève 1969, 157–167) observes and describes, and the ‘time of the end’ that is experienced in the messianic suspension. ‘What interests the apostle is not the last day, it is not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end, or if you prefer, the time that remains between time and its end.’ (Agamben 2005b, 62). Messianic time is neither chronos nor its end (eschaton) but rather the time that remains between the two, ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ (ibid., 67).3 In a sense, messianic time is constituted by the secondary division that divides the division between chronos and eschaton, being neither the former nor the latter but implicated in both. This understanding of messianic time reorients our discussion of postcommunism away from apocalyptic and eschatological themes towards the appreciation of the minute details, whereby chronological time undergoes contraction and abridgement and the past events appear recapitulated before our judgment in the kairological ‘now’. In the case of postcommunism, we are arguably dealing not merely with the consummation of all history but also with the condensation of all possibilities that could be anticipated for the future – all possibilities that exist on the ideological horizon, be it liberalism, socialism, nationalism, etc. – into the revolutionary time. In this manner, both all the events of the past and all possible futures are present in the here and now in the recapitulated form. The messianic time of postcommunism is the time of extraordinary condensation of potentialities, all of which are however suspended in the aspect of their actualization. All things can and do happen, though without significance or finality, ‘as if they did not’. All restorations of the past and visions of the future are summoned up in the messianic now and are in a certain sense accomplished, but precisely because all these incompatible things are accomplished equally, none of them is accomplished in a final state. All things could happen in the timelessness of the 1990s, but precisely because this time is taken out of normal, ‘chronological’ or historical time, their unfolding is entirely inconsequential. It is in this manner that history arrives at its second proper end. The difference between Agamben’s messianic concept of the end of history and the more familiar Hegelo-Kojèvian concept is thus evident: what is at stake for Agamben is not the triumph of one progressive teleology but the deactivation of the teleological dimension of the Project as such, the destruction of the very symbolic framework in which the demise of a particular teleological project could be conceived. While the Kojèvian end of history is inscribed in the very existence of history


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and presupposed in every historical instance, so that history itself seeks to attain its own end, the messianic suspension of teleology makes this drive of history towards its end utterly unintelligible. In other words, the second death of history puts an end to the very discourse of the ‘end of history’, which is perhaps the reason why Fukuyama’s revival of the Kojèvian approach has met with such a hostile reception. As Boris Groys has argued with reference to the post-World War II period more generally, ‘the world has entered the post-historical phase because [ . . . ] it lost the faith in overcoming history and wherever history doesn’t seek its own end, it disappears, stops being history, gets congealed in itself.’ (Groys 2003, 100) Thus, with the end of Soviet socialism, history ended not because of the unrivalled supremacy of Western liberalism (a dubious fact that could only be established by a facile subtraction of the Soviet Union from the bipolar system) but rather because the pitiful demise of the Soviet order made the very idea of rivalry between grand teleological metanarratives inconceivable. This is what makes the end of communism a messianic event of universal significance rather than a mere catastrophe of a particular ideology, which can always be recuperated in the economy of the ideological field by the correlate triumph of its rival – a balancing act attempted by Fukuyama’s liberal reading of Kojève. The messianic recapitulation of history is only accessible as a complete dismantlement of the teleological dimension, whereby all the objects in the field of ideological contestation are rendered inoperative and lose their capacity to mobilize human existence for historical tasks. What we have termed universal postcommunism consists precisely in the generalization of the messianic experience from the losing side in a historical confrontation to the entire field of teleological politics, that is, from the destruction of the communist project to the negation of the very idea of the Project as the condition of the human experience of temporality. The logic of recapitulation of past and future amid the lingering of the political permits us to understand why the frequently discussed depoliticization of the Russian society, which we shall address in detail in the following chapters, took place almost immediately after the anticommunist revolution in August 1991 (see Garcelon 1997; Kharkhordin 1997; Gudkov 2001; Prozorov 2007b). Rather than indicating a ‘betrayal’ of the revolution or its incomplete status, this retreat from the public sphere was the logical consequence of its messianic character. What took place after the failure of the attempted coup d’etat by the members of the Soviet government was an entirely unexpected and radically accelerated unravelling of the entire social order, which possesses all the

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attributes of the messianic event in a profane mode. Yet, the demise of Soviet communism did not mark the eschaton either literally (in the sense of the apocalyptic ‘end of time’, after which all meaningful human praxis must, according to Kojève, expire and ‘there will never more be anything new on Earth’ (Kojève 1969, 168)) or metaphorically (in the sense of a momentary implosion of one system that paves the way for the foundation of an alternative order) but rather introduced a wholly new experience of time, the kairological ‘time of the end’. Rather than indicate a transitional period between the collapse of the Soviet order and the triumph of the new order, this mode of temporality performs a disjunction in the chronological time, which makes possible an entirely different orientation to existence without radically transforming any of its positive features. As Agamben insists in a number of works, in the post-messianic condition ‘everything will be as is now, just a little different’ (Agamben 1993b, 53), no momentous transformation will take place aside from a ‘small displacement’ (Agamben 1999a, 164). This small displacement is the very substance of the ‘end of history’ announced by the collapse of the Soviet order, which, not being content with its own disappearance, drags into the abyss all the alternative historical projects of humanity. The nullification of the teleological dimension of social praxis is precisely what is transmitted by and remains to be grasped in the messianic kairos: ‘The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable.’ (Agamben 2005b, 71)

Inoperosity What is it that must be grasped in the kairological time of postcommunism? It is nothing other than utter vacuity of all future-oriented politics, which was experienced throughout the 1990s. The societal exit from politics after August 1991 was both an instrument and an effect of this experience, whereby the political sphere was not taken over by the victorious anticommunist social forces but rather vacated by them in the manner that, as we shall see in Chapter 3, characterized the lateSoviet social praxis from the 1970s onwards more generally. The exodus of the society from the space of value-based political antagonism left Russian politics to its own devices, so that it increasingly resembled a spectacle with an ever-diminishing audience (see Prozorov 2007b, 197– 200). In turn, the alienated, spectacular and proudly inauthentic nature of the postcommunist state progressively contributed to this exodus,


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while from the mid-1990s onwards the regime began to consciously foster it as a convenient way to achieve the closure of the system unto a depoliticized self-immanence. As we shall discuss in more detail below, it is therefore possible to speak of a mutual exclusion of the state and society from each other’s respective domains, whereby formal politics and social life unfold at such a distance from each other that it is increasingly impossible to conceive of any possible relation between them. While any conventional understanding of liberal democracy, however problematic this syntagm is, given the irreducible heterogeneity between the principles of democracy and liberalism (Schmitt 1985b; Mouffe 2000; Esposito 2008b), presupposes the existence of a clear distinction between the state and society, the postcommunist experience rather points to their radical non-relation. From this perspective, the anticommunist revolution (cf. Magun 2008, 47–61) was manifestly not democratic, let alone liberal, but rather perfectly nihilist in the sense given to the term by both Benjamin and Agamben (see Mills 2004, 60; Agamben 1999a, 171–177). Rather than attempt to depose a discredited order and replace it with a positive alternative (liberalism, nationalism, etc.), the events of 1991 suspended the very possibility of the construction of a new order, instituting instead a paradoxical, permanently unstable regime, whose authority was only sufficient to ensure that nothing ever takes the vacant place of the Soviet order. All things could happen (as its slogans remind us, the revolution was, after all, about ‘freedom’), but they should not matter to the society in the sense of once again transforming its conditions of existence or putting this existence at stake in yet another ‘progressive project’. The societal depoliticization in the 1990s might therefore be viewed as itself a form of politics, that is, a politics of fundamental passivity or, to use the privileged term of Agamben’s philosophy, inoperosity. According to Stefano Franchi (2004), Agamben’s affirmation of inoperosity, central to his ethico-political project, must not be read in terms of pure inactivity or apraxia, but rather as a ceaseless activity that is deprived of any telos, whereby all sorts of things happen for no reason whatsoever and can never be incorporated into a determinate Project. This is of course the only politics proper to the suspension of teleology in the end of history: Historical beings act in order to bring about certain ends; in the political realm, they act in order to transform the ideal ends provided by the metaphysical description of man into actuality by transforming or empirically negating the given reality. Post-historical beings, being the rascals they truly are, just act with no particular end in

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sight. Their life is pure self-contained action that does not receive its meaning from a transcendent telos, but becomes, paradoxically, meaningful in its being meaningless. (Franchi 2004, 26) In the following chapters we shall engage in more detail with the ontological aspects of inoperative praxis. At this point, we shall merely outline the key features of Agamben’s political diagnostic, which warrants his deployment of inoperative politics as the only authentic mode of social praxis in the contemporary conditions. For Agamben, the event of nihilism, whose political manifestation reached its heights in World War I, discloses the absence of any historical tasks that humanity must devote itself to. The transvaluation of all values entails the delegitimisation of all future-oriented sacrificial politics and brings into light the figure of man as argos (workless, inoperative). Agamben’s affirmation of inoperosity is inspired by his reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (I, 7, 1097b22–1098a18), the confrontation with which might indeed sum up Agamben’s entire philosophical project. While, for Aristotle, human beings may have a task or a function that arises out of the particular activity they are engaged in (e.g. man as sculptor, flute player, shoemaker, etc.), it is difficult to conceive of a task that would apply to humans qua humans, leading to the question of whether man as such is not essentially ‘workless’, without any tasks to achieve. While this originary worklessness was for centuries veiled by religion or political ideology, the advent of nihilism entails its coming to the foreground of social life: ‘[T]oday, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was in some ways evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear’ (Agamben 2004, 76). And yet, the ‘totalitarian’ experiments of the first half of the 20th century have managed to obscure the worklessness of man, not by radicalizing the 19th-century projects of nationalism and imperialism, but, in a much more insidious way, by turning life itself into a task of the human being that becomes the object of government: ‘man has now reached his historical telos and, for a humanity, which has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of the biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task’ (ibid.). While ‘traditional


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historical potentialities – poetry, religion, philosophy, which from both the Hegelo–Kojèvian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historicopolitical destiny of peoples awake, have long since transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences’, ‘the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man’ (ibid., 76–77). Yet, the biopolitical assumption of bare life as a historical task is not merely a logical incongruity but, in Agamben’s famous thesis on the concentration camp as the fundamental nomos of late modernity, leads directly to the totalitarian violence of the extermination of the very bare life that functions as the foundation of the politics of nihilism (cf. Esposito 2008a). Agamben’s politico-philosophical project thus seeks to advance an alternative to contemporary biopolitics through a radical affirmation of the worklessness of man as the originary attribute of social praxis: Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is politics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper operation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust. [ . . . ] Politics might be nothing other than the exposition of humankind’s absence of work as well as the exposition of humankind’s creative semi-indifference to any task, and might only in this sense remain integrally assigned to happiness. (Agamben 2000, 141–142) This notion of inoperative praxis should be distinct from the models that, in Agamben’s terms, attempt to supplant the external imposition of the ‘work of man’ with freely chosen forms of self-fashioning, most notably the ‘work on the self’, which is the centrepiece of a Foucauldian reconstruction of ethics as an aesthetics of existence. The Foucauldian strategy certainly does away with any outside teleology to which human activity is subjected but retains the overall teleological vision of human praxis (it is important to recall that one of the four ‘folds’ of a Foucauldian ethics precisely is telos) (Foucault 1990b, 25–32. See Prozorov 2007a, chapter 3 for a detailed discussion). In contrast, what is at stake in the ethics of inoperosity is dispensing with the work-oriented vision of human existence as such and rather opening it to the free use of time outside the coordinates of any historical project. In other words, the ethics of inoperosity attunes us to what Agamben calls ‘the one incomparable claim to nobility our own era might legitimately make in

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regard to the past: that of no longer wanting to be a historical epoch’ (Agamben 1995, 87. Emphasis original). While numerous constructions of the ‘first’ end of history, from Soviet communism to liberal globalization, habitually presented ‘our’ time as the epoch of the end of something and, invariably, a beginning of something else (e.g. postmodernity, postsovereignty, post-nationalism, etc.), Agamben’s second end of history questions precisely the very intelligibility of our present as an epoch: If one feature of our sensibilities deserves to survive, it is just this sense of impatience and almost of nausea we feel when faced with the prospect of everything simply beginning all over again, even if for the best. When tradition again tightens the momentarily loosened threats of its ancient, infamous fabric, in the face of new works of art and new trends in behaviour and fashion, there is something in us that cannot restrain a shudder of horror, even when we admire. It is precisely this that gets lost in the blind will of our time to be at all costs an epoch, even if it be the epoch of the impossibility of being an epoch, indeed, the age of nihilism. (ibid., 87) In Agamben’s argument, the very nihilism, which apparently destines humanity to totalitarian biopolitics, itself becomes the ground of a radical emancipatory project by bringing into full view the originary inoperosity of humankind. Agamben’s politics of inoperative passivity is nothing other than the appropriation of nihilism, in the same manner as the Heideggerian authentic existence is nothing other than the appropriation of the inauthenticity of our everyday existence. Against the recasting of nihilism itself into a paradoxical epoch of non-epochality, Agamben raises the question of the possibility of ‘surviving extinction, of overvaulting the end of time and historical epochs, not toward the future or the past, but toward the heart itself of time and history’ (ibid., 88). In the absence of any historical telos, even the nihilistic telos of biopolitical management, ‘post-historical’ existence becomes its own only value, which is summed up in the key concept of Agamben’s ontology that we shall address in detail below: ‘being-thus’ or ‘whatever being’, that is, ‘a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living’ (Agamben 2000, 9). An inoperative life, a life that is liberated from all destiny or vocation and therefore has nothing to do, is precisely the ‘happy life’ that is inseparable from its own form, a bios that is only its own zoe.


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Postcommunist Playland The affirmation of its ‘whatever being’ by the post-Soviet society is furthest away from the mantras of ‘transition to democracy’ that passed for political analysis for the most part of the 1990s. Indeed, if there is any substance at all in the politics of ‘whatever being’, it is the refusal of any idea of ‘transition’, of any demand of the population to submit its existence to any future-oriented political project ever again. In the manner of Melville’s Bartleby, a figure that probably embodies Agamben’s entire philosophy, the Russian society ‘would prefer not to’ engage in any transition, transformation or reform and only engages in politics to defend its ‘being-such-as-it-is’, that is, its being without any historical tasks (see Prozorov 2007b). The postcommunist Russian state has been characterized by a similarly inoperative orientation, foregoing any attempt at a radical societal transformation and concentrating, especially after 1993, on its own stabilization and consolidation at an ever-greater distance from the society. Thus, the radical suspension of the Project and the affirmation of inoperosity characterize the entire domain of postcommunist politics in Russia. From this perspective, the brief rupture of the anticommunist revolution in 1991 has indeed performed a ‘messianic shift that integrally changes the world, leaving it almost intact’ (Agamben 2000, 79) – nothing much really took place in 1991, in comparison with the other great revolutions of modernity, but nonetheless after this event everything has changed, even if and especially when it appeared to stay the same. As we have seen, this change did not take the form of the replacement of one ideological edifice by another, but rather consisted in rendering the existing ideological edifice inoperative. The difference of the Russia of the 1990s from other post-Soviet states consists precisely in the absence of positive ideological construction during the lingering of the political. While the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe grounded their newfound independence in the projects of European and transatlantic integration and the Central Asian states retreated from the chaos of Perestroika into an almost pre-modern traditionalism, during the 1990s the Russian society dwelled in the ruins of the deconstructed Soviet ideological edifice, which now functioned as an invaluable resource for parodic play. In 1992 Sergei Kurekhin, a famous avant-garde musician, appeared on a nationwide television show with a 90-minute-long performance of the alternative history of the socialist revolution that, among other things, revealed that Vladimir Lenin was in fact nothing other than

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a hallucinogenic mushroom. Basing the story on the popular myth of widespread drug addiction among the leaders of the Revolution, Kurekhin argued in the pedantic manner of the university professor that Lenin’s addiction to such toxic and mind-altering mushrooms as amanita (mukhomor) eventually reached such an extent that his consciousness was gradually displaced by that of the mushroom. On the basis of this premise, a series of biographical events in Lenin’s life, known to every Soviet citizen since childhood, were reinterpreted in a new light, with particular hermeneutic fervour applied to any mention of mushrooms in the diaries of Lenin and those who have surrounded him. Thus, Lenin’s famous armored car, on top of which he allegedly recited his April Theses in 1917, is revealed by Kurekhin to be identical in its cross-section to the rhizome of the amanita mushroom, while the famous lines from Lenin’s political writings (‘less is better’, ‘one step forward, two steps back’) are shown to be direct quotations from some mushroom-picking manual that are far more understandable in that context than in the context of politics, where they have already been transformed into meaningless formulae by the sterile routines of post-Stalinist ideological indoctrination (cf. Yurchak 2007). Rather than attack the dominant ideology from the perspective of its alternative (liberalism, nationalism, etc.), this parodic praxis decontextualizes its maxims, putting them in circulation in an alien context, where they appear to be devoid of meaning or receive new, unexpected meanings (cf. Agamben 2007b, 37–52).4 Such practices became increasingly widespread in the late-Soviet period, when the official ideology achieved such a degree of de-semantization and ritualization that its ‘straightforward support or criticism smacked of idiocy, narcissism and bad taste’ (Yurchak 2006, 252). Thus, from the late 1980s onwards Marxism–Leninism appeared to be good for anything other than its primary ideological function. Yet, this deactivated status was hardly the punishment inflicted exclusively on the loser in the ideological confrontation. As during the 1990s, (neo-)liberal ideology was used to legitimize the looting of the Soviet economy, and nationalist conservatism became a competition in devising the most otherworldly representation of ‘true Russia’, the entire ideological field has undergone a displacement that freed all political discourses from their canonical use and opened them up to the activity of play. The notion of play is central to Agamben’s early investigations of the theme of historicity in Infancy and History (2007a). Drawing on the work of Benveniste and Levi-Strauss, Agamben distinguishes between ritual, which fixes and structures the chronological time of the calendar


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through its orderly recurrence, and play, which changes and destroys it (Agamben 2007a, 77). In contrast to a sacred ceremony, which combines the form of the ritual with mythical content, play is constituted by the disjunction between the two, transmitting either the pure form of the ritual (as a ‘game’) or the mere content of the myth (as ‘word play’). In this manner, the sphere of play is viewed by Agamben as ‘the topsyturvy image of the sacred’ (ibid.), paving the way for his later studies of the problematic of profanation as a strategy of returning the objects sacralized by ritual to the sphere of free use by human beings (Agamben 2007b, 73–92). Playland is a country whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose they have nonetheless forgotten. [ . . . ] They free the sacred from its link with the calendar and with the cyclical rhythm of time that it sanctions, thereby entering another dimension of time, where the hours go by in a flash and the days are changeless. In play, man frees himself from sacred time and “forgets” it in human time. (Agamben 2007a, 12) It is easy to observe that this description strictly parallels the relation between chronos and kairos in the messianic temporality, play being the activity without a telos that is proper to the kairological moment of appropriating historicity. Pursuing this parallel further, we may suggest that in the messianic time of postcommunism all political ideologies become nothing other than objects of play, that is, toys. In Agamben’s argument, a toy is any object that has once possessed a particular function but is now withdrawn from all rules of use (Agamben 1993a, 57). What is crucial in this definition is the insistence on the ‘once’ and ‘no more’: being an object that once had a sacred, economic or practical function that specified the rules of its use but does so no longer, the toy ‘[is] an eminently historical thing, the Historical in its pure state. The toy is a materialization of the historicity contained in objects, [it] makes present and renders tangible human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the “once” and the “no longer” ’ (Agamben 2007a, 80). Playing with toys thus amounts to playing with history and the function of play (in contrast to that of rituals) is the transformation of synchrony into diachrony, of structures into events (ibid., 82). Taken together, ritual and play form the machine that incessantly transforms both synchrony and diachrony into each other, thus producing the differential margin between synchrony and diachrony that

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actually constitutes human time as history. In this conception, the end of history is logically thinkable as the triumph of either of the sides of this opposition, whereby the differential between synchrony and diachrony no longer exists. On the one hand, we may envision the formation of an absolutely synchronous society, in which no events are allowed to take place, and in which all play has been formalized into rituals. This image evidently resonates with the Hegelo–Kojèvian eschatological end of history, after which ‘there will never more be anything new on Earth’ – human praxis reduced to the reproduction of traditional rituals devoid of any meaning (Kojève 1969, 168). On the other hand, it is possible to imagine an absolutely diachronic society, in which all structures have dissolved into events and all rituals have eroded into innocent and meaningless play. In the context of the postcommunist experience the Kojèvian version is exemplified by the late-Soviet period, frequently labeled ‘the era of stagnation’, in which the Soviet order appeared entirely immutable (cf. Yurchak 2006, chapter 2). In contrast, the latter, Agambenian version is best illustrated by ‘timelessness’ of the 1990s, in which all attempts at the structuration of the postcommunist order have been a priori rendered inoperative by the transformation of ideologies into toys. In later works, Agamben applies the logic of play to the fundamental categories of political ontology, particularly law, which in his famous argument has entered the nihilistic phase of being in force without significance in a perpetual ‘state of exception’ (2005a, 86–88). One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. (ibid., 64) This messianic prophecy has arguably been fulfilled in the Russian postcommunism of the 1990s, not merely with respect to the law, but, more generally, with respect to the aspect of politics that we shall term teleo-ideological to highlight the inherently ideological character of any teleology and the dependence of any ideology on a clearly defined teleological direction. When both the defeated ideology of Marxism–Leninism and the plurality of its postcommunist successors are turned into toys and used in every possible way other than their canonical function, it is hardly far-fetched to suggest that for all the


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modesty of revolutionary fervour, the event of the anticommunist revolution of 1991 did perform the messianic displacement that integrally changed Russia while indeed leaving it almost intact. As Artemy Magun argues in Negative Revolution (2008, 144–153), the ‘minimal’ character of the anticommunist revolution is not an indicator of its deficiency, but rather the proof that this revolution was a genuine event, a purely formal act of negation, after which nothing stays the same even if it does not undergo any substantive change. What the messianic shift of the 1990s has left us with is a sense of the profound impossibility of any teleological politics owing to the societal refusal to lend its present ‘whatever being’ for any work of transition towards the indeterminate ‘bright future’. Instead, by turning the entire ideological field into an object of play, this society has deactivated authority by means of its temporalization, whereby formerly authoritative objects have been turned into fetish-like toys that contain nothing but pure historicity, which is consumed in the activity of play. By virtue of this gesture both the progress of the liberal-democratic transition and any kind of restoration and revanche have become impossible. In Kurekhin’s performance, ideology undergoes an irreversible transformation into a toy, whereby Lenin can at any time turn into a mushroom, but a mushroom can no longer transform itself back into a revolutionary icon. It is this irreversibility that truly marks postcommunism as the end of history: in the ceaseless conversion of structure into events, history itself is consumed in the activity of play, whose structural or synchronic residue cannot serve as the building blocks of an alternative political order. Yet, what if this incessant activity of play is arrested in the opposite dynamic of the historical machine? What happens to the pure historicity embodied in the ideological toys when play is transformed into ritual, events into structure and diachrony into synchrony? In the remainder of this chapter we shall probe the question of how the messianic politics of the 1990s has fared in the Putin period, whose official discourse has posited the task of the overcoming of the 1990s.

Post-transitionalism and its Double During his visit to the Institute of Space Studies in March 2007, President Putin was treated to a lecture by the director of the Institute, Professor Lev Zeleny, on the formation and transformation of the solar system. Meeting with the press after the visit, the president shared his impressions with the journalists, paying particular attention to the fact that

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in around seven billion years the Sun will cease to exist, turning into a ‘white dwarf’. ‘This is very saddening’, the president is reported to have said (Polit.Ru 2007). As saddening as this fact certainly is, Putin’s statement elicited a rare comic effect owing to the incongruity between the conventionally short-term temporal perspective, employed by politicians, and the seven billion years, left for us to enjoy the sunlight. Nonetheless, the statement appears emblematic of the temporal orientation of the Putin presidency, which, as we shall argue in this chapter, is characterized by privileging structure over events, synchrony over diachrony, stability over transformation. Putin’s regret over the eventual demise of the Solar System betrays the orientation of his political project towards arresting the accelerated movement of messianic time, with its recapitulation of the past and the deactivation of the future. Yet, what does it mean to suspend the messianic suspension and arrest the movement that itself results from arresting the teleological movement of grant historical projects? How is it possible to bring the end of history itself to an end? Putinism is normally viewed by both its adherents and its critics as a period of time after the timelessness of the 1990s, a return to normality after a traumatic rupture of Yeltsinism that lingered for an entire decade. However, why was Yeltsin’s ‘sovereign anarchism’ succeeded precisely by Putin’s bureaucratic authoritarianism with its highly idiosyncratic vision of normality? We suggest that it was because this mode of depoliticization is paradoxically closest to Yeltsinite ‘time of trials’ in retaining the radical openness of the political despite being, strictly speaking, its diametrical opposite. The two temporalities are identical in their suspension of teleological time of ‘normal politics’, that is, progressive development within a positive symbolic order. The moment of pure depoliticization under Putin is much closer to the pure kairological moment of the political than to a hegemonic articulation of a particular political orientation (e.g. socialism, nationalism or liberalism), which delegitimizes all others and thus effects a stabilizing closure of the political field. In contrast to the logic of hegemonic universalization of particular ideological content, Putinism suspends the legitimacy of all contenders for hegemony (witness the decline of all ideological parties, from liberals to communists, during Putin’s first term) without itself occupying any determinate ideological locus. In Sakwa’s argument (2007), Putin’s rule has been characterized by the devaluation of all substantive ideological alternatives to the postcommunist status quo, be they nationalist or anti-globalist, and a correlate formation of a ‘myth of normality’ that dispenses with any vision of a historical Sonderweg for Russia.


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Yet, while the decline of the entire ideological field under Putinism is easily noticeable, it is difficult to ascertain what this ‘myth of normality’ might be, especially if its location is to be sought somewhere within the discredited ideological continuum. The attempts of political scientists inside and outside of Russia to ‘pin down’ Putin’s ideological orientation have failed not in the sense of their being erroneous, but rather in all being entirely (and equally) correct (see e.g. Nicholson 2001; Tompson 2002; Sakwa 2004; Baker and Glasser 2005; Truscott 2005). To elucidate this paradox, let us return to the notion of ‘liberal conservatism’ that was one of the most popular interpretations of Putin’s project during the first term of his presidency. According to Polyakov (2000), Putin’s socioeconomic programme is substantively liberal, and thus continuous with the dominant orientation of the Yeltsin presidency, but situationally and stylistically conservative, which accounts for its perceived heterogeneity with the Yeltsin era. In this understanding, which recalls Samuel Huntington’s (1957) famous argument, conservatism as an ‘ideological’ orientation does not have its own substantive core (unlike, e.g. liberalism or socialism), but is constituted by a number of stylistic features that are opposed to similarly situational orientations such as, for example, ‘revolutionism’ (cf. Freeden 1996, part 3). Moreover, as Huntington argued, these stylistic features may be deployed to defend any particular ideological content or institutional order, insofar as it can no longer be defended in its own terms. In the context of the Putin project, these features include the rhetoric of consolidation and normalization after the turbulent and antagonistic politics of the 1990s, the abandonment of doctrinaire policy orientations in favour of a variably understood ‘pragmatism’, the refusal of the wholesale condemnation of Soviet history, the reaffirmation of sovereignty in foreign policy, etc. While there is little to be challenged in Polyakov’s argument, it can easily be complemented within the same analytical framework. Stylistically, Putin may easily be considered a conservative, a reformist and a revolutionary all at once, just as the substantive programme of his presidency lends itself to similarly multiple characterizations as liberal, nationalist and socialist. Thus, if there is such a thing as ‘Putin’s ideology’ (Chadaev 2005), it is self-consciously syncretic, combining the master signifiers from the entire ideological field (‘freedom’, ‘social justice’, ‘strong statehood’, etc.) in a bland ‘catch-all’ political discourse that, as we shall see, necessarily produces its own obscene supplement by virtue of its vapid character. A similar ambiguity concerns Putin’s style of rule, which has been manifestly deprived of any trace of charisma, so characteristic of the

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political elite of the early 1990s (see Prozorov 2005a, 2007b). Public opinion surveys in Russia have demonstrated that despite extremely high approval ratings, the figure of Putin stirs very little public emotion or passion, receives no ‘admiration’ or ‘love’. The public opinion of the current prime minister is rather ‘positively indifferent’. The ‘carnevalesque style’ of Yeltsin-era politics, characterized by hyperbolically intense political divisions and mass media controversies, has given way to the technocratic and business-like style, thoroughly devoid of the political pathos of the Perestroika period and the early post-communist politics. In a number of interviews and speeches, Putin has repeatedly presented himself as a ‘hired manager’, providing ‘services to the population’. Similarly, the Putin presidency has been marked by the decline of interest in the elevated and elusive ‘national idea’ as the ethicopolitical foundation for the new Russian state. In a number of public appearances, Putin has offered as his vision of the national idea ‘the idea of effective and efficient statehood’. Critical commentators have correctly pointed out that this answer simply evades the question, offering the achievement of desired goals in the least costly manner as the definition of these very goals. In his ideological omnivorosity that embraces the entire political spectrum, Putin delegitimizes all determinate answers to the question of ‘the Russian idea’ but refrains from offering his own answer, insofar as any such answer is bound to generate substantive political antagonism, which the Putin administration has tried to avoid at all cost (see Anderson 2007). The fractured society clumsily asks [the president] how to become whole, and he answers that it must become wealthy. Strictly speaking, the president’s response is tautological: he refers to efficiency, while the question is about charting that very social unity, which subsequently may be found efficient or inefficient. [ . . . ] To declare pragmatism as the ideology of power in today’s Russia is merely to put the cart before the horse. (Remizov 2002c) The increase of the momentum and efficiency of the reform process in the absence of political confrontation has been described as the main achievement of Putinism and a sign of political consolidation and stabilization in postcommunist Russia. In the aftermath of the triumph of the United Russia party in the parliamentary elections of 2003 Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of the presidential administration,


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has authoritatively pronounced the end of the proverbial postcommunist ‘transition’ and the emergence of a proper Russian state, no longer rhetorically tied to its predecessor (see also Pavlovsky 2000). The relative success of this consolidation is well illustrated by the bitterness with which it is addressed by Putin’s opponents from the ‘left-conservative’ camp: The decade of reforms was sufficient to come to terms with ‘being-thrown-into-the-market’ as something inevitable. Two years of Putin’s ‘rule’ were sufficient to spontaneously legitimate the postSoviet structural degradation of society [ . . . ] as a constituted and adequate reality. This is the necessary precondition of the conservative politico-psychological complex: the ability to perceive one’s social environment not in terms of collapse, catastrophe or a chaotic ‘transitional moment’ but as a crystallized reality, with regard to which it is possible to talk about ‘conservation’, ‘reproduction’ and ‘transformation’. (Remizov 2003) Indeed, from the perspective of left conservatism, characterized by a thoroughly irredentist attitude to both the political system, instituted in 1993 in the aftermath of Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Congress of People’s Deputies, and the economic order, grounded in the scandalous privatization deals of the early 1990s, the stabilization of this very system constitutes nothing short of a historical catastrophe. What is most significant in this critical diagnosis is its emphasis on the routinization of the originally uncanny experience of ‘being thrown into the market’. Indeed, if Putinism can be assigned anything like a set of determinate predicates, it could be summed up in terms of an unlimited valorization of capitalism, whereby economic rationality is generalized to become the universally valid model of social praxis, and politics, ethics, aesthetics and other originally ‘non-economic’ spheres of existence lose their autonomy and become judged in economic terms. Contemporary caricatures of Putin as a Soviet-style autocrat inside and outside Russia ignore the evident fact that it is only with the advent of Putinism that Soviet socialism was definitively destroyed, not merely as an actually existing form of order but also as a politically relevant object of nostalgia. It is completely impossible to understand the Putin regime outside the context of the triumphant restoration of capitalism in the Russian society. In an earlier study (2004a) we have analyzed the policies of the first term of the Putin presidency in terms of a ‘sovereign’, that is,

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statist and authoritarian form of neoliberal governmentality that both universalizes economic rationality and exempts state sovereignty from this universalization as an exception in the strict Schmittian sense. The valorization of sovereignty both enables the operation of the neo-liberal rationality of government in the absence of an explicit articulation of a neo-liberal ideology and conceals the operation of this rationality by the fetishisation of the state that is at odds with the more conventional ideologies of neo-liberalism.5 There is little to add to this diagnosis after the expiry of Putin’s second term and his assumption of the post of the prime minister other than to remark that this universalization, which, of course, did not begin with Putin but rather dates back to the rise of Soviet shadow economy in the 1970s, has largely been successful in recasting the state of ‘being thrown into the market’ as a new horizon of objectivity, whereby competitiveness, efficiency and consumerism function as pseudo-ethical guidelines in everyday behaviour rather than as beguiling esoteric concepts that they initially appeared to be in the late 1980s. At the same time, it is difficult to reconcile this impressive degree of stabilization and consolidation with Putin’s tautological politics of efficiency, which evades any determinate answer to the question of for what the society must be stabilized or consolidated. Throughout the Putin presidency, this dissonance resulted in the increasing recourse to phantasmatic discourses that claim to find behind the façade of sterile technocracy something like a ‘real Putin’ with a substantive political project that was, depending on the taste of the observer, either extremely liberal or extremely authoritarian – but always extreme, as if the only way to compensate for the surface nihilism of Putinite politics was to imagine its ‘real’ content to be so extreme as to somehow deserve being hidden. Curiously, Putin himself has fostered the hopes and fears of such an ‘obscene supplement’ of the tautologies of the official ideology in his famous habit of making calculated obscene quips that sharply contradict his own technocratic image. The already legendary promise to ‘waste [Chechen terrorists] in their outhouses’, the ominous claim that ‘whoever hurts us has three days left to live’ and the bemusing offer to a French journalist, sympathetic to the cause of Chechen separatism, to undergo ‘a circumcision, after which nothing will grow back on [sic!]’ are merely some of the verbal performances, stylistically at odds with the technocratic austerity of the contemporary Russian political discourse (see Prozorov 2004a, chapter 4; 2007b). The sheer gap between Putin’s ‘obscene lexicon’, which has also been appropriated by his successor since the 2008 Russian–Georgian war, and the


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sterile character of his regime recall Carl Schmitt’s (1985a) famous insistence on the ineradicable ontological non-coincidence of the sovereign with his order, whereby there is always an excess of the sovereign power of exceptional decision over the positive authority prescribed in the formal statutes of the regime. In the discourses about the ‘real Putin’, which have persisted throughout the two terms of the presidency, this excess of pure negativity is endowed with a positive ontic form of a ‘secret ideology’ behind the façade of a bland and technocratic ‘centrism’. It is as if the ‘myth of normality’ required its very opposite, that is, the obscene supplement of the radically Abnormal, to sustain itself. Yet, as Mikhail Remizov has amply argued, these discourses have been little more than self-serving illusions, as a latent political project is a contradiction in terms, the political being necessarily phenomenal rather than noumenal and hence contained without remainder in the actually occurring discursive practices. ‘ “Putin’s soul” is a metaphysical prejudice. [ . . . ] We simply need to recognize that there is nothing beneath the apparent, even if the apparent hints towards the existence of a secret. Secretiveness is the last resort of power, which no longer has anything about it that could deserve being hidden. Thus, Putin “wants” precisely that which he talks about, that is, nothing.’ (Remizov 2002b) Putin is thus interpreted in the oppositional circles as merely the sign of the routinization of the nihilism of the 1990s, its most logical conclusion: if Putin is a patriot, his ‘patria’ is the ‘New Russia’ of decadent hedonism that the oppositional observers consider an abominable historical accident.

The Realm of Pure Synchrony Although the ‘left-conservative’ critique of Putinism as a routinization and sedimentation of Yeltsinism in terms of substantive political content is certainly plausible (cf. Prozorov 2004a, chapter 4),6 we must nonetheless emphasize their stark difference in terms of their relation to the messianic event and the kairological temporality of the political. While for Yeltsin all politics could play out in the abridged messianic time with no serious finality because everything significant already happened in August 1991, for Putin nothing serious should happen because it already happened once, and it is the terror of this event (which Putin personally witnessed not in Russia but in the unravelling German Democratic Republic) that animates every aspect of Putin’s politics. While Yeltsin stood for the void of the political in the sense of preventing the onset of any ‘normal politics’, Putin stands in for this void in an

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attempt to conceal the non-identity of the postcommunist order with itself by the rhetoric of stability and the thoroughgoing depoliticization of social life. Yet, given the consumption of all positive ideological content in the messianic play of the 1990s, it is impossible to fill this void by positing new historical tasks and an alternative vision of development. Thus, Putinism exemplifies the only possible alternative to the Yeltsinite lingering of the political after the end of history – an absolutely synchronic and ritualized politics, which effaces the traces of the messianic event by precluding the possibility of the event as such. And yet, busily transforming kairos into chronos, diachrony into synchrony, events into structures, Putinism operates in the domain that has already been rendered devoid of meaning and purpose, a domain in which every statesman has already been turned into a mushroom, while all sacred objects have been used up and worn out as toys. In fact, it is this image of a wholly ritualized society that Kojève presents in his famous note to the Second Edition of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. According to Kojève’s original argument in the 1930s, the end of history leaves the natural world intact and only entails the ‘disappearance of Man’ in the sense of a radical cessation of Action (‘the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions’) (Kojève 1969, 158–159). As ‘man no longer changes himself essentially’ (ibid., 159), philosophy follows historical struggle into oblivion, having reached its completion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Nonetheless, Kojève argues that ‘all the rest can be preserved indefinitely: art, love, play, etc., etc.’ (ibid.). Kojève’s relegation of love, art and play to the post-historical terrain, in which Man as such disappears as a ‘negating negativity’, strongly contradicts Georges Bataille’s pathos of endowing these very domains with the ‘super-human’ aura of sovereign ‘negativity without use’, as these activities do not in any way point to the selftranscendence of the human being but rather to his animalization or ‘return to nature’ and are therefore utterly desublimated (see Agamben 2004, chapters 2, 3). However, in the 1962 note to the Second Edition Kojève recognizes the problem with this understanding of post-historical activities: what would these activities of art, love and play mean in the post-historical context, in which Man only remains alive as an animal, living in harmony with the natural world? It is here that Kojève describes the experience of his visit to Japan that leads him to the restatement of his original position. Post-historical Man, represented by the caricaturistic figure of the Japanese snob, is now ‘anything but animal’ (Kojève 1969, 161). In the absence of properly historical ‘Religion, Morals


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and Politics’, the Japanese civilization nonetheless created ‘disciplines, negating the “natural” or “animal” given, which in effect surpassed those that arose [ . . . ] from historical action’ (ibid.). Referring to the Noh Theatre, tea ceremonies and the art of bouquets of flowers, Kojève claims that this snobbish disposition leads to a life ‘according to totally formalized values – that is, values, completely empty of all ‘human’ content in the ‘historical sense’ (ibid., 162). The snob may therefore retain or borrow historical values, using them in the ritualized, purely formal manner that deprives them of all their meaning. Since ‘no animal can be a snob’ (ibid.), post-historical beings will remain human, albeit this humanity will no longer consist in the transformative work of negation that produced new content, but rather in the formalized rituals that the snob tirelessly reproduces with no developmental or progressive effects whatsoever. Kojève ventures that the interaction between Japan and the Western world will eventually end in ‘the Japanization of the Westerners (including the Russians)’ (ibid.). Only half-jokingly, we might suggest that this prediction has indeed come true in the case of Russia, as the Putinite reign of pure synchrony and structure corresponds, almost to the letter, to Kojève’s description of snobbery, with the proviso that the ‘disciplines’ in question have already been desublimated and profaned during the 1990s, making their ritualistic invocation even more ridiculous. The fact that something like Kurekhin’s television performance is absolutely unthinkable in today’s Russian state-controlled media does not conceal the fact that the rituals that the new regime snobbishly reproduces can no longer be restored to their ‘natural’ purity prior to their playful profanation (cf. Agamben 2005a, 88). Thus, rather than challenge the Yeltsinite ‘timelessness’ of the 1990s by the reactivation of the historical machine and the construction of a new teleo-ideological, Putinism merely freezes the scene of profane play into an uncanny still-life of a structure that can in principle survive as long as the Sun, which does not conceal its essentially toylike, ‘posthistorical’ qualities. The very name ‘Putin’ is an empty signifier that weaves together a set of meaningless tautologies into what today passes for ‘Russian politics’, a vacuous hegemony of efficient stability and stable efficiency, which does not ‘restart’ history but rather suspends the time of its end. As we have argued above, any possible resumption of history after its messianic interruption can only come in the form of Terror, in which the fear of death will ensure the return of the Slave to his work. Despite the proliferation of scarecrow caricatures of Putin, particularly during his second term, it is quite evident that his project is entirely alien to the terrorist drive of, for example, Stalinist totalitarianism,

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whose key characteristic is the drive for the total mobilization of the society for the fulfillment of the historical task of the construction of socialism. In this aspect, Putinism is the diametrical opposite of Stalinism, insofar as it lacks any idea of a historical task and any desire to mobilize the masses for any project whatsoever. On the contrary, we may venture that Putinism rather consists in a thoroughgoing demobilization, whereby the political regime renounces all historical tasks other than persevering in its own being. Even if and especially when this ‘stability’ is maintained by authoritarian measures or even brute force, we must bear in mind that what is thereby stabilized is nothing other than the scene of messianic suspension, the timelessness of the Yeltsin era, which, instead of being abandoned, is simply frozen into a static image. In a sense, Putinism may thus be viewed as an achievement of Yeltsinism (the genitive here being both subjective and objective), which endows this period of limitless and ceaseless change with a minimally intelligible form that permits us to speak of a ‘postcommunist regime’ rather than merely point to the all-consuming black hole (cf. Delyagin 2007). Yet, this achievement must be thought not as a violent interruption from the outside, but rather as the immanent suspension by the postcommunist elites of the profane play of early postcommunism, a second-degree inoperosity that permits the post-historical period to attain its form: ‘As we know, the world received its final form by virtue of the fact that God decided to rest on the sixth day of creation. If this did not happen and God continued to indulge in infinite creativity, we would be still waiting for its results at this moment.’ (Groys 2006, 95) Just as a work of art cannot emerge without an interruption of artistic practice and the withdrawal of the subject from work (ibid., 100), so the messianic timelessness of the Yeltsin era can only conserve itself through a singular gesture of its own suspension, otherwise it would evidently consume itself without remainder. Surkov’s claim about the end of the postcommunist transition may now be appreciated in its fruitful ambiguity. If, as we have argued, any discourse of transition posits a necessarily chimerical endpoint of the eschaton and then defers its fulfillment in an interminable advance towards it, what does it mean to end the transition? It is nothing other than to arrest this logic of perpetual deferral by authoritatively declaring the moment of parousia in the here and now, whenever and wherever this ‘here and now’ is. Putinism may then be grasped as the paradoxical conjuncture of the messianic ‘time of the end’ with the eschatological or transitionalist ‘end of time’. In other words, if the Yeltsinite period could only be grasped as a transition ‘from nowhere to nowhere’, then


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the suspension of this transition can only take place in the very same ‘nowhere’ that was both its origin and its endpoint. The arguments of both the few remaining cohorts of Yeltsinism and the growing hordes of the apologists of Putinism about a radical discontinuity between the two leaders hereby find their final refutation: rather than overcoming the ‘timelessness’ of the 1990s, the present regime achieves its ultimate triumph precisely by suspending what is already a moment of the messianic suspension of history. Thus, the Putin presidency may be credited with a simple yet formidable resolution of the aporia of postcommunist Russian conservatism that we have addressed above. While liberal conservatism attempts to conserve what is not yet created and left conservatism strives to conserve what no longer exists, the Putin presidency simply conserves what there is, that is, the ruins of the Soviet order. As this remnant of Soviet socialism is neither liberal nor socialist, and indeed escapes any positive predicate, we may speak of Putin’s reign of pure synchrony and structure in terms of absolute conservatism, which in Huntington’s terms has dispensed with the substantive object of conservation and instead articulates itself as pure form or style, which can be put into play in any context whatsoever. Applied to the scene of the messianic suspension of history in the aftermath of the demise of communism in the 1990s, this style achieves nothing other than the conservation and stabilization of the post-historical condition. Putin’s suspension of the messianic event of postcommunism does not put history back into motion with a new telos but merely arrests its consumption in the Yeltsinite play through the constitution of the apparently immutable structure that, on second glance, is nothing other than the destitute residue of messianic play. The Putinite negation of the negativity of the messianic moment of the 1990s does not lead to any affirmation whatsoever, but remains squarely within the dimension of negativity, from which it must draw resources for its overcoming. Thus, Putin’s advent as Yeltsin’s successor marks a paradoxical succession in terms of retaining the ateleological temporality of postcommunism. If, as Remizov argued, ‘Putin wants nothing’, this nihilism logically entails the suspension of all political teleology and thus a perpetuation of the ‘timelessness’ of the 1990s, this time in the guise of ‘stability’. While the timelessness of the 1990s was an effect of a messianic suspension of teleological temporality, the Putin presidency achieves much the same outcome in his ateleological suspension of the messianic kairos. The background motive for these two suspensions is however entirely different in the case of the two presidencies.

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If Yeltsinism is conceptually graspable in terms of awe before the messianic event, Putinism can be conceived as the attempt at the effacement of the event as such in the reign of pure structure. While Yeltsinite politics unfolded entirely in the shadow of the revolution of 1991, whose persistent tremors plagued any attempt at stabilization and rendered dubious any teleology of ‘evolutionary development’, Putinism may be understood as a via media between the abridged time of the messianic kairos and the progressive chronology of hegemonic politics with a clear developmental telos, which denies both the telos in the future and the traumatic event in the recent past in favour of stable endurance in the present as if no event ever has or will take place. The consequence of this orientation is precisely the curiously selfreferential character of the regime’s presentation of its own achievements in terms of stability and efficiency. It is the existing structure of authority as such, whatever it is, that must remain stable and minimize the costs of its functioning. The entire activity of the system is thus turned back on itself: the avowedly liberal socio-economic reforms of the first term of the presidency have largely come down to restructuring the governmental apparatus itself (see Tompson 2002, Prozorov 2004a), while the political transformations during the second term (e.g. the reform of the electoral system, the law on political parties, the restrictive legislation on national referenda, public demonstrations and the funding of non-governmental organizations) had a clear objective of structurally insulating the existing regime from any possible challenge by society, be it the electoral victory of the opposition or street protest. The sole criterion of political legitimacy in Putin’s realm of structure and synchrony is its successful warding off of every event and any resumption of play. While in the Yeltsin period the event of the demise of the Soviet order was fully visible in its pure negativity as a certain liberating clearing that prevents the closure of the new system and permits us to play with its plural ideologies, for the Putin presidency the event is negated in its very negativity, which, as is the case with every attempt to battle negativity with its own resources, does nothing more than exacerbate it. As it was this event that made the existing order possible in the first place, it continues to haunt the system from within in the guise of the oppositional discourse that persists in reminding us of the ‘lowly origins’ of the present regime in the very timelessness of the 1990s which it now hypocritically avows to have overcome. The Putin period of meaningless ‘stability’ has also been a period of ceaseless trepidation before the spectre of the messianic event of postcommunism, which keeps threatening its own return, which, given the end of history, cannot but be eternal.


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Why Russia No Longer Celebrates November 7 The Putinite apprehension of the event is particularly evident in the 2004 reform of national holidays. This reform is marked by a manifest disavowal of the origins of the present political system, evident in the abolition of the Day of the Constitution (December 12) as a national holiday and the purposefully low-key approach to other symbolic dates of the present regime, for example, June 12 (the Day of the Declaration of State Sovereignty, presently renamed in an ideologically sterile way as Russia Day) or August 22 (the day of the defeat of the August 1991 coup, which is self-consciously ignored by the present authorities). Even more tellingly, in 2004 the Russian Federal Assembly abolished the holiday of November 7 (the Day of the October Revolution, which in Yeltsin’s times was retained as a formal state holiday, albeit with an asinine title ‘Day of Consent and Reconciliation’) and introduced a Day of National Unity on November 4. The symbolic implications of this change are tremendous: the anniversary of the Revolution is demoted from the status of a holiday (even under a new name), and the newly chosen holiday symbolizes precisely a counter-revolutionary exit from the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, the restoration of order through the institution of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. The fate of November 7 is perhaps the most illuminating example of the difference between the Yeltsin and the Putin administrations. It would be absurd to suggest that in abolishing this holiday Putin revealed himself as somehow more ‘anti-Communist’ than Yeltsin. Even if that were humanly possible, it would not be true in the case of Putin, who after all is responsible for the restoration of the Soviet anthem and other Soviet symbols and has repeatedly voiced his regret over the demise of the Soviet Union, which he famously proclaimed the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’. What the regime seeks to efface in the abolition of November 7 as a holiday is not Soviet socialism but the October Revolution itself as an event in its paradigmatic purity. In other words, what Putinism marks as a threat is not the positive content of the Soviet order, in which the prime minister apparently finds much worth maintaining, but its origin in a revolutionary event of pure negation, which ruptured the history of Imperial Russia and instituted a regime that was at least initially radically heterogeneous to any of its predecessors. As we have argued above, the Marxist–Leninist ideology was rendered entirely inoperative in the late 1980s and poses no threat whatsoever to the bureaucratic capitalist order of today’s Russia. Moreover, the entire positive chronological history of the Soviet period has

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been successfully, if snobbishly, appropriated by the apparatus of official patriotism, which accumulates the entirety of ideologically incommensurable events of the past into the abstract ritual of celebrating our historical ‘heritage’ (cf. Tsipko 2000). The only event that resists such an accumulation is the brute fact of the revolution itself, which radically broke with the order that preceded it and was quite irreverent towards the accumulated ‘tradition’ (be it monarchy, Orthodox Christianity or pre-revolutionary ‘high’ culture). Thus, what is discursively eliminated in the abolition of November 7 as a holiday is not the period of Soviet socialism but its revolutionary origin, its evental character as a messianic suspension of the chronological time of the Russian Empire.7 Putinism effaces the messianic dimension of the revolutionary moment and affirms as the new object of celebration the exit from the quasirevolutionary condition of the ‘time of troubles’ through the institution of the new monarchic dynasty, choosing as the new holiday the date that is only two days away from the familiar day-off on November 7. In contrast, Yeltsin’s renaming of the holiday as a Day of Consent and Reconciliation in 1992 sought to dispense entirely with the substance of Soviet socialism by focusing the ‘celebration’ on the rehabilitation of anti-Soviet resistance from the White Army to Soviet-era dissidents, but, in a gesture of singular significance, retained the date of November 7. While the reasoning behind this decision may have manifold motives, we may interpret it as an indicator of Yeltsin’s unwitting fidelity to the pure event of the revolution, which, irrespective of his opposition to its ensuing positive content, did not allow him to entirely efface the revolutionary moment. Utterly intolerant of the political content of the Revolution, Yeltsin nonetheless remained faithful to its event. In a perfect contrast with Putinism, during the 1990s the October Revolution remained valorized as a purely formal event, its formality well illustrated by its reduction to a mere calendar date. While the Putin presidency is ready and willing to affirm select aspects of the Soviet order but must disavow its revolutionary origin, Yeltsin could paradoxically affirm the revolution as a pure event which, when deprived of all its substance, is formally identical to the anticommunist revolution of 1991. From this perspective, it would not be surprising if any future opposition to the Putin regime began to use ‘November 7’ as its privileged signifier in the absence of any concern for establishing one’s relation to the period of Soviet communism. In the present condition of the deactivation of the entire ideological field, the October Revolution has been stripped of almost any substantive content and figures in the discourse solely as a marker for the possibility of an event (much as the French Revolution in the West European discourse, wherein its symbolic significance has


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for long had little to do with its practically forgotten content). The sole significance of November 7 today consists in its function as an indicator of the fundamental political possibility that disrupts the chronological regularity of the political calendar and the teleological attribution of historical purpose to human time and inaugurates a messianic kairos of the pure event. If November 7 appears to be a potential marker of resistance to Putinism from a variety of incommensurable ideological standpoints, it is because the central motif of the Putin presidency is the fear of revolution as such (cf. Magun 2008, 14). As purely negative events that rupture the positivity of constituted power, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the anticommunist revolution of August 1991 are formally identical, and it is precisely the pure form of the event, including the event of the origin of the present postcommunist order, that Putin’s ‘absolute conservatism’ wishes to efface at any cost. It is from this perspective that we should understand the irrational and politically disadvantageous stance of the president on the ‘colour revolutions’ in the post-Soviet space, marked by a brazen support for the discredited and corrupt incumbent elites. Rather than point to cynical cost–benefit calculations or the unconscious persistence of the Soviet ‘imperialist’ disposition, Putin’s extremely negative reception of the ‘revolutions’ in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan rather reveals an apprehension before any political rupture, however simulative and ultimately ‘uneventful’, as has arguably been the case in all three cases. Rather than attempt to win over the upand-coming elites in the countries in question to Russia’s side through negotiations or intrigues, Putin continued to quixotically support the existing regimes against the popular challenge, even though such support was both politically costly and entirely impractical, given that the regimes of Eduard Shevardnadze, Leonid Kuchma or Askar Akaev could not even hypothetically be considered Russia’s ‘allies’. Rather than engaging in an autonomous game of national interests in the post-Soviet space, the Putin presidency is simply fearful of any interruption of the technocratic synchrony of the ‘eternal present’ by what, from the perspective of the suspension of the messianic could only be conceived as yet another ‘time of troubles’. It is in its ‘fear of the event’ that Putinism has been particularly disappointing for many of its initial supporters. Putin’s advent was perceived by many to be a genuine Event, a farewell to the timelessness of the 1990s, after which history recommences in a positive project of the construction of a new order, which would acquire sufficient ontological consistency to get rid of the very name ‘post-communism’ that still ties it to its predecessor. However, ironically, the ‘event’ of Putinism was

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entirely exhausted by its own advent, as the entire period of the Putin presidency was marked by the evasion of political identification and the suppression of all those who happened to have such an identification, from radical leftists to pro-Western neo-liberals. Nonetheless, despite the disappointment of political activists, Putin’s invariably high approval rating is owing precisely to his utter indifference to political identification. Putinism is tolerated because, and as long as, the regime does not do anything to disturb the inoperative ‘whatever being’ of the postcommunist society. As we have argued above, the ‘August revolution’ of 1991 was marked by a fundamental estrangement of the society from the political domain, a certain abandonment of power to its own devices, whereby it can revel in the majesty of its sovereignty on the condition that it does not exercise it in the positive sense. In their distinct ways, both the Yeltsin and the Putin presidencies fulfilled this condition. During the 1990s Russian politics was a diffused spectacle of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies, reforms and counter-reforms, rises and falls, all of which were a priori thwarted in their ability to achieve any finality and therefore were only of interest to their participants, not the society at large. In the Putin period, this spectacle gave way to an austere hegemony of nihilistic technocracy, which a priori forecloses the possibility of a political event. Rather than mobilize the population for a historical task of any ideological direction, Putin’s regime merely contributes, through restrictions on and repression of civic activity, to the societal exodus from politics that started immediately after 1991. In this manner, the present system endows with positive normative value the features of the ‘timelessness’ of the 1990s that were formerly deemed unfortunate objective obstacles to the swift ‘transition’: in a Kantian–Lacanian twist, what was formerly impossible has now also become prohibited. While for Yeltsin all things could happen as a matter of play and be reversible in the messianic recapitulation, in Putin’s times nothing major must any longer happen in order for the reign of pure structure to retain the valorized stability. Against any attributions of reformist credentials to the current administration, we may suggest that its legitimacy and support are rather grounded in a fundamental societal prohibition to intervene in its existence, to disturb the immanence of postcommunist inoperosity outside the teleological order of politics. Perhaps, someday this will be known as the 21st-century ‘Russian idea’ – an ‘impotentialization’ of power through a paradoxical synthesis of the acceptance of the majesty of sovereignty and the prohibition on its exercise.


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The Legacy of Alexander Rutskoi This prohibition, which in our view forms the ‘unthought’ and definitely ‘unspeakable’ foundation of Putinism, entails the extension of the post-historical inoperosity to the entire socio-political field in the contemporary Russia, whereby it marks both the process of the societal disengagement from the state and the statist disengagement from any ambition of societal transformation. While the idea of societal inoperosity has been present in the discourse of postcommunist studies in the form of lamentations about the passivity and submissiveness of the Russian society, the idea of the inoperative state, which is central to Agamben’s (2008) argument on ‘glory’ as the foundation of government, might appear rather more controversial. We may clarify this admittedly arcane idea by considering a concrete example from the Russian politics of the early 1990s. In the 1991 presidential elections Yeltsin ran together with the vice-presidential candidate Alexander Rutskoi (a Soviet army general and Afghan War veteran, the leader of the Democratic Party of the Communists of Russia), whose left-wing populist orientation gradually alienated him from Yeltsin’s neo-liberal ‘reformist’ government. During 1991–1993 Rutskoi drifted ever further away from Yeltsin, aligning himself with the oppositional Congress of People’s Deputies and eventually heading the anti-Yeltsin rebellion in October 1993 in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Congress, which we shall address in more detail in Chapter 4. Yet, prior to this violent confrontation that eventually led to Rutskoi’s brief imprisonment, Rutskoi formally remained vice-president despite his increasingly extreme anti-Yeltsin stance. To neutralize Rutskoi, who, according to the Constitution, could not simply be dismissed by the president, Yeltsin administration relied on the ambiguous constitutional specification of his competence. According to article 121–127, the vice-president performs, ‘according to the assignments of the president’, duties within the competence of the president. In a televised address in early May 1993, in the aftermath of the successful referendum of confidence in Yeltsin and the federal government, Yeltsin formally relieved Rutskoi of all presidential assignments as such, making any political action on the part of the vice-president a violation of the Constitution and a ground for his dismissal. Thus, from May to September 1993 Rutskoi formally remained vice-president but was stripped of all authority, serving as an embodiment of Agamben’s formula ‘being in force without significance’. Rather than being a curious example of Yeltsin’s political dexterity, this figure of the holder of power relieved of all tasks and radically incapable of any

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positive political action illuminates the pure ontological form of power that remains when every positive task or project is subtracted from it. Interestingly, the figure of Rutskoi also exemplifies the diametrically opposite reduction of power to the pure content of violent force – in the rebellion of October 1993, Rutskoi, proclaimed as president by the Congress of People’s Deputies, acted with little concern for formal legality, converting his inconsequential ‘being in force’ as vice-president into the militant actions of the self-appointed president, whose authority is not yet formally in force. Unwilling to remain in power on the condition of doing nothing, Rutskoi opted for the pure violent act that lay outside the order of power and rather exemplifies an abortive moment of Terror. Rutskoi’s tragicomic career in 1993 therefore unfolded entirely in the zone of anomie or, in Agamben’s terms, the state of exception, in which ‘a minimum of formal being-in-force coincides with a maximum of real application, and vice versa’ (Agamben 2005a, 36). The figure of Rutskoi reveals in a hyperbolic manner the radical separation between law and life, which in Agamben’s theory is the concealed negative foundation of all constituted power, which permanently oscillates between Rutskoi’s inoperative vice-presidency (a norm formally in force but not applied) and his abortive rebellious sovereignty (action that is not formally legal, yet claims for itself the force of law) (see ibid., 38). The violent suppression of the October rebellion is only a more extreme version of the lesson taught repeatedly by Yeltsin to all challengers to his presidency (Zyuganov, Lebed, Primakov, etc.) who sought the closure of the void of the political through the installation of a hegemonic project that would restart history after its messianic suspension in 1991. In the post-historical condition power must remain inoperative, that is, remain in force without any positive project, while any attempt at a hegemonic resumption of history is only thinkable in the mode of a necessarily abortive violent uprising that no longer has the ‘force of law’. Thus, from October 1993 onwards the Russian political elite has, almost without exception, functioned in the inoperative mode exemplified by Rutskoi’s vice-presidency, ‘relieved of all assignments’. While in the 1990s this inoperative condition was partly concealed by the inconsequential politics of the diffuse spectacle with its myriad pseudo-events, the Putin administration makes this inoperosity its foundational principle precisely by suspending the very scene of messianic suspension, reducing Russian politics to the pure synchronicity of meaningless ritual, whose continuous reproduction recalls the ‘tea ceremonies’ to which Kojève consigned the snobbish, post-historical humanity. In this manner, the Russian parliament, formerly the site


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of economic exchange among oligarchic elites, has been reduced to a machine for endorsing the government’s bills, whose ritualistic character has been well summed-up by Speaker Boris Gryzlov’s 2004 revelation that ‘the Parliament is no place for discussion’. However, it is precisely this sterility or monotony of the present as an uneventful reign of timeless synchrony and structure that generates the temptation of the event. The prohibition of the impossible always tempts one to transgress the prohibition by making the impossible appear as merely forbidden (cf. Bartelson 2001, chapter 1; Prozorov 2007a, chapter 6). If all events are foreclosed in the reign of pure structure, this entails that the ‘place’ in question is left open for something else, for something that keeps threatening its future advent. The void of the political that remains unconcealed in the ateleological technocracy of Putinism marks the existence of a space of the event that is presently vacant. The very suspension of the messianic opens a structural possibility for the event. This explains the dominant ‘sense of the age’: in Yeltsin’s times one craved stability, an end to the exhausting political spectacle in a triumph of a definite political orientation, while in Putin’s times one cannot but expect an event; one is increasingly hopeful for or, more often, fearful of something, anything that might happen. However, if we take seriously the arguments made above, what would an event be after the end of history, other than yet another re-marking of the latter, whereby the end of history keeps on coming? Our reading of Putinism as the eschatological ‘ending’ of the messianic ‘time of the end’ permits us to understand why no oppositional challenge to this regime has so far shown any sign of success. As we have argued above, the deactivation of the teleo-ideological aspect of politics in the early 1990s characterized the entire ideological field: liberalism, reduced to economy-centric technocratic governance explicitly opposed to democracy (cf. Reddaway and Glinsky 2001); nationalism, which degenerated into a plethora of esoteric doctrines; and socialism, which suffered most due to its surface association with the Soviet regime and miserably failed to mobilize resistance to the social-Darwinist policies of postcommunist governments. Starting from the second term of the Putin presidency we have witnessed a number of attempts by the increasingly marginalized opposition to overcome this deactivation through synthesizing disparate elements of the inoperative ideological field. Perhaps, the most surprising of such syntheses has been Another Russia, a coalition of the most radical opponents of the presidency from what used to be the left and the right fringes of the political spectrum. Another Russia unites the Popular Democratic Union of the

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former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, unceremoniously sacked by Putin in Spring 2004 after expressing humble dissent over the persecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the far-left National Bolshevik Party of the acclaimed novelist Eduard Limonov, the orthodox Marxist–Leninist Red Youth Vanguard, the neo-liberal United Civic Front of the chess champion Garri Kasparov, etc. It is easy to see why such a coalition of disgruntled liberals, nationalists and socialists is a perfect example of a cause that is lost even prior to its proper articulation. It is evidently impossible to remobilize the post-historical society with the help of the slogans of the Age of History, to invite the people to submit once again to the historical project of construction of a ‘bright future’ in a mythical ‘true Russia’, a neo-socialist state, or a globalized world economy. All of these visions have demonstrated their political impotence in the messianic kairos of the early 1990s, and their combination is certain to do so today. There is, nonetheless, one aspect in which a movement like Another Russia is genuinely oppositional to Putinism, which explains its ‘cruel and unusual’ persecution by the authorities. In its beguiling ideological alchemy that is not averse to pitting side by side EU, Soviet and Russian Imperial flags; portraits of Che Guevara, Stalin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky; and the inflatable toy alligator (a symbol of a fringe nationalist movement), Another Russia is a perfect epitome of messianic play, which recapitulates the most incommensurable elements of the ideological field, mobilizing them for the last time in the demand for the resumption of the kairological time of the ‘end of history’. In this manner, Another Russia is nothing other than the spectre announcing the return of the Russia of the 1990s, the overcoming of the Putinite reign of pure synchrony and the resumption of the consumption of historicity, in which the elements of the entire ideological field are profaned in the limitless activity of play. Just like Putin was in many ways the most ‘natural’ successor to Yeltsin, Putinism can only be succeeded by a new Yeltsinism. Thus, as long as the Russian society remains revelling in the immanence of inoperosity, any political change is going to be restricted to the narrow space of the spectacle, in which the basic opposition is between the Yeltsinite messianic suspension and the Putinite suspension of the messianic, between the secure instability of the 1990s and the unstable security of today, between the timelessness of playful pluralism and the timelessness of autocratic nihilism. If our diagnosis of postcommunism as the messianic experience of the end of history is correct, it logically follows that history can never be ‘restarted’ by the hegemonic appropriation of the monopoly on the political, if only because the very space of


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the political has already been subjected to a fundamental deactivation that has rendered inoperative all teleo-ideological content. It is only the resort to brute Terror on the part of the would-be Master that can set history back into motion and generate, in the course of the work of the Slave, new historical tasks and projects. In the absence of such recommencement of the historical dialectic, the postcommunist machine of ritual and play may busily turn all synchrony into diachrony and all diachrony into synchrony, thereby producing endless alternations of Yeltsinism and Putinism, yet its productivity does not conceal the fact that the machine has been running on empty since 1991 and thus no longer produces anything that we could recognize as history. The entire matrix of Russian postcommunist politics is constituted by the dualism of the Yeltsinite play and the Putinite ritual, both of which may even alternate in the figure of a single person. From this perspective, the very concept of postcommunist transformation that we continue to rely upon is misleading – the entire point of the postcommunist period (as opposed to the failed project of the reconstruction of the Soviet order during Gorbachev’s Perestroika) is that nothing at all is transformed in it and the very idea of transformation appears discredited on the societal level. As opposed to the revolutionary taking over of the state by social forces or the authoritarian domination of the society by the state, we rather observe a mutual exclusion of the state and society from each other’s domains and a withdrawal of both into self-immanence. The postcommunist state and society are thus engaged in a rapid movement away from each other, yet in accordance with the same logic of disengagement and inoperosity, whereby existence as such triumphs over the teleology that would actualize or manifest some essence. While the postcommunist society finds in this pure affirmation of existence the condition of the possibility of immanent ‘whatever being’ at a distance from all project-oriented politics, the postcommunist state deploys this affirmation to perpetuate its presence as a pure form of sovereignty devoid of all positive content. What Vice-President Rutskoi never understood, to his disadvantage, is the possibility for political power to maintain itself indefinitely in the condition of being ‘relieved of all assignments’. Perhaps, then, the value of our diagnosis of postcommunist temporality consists in the displacement of the horizon of expectation as such: if we conceive of the future as an eternal return of the end of history, there appears little sense in endless ruminations on what is going to happen after Putinism in the future that appears increasingly distant. The messianic event of postcommunism has already taken place, and neither

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the indefinite protraction of the inoperative reign of Putin’s United Russia nor the unlikely replay of the timelessness of the 1990s conjured by Another Russia could ever fully erase its traces. What is at stake in the irreparable condition of postcommunism is the realization that whatever future we might have is entirely present in the present in which we live. From the transitionalist perspective, the diagnosis of postcommunism as a period of the suspension of teleology and generalized inoperosity may appear normatively problematic, as it can only mean a farewell to ‘progressive politics’ as we know it. At the same time, why should the cessation of the progressive temporality of history be viewed pessimistically? In Agamben’s argument, the end of history ushers in a time without tasks, divorcing human existence from the imperative of work and letting it be in the form of ‘whatever being’, constrained neither by identity not vocation (Agamben 2000, 141). However apocalyptic this vision might appear, Agamben repeatedly notes that in the post-historical time ‘everything will be as it is now, just a little different’ (Agamben 1993b, 53). Rather than think the end of history in terms of a momentous catastrophe, Agamben suggests that its ‘little difference’ from teleological politics concerns the relation of human beings to their own existence rather than the introduction of some new positive content to this existence. The end of history drops all demands on the human being, disqualifying from the outset all values that have served as imperatives for sacrifice of the self and others in the present in the name of the future. At stake is not merely the loss of a future open to competing teleologies and projects of transformation but the loss of that very loss itself, a certain forgetting of the future (cf. Agamben 1993b, 102). All that remains after the end of history is the present, the now in which we live and which is the only time in which it might finally be possible to live, once existence is released from its deployment as a project into its own inoperative immanence. If all possible versions of the telos of postcommunism have been rendered entirely inoperative, what remains is the question of its ethos, the mode of dwelling in the present. As the discussion in this chapter has tried to demonstrate, this ethos is not to be found in the political realm.

Poetry and Politics in the Ethics of Postcommunism The approach to postcommunism as the end of history in the Agambenian sense entails the need to rethink the ontological status of politics and its relation to social praxis. The insufficiency of conventional


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categories of the political discourse not merely follows logically from the post-historical character of the period, in which all positive political content is rendered inoperative, but is also conditioned by the phenomenon of the societal exodus from the formal political domain, which remains cast in negative terms as an obstacle to Russia’s democratization or an effect of the repressive policies of the regime. Concluding his astute portrayal of Russia’s ‘managed democracy’, Perry Anderson (2007) nonetheless addressed this exodus in a conventionally negative manner, reverting to the closing lines of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov: ‘the people are silent’. Yet, isn’t silence an appropriate response to the ritualized politics of Putinism that evidently does not merit much discussion? Dismissing this ‘silence’ and interpreting the exodus from politics in the solely negative terms of passive submission carries the risk of making obscure the direction this exodus actually takes and the discourses produced on the way in this as yet unidentified direction. If we want to understand the modes of human existence proper to the end of history, we shall not find them in the formally political domains of the state and organized civil society, which have been evacuated of all meaning and all passionate attachment. Nor shall we find them in the private sphere, dominated as it is by the market imperatives of consumption and the rationalities of advertising, which renders it just as ritualized as the formal realm of the political, especially given the abovediscussed dependence of the Putinite stability on the presentation of the grotesque monstrosity of contemporary Russian capitalism as a ‘new objectivity’. To inquire into the ethics of postcommunism we must follow the Russian society in its exodus from the political sphere towards an abode, which is not easily localizable with the usual mapping devices, the place which is a quest as much as it is a destination. Just as we have theoretically dissociated the messianic ‘time of the end’ from the eschatological ‘end of time’, we must dissociate the idea of the post-historical condition from the ‘definitive order’, in which the historical dialectic is resolved in the universal reconciliation of humanity with itself that takes the form of a fully ritualized reign of pure synchrony and structure. In other words, we must move beyond the presentation of postcommunist politics in terms of the Hegelo–Kojèvian end of history as the reign of ritualistic snobbery towards a reading of post-historical social praxis in Russia in Agambenian terms of a ‘happy life’ of inoperative ‘whatever being’. It is virtually impossible to describe this ethos of living in the posthistorical messianic time in the familiar categories of political theory, given the predominance of teleological discourses of socio-political

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praxis, which are only able to account for this ethos in a negative manner. Emphasizing the radical novelty of post-historical experience, Agamben’s philosophical perspective leads our investigation of the ethics of postcommunism to the domain of art, and specifically poetry, understood in terms of poiesis, ‘pro-duction’ or bringing into presence (Agamben 1999d, chapters 8, 9), in which a human being may appropriate his present and experience his being in the world in an authentic manner. Man has on earth a poetic status, because it is poiesis that founds for him the original space of his world. Only because in the poetic epoche he experiences his being-in-the-world as his essential condition does a world open up for his action and his existence. Only because he is capable of the most uncanny power, the power of pro-duction into presence, is he also capable of praxis, of willed and free activity. (ibid., 101) Art is therefore an important site for any inquiry into a post-historical ethics, poiesis being a more originary experience of bringing into presence conditioning the possibility of praxis as free and willful action. While the messianic deactivation of the political field has left postcommunist social praxis without adequate representation in discourse, we may expect postcommunist poiesis to provide an innovative paradigm of such praxis that gathers together a multiplicity of dispersed and misrecognized forms of post-historical existence into exemplars, making them familiar and habitual features of the postcommunist ethos (cf. Agamben 1991, 93). Thus, postcommunist poiesis may provide us with paradigmatic examples of practices that have largely remained invisible to conventional socio-political analyses or have been approached in a purely negative manner as deviations from a theoretical model prescribed for postcommunist society. Our application of the notion of paradigm in this book follows from Agamben’s development of the notion on the basis of the work of Thomas Kuhn (1970) and Michel Foucault (1977b, 1990a). Agamben’s famous recourse to hyperbolic paradigms (e.g. homo sacer (1998) and Muselmann (1999b)) is similar to Kuhn’s more specific deployment of the concept in the sense of a concrete exemplar of problem solution that can guide research in a tacit manner, without explicit rules of application. Similarly, although Foucault never used the term ‘paradigm’, opting instead for episteme or dispositif, his genealogical investigations


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arguably deploy a paradigmatic method, which reconstitutes the rationalities of power-knowledge in modern societies through a focus on singular examples and stark images (e.g. the Panopticon or the confessional) that illuminate the overall logic also at work in entirely different contexts (see Foucault 1991b). Elaborating this logic, Agamben emphasizes the way a paradigm as a singular example functions as a condition of intelligibility of the set, of which it is also a member, by virtue of the suspension of its own denotation (1998, 22). For instance, the word ‘paradigm’ may be a paradigm of an English noun in the singular, but in its very functioning as a paradigm, this word must exit the set, whose intelligibility it exhibits. Thus, Agamben ends up with an elegant definition of a paradigm as ‘something shown beside itself, exposed in its own knowability’ (Agamben 2002). Just as Kuhn’s scientific paradigms can guide research activities even in the absence of explicit rules warranting their application, so the poetic paradigm of the ethics of postcommunism arguably guides social praxis in diverse domains without being explicitly deployed as its ‘foundation’ or ‘principle’. Rather than belong to a different domain than social praxis, a poetic paradigm is one of its forms, which is taken out of its domain in the pro-ductive act of poiesis and thereby paradoxically exposes its belonging to it by virtue of being excluded from it. It would thus be erroneous to conceive of the poetic paradigm as a ‘deeper’ model or principle of social praxis, something that the latter must emulate and adapt. Our argument is furthest away from endowing, in a romanticist gesture, the domain of art with a privileged status in relation to the wider field of social praxis, ‘suturing’ the latter to the former as an unequivocal foundation and thus producing yet another closure of this field (cf. Badiou 1999, 61–78; Nancy 2008, 129–138). A paradigm is not a foundation but rather something that is exposed as an example of something beyond itself without being presupposed as an explicit principle, something which is (exactly, and no more than) what it seems (Agamben 2002). To develop a paradigm of postcommunist social praxis in an analysis of poetry is neither to aesthetize politics nor to politicize art but rather to concretely exemplify the modes of social praxis that remain obscured by the dominant political discourses, rendered inoperative in the post-historical condition but still delimiting our political imagination. In the remainder of this book we shall rely on the central problematics of Agamben’s philosophy in an attempt to reconstruct a paradigm of the ethics of postcommunism through a detailed analysis of the lyrical oeuvre of Boris Grebenshikov, a singer-songwriter and the leader of the

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group Akvarium. With a career spanning over three decades, Grebenshikov has acquired the status of a cult poet, his work widely considered to be the most influential exemplar of the late-Soviet counter-culture. A unique blend of the Western alternative cultures of the post-World War II period, the reinterpretation of religious traditions from Buddhism to dissident Orthodox Christianity and an incisive portrayal of most mundane Soviet and Russian realities, Grebenshikov’s poetry from 1972 to the present is an invaluable source for rethinking the post-historical condition of postcommunism for two reasons. First, on the level of its semantic content, Grebenshikov’s poetry (as well as his own experience in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods) offers a wide variety of examples of inoperative praxis that, as we have argued, characterizes Russian social life throughout the postcommunist period. Second, as a performative act, Grebenshikov’s work itself exemplifies many of the trends that we shall discuss as characteristic of postcommunist society, from the flirtation with the esoteric and the occult in the early 1990s to the ironic indifference and detachment from the consolidated political regime of the Putin period. The analysis will proceed through three stages. First, we shall trace the genealogy of the postcommunist deactivation of the political field through a reading of Grebenshikov’s lyrics of the late-Soviet period (1972–1986), in which we shall identify the initial articulation of a paradigm of inoperosity as a mode of social praxis. Second, we shall discuss Grebenshikov’s efforts at coming to terms with the tragicomedy of the destruction of the Soviet order and the ‘timelessness of the 1990s’ (1987–1996), paying particular attention to the deactivation of the entire ideological field in the messianic kairos of the 1990s. Finally we shall trace Grebenshikov’s response to the ‘post-transitionalist’ sociopolitical consolidation and the reassertion of state authority during 1997–2008, the period in which the disorientation, characteristic of early postcommunism, gives way to a powerful gesture of the reappropriation of human existence in the habitual use of post-historical temporality, which completes the conversion of the late-Soviet practices of resistance into a new-found ethos, a mode of dwelling in the world without historical tasks and teleologies of salvation.

3 The Janitor Generation: The Ethics of Disengagement in the Late-Soviet Period

The Refusal of Work in Soviet Counter-Culture The preceding chapter has demonstrated that the key feature of the postcommunist period in Russia is the concomitant process of the exodus of the society from the sphere of politics and the evasion of any transformative action by an increasingly depoliticized and technocratic state. It is therefore obvious that we cannot find the paradigm of postcommunist social praxis in the ever-narrowing political sphere. Instead, we should focus on this very exodus or disengagement as an ethos or a form of life in its own right, rather than as an indicator of underdevelopment, or some chimerical feature of the Russian ‘tradition’. Nonetheless, this disengagement is not an entirely unprecedented move that followed the brief surge of political mobilization of the Soviet society during Perestroika, but should rather be understood as a recommencement of the process that was characteristic of the lateSoviet period. To understand postcommunist social practices it is thus necessary to undertake a genealogy of this ethics of disengagement, paying particular attention to the way it has succeeded in enabling autonomous forms of life at a distance from the ritualized Soviet public sphere. Underground culture, particularly rock music, is a privileged domain for the investigation of such forms of life, given both its extraordinary popularity in the late-Soviet period and its evident distance from the official public realm, which frequently treated its practitioners in the same manner as it did the political dissidents. It was argued in the early post-Soviet period that rock music was partly responsible for bringing down the Soviet system, its massive popularity gradually shifting the 89

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loyalties of the younger generation to the ‘imaginary West’ (Yurchak 2006, 159), the incessantly mythologized locus of the coveted freedom that rock music epitomized. While it makes little sense to single out one of the numerous factors contributing to the demise of Soviet socialism, it is undeniable that Soviet rock music is a perfect example of the late-Soviet tendency for the development of creative and autonomous forms of life beyond the confines of the ritualized public sphere. These forms of disengagement, whereby ever greater sections of society dissociated themselves from the system to pursue autonomous forms of life, frequently at the risk of public denunciation and ostracism, if not persecution, had nothing to do with a ‘head-on’ confrontation with the Soviet system. The rock poetry of the late-Soviet period that we shall analyse in this chapter is not exceptional in avoiding explicitly political themes and even, as we shall see, ridiculing active political engagement. Yet, neither was this mode of praxis a mere retreat into private life – if anything, late-Soviet rock poetry may be viewed as an anticipatory critique of social atomization and the valorization of the private, which accounts for its continuing timeliness in the condition of the postcommunist restoration of capitalism. Moreover, the very idea of retreating into the private realm to furnish a consumerist lifestyle was not an option in the Soviet system, in which one’s opportunities for consumption were defined entirely by one’s position in the public realm, which alone authorized privileges and benefits that could approximate the living standards of a Soviet citizen to that in the ‘imaginary West’. Instead, the practices of disengagement displaced the very opposition between the public and the private in furnishing new forms of life that were social despite lacking any public visibility. In this chapter, we shall argue that it was precisely the generalization of this disengagement during the Perestroika period, when it no longer carried the dangers of ostracism or imprisonment, that brought about the demise of the Soviet system. The end of the system was brought about less by means of the mobilization of the society for oppositional political action than by a radical demobilization, a mode of resistance both practiced and preached by many representatives of the late-Soviet alternative culture, including the protagonist of our study, Boris Grebenshikov, and his group Akvarium. Boris Grebenshikov was born in Leningrad in November 1953. He founded Akvarium in 1972 initially as a duo with his friend and fellow poet Anatoly Gunitsky. During the 1970s Akvarium experimented

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with a variety of artistic styles, including semi-theatrical performances in which poetry was considerably more important than music. The privileged status of lyrics has remained the staple of Grebenshikov’s work ever since, although he may also be credited with being the first underground Soviet musician to experiment with such musical styles as reggae, jazz-rock and electronic avant-garde that were virtually unknown in the Soviet Union at the time. Akvarium has also been a pioneer in the Soviet underground recording industry, giving rise to the phenomenon of magnitoalbomy (‘tape albums’), which, along with the more familiar samizdat, was crucial in spreading alternative culture around the entire Soviet Union. By the middle of the 1970s, the monopoly of the State Recording Company Melodia was radically undermined by the ubiquitous shadow market of tape recordings of both Western jazz and rock music and, increasingly, Soviet underground music. In the former case, Western vinyl records that made their way into the Soviet black market were copied onto audio cassettes, which subsequently became the source of other copies and so on, so that a single vinyl smuggled into the country could eventually spawn a few hundred copies, distributed all over the USSR among those who could not afford or did not have the access to the ‘original’ record. In the case of Soviet rock, the albums were, from the outset, recorded on tape and freely circulated around the USSR with no concern for copyright or royalties. These recordings, frequently of poor quality, had quickly become prized possessions among the Soviet youth, and access to underground rock music became a key status marker among the younger generation. Akvarium’s nationwide success had, characteristically for this period, coincided with its first encounter with the repressive apparatus of the Soviet system. In the summer of 1980, Akvarium played a landmark concert at the Tbilisi Rock Festival, which largely featured ‘official’ rock and pop bands, whose lyrics were pre-approved by governmental censors. In contrast to this rather bland assortment of indistinguishable imitators of Western art-rock of the 1970s, Akvarium performed an uncharacteristically abrasive punk-rock show (immortalized in the first half of the compilation album Electricity (1982)), which included numerous slaps in the face of the system, from the use of expletives to broaching taboo topics. For instance, in ‘Marina’, Grebenshikov violated the taboo subject of emigration from the Soviet Union by depicting his heroine as a world-weary young woman who ponders emigration from the USSR through marriage to a Finnish citizen – an

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exit strategy that was increasingly customary in Leningrad in the 1980s: Marina told me that she has had enough, That she is all tired and fucked up, She burned down her brain and burned out her body . . . Marina told me that it had all become clear, That she is beautiful but life is in vain And it is time for her to marry a Finn . . . (‘Marina’, Electricity, 1982) After the festival, Grebenshikov, who held a degree in applied mathematics, was fired from his position at a design bureau and expelled from the Komsomol (Young Communist League), which, even in the lateSoviet period, meant an end to any meaningful career prospects and a steep decline in social status. It was in this period that Grebenshikov followed many representatives of his generation in finding employment as a janitor alongside other rock musicians in Leningrad. In 1987, already the prime Soviet rock star, he would entitle one of his more anthemic songs ‘The Janitor Generation’. Grebenshikov has indeed become a spokesman of numerous representatives of what Alexei Yurchak (2006) has labeled ‘the last Soviet generation’, for whom the experience of freedom became available at an increasing distance from the public sphere of officialdom. The paradigmatic example of this experience is the purposeful abandonment by many young people of promising career paths to pursue an ‘alternative’ lifestyle of musicians, poets, artists or blackmarket traders. As the absence of official employment was a criminal offense in the USSR, it was impossible to remain entirely outside the official economy even if one could earn an independent income without being formally employed, for example, by giving underground concerts or selling tape recordings. Thus, ever greater numbers of young people gave up their careers for the low-prestige occupations that paid a minimum wage but offered a great amount of free time for the pursuit of autonomous creative activities. In an interesting adaptation of a practice of ‘simple living’ (or what is currently known as ‘downshifting’), these individuals, many of them possessing doctoral degrees, took the jobs of janitors, boiler room technicians, watchmen, freight loaders, etc. These jobs were attractive both because they only required one to work for two or three night shifts a week (yet allowed one to maintain a decent standard of living) and because such solitary and publicly invisible work spared one the need to attend numerous meetings of local Komsomol


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and Party cell committees that were otherwise obligatory (see Yurchak 2006, 151–156). In an autobiographic song Grebenshikov describes this experience of assuming a ‘new position’ at the margins of the system: Ivan hurries to work, he hurries to work, Taking his time. It seems he does not care if he can’t be there by nine. An autumn park, fallen leaves, Oh what beautiful dirt. He was an engineer, now he is a watchman And that was his own choice. And his Belomor1 is burning in the wind, And that’s a new life in a new position. (‘New Life in a New Position’, Ichtiology, 1984) This phenomenon forms part of the more general tendency towards the ‘refusal of work’ in the late-Soviet society, which in the post-Stalinist period was demobilized from its condition of a ‘labour army’ during forced industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, but not yet re-mobilized as an agent of consumption in the circuits of the capitalist economy (see Groys 2003, 14–15). No longer a self-sacrificial producer and not yet a self-obsessed consumer, the Soviet society of the period of ‘stagnation’ gradually distanced itself from the activity of work as such, eagerly inventing forms of praxis that evaded the requirements of productivity and the rhythm of ‘working time’: ‘The forces of social gravity that force human beings to work, have weakened to an unprecedented degree. Hence the strange perception of societal weightlessness, of a historical pause, of floating in the void that is well-known to anyone who lived during that epoch’ (ibid., 15). Even though the tendency to take low-prestige jobs that maximized one’s free time did not spread to the majority of the Soviet population, the underlying ethics of such practices was certainly observable at almost every work place in the Soviet Union in the 1970s–1980s, from the protracted lunch and smoking breaks at enterprises and offices to the use of working time for private activities (reading, chatting with colleagues, manicure, chess or drinking). The old folk saying that dates back to the era of serfdom ‘Do not run away from work, but do not do work!’ (Ot dela ne begai, a dela ne delai) is a perfect description of the ‘refusal of work’ under late socialism. Distancing themselves from the sphere of work and its wider context of public ritual, the representatives of the last Soviet generation sought to make use of this historical pause, appropriating it as free time that could

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be devoted to the cultivation of alternative forms of life in the void of late socialism. Radicalizing this ethics by moving to the margins of the official economy, the practitioners of underground culture both found free time for their autonomous activities and minimized their participation in the official public sphere. As Soviet rock music became ever more popular during the 1980s, we could observe a paradoxical situation whereby artists, whose ‘cassette albums’ reached a circulation of a few million copies, were formally employed at a minimum wage at boiler rooms and warehouses. Grebenshikov is a case in point: starting from the early 1980s, a series of albums, from the Bob Dylan-esque Blue Album (1981) to the new-wave Children of December (1985), made Akvarium the most popular Soviet rock group and a cult phenomenon among Soviet youth without a single mention in the official media. By the time the state recording company Melodia released the first ‘official’ Akvarium album in 1987, Grebenshikov had already been firmly established as the leading poet of the ‘last Soviet generation’, his lyrics being a key source of inspiration for those who, like him, cultivated their autonomy at a distance from the official public sphere. The importance of rock music in late-Soviet culture has been noted by numerous observers of postcommunist transformation. Alexei Yurchak’s magisterial study of late socialism provides the most detailed investigation of the way in which rock music, ostracized in the formal public sphere, gradually became an essential part of the way of life of Soviet youth, not merely those pursuing an underground lifestyle but also those occupying authoritative positions in the public sphere, for example, Komsomol activists (see Yurchak 2006, chapters 5, 6). Against the facile ideological explanations that equate rock music with anticommunist dissent, Yurchak demonstrates how the commitment to the official ideology could easily go hand in hand with a passionate interest in rock music and the pursuit of the latest tape recordings in the black market, there being nothing contradictory about being ‘passionate about both Lenin and Led Zeppelin’ (ibid., 219). Yurchak’s argument, which is illustrated by the well-known fondness of President Medvedev for British hard rock of the 1970s, derives its credibility from his explicit focus on Western music, whose reception in the USSR paid little attention to the content of the lyrics: ‘the literal meaning of these songs was irrelevant. What was important was their Western origin, foreign sound and unknown references that allowed Soviet fans to imagine worlds that did not have to be linked to any “real” place or circumstances’ (ibid., 191). Moreover, Yurchak claims, somewhat impressionistically,


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that the most popular Western rock groups in the late-Soviet period all shared a certain aesthetic: Most of them played a version of art rock or hard rock; their music was neither “light” nor “melodious”; their compositions included multiple parts, with rich instrumental arrangements, complex, passionate, often operatic vocals, improvisational passages, changes in key, heavy guitar riffs, overdrive sounds and distortions, and an overall trancelike quality’. (ibid., 236) It is this aesthetic that, according to Yurchak, resonated with the ‘futuristic’ or ‘avant-garde’ aesthetic of some of the ‘official’ Soviet popular culture and, more generally, with the revolutionary ethos that even the decades of ritualized ‘stagnation’ could not entirely efface. It was therefore entirely possible to be a devout Komsomol activist and a fan of Deep Purple, King Crimson, Uriah Heep, Yes or any of the other bands popular in the USSR in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The analysis of Soviet rock music, which Yurchak pays practically no attention to, permits us to counter this line of reasoning with an argument for an inherent distance between the values of Soviet officialdom and the ethos cultivated in the work of groups like Akvarium (but also many others, including Auktsyon, Nautilus Pompilius, Televizor, Zvuki Mu, etc.). Indeed, much of the British progressive rock of the 1970s evidently did not grant lyrics top priority, and whatever sense there was in those lyrics was not readily accessible to the Soviet youth with a usually poor knowledge of English. On the contrary, Soviet rock became an immediate attraction precisely because of the content of its lyrics. Indeed, from a strictly musical point of view, early albums by Akvarium, not to speak of its younger peers, took the lo-fi aesthetic to the limit and today appear barely listenable. It was evidently the lyrical component that made these records the object of a genuine cult in the late-Soviet period. Yet, it is here that Yurchak’s thesis on the insignificance of the lyrics and the ‘futuristic’ ethos of rock music becomes inapplicable. It was simply impossible to approach Akvarium’s songs as a soundtrack to the grand projects of the construction of the ‘New Soviet man’, however fictional these projects have become in that period. Instead, these songs both described the manifold practices of taking distance from the official public sphere and in themselves took this distance in the choice of eccentric musical styles to accompany the descriptions of mundane Soviet experiences. While the interest of Soviet youths in

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Western rock could be officially condemned as a gesture of subservience to the degenerate Western ‘mass culture’ that merely tarnished, without entirely destroying, the reputation of Soviet citizens, the interest in domestic rock music that was tabooed in the official discourse pointed to something rather more dangerous, that is, the non-identity of Soviet society with its own formal representation, the existence of ‘non-Soviet’ phenomena in the interstices of the system that prided itself on the complete subsumption of social life under its ideological superstructure. Thus, listening to Akvarium itself became an experience of (at least a temporary) disengagement from the public sphere and the participation in the forms of life whose precise character we shall attempt to reconstitute in this chapter. In our analysis of the lyrics we shall distinguish between two aspects of the functioning of Grebenshikov’s poetry in the wider discourse of late-Soviet and Russian postcommunist culture: the enunciated content and the position of the subject of enunciation. This distinction, developed in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan 2001, 94–96, 182–184, 330–332) as part of the proverbial ‘decentring of the subject’ also resonates with Michel Foucault’s (1989) distinction between the content of discursive practice and its ‘enunciative modality’ and J. L. Austin’s (1976) distinction between constative and performative aspects of an utterance. For our purposes, this distinction is crucial for emphasizing how the ethics of disengagement and its subsequent postSoviet transformation were not merely communicated in the semantic or locutionary meaning of Grebenshikov’s lyrics but were also produced though the illocutionary force of the lyrics themselves as speech acts, performed from a certain enunciative modality in the socio-cultural context of postcommunism. Akvarium has arguably become such a powerful symbol of the late-Soviet exodus towards autonomy at the margins of the Soviet symbolic order precisely through a powerful subjective enactment of the enunciated content of the lyrics. Thus, while this analytical distinction was originally developed to highlight the noncoincidence of the speaking subject with the subject of the statement, in our analysis it will serve the opposite function of demonstrating the ways in which the discursive affirmation of disengagement was inherently entwined with a homologous subjective investment that granted additional performative force to these lyrics. This subjective investment is of course not reducible to merely ‘practicing what one preaches’, that is, practicing the very forms of existence that the songs referred to, even though Grebenshikov, as a representative of the ‘janitor generation’, certainly did that too. More importantly, the distinction between the


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enunciated content and the position of the subject of the enunciation marks the relation of mutual reinforcement between what is said and how, or more literally from where, from what subjective position, it is said. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall trace the convergence between these two aspects in Grebenshikov’s poetry of the 1980s.

Ivanov, or Beside the System Let us begin our discussion of the late-Soviet ethics of disengagement by specifying the relation of its locus of enunciation to the official public sphere. This question has become the object of contention in Russian studies, particularly in the post-Soviet period, when the caricaturistic image of a ‘totalitarian society’ courageously resisted by a handful of liberal dissidents could no longer be maintained. Yet, even in the ‘revisionist’ turn in communist and postcommunist studies, which paid greater attention to practices of everyday life, which evidently contradicted the mythology of totalitarianism, the practices of disengagement from the Soviet public sphere were frequently conceptualized only negatively, as instances of cynicism and inauthenticity that, to recall the famous slogans of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel, could only be mended by recourse to a dissident ethos of ‘not living according to a lie’ and ‘living in truth’. Even the interpretations that avoid such moralizing posit dissimulation as the constitutive feature of postcommunist social life. In an influential Foucauldian study of collective and individual subjectification in the Soviet Union Oleg Kharkhordin (1999, chapters 5, 6) has argued that the postcommunist resurgence of liberal individualism has its point of descent in the late-Soviet practices of self-fashioning in the private sphere, where a number of ‘official’ technologies of individuation (e.g. ‘revelation by deeds’, self-planning, hero identification) were adapted by individuals without the adoption of the official telos, self-fashioning itself gradually becoming its own goal. The deployment of official individualizing techniques, with no regard for the ‘higher conscience’ to which they were directed, helped to furnish the ‘informal’ domain of individuality, constituted and sheltered from the omniscient public gaze by widespread practices of dissimulation. Dissimulation was not only practiced against external state authority, but also, as Soviet governmentality was based on mutual horizontal surveillance among the members of the ‘collective’, against one’s peers, thereby effacing the very possibility of ‘social solidarity’ that could emerge as a result of resistance to the more traditional, top-down authoritarian government (ibid., chapter 4). With the

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relaxation of the terror of purges in the late 1950s, the ‘mature’ Soviet order no longer sought to reveal and punish dissimulation, but merely required full participation in the official displays of loyalty, which led to the proverbial ritualization of public life in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. In Kharkhordin’s description of late-Soviet society, ‘the collective of saints turns out to be the collective of accomplices who merely produce a saintly image of themselves while consistently demanding the display of loyalty to these images both at work and at home’ (ibid., 276). On the other side of this dissimulative split there was formed ‘the secret sphere of intimate life’, constituted by ‘closing off’ a narrow domain of individual existence from the ubiquitous public gaze (ibid., 357). In Kharkhordin’s argument, dissimulation did not preserve anterior individuality from official surveillance, but produced this very individuality by marking off from the domain of ritualized publicity a shadow zone, gradually furnished through the displaced and rearticulated techniques of subjectification (ibid., 270–278). Kharkhordin utilizes the intricate difference between the two Russian words for ‘dissimulation’ to stress its constitutive function. While the dissimulative practices of Soviet citizens have long been noted in the literature, they are usually discussed in terms of ‘hypocrisy’ (litsemerie), which connotes playacting, ‘changing faces’, and thus presupposes the anterior existence of the subject who chooses multiple ‘faces’ or ‘roles’ in his or her dissimulative game. In contrast, the word pritvorstvo refers to the practice of ‘closing off’, retraction or concealment. The latter sense accords with Kharkhordin’s thesis of dissimulation being productive of the private domain rather than protective of it. Thus, the New Soviet Man, whose formation was the utopian task of the revolution, was in fact created, albeit to the eventual disappointment of its makers: Soviet society did succeed in creating a new individual, though not precisely the one intended. The goal was to construct a new society that would make saintly zeal its central organizing principle; the result [ . . . ] was a society whose key constitutive practice was a pervasive, and in the long run, increasingly cynical dissimulation. (Kharkhordin 1997, 335) This elevation of dissimulation to the status of the constitutive principle of late-Soviet subjectification is the most controversial aspect of Kharkhordin’s remarkable genealogy of the postcommunist subject. While it is true that the absolute majority of the Soviet society never openly challenged the rituals of the public sphere, imposed by the


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regime, it would not be accurate to say that they always obediently continued to perform them. The very notion of the ‘janitor generation’ testifies both to the possibility and to the actuality of a conscious choice in favour of the alternative form of life, which logically entailed an exodus from the Soviet public sphere, which had nothing dissimulative or conformist about it. Instead, such practices sought to carve out, in the sphere of ritualized publicity, spaces for autonomous existence, however modest or mundane. Rather than speak of dissimulation, we might rather approach these practices in terms of a cultivated indifference to the public realm. We may find a model of such indifferent disposition in one of the most famous songs of early Akvarium ‘Ivanov’. This prosaic description of a day in the life of a Leningrad loafer movingly demonstrates the disjointed coexistence of a representative of alternative culture with the wider society of ‘his fellow-citizens’: Ivanov is at the bus stop, expecting his carriage, Anticipating a glass of beer. Life is difficult on Monday morning. All around there are common people That crowd into the bus, Tripping on Ivanov, stepping right on his wings. And there is no way he can merge with them, With his fellow citizens, He’s got Sartre in his pocket, while they at best have a penny. Ivanov is reading while the ticket controllers come in and fine Ivanov – on Monday morning it all goes wrong He lives at Petrogradskaya, in a communal corridor Between the kitchen and the bathroom, And the bathroom is always crowded. He is visited by people with suitcases of port, Who spend their lifetime over a comparative analysis of wine. And then they leave and only the best friends and enchanted ladies Stay with Ivanov until the morning. Then comes the morning, everything is smoky and grey, Which proves the old thesis that today is the same day as yesterday. (‘Ivanov’, Acoustics, 1982) Utterly lacking any facile romanticization of ‘alternative lifestyle’, the song nonetheless succeeds brilliantly in marking the distance between

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Ivanov (the most typical Russian last name), who could easily have been modeled after any of the members of Akvarium and a great share of their audience, and the Soviet society at large. Ivanov is counterpoised against not merely the ticket controllers but against the ‘fellow citizens’ on the bus, although we should be careful not to overinterpret the reference to Sartre as an insistence on Ivanov’s intellectual superiority, if only because in the late-Soviet youth slang ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’ was, in a completely baffling way, a euphemism for a male sexual organ. At the same time, this image of estrangement is overcome in the second verse of the song, which describes Ivanov’s social milieu of fellow drinkers of ‘port’, the cheap strong wine favoured by the Soviet male population that bore a most distant resemblance to Portuguese port. Despite the depressingly repetitive character of activities in this circle, the final line of the song (‘today is the same day as yesterday’) should not be read as a veiled critique of the uneventful ‘stagnation’ period of late socialism, but rather as a contrast between the temporality of the Ivanov circle and the progressive chronology of the Soviet public sphere, which, in full accordance with the Marxist–Leninist ideological dogma, posited the experience of time in terms of the unarrested advance towards the emergence of a communist society. A number of studies of Soviet society emphasize the way the rituals of the regime implied a certain ‘etatization of time’ (Verdery 1996, 40–55), the expropriation of the experience of temporality by the hegemonic narrative of the progress of history. It is therefore hardly a surprise that the societal disengagement from the public sphere should put into play a wholly different rhythm of temporality that sought to reappropriate time from statist control, which can be best achieved by jamming the machine of historical progress and expanding, as much as possible, the sphere of ‘free’ or ‘leisure’ time, which by definition is placed outside the progressive chronology. The circular temporality of hedonistic self-indulgence may be considered a way of interrupting the progressive rhythm of Soviet historicity, just as the content of these practices disrupts the moralistic pathos of the Soviet public sphere as well as of the dissident circles (see Groys 2003, 15). We can find innumerable examples of this free use of time in Soviet everyday life in the 1970s–1980s: exploiting generous sick-leaves offered by the Soviet health care system; covertly reading prohibited books or Western magazines during the interminable Komsomol or Party meetings; and extending tea- and smoking-breaks for hours during working shifts at enterprises are all examples of the same trend of reclaiming time from history and the tasks that it imposes (cf. Yurchak 2006, 155–156). From this perspective, ‘today being the


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same day as yesterday’ cannot but be good news for those who chose to live at a distance from the Soviet system. As Grebenshikov would write in 1989, ‘we could have gone into history, but we went the other way’ (‘Don’t Stand in the Way of High Feelings’, Territory, 2002 [1989]).

What is a Pure Performative? If the theory of dissimulation does not fully capture the late-Soviet ethics of disengagement, how should we understand the relation between these ‘alternative’ forms of life and the official public sphere? In a brilliant revisionist account of late socialism Alexei Yurchak has rejected the conception of these alternative practices as unfolding in ‘spaces of authenticity and freedom that were clandestinely “carved out” from the spatial and temporal regimes imposed by the state’ (Yurchak 2006, 156). Instead, their heterogeneity to the official ideology was a result of what Yurchak terms the ‘deterritorialization’ of the system through a ‘performative shift’, a gradual displacement of the constative or semantic meaning of the Soviet ideological discourse at the expense of its performative dimension, which acquires ever-greater importance owing to the ritualization of all social life in the postStalinist USSR. When the performative invocation of a ritual becomes independent from communicating its semantic content, there arises a possibility of using the ritual to one’s advantage to communicate alternative meanings or no meaning whatsoever. Yurchak’s argument is thus almost identical to Kharkhordin’s in its empirical reference – the engagement of the Soviet population in ritualistic performances without concern for their semantic content. Yet, while Kharkhordin conceives of the uncoupling of constative and performative dimensions of the ideological discourse in terms of dissimulation, Yurchak ventures a more controversial argument: owing to the systemic nature of this uncoupling, which embraced the entire socio-political field in the USSR, the practitioners of these performances did not dissimulate the system but simply practiced the possibilities that it opened. The ritualization of the Soviet public sphere after the death of Stalin (who, as the last Soviet sovereign, remained both inside and outside the system, guaranteeing the meaning of the authoritative discourse through personal interpretive interventions) has itself opened the system up to the diverse forms of use on the condition that its practitioners abide by the structure of the ritual, whose increasing rigidity went hand in hand with the loss of interest in its ideological maxims or, in Agamben’s terms, the ‘mythical’ component of the ritual.

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Yurchak’s theory is attractively parsimonious, especially in its interpretation of the demise of the Soviet Union. In his account, the ritualized system (which resonates strongly with Kojève’s description of the post-historical society of snobs) could have persisted for a long time, were it not for the accident of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which literally stopped the system in its tracks by an entirely unanticipated re-engagement with the constative aspect of the Soviet ideology (ibid., 291–295). Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign incited the Soviet population to abandon purely pro forma participation and take an active part in the reconstruction of the Soviet system along ‘truly Leninist’ lines. This evidently meant rethinking (and thus taking seriously for the first time in at least two decades) the maxims of the Soviet ideology precisely on the level of their semantic content, which suddenly revealed to the Soviet society the absurdity of the most familiar rituals and authoritative maxims, which were suddenly perceived as lacking both sense and reference and reduced to mere linguistic formulae or ‘pure signifiers’. Thus, instead of being reconstructed along democratic-socialist lines as envisioned by Gorbachev, the Soviet Union has undergone what, in a strict terminological sense, corresponds to the Derridean definition of deconstruction, a reversal and displacement of the binary oppositions structuring the discursive field (see ibid., 295. Cf. Derrida 1981, 41–42, 66–69). The lesson to be learned from the collapse of the Soviet order is therefore that any constituted order can persist almost indefinitely insofar as its rituals lose their constative meaning and are reduced to performative formulae but breaks down as soon as these rituals are taken up again in their semantic aspect by governmental rationalities in the attempts at optimizing the functioning of the system. Even a momentary humble questioning of what the formulae of the official discourse actually meant in the Soviet context of the 1980s was sufficient to reveal the void at the heart of the Soviet system, which was thus assigned the fate of the proverbial cartoon figure of a cat that runs off a cliff and for a little while is able to keep running in its mid-air suspension, but falls as soon as it looks down and observes the abyss beneath it. Yurchak’s interpretation is certainly original and illuminating in its emphasis on the way the unravelling of the Soviet order was a result of its own internal mutations in the post-Stalinist period. At the same time, similarly to Kharkhordin’s theory, the logic of the performative shift suffers from the ambition to provide a totalizing account of lateSoviet societal dynamics. Just as it appears implausible to posit cynical dissimulation as the constitutive practice of the postcommunist subject and ignore the practices of concrete disengagement from the public


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sphere, it is difficult to imagine the late-socialist system being sustained by a purely performative invocation of its ideological maxims in the absence of any concern for their constative meaning. What is at stake is not merely the empirical evidence to the contrary (e.g. the recurrence throughout the Soviet period of campaigns against ‘formalism’, a purely ritualistic participation without authentic subjective engagement), but also the philosophical problem of the performative force of an utterance being divorced from its constative meaning. The problem with the idea of the performative shift as the abandonment of the relevance of the constative semantics of the speech act is that this logic obscures its own internal reversal. What is a performative without a constative dimension, that is, a mere ‘I promise’, ‘I demand’ or ‘I declare’ without the specification of content that follows the performative verb? The performative verb is actually constructed with a dictum that, taken on its own, is of a purely constative nature, without which it would remain empty and inefficient. [ . . . ] It is this constative quality of a dictum that is suspended and put into question at the very moment that it becomes the object of a performative syntagma. (Agamben 2005b, 133) In the performative utterance, the constative dictum of the subordinate clause is suspended from its denotative function and turns into a factum by virtue of the illocutionary force of the preceding verb. A performative act is an act of the transformation of language into fact, into reality itself, about which new constative statements are then possible. This act depends on the presence of both the locutionary dictum and the illocutionary factum to translate the denotative function of the former into the facticity of the latter. In this case, doesn’t a pure performative, whose constative meaning has become irrelevant, turn itself into a brute factual material for a new constative? A pure performative is then the performative verb itself made fact, ‘I promise’ becoming a merely semantic true-or-false description of the action of the subject of the statement. A pure performative is therefore entirely indistinct from its opposite, a pure constative, that is, the denotative semantics of the statement. In other words, a performative act, whose locutionary aspect has been suspended, transforms itself into a referent, a signified, about which constative statements are possible. Thus, the ritualization that Yurchak describes is not the reign of the pure performative but its very opposite, the loss of the performative

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force of the conventional formulae which thereby become ‘dead letters’, a process similar to the degeneration of the Christian faith into religious dogma (Agamben 2005b, 135). In the official discourse of late socialism the conventional formulae that originally might have possessed both a constative meaning and a performative force linked to it (e.g. Lenin’s proverbial ‘Marx’s teaching is omnipotent because it is correct’) have been utterly desemantized and decontextualized. This has certainly diminished the ordering functions of these formulae in the symbolic order, but at the same time rendered them available for free and unconventional use. The best-known example of such use is of course the adoption of these formulae in the unofficial sots-art as the already meaningless material that yields to the most arbitrary recombination, for example, in the conceptualist texts of Vladimir Sorokin that at their most extreme literally deconstruct the edifice of Soviet discourse, dissolving it into a plurality of meaningless marks. The ease with which the clichés of the Soviet ideological discourse became appropriated by unofficial and underground art testifies to the fact that they have already ceased to perform their ordering function in the society, having become dead letters available for profane play. In terms of Agamben’s distinction between ritual and play, profane play is characterized by the separation of the rite or ‘game’ from its corresponding myth. On the one hand, we observe the faithful reproduction of the myth, that is, the verbal content of the discourse in question, in the absence of the rite that would correspond to it, which deprives it of its performative force. For example, in Sorokin’s Thirtieth Love of Marina (1984), the leading heroine hears the Soviet anthem, reproduced verbatim in the novel, at the time of her first orgasm, which thus becomes a signifier of her sexual fulfillment rather than a tedious rite of Soviet patriotism. On the other hand, Sorokin’s Norm (1983) features numerous descriptions of Soviet public rituals, which are deprived of their corresponding ‘myth’ in the official Soviet discourse and acquire an uncannily absurd character, whereby, for example, an editorial meeting of a Soviet newspaper formally proceeds in accordance with all formalities, yet its participants express themselves in a language that has lost all capacity for signification and is reduced to meaningless signifiers. In both cases, both the myth and the rite are removed from separate, ‘sacred’ spheres and become available to a new, in this case truly profane, mode of use (cf. Agamben 2007b, 75–76). In Soviet rock music, the best example of such profanation is offered by the side project of Yegor Letov (singer of the Omsk punk rock group Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense)), unabashedly called


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Kommunizm, which during the period of 1988–1991 recorded over a dozen albums featuring improvised performances that combined, in the span of a single song, citations, musical or verbal, from Lenin, James Joyce, Bach, Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, the Sex Pistols and Dostoyevsky. Such appropriation of the Soviet and other authoritative discourses by unofficial art as at best an object of parody and at worst an object of literal deconstruction is distinct from the political criticism of the dissidents precisely because it no longer recognises in this discourse either a semantic or a pragmatic aspect that would deserve serious criticism. Just as most of us would not think of venturing a political critique of, for example, ancient pagan rites, whose meaning we are not aware of and whose force we do not believe in, public expressions of dissent with the dead letters of the Soviet discourse were hardly revelatory for the rest of the Soviet society and should rather be viewed as subjective acts of heroic self-fashioning whose public significance was minimal. Insofar as it is the very ‘purity’ of the performative act that reduces it to a dead letter, we may grasp the idea of a pure performative in terms of Agamben’s notion of inoperosity. Indeed, a pure performative is quite simply a performative that no longer works, both in the sense of its effectiveness and, more importantly, in the sense of its very essence as an act. Paradoxically, the purity of the performative consists in its ceasing to perform, its ‘decreation’ of itself. Yet, it is this very inoperosity that renders the formerly powerful formulae available for use in unprecedented ways, no longer as ‘words’ but rather as ‘things’. To purify a performative is thus to profane it and render it inoperative, to let it ‘idle’ (Agamben 2007b, 91), and in this manner to neutralize its ordering powers. What is a dead letter if not word-made-fact, language that has been extinguished from its signifying function and simply belongs to the real in its materiality without meaning? (cf. Chiesa 2007, 46–59) If the ritualized forms of the late-Soviet ideology signify anything at all, it is the cessation of their performative force and their transformation into mere letters in their pure materiality. The late-Soviet ritualization of public life thus marks the reign of the dead letter, which made possible the transfer of the performative force of language to the counter-cultural sphere. This is not to say that rock music acquired the features of authoritative discourse, akin to the official ideology. Instead, it is possible to understand its performative force with the help of Stanley Cavell’s development of Austin’s speech act theory, which isolates, alongside constatives and performatives, ‘passionate utterances’, which, unlike the classical Austinian performatives, are not deployed to enact authority or elicit obligation, but on the contrary produce a rupture in the existing state of affairs, destabilizing that very conventional procedure

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that is essential for Austinian performatives to work (Cavell 2006, chapters 1, 7). The lyrics of Soviet rock are thus neither ‘purely constative’ in their denotative reference to the realities of Soviet society nor ‘purely performative’ in themselves becoming facts and turned into authoritative dogma, but rather utterances that have reappropriated the illocutionary and perlocutionary force that the official discourse had lost in the late-Soviet period. In this manner, Grebenshikov could write his profane anthems honouring the ‘generation of janitors and watchmen’ that carried far more passion and authenticity than the public glorification of the ‘heroes of socialist labour’. The song ‘Watchman Sergeev’ illustrates this potential for a deconstructive reversal of the official discourse that has little to do with the invocation of its performative maxims but is rather made possible by the politically fatal transformation of formerly performative acts into dead letters. A green lamp and a dirty table, With a list of rules hanging over it. Watchman Sergeev looks into the glass And thinks about the past. But then his friends come in, Interrupting his train of thought, And rapidly pour a litre of port Right into the watchman’s mouth. [...] And he talks with them until the morning, Forgetting to patrol the backyard. He is drinking, not even glancing toward the door, Through which the thief might have come in. But the night passes and the day begins As happens in this world. And watchman Sergeev falls under the table, Having finished his wine. The green lamp is fading out, The next shift has already begun. Watchman Sergeev can barely get up All blue from the hangover. Shivering, he walks out Not knowing where to go, Craving a beer and a little nap, The humble hero of labour. (‘Watchman Sergeev’, Ichtiology, 1984)


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In Yurchak’s argument, the reproduction of the official discourse in its performative aspect enabled the explosion of creative innovation on the level of constative meaning, ‘enabling one to have a meaningful life, pursue interests, education, careers, ethical values, ideals and hopes for the future, have friendships, belong to a community, and even reject some bureaucratic interpretation of the constative meaning of such acts’ (Yurchak 2006, 286). However, if we maintain that there is no such thing as a pure performative, then it logically follows that the obliteration of the constative aspect of the official discourse also deprived it of illocutionary force, turning it into a lifeless rite without a corresponding myth or a myth made meaningless by the disappearance of any conventional rite (Agamben 2007a, 78) that can easily be turned into the opposite of ritual, that is, play. The humourous play with the official discourse akin to Grebenshikov’s hymn to idleness in ‘Watchman Sergeev’ is thus not conditioned by the ‘performative shift’ of the Soviet system but rather by the gradual loss of all force of the official discourse and its reappropriation in the passionate utterances produced by underground culture. As the official consecration of the ‘heroes of socialist labour’ turned into a lifeless ritual that was universally mocked and parodied, the ‘humble heroes of labour’ that populate the symbolic universe of Akvarium’s songs began furnishing their own forms of life at a distance from both the constative semantics and the performative force of the Soviet discourse. We must now try to measure this distance more precisely.

Para-Soviet Praxis The practices of Grebenshikov’s ‘humble heroes of labour’, who have voluntarily taken ‘new positions’ at the margins of the Soviet public sphere, evidently cannot be understood in the framework of the performative shift that takes place within the system rather than outside it. This limitation of focus is arguably owing to Yurchak’s purposeful prioritization of the practices of ‘normal life’ in the late-Soviet period, distinguished both from the careerist fervour of the zealous ‘activists’ and the militant and self-righteous opposition of the ‘dissidents’. The desire to insulate ‘normal life’ from the dissident lifeworld, which is curiously silenced in the book, leads Yurchak to overemphasizing the degree of the commitment of Soviet society (especially the ‘last Soviet generation’) even to the ‘purely performative’ invocation of Soviet official rituals. As he tries to downgrade the importance of dissent in bringing down the Soviet system, which in his account has actually destroyed

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itself by the abandonment of the performative shift during Perestroika, he fails to appreciate the distinct mode of social praxis that was neither explicitly dissensual nor ‘ironic-performative’ but rather consisted in a purely negative gesture of disengagement from the official discourse in both its constative and performative aspects, an ‘exodus’ from the Soviet public sphere as such. Interestingly, Yurchak does discuss this type of ‘extra-systemic’ praxis in a separate chapter in the middle of the book, entitled ‘Living vnye’, which addresses a number of examples of life outside the Soviet symbolic universe. We are introduced to Joseph Brodsky’s blissful ignorance of the official Soviet discourse, to the extent that he believed Comintern to be the name of a musical group and likened the portrait of a member of the Central Committee to William Blake (Yurchak 2006, 127). Yurchak also offers a multitude of examples of Soviet students, artists, engineers, etc., who defined themselves in opposition to the ‘Soviet people’, both the ‘pro-system and the anti-system parts’, as ‘organically different’ (ibid., 129). This section of the Soviet society purposefully sought to develop its own lifeworld that would be strictly ‘non-Soviet’ (as opposed to the anti-Soviet discourse of pro-Western dissidents) and cultivated active disinterest in all things ‘social’ or ‘public’ in the official sense, refusing, for example, to read newspapers, listen to the radio or watch TV and subjecting all products of ‘official culture’ to a scornful ostracism. As Grebenshikov recalled in a 2008 interview, [I] did not exist in the Soviet reality from around 1964 when I first heard the Beatles. From that point on, the Soviet reality existed only as a joke for me. You encounter it in an extreme situation, when a boss prohibits you to do something and applies punishment. The rest is reality as such. (Grebenshikov 2008) It is highly important not to confuse this affirmation of the non-Soviet lifeworld in the interstices of the Soviet system with the anti-Soviet pathos of the dissident movement. As Groys (2003, 134) demonstrates, there are at least two ways in which the anti-Soviet dissident movement paradoxically reinforced the system that it struggled with: first, by willfully occupying the locus of the ‘enemy of socialism’, it assumed the enunciative modality that is always already presupposed by the ideological discourse; and, second, in its own ideological standpoint that was usually a confused mix of liberal, socialist and nationalist slogans, it ‘reproduced that very social-liberationist gesture, which had generated


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the [Soviet] ideology and had already found its place there’ (Groys 2003, 134). Soviet-era dissidents were thus both against the system and manifestly inside it, belonging to it both in their formal enunciative modality and in the enunciated content of their discourse – an uncanny proximity that has not gone unnoticed by the wider Soviet society, which, as Yurchak (2006, 107–109, 129–130, 277–278) illustrates, tended to view the dissidents as perverse mirror images of the Soviet authorities (cf. Kharkhordin 1999, 340–360). Unfortunately, these insights into the lives lived at a distance from the system are not elaborated in the remainder of Yurchak’s book and thus do not influence the overall argument about the performative shift. The difficulty Yurchak has with this praxis of ‘living vnye’ is manifested in his peculiar refusal to translate the Russian preposition ‘vnye’, so that a nonRussian-speaking reader might be left with the impression of ‘vnye’ as a mysteriously untranslatable, uniquely Russian characteristic. Yurchak explains the difficulty with translating ‘vnye’ (which dictionaries simply translate as ‘outside’ or ‘out of’) with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘vnenahodimost’ ’, whose translation as simply ‘being outside’ he finds wanting (ibid., 133). While a conventional dictionary translation might indeed not be sufficient to grasp the specificity of Bakhtin’s concept, there exists a better English equivalent that spares one from the need to employ cumbersome untranslated terms. Bakhtin’s vnenahodimost’ may be quite conventionally translated as ‘exteriority’, which presupposes being outside or beyond in relation to something. By the same token, ‘vnye’ connotes the degree of exteriority and proximity, best captured by the preposition ‘beside’, that is, not simply being outside in the sense of not belonging, but rather coexisting side by side in proximity, which marks the infinitesimal yet still unbridgeable difference. Furthermore, this difference does not take the form of a frontal opposition between positive entities (e.g. Soviet officialdom and the dissident movement) but rather marks the non-coincidence of the Soviet society with itself, the radical incapacity of the official discourse to embrace the richness of the forms of life developing in Soviet society. The exodus to a position beside the system is thus not a leap into a nonSoviet outside (e.g. by means of emigration) but a passage to the limit of the Soviet order itself, a ‘limit experience’ that is furthest away from the hysterical provocation of the Bataillean transgression but must rather be thought in Badiou’s terms of subtraction, introduced in Chapter 1 (cf. Virno 2008, 165). The subjects of ‘living vnye’ are by definition constituted in the exteriority of the Soviet public sphere and maintain a negative relation with it. Yet, in contrast to political dissidents, the

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mode of negation that they practice is not oriented towards the destruction of the system and its replacement with a positive alternative but rather towards establishing a minimal difference between that system and themselves. This difference cannot be translated into the positive terms of ideological contestation (pro-Soviet vs anti-Soviet) but is rather affirmed in its own right as the marker of the non-coincidence of the Soviet order with itself, its contamination by what is entirely indiscernible to it but nonetheless exists right beside it. As Artemy Magun (2008, 63–65) correctly notes, this mode of negation is, if anything, far more radical than the determinate negation practiced by the anti-Soviet dissidents, who recognized the existence of its antagonist and, precisely by confronting it, fortified its identity. The difference of the characters of Yurchak’s ‘living vnye’ chapter from those of his overall pool of case studies is that rather than ironically reiterate the performative rituals of the Soviet public sphere to displace their constative meaning and thereby engage in practices that the authoritative discourse did not condone, they displaced both the constative and the performative dimensions of the official discourse, being interested neither in contesting the constative meaning of Soviet ideology nor in using its performative force to furnish their ‘normal life’. Instead, significant sections of the Soviet population, particularly the younger generation, simply chose to disengage themselves from the system as such, evading as much as possible even the formal participation in official rituals. Even though this exodus never managed to leave the Soviet realities completely (aside from the sadly widespread cases of retreat into religious mysticism, alcoholism or drug addiction), the invocation of the Soviet discourse in the cultural practices of those living beside the Soviet system was precisely anti-performative, that is, arresting rather than sustaining the illocutionary force of the formulae in question. As Boris Groys (2003, 212) emphasizes in the wider context of late-Soviet art, this ‘decreation’ of the Soviet discourse through parodic play was utterly alien and shocking not only to the official discourse, which obviously viewed it as a profanation of the ‘objective truth’, but also to the dissident circles and Western observers, whose innumerable ‘black books of communism’ solemnly treated the Soviet ideology as a giant lie rather than a mere laughing matter. Being beside the system was thus marked by a pure disengagement from the official discourse in both its semantic and pragmatic – constative and performative – aspects, which turned it into the object of play in which the formal ritual and the semantic myth of the authoritative discourse are disjointed and become available for irreverent free use.


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Thus, rather than formulate alternatives to the sterile and ritualized ideological discourse, this disengagement sought to render it inoperative, at the very least, for the existence of those engaged in these practices. This strategy clearly recalls Hermann Melville’s Bartleby’s famous ‘I would prefer not to’. Bartleby’s refusal is not a negation of the actions he would prefer not to undertake in favour of some alternative that he would prefer; instead, it is a simple affirmation of the absence of preference as such, a disengagement from the very symbolic coordinates within which one can be ‘for’ or ‘against’ something, prefer this as opposed to that (see Agamben 1999a, 243–271). In the case of Akvarium, and other underground poets and rock groups, this ethics is manifested both semantically in the enunciated content of the lyrics of the 1980s that emphasize the themes of exodus from the public sphere and pragmatically on the level of the subject of enunciation in the attempt to occupy an enunciative position at the exterior limit of both the constative and the performative aspects of the system. We may therefore term these practices of being beside the official public sphere as, in a strict sense, para-Soviet. This topological figure helps us to identify a mode of praxis that is distinct from both frontal opposition (dissident resistance) and an ironic (or cynical) displacement of the ideological field and its adaptation to private interests and the desire for ‘normal life’. The existential problem of the late-Soviet society was remarkably similar to that of the early Christians or medieval heretics: how ‘to create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them yet rendering them inoperative’ (Agamben 2005b, 27). Interested neither in openly opposing the system on its own terrain of teleo-ideology nor in continuing to enact its rituals in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the practitioners of the ethics of disengagement formed autonomous spaces beside the system, both material (private apartments, cellars used as concert halls, cafes, boiler rooms, etc.) and symbolic.2 The fact that these practices were parasystemic rather than unfolding in complete isolation from the system meant that their practitioners could live off the socio-economic opportunities that the system provided (controlled prices, subsidized housing, state-sponsored tourism and recreation, libraries and other cultural facilities) while ignoring to the maximal possible extent the ideological ‘superstructure’ of the Soviet order. Just as Bartleby’s refusal of work as a scrivener did not entail his departure from the office but, on the contrary, literally transformed it into his permanent abode, the subjects of late socialism constituted their forms of life on the basis of the existing system yet were maximally disengaged from the work on the

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reproduction of this system. To speak of para-Soviet praxis is to accentuate that such a form of life could only emerge and survive in the material conditions of Soviet socialism but nonetheless owed very little to its substantive ideological features. As we shall demonstrate below, nor did it possess easily recognizable features of its own.

Identity and Potentiality in Para-Soviet Milieus As we have seen, the specificity of para-Soviet praxis consists in its cultivation of autonomous forms of life beside the official public sphere that draws on its material resources while minimizing the participation in its symbolic lifeworld. Yet, how can we identify the forms of life, enabled by this disengagement? What is the non-Soviet identity that was constituted in the para-Soviet sphere? The reason why it is practically impossible to answer this question is the heterogeneity of para-Soviet praxis to the logic of identity politics, whereby any disengagement from the hegemonic identity is driven by the desire to assert an alternative, minoritarian or subaltern identity. Instead, the paraSoviet ethics at work in Grebenshikov’s lyrics is characterized by the radical displacement of the logic of identity, which is subjected to a sarcastic criticism in one of the most popular Akvarium songs of the period, ‘Electric Dog’: No one around here can inspire Life or death or just a couple of lines, And one looks to the West with amazement And the other looks to the East with delight. And for the last ten years they have been memorizing the parts That should have been forgotten ten years ago While this dog is laughing at us, It is not preoccupied with the question of What and why it must be. (‘Electric Dog’, The Blue Album, 1980) Serving as an early warning about the resurgence of the debilitating polemic of the heirs of Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1990s, the song derides amateur philosophizing about ‘Russian identity’ in the underground circles as nothing but a waste of time. Both the ‘amazement with the West’ and the ‘delight with the East’ are deemed markedly irrelevant and fall short of inspiring ‘even a couple of lines’. What


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does Grebenshikov’s ‘electric dog’, which arguably embodies the rockn-roll ethics, offer as an alternative to this passion for a non- (or anti-) Soviet identity? It is nothing other than a repetition of Bartleby’s ‘preference not to’, a sustained indifference to the question of identity as such, the displacement of the very question of the essence and meaning of existence, of ‘what and why it must be’. This ‘happy minimalist’ attitude of not knowing and not caring what one is (see Caputo 2000, 5–7), which, as we have discussed elsewhere (Prozorov 2007a, chapters 2, 3), is much closer to Foucault’s ethics of the care of the self than to the neo-liberal narcissism with which it is sometimes erroneously identified, conceives of the experience of freedom as a potentiality for being otherwise without specifying it in the positive terms of being someone else. Thus, for Grebenshikov and his peers the exodus from the Soviet public sphere was necessary not because the latter proscribed and repressed any particular identitarian predicates and modes of existence (which could, after all, always be somehow incorporated into the official discourse) but because it restricted the potentiality for being otherwise as such, the possibility not to be this or that (see Agamben 1999a, 249–250; 1998, 45–47. See also Franchi 2004; Gulli 2007,). The exodus to the para-Soviet space beside the public sphere is practiced not to affirm alternative identities that would flourish there but because it opens the experience of being in excess of all identity, of a potentiality that is not actualized into positive forms of existence but is experienced as such, in other words, experienced as freedom: [To] be potential is to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own nonBeing. Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or other thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or other thing. To be free is to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. (Agamben 1999a, 182–183. Emphasis original.) It is this experience of freedom that is evoked in Grebenshikov’s songs of the 1980s, in which the question of identity is dismissed as utterly irrelevant to the existence of para-Soviet subjects. The contrast between the affirmation of potentiality and the valorization

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of identity is illustrated in the 1983 song ‘It Snowed in the Morning’: Turn off the lights, Leave a note that says we are not home, Tip-toeing to the open doors There, where all is light and all is quiet. And you can be aloof like steel, And you can say that things are not the way they should be, And you can pretend you are starring in a film About people who live under high pressure, but . . . It snowed yesterday. You can do something else, if you want to. You remember, I used to know myself. My traces lay like chains around me. I used to live, convinced that I am right, But snow has fallen and once again I no longer know who I am. And someone is broken and does not want to be whole, And someone is minding his own business, And it is possible to be close, but no more than skin to skin, But there is something better and it is so simple. (‘It Snowed in the Morning’, Radio Africa, 1983) In this lyric the morning snow functions as a recurrent moment of absolution that permits us to abandon our identity for the potentiality of being otherwise, whatever we want to be or do. Rather than engage in the favourite pastime of Soviet intelligentsia (discussing how ‘things are not the way they should be’) and put on a self-consciously miserable appearance of ‘living under high pressure’, we are invited to simply abandon ourselves to ourselves, erase the ‘traces that chain us’ and be whatever we want to be without any attachment to this identity and without regard for the system in which we are constituted as ‘dissenting’ (or at least dissatisfied) subjects of the Soviet order. What is at stake here is not any positive transformation that one must undergo in the paraSoviet sphere – in an early song featured in the scandalous set at the Tbilisi festival Grebenshikov had already declared: ‘If someone here has to change, then I don’t think it is me.’ (‘Heroes’, Electricity, 1981) Rather than call for any transformation, whether on the level of the subject or


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the level of the system, Grebenshikov is concerned with the possibilities of being in excess of any positive order, with ‘something greater’ than the difference between the positive predicates of alternative political projects. ‘Dreams of Something Greater’, a song from the 1985 album Children of December, features a rare instance of the justification of this stance in a prophetic expectation of the demise of the Soviet system: When the time of justification comes What shall I tell you? That I saw no point in doing the bad things, But I saw no chance in making things better. It seems that something has passed me by, And I do not know how to put it into words. Even the mirrors at home are made of clay, So that in the morning you won’t discern in your eyes The dreams of something greater. (‘Dreams of Something Greater’, Children of December, 1985) Grebenshikov’s formula of justification comes as a response to the imaginary victorious dissident movement, which takes upon itself to demand justifications or apologies for not engaging in active resistance to the system. While such an interrogation scene never took place in Russia, where few dissidents were able to join the ranks of the postcommunist nomenklatura, which itself never resisted the previous regime but simply betrayed it at an opportune moment, Grebenshikov’s response remains highly interesting as a self-description of the ethics of disengagement. Unwilling to engage in the activities of the system that they considered morally reprehensible or simply uninteresting, its practitioners nonetheless saw no chance to improve the system through active participation, insistence on reform or public demonstrations of dissent. Yet, their exodus from the system was in no way marked by a sense of defeat, if only because an ideological victory over the system was never on the agenda. Instead, as the second verse demonstrates, the experience of freedom sought by Grebenshikov’s generation is impossible to put in positive terms and is accessible only as something that passes by at the very moment of the apparent liberation. ‘Dreams of something greater’ are not at all the dreams of a different political order that may or may not be fulfilled in the potential macro-social transformation. In

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fact, these are not the kind of dreams that are meant to be fulfilled at all, as their object is not the actualization of some determinate scenario but rather the existence of the potentiality as such, of something in excess of the actual that nonetheless exists, even if it remains impossible to pin down. To the extent we can speak of a ‘task’ with respect to these dreams, it is evidently not to actualize these dreams but to continue to dream them and to be able to discern their traces in the ‘mirrors of clay’. In other words, dreaming of something greater does not entail the mobilization of one’s existence for the work of fulfilling these dreams but rather a receptivity to the inexhaustible potentiality of ‘something greater’ in our existence in the here and now. Just as romance poetry is different from pornography precisely in its lack of interest in the potential fulfillment of desire, Grebenshikov’s ‘dreams of something greater’ are distinct both from the ideological lure of the fulfillment of humanity in a new form of social order and from an idealism that guards the dreams of humanity from their necessarily disappointing actualization: Naturally it is not a matter here of fulfilling something; nothing is more boring than a man who has fulfilled his own dreams: this is the insipid social-democratic zealousness of pornography. But neither is it a matter of carefully keeping in chambers of alabaster, untouchable and garlanded with jasmine and roses, ideals that would crumble on coming things: this is the secret cynicism of the dreamer. (Agamben 1995, 75) Neither meant to be fulfilled in a ‘bright future’ nor guarded from the danger of their fulfillment, Grebenshikov’s dreams rather function in accordance with the para-Soviet paradigm that we have established above as a supplement to the existing public sphere that grants one the possibility of ontological release from the gravity of the identitarian structure of the system, an experience of the ‘lightness of being’ beside the absurd seriousness of the ideological discourse. In other words, these dreams without positive content did nothing more than interrupt the ritualized transmission of authority in the Soviet public sphere and thereby provided, on the level of the subject of enunciation, a concrete experience of freedom in the interstices of the system whose own emancipatory credentials have by now become an obscene travesty. In one of Akvarium’s earliest songs, this commitment to the liberating potential of the meaningless was also explicitly affirmed on the level of the enunciated content:


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We were standing on the plane with the invariable angle of reflection, Observing the law that sets landscapes into motion, Repeating the words deprived of any meaning, But without any tension, without any tension. (‘The Plane’, The Blue Album, 1981) What could possibly be the benefit of ‘repeating the words deprived of any meaning’ in the conditions of late socialism, which to most observers inside and outside the country already appeared absurd owing to the ritualization of the Soviet ideological discourse that rendered it increasingly self-enclosed and non-referential? The absurdity of human existence has become a catchphrase in 20th -century philosophy, described in terms of the Gods’ taking leave, alienating technologization, a repressive ‘one-dimensionality’ of instrumental rationality, the proliferation of normalizing disciplinary mechanisms, the commodification of social life, etc. Along with these descriptions, we find an abundance of attempts to redeem meaning in a meaningless world, which unwittingly contribute to the problem they were meant to solve, as the very desire for the world to be made meaningful produces a fundamental existential disorientation in the condition of the presence of innumerable versions of this ‘sense of the world’, among which one cannot adjudicate. As Simon Critchley has argued, it is therefore not the lack of meaning but rather its plenitude that accounts for the unbearable gravity of human existence under the modern condition of nihilism: If meaninglessness were a fact, then the theological solution to this situation would make sense; it would be the very making of sense, the redemption of meaning in a meaningless world. [ . . . ] However, the situation would seem to be precisely the opposite: the world is overfull with meaning and we suffocate under the combined weight of the various narratives of redemption – whether they are religious, socioeconomic, political, aesthetic or philosophical. What passes for the ordinary is cluttered with illusory narratives of redemption that conceal the very extraordinariness of the ordinary and the nature of its decay under conditions of nihilism. (Critchley 1997, 179–180) From this perspective, meaninglessness is not a brute fact of human existence that must be confronted with the ‘narratives of redemption’ that exemplify what Nietzsche called ‘imperfect’ or ‘incomplete’ nihilism,

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but is rather, in Critchley’s words, an ‘achievement’ (ibid., 179), something that must be produced amid the plenitude of meaning. Thus, supplementing Albert Camus’s (2005) famous reconstruction of the myth of Sisyphus, Critchley argues that we should not merely heroically assume the absurdity of our being in the world but must also actively and purposefully produce it in resistance to the numerous idols of this world that tempt us with redemption. Just as Camus’s Sisyphus realizes the meaninglessness of his existence and finds both liberation and happiness in this awareness, the affirmation of meaninglessness in today’s world against all forms of metaphysical consolation is a condition of possibility of concrete freedom, irreducible to any positive predicate and thus practicable in, or rather beside, any ideological order (see Prozorov 2007a, chapter 3). In this manner, Grebenshikov’s ‘songs without purpose or shame’ help us alleviate the gravity of existence, dominated by the narratives of redemption: What have you been busy with? I flowed like water. What did you bring? That which will vanish without a trace. Songs without purpose, songs without shame, Sung to heal your sadness. What is in our power? The granite fields, Birds of ashes and crystal balls. Where we walked is now only sky and earth, But the wind will blow and there will be no more pity for us. (‘Crystal Balls’, Ten Arrows, 1986) Grebenshikov’s recourse to the absurd in his lyrics of the late-Soviet period contributes to the excavation of the experience of the ‘extraordinariness of the ordinary’ amid the ritualized narratives of redemption practiced both in the official discourse and the discourse of the antiSoviet dissidents. Even if all that remains ‘in our power’ is the wasteland of ‘granite fields’ and ‘birds of ashes’, even if all that is communicated in these songs ‘without purpose’ is nothing but language itself in its existence as pure communicability (Agamben 1999a, 60), this meaningless speech nonetheless succeeds in its force of a ‘passionate utterance’ that demonstrates the existence of a gap between the enunciative position of the subject of these songs and the formal public sphere. To the enunciated content that is strictly devoid of meaning (rather than being simply nonsensical)3 in the symbolic coordinates of the Soviet order, there corresponds an enunciative position outside this public sphere.


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In this manner the purposeful production of the absurd in the underground culture of late socialism verified the existence of a para-Soviet culture and para-Soviet subjects. Thus, as the official discourse wore out its constative meaning and lost its performative force, becoming absurd in the strictly semantic sense, this loss of meaning was not recuperated in the Soviet underground culture by the quest for meaning and the formation of an alternative political discourse. The practitioners of para-Soviet culture were quite simply uninterested in trading the official discourse of the ‘construction of socialism’ for its mirror image of the construction of capitalism, liberal democracy or whatever else the new variant of future-oriented politics would tempt its subjects with. The late-Soviet Bartlebys’ ‘preference not to’ remained rigourously distinct from any alternative preference and was thus able to manifest itself in its pure negativity that is at the same time nothing but a pure affirmation of freedom understood in terms of potentiality. For all its repressive features, the late-Soviet regime failed to suppress the para-Soviet owing to the extreme ritualization of the former’s ideological edifice, which only found threatening the public display of illicit behaviour and ignored the rapid shift of the loyalty of the last Soviet generation to counter-cultural figures like Grebenshikov and other rock stars of the 1980s, whose ‘passionate utterances’ had far more performative force than the sterile rituals of the system. And yet, as the constative, semantic content of these utterances had little to do with generating alternatives to the Soviet order but rather consisted in the disengagement from its meanings through the ‘achievement of meaninglessness’, this meant that there was precious little in Soviet rock, or alternative culture more generally, that could be mobilized in the final attempt at reforming the Soviet order during Gorbachev’s Perestroika.

Between Law and Love The Perestroika period is generally held to be the ‘Golden Age’ of Russian rock, a brief period of nationwide glory between years of underground existence and the retreat back into the underground in the 1990s. Perestroika was a unique period of the ascent of the Soviet intelligentsia, from scientists to performance artists, to the status of the superior symbolic authority, compensating for both the delegitimization of the authority of the CPSU and the absence of a democratically elected authority. For a brief period of time between

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1987 and 1991 the Soviet public sphere recovered from its ritualistic lethargy and exploded into the wild frenzy of activity that could only be compared to the creative outburst of the post-revolutionary decade of the 1920s. Rock music was no exception but a particular, vivid illustration of the rule, as underground cult groups became national celebrities with their records selling millions of copies and their opinions on the political situation actively sought by the newly liberated mass media. The widely popular documentary film Rock (1988), directed by Alexei Uchitel and featuring Akvarium as one of the four top Soviet groups (along with Kino, Auktsyon and DDT), both documented and contributed to the unique cult of rock music during Perestroika, which is all the more impressive given the subsequent commercialization of popular culture from the early 1990s onwards. Nonetheless, when we consider Akvarium’s songs, it is puzzling that the very few references to this turbulent period, and its political project of reform that we can find there, are of a rather ambiguous nature, lacking the general enthusiasm with which the society at large initially welcomed this project. In fact, the songs written prior to Perestroika (in 1983–1984, the years during which few would have expected reforms to take place) contain a number of prophetic statements about the looming changes that are viewed as more confusing than liberating, a perception summed up in labelling the coming era the ‘epoch of international jazz’ (‘The Business of Master Bo’, Day of Silver, 1984): There has been ballroom dancing in the tram depot for five days, And laughing gas is flowing from the faucets in the kitchen. The pensioners on a tram are discussing star wars. Hold me, be with me, protect me before jazz begins. (‘Before Jazz Begins’, Day of Silver, 1984) Even as Akvarium’s songs in 1987–1988 do make positive references to the ongoing transformation, this very enthusiasm is communicated from an enunciative position outside the political terrain of reform. In ‘Swan Steel’ (Equinox, 1987), Grebenshikov triumphantly yet cautiously claims that ‘we have survived the night, let us see what the day looks like’, while another song from the same album features an ironic remark about the rise to public prominence of the Soviet dissident underground: ‘here ride the partisans of the underground moon; well, let them ride . . .’ (‘Full Moon Partisans’, Equinox, 1987). Besides, it was on


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the Equinox album, recorded in the early, optimistic phase of Perestroika that Grebenshikov presented perhaps the most succinct paradigmatic expression of the ethics of disengagement that explicitly rejects any entanglement in ideological struggle or frontal resistance and rather proposes an inoperative existence beside the system, characteristic of the ‘generation of janitors and watchmen’: The Great Janitor in the fields of infinite dew. They will catch us only if we try to run. They will find us only if we hide in the shadows. They have no power over what belongs to you by right. They will not touch you, they will not touch you . . . (‘The Great Janitor’, Equinox, 1987) Rather than call for a return to the public sphere, which has overcome its lethargic ritualization and undertakes a critical re-evaluation of the constative meaning of its ideological discourse, Grebenshikov appears to opt for the continuation of para-Soviet practices that neither confront the system nor try to escape or hide from its reach but rather firmly maintain their freedom in the social conditions that are gradually revealed to be no less than catastrophic. This position is best summed up in ‘The Janitor Generation’, Grebenshikov’s anthem for the inhabitants of paraSoviet spaces, which concludes Equinox. The first verse explicitly pits the ‘para-Soviet’ generation against the numerous ‘heroes’ of the new era of ideological change and sees them, against all odds, as the best guarantee against the looming catastrophe: The generation of janitors and watchmen Got lost in the expanse of the infinite Earth, Everyone has gone home. In our times, when every third person is a hero, They do not write articles, they do not send telegrams. They stand like the stairs, While the burning oil flows from floor to floor. And from somewhere afar they hear singing. And who am I to tell them that it is all a mirage? (‘The Janitor Generation’, Equinox, 1987) The socio-economic changes of the late 1980s led to the gradual dissolution of para-Soviet milieus, as the janitors and watchmen began

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pursuing radically heterogeneous lifestyles, some leaving the underground culture to pursue newly available business opportunities, others engaging in oppositional politics and many, like Victor Tsoi and Mike Naumenko, the singers of Leningrad groups Kino and Zoopark, not surviving Soviet socialism. Nonetheless, Grebenshikov credits this generation with a more authentic form of life than the shallow chic ‘dissidence’ that began to flourish after 1988, marked by a hysterical, though now perfectly safe, condemnation of the sins of the Soviet order. While the ‘burning oil’ of the coming catastrophe threatens to destroy both the Soviet system and the multiplicity of ways of life beside it, the ‘generation of janitors and watchmen’ both stand in the way of the disaster and discern, against all hope, the slight possibility of redemption: Tell me what I did to you, why this pain? But this is without explanation, It is just something in the blood. But I have myself lit the fire that burned me inside out. I have left the law but never quite made it to love. But pray for us, pray for us if you can. We have no hope but this way is ours. And the voices sound closer and stricter And I’ll be damned if it is a mirage. (‘The Janitor Generation’, Equinox, 1987) The location of the para-Soviet ethos between the abandoned figure of the law and the not-yet attained love clearly resonates with the subtle dualism of law and love in the Pauline epistles that Agamben draws on in his reconstitution of the paradigm of the messianic ethos. In Agamben’s original interpretation, Paul’s famous statement that love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13: 8–9) invokes a logic that is identical to the Hegelian Aufhebung, a simultaneous gesture of abolition and conservation that both leaves the law intact and renders it inoperative in the move of progressing to a better way of life (Agamben 2005b, 98–99. See also Taubes 2004, 23–24, 70–76). Rather than deploy a simple antinomy between law and love, Paul renders this relation far more intricate through the notion of katargesis, which Agamben translates variably as ‘making inoperative, deactivating, suspending the efficacy’ (Agamben 2005b, 95). Rather than destroy the law messianic power, which is radically heterogeneous to any ‘law of


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works’, makes the law inexecutable (1 Cor: 15:24) and thus removes it from the sphere of actuality to that of potentiality, in which inactivity and fulfillment are evidently one and the same. In terms of the Russian folk-saying introduced above, the messianic social praxis does not ‘run away’ from law, stays within its orbit, but simply ‘does not do’ it, that is, deactivates its operation rather than destroy it as an object. Yet, what does it mean to fulfill the law via its suspension? Reading Paul together with Carl Schmitt’s (1985a) theory of the sovereign exception, Agamben ventures that this fulfillment takes the form of three ‘indistinctions’: between the inside and the outside of law (whereby Paul dismantles the distinction between Jews and non-Jews that were outside the law), between observance and nonobservance of the law (whereby it is impossible to distinguish ‘the just one’ from the transgressor) and, finally, between prescription and prohibition, whereby the law becomes absolutely ‘informulable’ in positive terms, which makes it impossible to distinguish the licit from the proscribed (ibid., 106–108). Making the law unlimited, informulable and unobservable in the messianic state of exception, Paul is able to fulfill it by summing up all its commandments in the maxim ‘You must love thy neighbour as yourself!’ (Romans 13: 8–9).4 The figure of the law is thus split into the positive human law and the law of God and the former is fulfilled in its deactivated sublation in the latter. Yet, we must recall that Agamben’s paradigm of messianic time is rigourously distinct from eschatology, its experience contained not in the ‘end of time’, in which human law is entirely aufgehoben and love as the law of God may finally reign, but in the ‘interim’ time of the end, which is not a ‘transitional period’ but rather a kairos contained within the chronos that takes its time in bringing the latter to the end. Thus, Grebenshikov’s appropriation of the locus between law and love is strictly analogous to the experience of messianic time. ‘The Janitor Generation’ and other songs of the late 1980s were written at the very beginning of the unfolding of the messianic event (the collapse of Soviet socialism), in which the law (and the political sphere more generally) had already been deactivated with the help of the late-socialist ethics of disengagement but its fulfillment through love remains to be achieved. As the para-Soviet subjects have already irrevocably abandoned the sphere of ‘law’, they logically remain disengaged from the politics of reforming the Soviet system during Perestroika. As the Soviet public sphere gradually turned into a domain of struggle for or against reform, a struggle between competing teleologies of historical

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development, Grebenshikov persisted in his refusal of struggle as such and clearly shunned the role of the leading celebrity in the ‘democratic intelligentsia’. It is in this context that we must discuss one of the few explicitly political songs of Akvarium, ‘Train on Fire’, which was by far their most popular song in the late 1980s, often (mis)construed as an anthem in support of Perestroika. Colonel Vasin came to the front with his young wife. Colonel Vasin summoned up his platoon and told them ‘Let’s go home! We have been fighting this war for seventy years, We have been taught that life is a battle. But according to the recent intelligence, We have only been fighting ourselves. I have seen the generals, they drink and dine on our death; Their children go mad because they have nothing left to want. While the land is lying in rust, the churches reduced to ashes. If we want there to be somewhere to return to, It is time to return home.’ This train is on fire and there are no buttons left to push. This train is on fire and there is nowhere left to run. This land was ours, until we got stuck in the struggle. It will die if it belongs to no one, It is time to return it to ourselves. There are torches blowing all around. All the dead regiments are summoned up again. And the people who shot at our fathers, Are now making plans for our children. We were born to the sound of marches, We kept being threatened by prison. Well, enough of this crawling around We have already returned home. (‘Train on Fire’, Black Rose . . . , 1990) Even though Grebenshikov appeared to disown this song in the postcommunist period, never performing it at concerts and not including it on any of the bestselling anthologies, ‘Train on Fire’ remains one of the key cultural documents of Perestroika, incorporated (not without


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hermeneutic violence) into the canon of late-Soviet ‘protest songs’, including Kino’s ‘I Want Changes!’, Alisa’s ‘My Generation’ and DDT’s ‘Revolution’. Nonetheless, the semantic content of the song is definitely not exhausted by a condemnation of the Soviet system. Colonel Vasin, whose resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev Grebenshikov has repeatedly denied, comes to the front not to call the troops to turn their weapons against the system (in the manner of Lenin’s move of turning the imperialist World War I into the Russian civil war) but to call for a simple flight from the frontline. His ‘recent intelligence’ reveals that the war fought for the 70 years of the Soviet order was nothing but our struggle with ourselves, which must now be ceased through a ‘return home’ that reclaims the land that was once ours. Barely concealing his disgust with the ‘generals’ and other representatives of the system, who, irrespective of their political orientation, now ‘make plans for our children’, Colonel Vasin is nonetheless clearly preoccupied not with the question of winning the struggle but with vacating the terrain of ideological warfare as such, stopping the train of history that is already ‘on fire’ with ‘no more buttons left to push’. The task is not to claim victory in the century-old struggle against ourselves, but to exit the debilitating condition of being ‘stuck in the struggle’ that threatens to destroy the very possibility of there being a home to return to. In this manner, Colonel Vasin renders inoperative the entire paradigm of historical struggle, constitutive of the Soviet ideological field since the October Revolution. Grebenshikov’s refusal of the paradigm of historical struggle in the semantic aspect of the enunciated content is complemented by a similar gesture on the level of the enunciative modality, exemplified by the original context of the song’s release. Despite its ubiquitous radio airplay in the late 1980s, ‘Train on Fire’ is only to be found on the soundtrack for Sergei Soloviev’s arthouse film ‘Black Rose is an Emblem of Sadness, Red Rose is an Emblem of Love’, where it finds its place among mischievously entitled instrumentals (‘On His Awakening, the Druid Goes Out for a Beer’) and absurdist snippets (‘The Abduction of I.V. Stalin by the Irish Popular Hero’) and must be understood in this context rather than the retroactively construed canon of ‘Perestroika protest songs’. Rather than being a passionate call to arms for the liberation of ‘homeland’ from the Bolshevik scourge, the song is an ironic ‘farewell to arms’ that renders inoperative the entire paradigm of historical teleo-ideology, both communist and anticommunist. In this sense, it finds its proper enunciative locus on one of Akvarium’s most absurdist albums. The two gestures of the exit from the field of ideological struggle and the absurdist displacement of the constative meaning of the Soviet ideological

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discourse are perfectly congruent in the context of the messianic deactivation of the law, which recontextualizes both the constative semantics and the illocutionary force of the ideological discourse in what Foucault (1970, xvii) has famously termed ‘heterotopia’, the space of irreparable disorder in which it is no longer possible to formulate and thus observe the law. In this disorderly space, in which ideological statements, pro- or antiSoviet, are forced into a coexistence in close proximity with absurd gestures of profanation, the performative force of the Soviet project of mastering history is rendered inoperative and its signifiers become available for non-canonical, profane use in artistic forms of play. Nothing in this messianic logic of Aufhebung presupposes either the disappearance of law or the creation of alternative laws. Instead, the properly messianic ethics leaves the law intact while depriving it of its force. A heterotopia is not an ‘other place’ that must be constructed in yet another historical project, but rather an effect of a shift of one’s disposition in the reality one inhabits. The choice is between lingering in the historical dimension, which has lost all recognizable meaning and whose tasks no longer possess a performative force, and renouncing the formal guarantees of historical progress in the messianic time, which leaves the law behind in the attempt to fulfill it in love. The irreducible heterogeneity between history and love is accentuated even more explicitly in another song off the Black Rose soundtrack, ‘Commissar’, which elaborates the theme of ‘farewell to arms’ that is central to Grebenshikov’s work in the late 1980s:

Commissar, I know you can hear me. Just pretend you do not notice that I speak to you. There is no reason to give a cause for war. But you know how they love to shoot and obey the horn, Yet you have already taken an invisible step, And now you are under protection and we speak in silence. Commissar, I have come to confirm that all that was sung Was performed without recourse to words, And we have been guessing what this sign might be. But Commissar, from the outset we have been given the choice Between history and love, And her body is singing in your arms And there is no more fear, and you two are eternal while this is so.


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We have been taught that all of this is fairy tales, We have been taught that it is all nonsense But, Commissar, this sky has already begun to sparkle, Look into her eyes, you will see the reflection of this light. (‘Commissar’, Black Rose . . ., 1990) Similarly to Colonel Vasin’s injunction, the call for the exodus from the battlefield is communicated to the figure of the commissar, engaged in struggle, who has already ‘taken an invisible step’ beside this field into the para-Soviet reality, which alone is posited as the possible locus of love, an experience that is eternal while its subjects have no fear of the historical struggle, represented by those who ‘love to shoot’ and ‘obey the horn’, catching up with them. This opposition of history and love echoes Julian Barnes’s formulation in the History of the World in 10/12 Chapters: But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. [ . . . ] Love won’t change the history of the world . . . but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. (Barnes 1990, 240) The understanding of love as radically heterogeneous to history is not restricted to Barnes, Grebenshikov or any other representative of the contemporary post-historical art, but was also articulated in the Hegelo– Kojèvian discourse on the end of history. In the famous concluding pages of his ‘Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel’, devoted to the constitutive status of finitude for human existence, Kojève (1969, 244–247) brings up an early, ‘romantic’ fragment by Hegel, in which it is love (rather than fight and work) that is presented as the properly dialectical experience. Single and independent beings enter an amorous relationship, in which they remain distinct from one another precisely by virtue of their individual mortality, which they can nonetheless dialectically overcome by means of the conception of the child, in which their ‘union’ becomes truly inseparable. There is something saddening in the subsequent replacement of this image of the amorous Aufhebung (however primitive this ‘fusional’ conception of love appears to us) by the ‘fight to the death for recognition’ and

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the slavish work until the end of history in the universal homogeneous state. While in Kojève’s reading Hegel ‘implicitly’ reproached himself for initially presenting the experience of love as a properly human experience because of its ‘lack of seriousness’, in contrast to the Phenomenology’s central theme of the risk of death (ibid., 244–245), this reproach appears out of place. Although this is certainly a matter of judgment, we dare suggest that few philosophical texts are as comical, in the strict sense of the word, as the description of the Master–Slave dialectic and its Aufhebung (cf. Agamben 1999c, 1–23). On the other hand, it is easy to understand why Hegel abandoned his original project of the phenomenology of love in favour of the dialectic of the Real, exhausted in and by fighting and working. Although love may be a dialectical experience, it is resolutely not a historical experience in the Hegelian sense of history as negating action. Indeed, Kojève’s own dismissal of love perfectly demonstrates its radical heterogeneity to history: [N]ot presupposing Risk, Love does not presuppose Action in general. Therefore it is not Action or Product that are recognized in love as absolute values, but given being, i.e. precisely that which is truly human in Man. As Goethe said, one loves a man not because of what he does but for what he is; that is why one can love a dead man, for the man who does truly nothing would already be like a dead man. Only Fighting and Work (born from the desire for recognition properly so called) produce a specifically human objective reality, a technical and social, or better, historical world; the objective-reality of Love is purely natural (sexual act, birth of the child): its human content always remains purely internal or private. History, and not Love, is what creates Man; Love is only a secondary ‘manifestation’ of Man who already exists as human being. (Kojève 1969, 244, note 32. Emphasis original.) As a ‘sentiment of the living’, love is presented by Kojève as restricted solely to the natural reality of human existence (represented by the following chain of concepts: Life, Being, Identity, Nature, Space). Insofar as lovers recognize each other in the absence of a struggle, in which both participants must face death and consequently become Master and Slave, their relationship after the amorous encounter remains symmetrical. Thus, reciprocal recognition is obtained by the lovers immediately, the notion of immediacy here carrying the full gravity of Hegelian connotations. The dialectic of love achieves at the very moment of the amorous encounter the synthesis of universality and particularity


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in the mutual recognition that, in the Master–Slave dialectic, forms the very content of the millennia of human history, and, moreover, achieves it without the negating action that creates the very ‘technical and social world’ that at the end of history is appropriated by the universal homogeneous state. As Kojève correctly notes, the immediate fulfillment of the dialectic in love entails the cessation of all action that in the historical dialectic creates man as a positive totality that eventually, by taking up again the struggle for recognition, becomes a free historical individual, satisfied with himself and thus truly Self-conscious. In other words, the Hegelian dialectic and the end of history that completes it are indeed constituted by the prioritization of action, of what man ‘does’ (Negativity) rather than what he ‘is’ (Identity), which is precisely what lovers recognize in each other, being quite indifferent to both fighting and working. Thus, the dialectic of love is rejected by Kojève’s Hegel because in this logic history ends without having to begin. Kojève is thus quite correct in saying that love cannot create man but only manifest his existence. Yet, if we do not conceive of love as an alternative type of dialectic, but rather probe the possibility of the rupture of the amorous encounter within the historical process in the manner depicted in Grebenshikov’s ‘Commissar’, we arrive at a rather different reading. Within the historical process, it is only the Slave that acts, while the Master’s existence is manifested in his self-identity, his freedom remaining dissatisfying and frustrated owing to the non-reciprocal character of recognition. On the other hand, the work of the slave does not endow him with freedom but, in Kojève’s own admission, only ‘manifests’ it: ‘The Slave progressively frees himself through Work which manifests his freedom; but he must finally take up the Fight again and accept the Risk in order to realize this freedom by creating through victory the universal and homogeneous state of which he will be the “recognized” citizen’ (1969, 248, note 34). As we have remarked in Chapter 1, no properly human experience of freedom is thus possible within the historical process. It is this impasse that is ruptured by the figure of the workless slave that we have presented above and which may now be equated with the figure of the Lover, so hurriedly abandoned by Kojève’s Hegel. Lovers, who have ceased their work without at the same time engaging in the fight against the Master, testify to the possibility foreclosed in Kojève’s analysis, that is, the possibility of ending history by terminating the dialectic in a subtractive manner rather than leading it to fulfillment by the destruction of the world of the Master. To be sure, as a result of this termination the lovers, who are already human

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by virtue of their originary engagement in the historical struggle for recognition, do not realize their freedom in the synthetic totality of post-historical citizenship, but rather appropriate the very manifestation of their humanity, that is, their exposed being-such-as-they-are without any negating action, as the condition for a ‘happy life’, in which one’s essence is exhausted by the manifestation of existence itself. Love is not a weapon against history that would be capable of changing it. Instead, it is an experience of the non-historical within history, just as the messianic kairos erupts within chronos and transforms it via the recapitulation and abridgment of time. History and love are therefore not separated as epochs but rather coexist as alternatives for a choice to be made within chronological time, the choice that Grebenshikov’s Commissar faces: to maintain oneself in the historical field of struggle between competing teleological visions or to exit the historical domain through a para-systemic disengagement that places one in the messianic heterotopian space halfway between law and love.

The Paradox of Perestroika In his lyrics of the 1980s Grebenshikov clearly opts for the latter alternative, which explains his detachment from the political turmoil of the Perestroika period. According to a number of sociological studies of late socialism, it is precisely the detachment of the ‘shadow society’, which we have termed para-Soviet, from the political sphere that accounts for the failure of the reforms of Perestroika and the demise of the USSR (see e.g. Garcelon 1997; Ledeneva 1998; Kharkhordin 1999; Kotkin 2003; Prozorov 2007c). Against the superficial understanding of the demise of the Soviet order in terms of a radical discontinuity, these studies point to the protracted process of the exodus of the Soviet society from the formal public realm and the cultivation of social, economic and cultural practices that contradicted the self-description of the Soviet regime. The proliferation of the forms of life in the Soviet shadow society that were dramatically at odds with the state’s ideological imperatives, from the invisible ‘sexual revolution’ to the rise of consumerist lifestyles, evidently did little to challenge the Soviet state in the formal aspect of its sovereignty – after all, the government could, and often did, respond to these activities with brute force, although the ineffectiveness of such reprisals was apparent to everyone. Nor was Soviet sovereignty ever the target of these forms of resistance. As we have argued above, the Soviet ‘shadow society’ lacked any pronounced ideological orientation and, as post-Soviet developments demonstrate,


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extended its disenchanted scepticism to the entire spectrum of political ideologies (see Gudkov 2001; Garcelon 1997). And yet, the proliferation of para-systemic forms of life gradually undermined the Soviet regime in its positive capacity to mobilize the Soviet population for the fulfillment of historical tasks, stipulated in the ideological discourse. By the late 1970s, even the reproduction of the Soviet system, not to speak of its progressive development, became marred by the exodus of the population to the para-Soviet sphere, including the shadow economy. Among the ‘counter-productive’ practices in the Soviet society we may recall the lax and malingering attitude to work, absenteeism and sabotage, widespread practice of theft of state property by employees, the use of public offices for private gain at all levels of administration, etc. (see Zinoviev 1979, 1981; Fitzpatrick 2001). In fact, any ‘informal’ form of life, from ethnic mafias to underground rock culture, impaired the teleo-ideology of the ‘new Soviet man’ by actualizing the potentialities of ‘being otherwise’ and testifying to the possibilities of sustaining life beside the Soviet public sphere (see Prozorov 2004a, chapter 4; 2007c). Contrary to the interpretations that argue that the existence of a parasystemic ‘shadow society’ that avoided a frontal confrontation with the system was in fact helpful to the maintenance of the Soviet regime – itself thoroughly permeated by cynicism (see e.g. Zizek 1999; Gudkov 2001) – the only thing that could prolong the existence of the USSR would be precisely the eruption of an open ideological conflict. Of course, dissimulative or ironic participation in the official rituals of, for example, health promotion, international solidarity, adult education and, ultimately, work itself did not challenge the sovereignty of the regime as radically as an armed rebellion would. At the same time, a frontal attack on the Soviet order would undoubtedly have been defeated by the state apparatus of violence and achieved nothing more than the reassertion of the regime’s sovereign power through the reactivation of the themes of historical struggle and civil war. In contrast, the invisible exodus of the society from the ritualized public sphere, coupled with a simultaneous creative development of ‘informal’ forms of life, gradually ebbed away at the productivity of the Soviet order, ultimately leaving it with little more than a pure form of sovereignty that remains in force without any significance (see Prozorov 2007a, chapter 5; 2007c. Cf. Passavant 2007). While these developments have been conventionally described in negative terms of ‘internal emigration’, the forced exit of the society from the ‘totalitarian’ public space, we shall suggest a diametrically opposite interpretation. Instead of society emigrating, we might rather

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speak of the teleo-ideological authority of the Soviet regime being displaced and ultimately expunged from the life of its subjects, the richness of forms of life in the para-Soviet ‘shadow society’ contrasting with the utter impoverishment of ‘public life’ in the Soviet Union, reduced to a parody of official ideological maxims. As Andrei Babitsky (2007) writes in his recollection of the late-Soviet period in the context of the premonition of a new ‘era of stagnation’ under Putin and Medvedev, ‘the state did not belong to us, but we did not belong to the state either’. Similarly, in his analysis of the decade of the 1970s, Yevgeni Saburov (2007) proposes that this period inaugurated a radical disjunction between the state and society, with the latter giving up the illusions of the 1960s about the possibility to reconstitute the state along more democratic lines and beginning to consciously cultivate an ‘alternative life’ at a distance from the public sphere. By the beginning of Perestroika, the society that was governed by the Soviet regime was thus no longer socialist in any meaningful sense of the word. Nor, for that matter, was it anti-socialist in the binary logic of ideological antagonism. The paraSoviet realm did not have any positive content to itself that could come into the open and occupy the hegemonic terrain once the Soviet system expired. The very existence of this sphere was nothing more than the process of the demise of the Soviet order, its shadow double that presides over the disappearance of the latter (much as Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was, according to Badiou (2007b), not a new form of state but the form taken by the process of the destruction of the bourgeois state). The recurrent temporality of para-Soviet life in the 1980s that Akvarium’s songs of the period described so vividly is precisely the time that it took for the Soviet system to come to an end, for the unfolding of the messianic event in the most mundane practices of everyday life, from rock concerts at private apartments to infinite smoking breaks at Soviet enterprises that functioned as privileged temporal sequences in which autonomy was practiced beside the system. As Grebenshikov wrote in 1984, the ‘ashes of your cigarettes are the ashes of empires’ (The Sky Is Getting Closer’, Day of Silver, 1984). Once we recognize the centrality of this ethics of disengagement for the late-Soviet lifeworld, it becomes possible to reconcile our argument with Kharkhordin’s and Yurchak’s diagnoses discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It is perfectly plausible that some of the participants of the exodus from the system continued to participate in its rituals as cynical dissimulators and others as reasonably faithful ironists. After all, it does not really matter which of the two logics, cynical dissimulation or the performative shift, guided the ritualistic participation in the Soviet


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public sphere. What is crucial is rather that the fate of the Soviet system was sealed when its subjects began cultivating their autonomy beside rather than within it and thus no longer depended on the symbolic resources of the system (as opposed to its material resources, eagerly used by para-Soviet subjects). For this reason, when Gorbachev’s government launched the ambitious attempt to reform the system along the lines of democratic socialism, reviving the revolutionary origin of the Soviet order and mobilizing the Soviet population for more active and authentic participation in the affairs of the state, these initiatives were given a cold shoulder by the population that preferred to be a passive observer of the political intrigues of the struggle for power in the late 1980s – early 1990s rather than a maker of history in its own right. Of course, the para-Soviet society benefited from the freedom from state coercion and regulation that flourished during the Perestroika era, yet it is crucial to understand that the space of this freedom had already been established by the practices of disengagement long before freedom became a slogan for the Perestroika reforms. Moreover, the activities to which freedom would be devoted, from rock music to private entrepreneurship, were long developed in the ‘shadow society’ and not provided as endowments by Gorbachev’s reformist regime. Similarly, the significance of the Soviet government’s policy of glasnost (openness) for the practitioners of the para-Soviet ethics should not be overestimated. It would be absurd to suggest that prior to Gorbachev’s reforms the Soviet society was blissfully unaware of the phenomena revealed in the glasnost campaigns, from the Stalinist terror to the contemporary societal degeneration (corruption, violent crime, drug abuse, etc.). The force of these ‘revelations’ consisted not in their novelty but rather in the sheer self-exposure of the Soviet system that was no longer willing or capable to conceal its vices. The brief attraction of the self-criticism of the glasnost era, which in the late 1980s was commonly referred to as chernukha (literally ‘blackening’ or smearing), may therefore be explained by analogy with pornography. There is certainly nothing revelatory in the pornographic representations of sexual activity for the adult audience, which, with any luck, can engage in it on a daily basis. Rather than reveal anything new or secret, pornography attracts its audience precisely by daring to represent the sexual reality ‘as it is’, in its brute facticity, without any concealment or dressing up, with the proviso that it is precisely the ‘as-it-is’ of the pornographic image that is inaccessible to the actual experience of sexual activity, which obviously cannot attain its own representation in the course of its unfolding. In the very same manner, the revelations of the evident

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in the campaigns for glasnost during the late 1980s derived their force not from their content, which was well-known to most of the Soviet population, but from the perceived audacity of its public representation that was entirely alien to the usual practices of the Soviet public sphere. While the organized denigration of the rule of one’s predecessor boasts a long tradition in Russian politics, the open representation of the vices of the present was a singular event, which drew huge audiences, eager to observe the formerly unrepresentable reality that they encountered regularly in their everyday lives.5 Yet, just as the attraction of pornography is ultimately ephemeral, the fixation of the Soviet society on the authoritative representation of the vices of its past and present was similarly fleeting and definitely insufficient to endow the Gorbachev government with any lasting legitimacy in its attempt to remedy these very vices through the reconstruction of the system along the lines of ‘democratic socialism’. Instead of mobilizing the Soviet society for the project of improving, reforming or, finally, rescuing socialism, the pornographic desublimation of the Soviet order, achieved by glasnost, merely accelerated the para-Soviet exodus from the public sphere. Indeed, the society, whose cultural praxis from the early 1970s onwards consisted in the ironic displacement of the clichés of the official Soviet discourse, could not be expected to take seriously their semantic modification in the Perestroika rhetoric of the CPSU. Furthermore, this modification actually maintained the conventions of the official Soviet discourse as late as the May Day demonstrations of 1990 (otherwise marked by the historic fact of the Soviet government deserting the tribunes when faced with the oppositional demonstration in the Red Square), which had such bizarre official slogans as ‘The Toilers of the USSR! Let us accelerate economic reform, the guarantee of our well-being!’ or ‘Compatriots! Let us support the efforts of the president of the USSR to normalize the situation in the country!’ (Izvestia Editorial 1990). The Soviet society was quite simply too disengaged from Soviet politics to take any serious interest in reforming it, was already too free to engage in the state-led project of the construction of a ‘free society’. Any re-engagement in the public sphere in the context of Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms would have been a step backwards for the generation that by the late 1980s had successfully expunged ‘all things Soviet’ from its existence. Thus, the practitioners of the paraSoviet ethics responded to the positive project of Perestroika with an intensification of their exodus from the system, whose democratizing


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rhetoric was largely perceived as the delirium of a terminal patient. Against the transitionalist narratives of the 1990s about the inherent ‘unreformability’ of Soviet socialism that doomed Gorbachev’s reforms, we propose that nothing inherently stood in the way of the project of Perestroika, whose democratic-socialist design invariably received more electoral support than the neo-liberal policies implemented by successive postcommunist governments. The reason for the failure of Perestroika lies not in its design but in the social context of its actualization, marked by a radical disengagement of society from the ideological edifice of the system. Perestroika would have succeeded if it could tempt the disengaged society to return to the public sphere no longer as cynical dissimulators or the habitual agents of performative utterances but as genuine subjects of the historical process. It is not a coincidence that Gorbachev’s criticism of the Brezhnev period labelled the latter the era of ‘stagnation’ – such a label is only pejorative from a progressivist teleological standpoint that wishes to set Soviet history back into motion. In fact, as Boris Groys emphasizes, the original project of Perestroika was not that different from previous campaigns of redemptive self-denunciations of the Soviet regime that reactivated its revolutionary pathos. Indeed, the very slogans of ‘reconstruction’, ‘acceleration’ and ‘openness’ resonate strongly with the Stalinist ‘second revolution’ of the 1930s (see Groys 2006, 112). The sole difference between the two campaigns was that Stalin’s remobilization of the Soviet society after the post – Civil War belle époque of NEP (New Economic Policy) was self-consciously terrorist and murderous, while Gorbachev’s attempt to reinvigorate the promise of the October Revolution shunned any recourse to violence and thus ended up suicidal.6 The disengaged society was at first cautious and after the rapid economic decline of 1989–1990 utterly scornful of this attempt to breathe life into the empty shell of Soviet socialism. The landslide of demonstrative renunciations of party and Komsomol membership starting from 1989 points to the centrality of the paradigm of exodus in late-Soviet social practices. Rather than attempt to reclaim the Soviet system through its democratization or challenge the ideology of Perestroika through an alternative teleo-ideological vision, the men and women, for whom the ethics of disengagement was a central element of subjectification, merely stepped aside to observe its demise, which was simultaneously the demise of history in the sense of its second, symbolic death. Reflecting

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this sentiment, Grebenshikov promised in 1987 with a blissful ontological carelessness: ‘we shall wait until time expires and we’ll meet after its end’ (‘The Tree’, Equinox, 1987). In the following chapter we shall re-encounter Grebenshikov after this ‘end of time’ in a far less euphoric disposition. In the meantime, let us conclude that the failure of the reform project of Perestroika had nothing to do with the inherent vices of Soviet socialism or the historical necessity of ‘transition to democracy’ but was rather a product of late-Soviet social praxis, whose ethos was characterized by a purely negative gesture of disengagement. There is an old children’s joke about a cowboy named Unassailable Joe, who is called that way because there is not anyone who would be bothered to assail him. During the late 1980s the Soviet system was non-reformable simply because at that period nobody could any longer be bothered to reform it. Failing to re-engage the para-Soviet society in a democratized public sphere, the Soviet project of mastering history and fulfilling its telos ended with a termination of the historical process as such.

4 From a Shining Void: The Dialectic of Bespredel in Postcommunist Social Praxis

The Empty Cage The paradigm of late-Soviet social praxis that we have termed the para-Soviet ethics of disengagement consists in the cultivation of autonomous forms of life beside the formal public sphere that evade the subjection of one’s existence to the historical tasks posited by the governmental rationality of the existing political order. As Akvarium’s songs of the early 1980s demonstrate, these practices of disengagement open an experience of time that is freed from the prescriptive rhythm of the authoritative chronos. In this manner, the unfolding of historical progress in the Soviet Union was subverted by the establishment of autonomous spaces, in which history was arrested and time was appropriated for free use. Yet, what happens to these extra-historical zones, when the official public sphere of historical politics, against whose background they were formed, itself implodes into the condition of ‘timelessness’? How can one maintain disengagement from the system whose historical motion has been rendered inoperative? The events of the Soviet anticommunist revolution of 1989–1991 have been well documented in numerous studies both inside and outside the former Soviet Union. Yet, rather than providing us with the benefit of hindsight, the passage of time since the demise of the USSR arguably distorts our recollection of the event of postcommunism, as it increasingly becomes recuperated in the new chronology, losing its ‘timeless’ character that made it both a dangerously exciting and uncannily disorienting period. As we have argued in Chapter 2, too much has actually happened in the 1990s with no significance or finality, which entails that this era is gradually translated into a period of pure negativity both in the Western transitionalist discourse on the failure of ‘liberal-democratic 137

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reforms’ in Russia and in the pseudo-developmental discourse of Putinite stability, which can only speak about the 1990s in the context of their perpetual overcoming. However, we will certainly not be able to understand the Putinite post-transitional suspension of the messianic without a due appreciation of the experience that it suspended, the experience of the messianic time of the end during early postcommunism. In this chapter we shall attempt to reconstruct this experience through a reading of Grebenshikov’s lyrics of the 1990s, paying particular attention to the way the ethics of disengagement that dismantled the Soviet order was transformed in the situation of the demise of the system, from which it dissociated itself, and the disorienting condition of timelessness became the site of the quest for the reappropriation of temporality by the postcommunist society. In full accordance with the para-Soviet ethics, Grebenshikov was out of the USSR during the most turbulent years of Perestroika and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union. After a series of nationwide stadium tours in 1986–1987, which consolidated his status of the top Soviet rock star, Grebenshikov put Akvarium ‘on hold’, arguing that the band had fulfilled its potential. In the brief surge of interest in all things Soviet in the West during the late Perestroika, Grebenshikov was offered a record deal with Sony-CBS in 1988 and left for the USA to record an Englishlanguage solo album, the first ever by a Soviet rock musician. Touted as the ‘Russian Bob Dylan’ (as well as the Russian David Bowie, David Byrne and Bryan Ferry, among other analogies) by the music press and fellow musicians interested in Soviet rock, Grebenshikov became, for a brief period, a key article of Soviet export and a living proof of the new freedoms offered by Perestroika. However, the album Radio Silence, released in May 1989, was a major disappointment both commercially (peaking at no. 198 in the Billboard charts) and critically, particularly given the unchallengeable status of Grebenshikov as the leading Soviet singer-songwriter, praised by such well-known and established poets as Andrei Voznesensky. The commercial failure of Radio Silence is easily understandable: after all, it would be difficult to expect a Soviet rock singer that self-consciously imitated the off-mainstream Western rock of the 1970s to sell a lot of records in the pop-musical context of 1989. Even the critics initially excited by the prospect of a ‘Red wave’ in rock music were eventually disappointed with there being very little recognizably Russian about Grebenshikov’s music and lyrics. Confounding every expectation of the audience interested in ‘ethnic’ or ‘world music’, Radio Silence sounds like a regular ‘adult contemporary’ rock album by a singer with a slight Russian accent. While numerous explanations of the

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lack of success of contemporary Russian art, literature, film and music in the West make recourse to the ‘untranslatability’ of the unique traits of Russian culture, the depth of the ‘mysterious Russian soul’ etc., the case of Radio Silence falsifies this explanation, turning it upside down. The reason why this record did not impress the Western audience was not the untranslatability of its themes or musical styles but the fact that Grebenshikov’s music is itself already a translation of Western rock for the Soviet audience, which entails that it would obviously not sound terribly exciting when returned to the sender in a ‘second-hand’ format. Despite the failure of Radio Silence, Grebenshikov spent most of 1990 recording his second English-language album, which ironically only came out in Russia a few years after as Radio London, as the record company refused to release it in the West in the absence of public demand. Suffering from the same paradox of Western rock returning to sender, Radio London nonetheless featured a song, whose English-language lyrics are crucial for understanding Grebenshikov’s utter disillusionment with the political turmoil of Perestroika: They have said they’re building heaven, So it could be awkward if we stay. And the watchmen in their towers Somehow have failed to see How we dance away, We sail away From their promises of Eden. And while their wise men ponder New ways to set us free, We dance away, We smile away From their promises of Eden. (‘Promises of Eden’, Radio London, 1990) The promise of liberation, which by 1990 became the ubiquitous slogan of the day, competed for by the weakened democratic-socialist orientation of Gorbachev and the rising nationalist opposition in the Soviet republics, including Russia, is bluntly refused as Grebenshikov’s paraSoviet subjects continue their exodus from the formal public sphere, even as the latter is no longer repressive but rather makes freedom its own modus operandi. The ‘promises of Eden’ are clearly perceived as a trap, because any deployment of freedom as an attribute of a

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political order logically effaces freedom in the sense of potentiality of being otherwise, that is, of being beside this very order (cf. Prozorov 2007a, chapters 2, 3). Moreover, as Grebenshikov ironically remarks, the para-Soviet habitual practices of dissimulating the system, profaning its sacred values and ridiculing its rituals, would be of no use to the new authorities that are expected to continue to posit new historical tasks and tempt the Soviet population with a new version of a ‘brighter future’. It would indeed be awkward if the likes of Grebenshikov participated in the project of ‘building heaven’, from which he so successfully twisted loose during the 1980s. In the aftermath of Boris Yeltsin’s death in April 2007 the critical discussion of his legacy (see e.g. Svyatenkov 2007; Ashkerov 2007) invariably brought up the question of freedom. According to Yeltsin’s remaining supporters, his historic achievement was that he had ‘given us freedom’, while the numerous opponents of Yeltsinism contested that the freedom in question was in fact given by Gorbachev during 1987–1991 and was substantially restricted by means of Yeltsin’s socialDarwinist policies of the early 1990s and the ‘super-presidential’ regime inaugurated in the 1993 Constitution. These two positions appear equally uncanny in their shared assumption that freedom was actually given to (post-)Soviet citizens by the incumbent leader of the respective period, posing the question of what all of the citizens must have been prior to this gracious endowment. And yet, the para-Soviet ethics that we have reconstructed in the previous chapter clearly demonstrates that whatever freedom (post-)Soviet citizens had was never granted by the authorities, be it Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but rather cultivated in the autonomous practices of disengagement whose form and content indeed appear ‘awkward’ for any project of ‘building heaven’. Thus, in the interregnum between the Soviet system and postcommunist Russia Grebenshikov asserts the irreducibility of the experience of freedom to any attribute of a positive order and bluntly refuses to become the figurehead for the new state of ‘free Russia’. In a song ‘St Yuri’s Day’, eventually released as the only new track on a 1994 anthology of 1976–1986 rarities Sands of Petersburg, Grebenshikov conjures the spectre of a different, more radical experience of freedom that is grounded in the assumption of a priori antagonism between the rulers and the ruled, which makes it logically impossible for freedom to be a matter of political order, institutions or policies. The demise of the Soviet order is thus not expected to produce a new, ‘free’ Russian state, but merely offers the opportunity for the ruled to dissociate themselves once and for all from the relationship of domination. The significance of St Yuri’s Day (or St George Day, in the Western Christian tradition)


in late-medieval Russian history prior to the reign of Boris Godunov is that this autumn day marked the beginning of a brief period, in which Russian peasants were free to leave their lords, either to establish a new relation of serfdom or to pursue the risk of freedom in the areas in which serfdom was not instituted. The moment of anticommunist revolution is thus viewed as a blessing in a purely negative sense, as a moment that allows the society to make a final break away from all constituted authority rather than reclaim the public sphere for itself. In the song, Grebenshikov makes a similar break, stating that ‘someone else’ would have to play the role of the revolutionary celebrity: I stood and watched the wind blow the crown from your head, And one of us made a knightly gesture. (Sing, sing your song!) Now he is inscribed in gold in the list of the saints, He is your new last hero. They told me that I would be next, I am sorry, but it will have to be someone else. The Phantom Lady and Tatiana are selling themselves In the shadow of your cross, Grateful for the right to work. (Sing, sing your song!) Your singer perished in your mines, The birdcage is empty. I was told I was in the line for the throne, I am sorry, but it will have to be someone else. [...] Soon it is St. Yuri’s Day and there are more and more candles At the desolate gates of the Emperor. Burn them or not, they will not save you. (Instead, sing, sing your song!) Yesterday the Young Pioneers from the monastery Brought me a summons to appear in court. They said I was going to be one of the judges; Don’t wait up on me – it will have to be someone else. (‘St. Yuri’s Day’, Sands of Petersburg, 1994) ‘St. Yuri’s Day’ is one of Akvarium’s first songs to highlight the catastrophic aspects of the looming decade of ‘transition’, anticipating many of the themes and images we shall encounter in this chapter. We observe

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the Phantom Lady (the famous addressee of Alexander Blok’s Silver Age poetry) and Tatiana (the character of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin) engaging in prostitution, which, in accordance with the deconstructive reversal of the binary oppositions of the Soviet moral-political discourse, briefly enjoyed the status of a fashionable line of employment in the early 1990s, illustrating the uncanny convergence of the sexual and the bourgeois revolutions in the post-Soviet society. The court summons, inviting the author to be among the judges in the trial of the defeated system, is brought by the ‘Young Pioneers’ (a Soviet organization for youths aged 9–14) from the monastery – a disconcerting image presently embodied in the rapidly proliferating pro-Putin youth organizations, from Nashi (Ours) to the Young Guard of the United Russia party. Leaving the scene of the anticommunist triumph and evading the temptation of postcommunist liberation in the early 1990s, Grebenshikov achieves the greatest degree of disengagement from the public sphere, which is reflected both in the content of the lyrics of that period and his decision to dissolve Akvarium and launch a solo career. Yet, how does one disengage from what no longer exists? It is understandable how this ethos could have emerged in the Soviet period beside the ritualized formal public sphere; but how is para-Soviet praxis thinkable in the absence of the Soviet order? Evidently, the post-Soviet society finds itself disoriented, at the very least, by the disappearance of the object, beside which it was cultivated. This disorientation has little to do with a euphoric and dazzling experience of liberation, simply because para-Soviet existence had already granted its practitioners a radical freedom from any form of order. Thus, it is only logical that in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union any construction of a new order would be received at best with an ironic detachment. However, the socio-economic and cultural catastrophe of 1991–1992 was such that the ironic discourse of Akvarium’s early albums appeared entirely inappropriate. Instead, the Russian Album, Grebenshikov’s first major release since his sojourn in the USA, is a sombre description of the scene of the post-Soviet catastrophe, phrased in almost eschatological terms that nonetheless are more complex than a mere ‘religious turn’ or a shift to ‘Russian nationalism’, of which the author was frequently accused at the time. Indeed, in the Russian pop-musical climate of the early 1990s, marked by the hurried imitation of Western musical fashions, the Russian Album sounded positively strange if not outright alien. It was only after a decade that this record became fully appreciated as one of the best works of the late-20th-century Russian art. Let us now consider the songs of the Russian Album in detail to grasp the messianic experience of early postcommunism.


The Premonition of Civil War The opening song on the Russian Album, ‘Nikita of Ryazan’ immediately sets the tone for the apocalyptic scene of the collapse of the Soviet order, its chorus erupting into a rare instance of a prayer in Grebenshikov’s lyrics: Oh Lord, look, there is a fortress, And from a fortress there arises fear, And we are children in your hands, Teach us to see you Behind every misfortune . . . . Oh Lord, take from us this bread and wine, Oh Lord, look, we are going down to the bottom. Teach us to breathe underwater. (‘Nikita of Ryazan’, The Russian Album, 1992) The song, written during Grebenshikov’s tour of the Russian provinces in the crisis-ridden 1991, perceives the scene of postcommunism as an utter catastrophe – an apocalyptic attitude widespread in the post-Soviet culture during 1990–1993. The analogies with ancient or medieval Russia that are at work throughout the album both intensify the contemporary experience and, more importantly for our purpose, posit the past events of Russian history as a prefiguration of the current predicament. In Agamben’s study of the Pauline epistles this use of the past is referred to as typos, literally a ‘figure’ in the past that foreshadows the events of the present, establishing a correlation between the past (which, as we recall, is all recapitulated in the messianic kairos) and the messianic ‘now’, whereby ‘the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past’ (Agamben 2005b, 74. Cf. Taubes 2004, 39–46). This use of the past is the very opposite of the well-known conservative strategy of the linkage of present events with past glories to ‘root’ the profane present in the venerable tradition and endow it with legitimacy – a gesture attempted on innumerable counts by the postcommunist authorities with invariably disappointing, if not outright ludicrous, results. In the typological relation, the reference to the past does not stabilize the present but contributes to its destabilization by a dislocation of past discontinuities and ruptures into the present. As we shall see below, nothing in the historical references of Grebenshikov’s lyrics is intended to ground the current experience or provide it with a minimum of intelligibility. On the contrary, both the past and the

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present undergo a displacement in their constellation, whereby ‘the past (complete) rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfilled and the present (the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfillment’ (Agamben 2005b, 75). Contrary to the initial reception of the Russian Album by the critics, Grebenshikov’s work is therefore the very opposite of the search for refuge from the meaninglessness of early postcommunism in the Russian tradition. The symbolic resources of tradition are instead mobilized to reinforce the perception of the present as a messianic kairos, in which the past events are recapitulated and in a way unfulfilled, restored to the potential status in the time that remains before redemption. The chaotic unravelling of the Soviet order is perceived as a purely negative event that is to be matched with a similarly ‘non-positive’ affirmation of the sought salvation: if we are indeed going down to the bottom, salvation consists in surviving this destruction, taking as wide a distance from the catastrophic events in politics and the economy. In fact, ‘breathing underwater’ is a metaphor that could well be applied to the form of life described and practiced by Akvarium in the previous historical era: given the suffocatingly ritualized character of Soviet social life in the early 1980s, the practices of dissociation from the public sphere demonstrate the possibility of freedom in the most adverse conditions. This para-Soviet ethics of disengagement is now maintained in a radically new situation, marked by the absence of any system on whose margins freedom could be sought. It is this paradox of continuing to live beside the system that no longer exists – that is, in proximity to the void – that is central to all Grebenshikov’s lyrics of the 1990s. This paradox permits us to critically engage with Kharkhordin’s (1999, 358) thesis on the apparently unproblematic character of the post-Soviet assertion of liberal individualism as already conditioned by the ‘individualistic’ mode of self-fashioning in the ‘shadow’ para-Soviet society. What this thesis obfuscates is the dependence of these shadow practices on their ‘formal’ correlate of the stable social order, which allowed the practitioners of the para-Soviet ethics to literally ‘live off’ the formal and public socio-economic order. In the context of economic praxis this originary entwinement of the public and the private produced the infamous phenomenon of postcommunist ‘meta-corruption’, irreducible to particular instances of the violation of law but rather arising out of the radical indeterminacy of the law itself with respect to private economic conduct (see Ledeneva 1998). A similar logic is observable in the case of the practitioners of para-Soviet underground culture, for whom the collapse of the Soviet order did not merely remove a redundant complement to their already autonomous


existence but usher in a period of existential disorientation. During the Soviet period autonomous practices unfolded against the background of a static and ritualized order, onto which one could always project one’s disappointment, dissatisfaction and frustration. Nothing would be easier for the practitioners of the para-Soviet ethics than to persist in disengaging from a new postcommunist order, ‘dancing away from the promises of Eden’ – as we have seen, this ethics does not oppose any particular political content and for this reason is practicable with respect to any positive teleo-ideological order. Yet, in the absence of such a negative referent in the early 1990s, practices of freedom suddenly began to unfold in the sphere of pure negativity, hence, as we shall see below, the frequent recourse to the figure of the void in Grebenshikov’s lyrics of that period. This disorientation is evocatively depicted in ‘Empress’, a song in which Grebenshikov for the first time compares the Soviet and post-Soviet experiences. Oh Empress, do you remember us building the house? It was all fine, but empty. So many years of sewing silver over snow, Afraid of touching it with acid. So many years we were singing until the daybreak, We were singing but were afraid to speak. But, Empress, if you wanted enemies, Who could have dared to defy you? (‘The Empress’, The Russian Album, 1992) This verse features a moving retroactive summation of the para-Soviet ethics. Addressing the defeated Empress, Grebenshikov explicitly rejects the view of the underground community as antagonistic to the Soviet order, however ‘empty’ it ended up owing to his generation’s exodus from the Soviet public sphere. Engaged in their own autonomous practices of ‘singing until the daybreak’, this community never explicitly ‘spoke’ out against the system and therefore never challenged the Empress’s project. Whatever enmity existed between the system and the shadow para-Soviet society was solely according to the former’s own whim – perceiving even the most ideologically neutral cultural autonomy as a priori dangerous for the Soviet project, the system created its own enemies that in turn obliged and took on this status, eventually bringing the Soviet order to a pathetic demise, whose aftermath is described by Grebenshikov in the second verse.

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So what of us now? Why do we keep drinking this rubbish And keep grabbing the demons by their hips? We have been told that the morning won’t take its due, We have been told that the burden is light. So then was it in vain that we were building this house? It is not our fault that it ended up empty. At least now we know how it went with silver, Let’s see how it goes with acid. (‘The Empress’, The Russian Album, 1992) The collapse of the Empress’s order entails that the burdens of the past no longer have to be carried on into the future, but may be deactivated in the messianic present. The morning of the first day of the messianic kairos will no longer require us paying our debts and serving past obligations to the Empress. And yet, this liberation is not received euphorically and triumphantly but approached in its brute facticity as the new condition of existence in what looks like a radically indeterminate and dangerous present, the new ‘house’ of postcommunism built no longer of silver and snow but, evoking the penchant for mind-altering substances in the Russia of the 1990s, ‘with acid’. One of the key features of the Russian Album is the intimation of the eruption of civil war in the postcommunist era. This premonition was characteristic of Russian rock more generally – in 1991, the St Petersburg group DDT stirred controversy with its song ‘The Premonition of Civil War’ (Plastun, 1991), which strongly contradicted the brief enthusiasm over the end of communism in the wider society, describing the present as a time ‘when suicide is the most honest option’. The dystopian and apocalyptic visions of the imminent future were also prominent in the Russian literature (e.g. Alexander Kabakov’s Non-Returnee) and films (e.g. Eldar Ryazanov’s The Promised Heaven) of the time. For Grebenshikov, whose view of the postcommunist landscape was similarly bleak, the central question was the ethical stance that the postcommunist subjects must assume with regard to this danger. The song ‘Little Swallow’ is exemplary in its depiction of the expectation of the catastrophe, whose farcical miniaturization will indeed take place in October 1993, and the wariness of the author to take any sides in the ideologically charged ‘war on evil’: Jump, swallow, jump – up the white wall. Jump, swallow, jump – right up to me. The sun is up, so the time has come. Jump, swallow, jump – war is coming around.


Jump, swallow, jump – right into the yard. Jump, swallow, jump – an axe in your claws. On one side there is light – and there is no other side. This means that in our yard there hides a thief. Life drops like a stone – there are circles in the sky. Jump, swallow, jump – there are enemies all around. To a war on evil, let the falcon spring up like a goat. While you, swallow, sing on but do not follow! Sing, swallow, sing, while we keep beating our drums, Beautiful falcons on this side, beautiful falcons on the other. The falcon will rise, the woman will give birth, So everything is as always, everything is in its place. (‘Little Swallow’, The Russian Album, 1992) The pathos of politico-ideological confrontation that began to intensify from early 1992 onwards in the condition of a permanently unstable power-sharing between President Yeltsin and the Congress of People’s Deputies is ridiculed and devalued in the simile that likens the ‘falcon’ of the war on evil to a ‘goat’ and in the explicit injunction of the swallow to sing but not follow the militants into the battle. In a striking reversal of conventional categories, civil war is not perceived as a rupture in the normal order of things, but rather a return to the latter, which recalls the statement of Colonel Vasin in ‘Train on Fire’ about a war with ourselves that we have been fighting for 70 years. What would be tragic about the postcommunist civil war, intimated by so many in the early 1990s, is not the interruption of the historical process of postcommunist development that it would bring about but the fact that it would entail the resumption of history as such, given that civil war as an extreme form of social antagonism may well be the very paradigm of the historical process in the Hegelo–Kojèvian dialectic. For this reason, the distant beating of the drums and the frontal opposition between notably indistinguishable ‘beautiful falcons’ are not a premonition of yet another discontinuity but of the return to the familiar scene of history, where everything, including war, has its rightful place.

Bespredel In contrast to this pessimistic anticipation of the relapse into history, the hope for the practitioners of the para-Soviet ethics is contained in the irreversibility of the end of history, which alone may redeem the contemporary catastrophe by ensuring the collapse of the entire

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teleological dimension of history. The question of how postcommunism can be redeemed is central to the understanding of its ethos and will preoccupy us in the remainder of this book. As early as 1992, we encounter in Grebenshikov’s lyrics an intricate logic of redemption through a catastrophe that may be illuminated with the help of a detailed consideration of a post-Soviet neo logism, which is frequently deployed in various contemporary contexts. The Russian word bespredel is literally translated as ‘limitlessness’, which is the lexeme we shall deploy in our translation of Grebenshikov’s lyrics. However, the more general significance of this neo logism exceeds this denotative meaning, hence in our analysis below we shall refrain from translating bespredel and rather deploy it as a technical term, whose intricate and paradoxical logic provides us with a point of entry into the analysis of the postcommunist ethics. As opposed to a neutral noun ‘bespredelnost’ with the same denotation of ‘limitlessness’, the abridged form ‘bespredel’ entered the popular lexicon in the late 1980s with a sharply negative connotation. Originally this term emerged as part of the criminal slang, in which it referred to the practices that violated the tacit rules of conduct in the hierarchical structure of the Soviet underworld. It is highly significant that in its original meaning bespredel does not designate ‘illegality’ per se and is thus entirely distinct from the corresponding Russian term ‘bezzakonie’, which is literally translated as ‘without-law’ and refers precisely to acts or phenomena that clearly violate the established legal norms or statutes. In contrast, from the very origin of its use bespredel designates not the illegality of acts (that in the context of the underworld are all ipso facto illegal) but rather the disappearance of the very framework in which the legal and the illegal could be distinguished, a meta-illegality or anomie of the second degree that is characterized by the radical impossibility of adjudication. In the late-Soviet and postcommunist period bespredel became the favourite term to describe the socioeconomic disorder and rampant criminality that characterized the later years of Perestroika and particularly the ‘market reforms’ of the Yeltsin presidency. In various enunciative contexts bespredel may refer to the utter disrespect for authority, the politicians’ disregard for public opinion, the absence of a clear distinction between the permitted and the prohibited, the disappearance of ethical standards in professional practices, the domination of private entrepreneurship by criminal protection rackets, etc. In the political discourse, the problematization of bespredel became the staple of the superficial ‘conservatism’, whose hegemony in Russian postcommunist politics we have discussed in Chapter 2.


The limitlessness of the postcommunist socio-political field is a direct effect of the collapse of the hegemonic edifice of the Soviet ideological discourse, whose function was precisely to install a certain distribution of exclusions, rarefactions and restrictions (Foucault 1981) that delimit the anarchic flux of social praxis and thus constitute a positive form of order. Once this ideological discourse has been rendered inoperative and lost its performative force, the social order unravelled and became literally limitless – a structure of pure negativity, lacking the constitutive delimitation that would endow it with a positive substance. In other post-revolutionary contexts, including Central and East European postcommunism, this limitlessness, whose momentary eruption is the feature of any genuine revolution, was quickly effaced by the institution of a new hegemonic delimitation that took the form of a ‘return to Europe’ and the institutional process of NATO and EU accession. A similar installation of limits took place in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, albeit in an explicitly anti-democratic and traditionalist manner. In contrast, in the Russian case the limitless moment of the political exhibited a tendency to linger, and all attempts at installing a positive form of postcommunist order appeared to be thwarted in advance by the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics. Thus, the temporal structure of messianic suspension or ‘timelessness’, addressed in Chapter 2, is on the level of the phenomenology of everyday life translated into the experience of ‘limitlessness’. During the early years of postcommunism the lament over the condition of bespredel would typically proclaim that ‘everything has become possible’, with a melancholic caveat ‘but not for us’. In his analysis of Russian postcommunism as a ‘minimal’ or ‘negative’ revolution, Artemy Magun (2008, 66–84) has demonstrated that lamentation, melancholy and mourning are the dominant moods of the post-revolutionary period, functioning as the symptoms of the failure of the revolution to fully actualize its negative potential, which could take place only through the complete annihilation of the symbolic order of human society as such. As such annihilation does not take place and every revolution is, in a sense, a failure, its aftermath entails nothing other than the materialization of its negativity in our everyday existence as an experience of concomitant radical liberty and utter disempowerment simultaneously. Bespredel is both a dizzying experience of freedom from all artificial limitations and a nauseating experience of the impossibility of its practice, both a wide expanse of potentiality for being whatever one wants to be and a sense of actual powerlessness in the face of the reign of brute force and corruption. In the experience of bespredel potentiality

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and actuality are radically separated, whereby the absence of all limits paradoxically bars and thus forecloses the actualization of the very possibilities enabled by it. The eternal temptation of teleo-ideological politics is the conversion of this gap into the promise of the actualization of the currently impotential possibilities in the brighter future after the investment of vital forces in the fulfillment of historical tasks. Yet, the entire content of the end of history consists in rendering this promise inoperative, whereby the present is the only time that remains for the actualization of the possibilities of freedom. The tragedy of early postcommunism is that in this period the practices of freedom in the pure present were hindered by the nature of that present itself as the time of timelessness. Similarly to Russian politics, state and law, whose own suspension in the inoperative status we have addressed in Chapter 2, freedom in the condition of bespredel remains in force without significance. It is certainly present in the mode of potentiality, which is, after all, proper to freedom as such, but this potentiality is barred from all actualization so that freedom becomes actually equivalent to its opposite (i.e. impossibility), and inoperosity (i.e. having nothing to do), is reduced to apraxia or the impossibility of action as such. If there is a single term that can sum up the description of the experience of early postcommunism in everyday life, it must be bespredel, the wide expanse of an utterly unusable freedom. It is evident that this term succinctly sums up the paradox of maintaining the para-Soviet ethics after the demise of the Soviet system, that is, living in proximity to the void. While the late-Soviet practices of freedom derived their meaning precisely from the transgression of the limits posed by the Soviet order and the exodus from its regulated public sphere, the aftermath of the latter’s destruction left the subjects of freedom with neither meaning nor direction to their practices of freedom, while freedom itself degenerated into a menacing and disorienting experience of the actual existence of an impossibility (cf. Agamben 1999b, 148). We may therefore conclude that bespredel is ultimately the best Russian translation for what Agamben terms the ‘state of exception’ (2005a). Indeed, this notion immediately recalls two of the most controversial paradigmatic figures in Agamben’s work, homo sacer and the Muselmann (1998, 1999b), and also permits us to differentiate between them, contrary to the frequent conflation of these figures in the interpretations of Agamben’s work (cf. Laclau 2007; DeCaroli 2007). Insofar as bespredel designates the dissolution of all structures of authority and the inoperative status of all norms, its subjects evidently inhabit the state of exception, in which they are all homini sacri, beings abandoned by the sovereign power that withdrew from the social realm after the demise of the Soviet Union.


Moreover, given the rampant criminality of early postcommunism, its subjects indeed dwelled in the harrowing condition of being ‘capable of being killed with impunity’. And yet, just as the objects of what Agamben calls the ‘ban’ (Agamben 1998, 104–111), who have undergone a ‘civil death’ and are ostracized or banished from the community, postcommunist subjects may also paradoxically experience their banishment as a matter of freedom, an extreme potentiality that has done away with any positive structure of authority. It is this potentiality, which may of course be completely barred from empirical actualization, that ultimately differentiates homo sacer from the Muselmann, the utterly desubjectified inhabitant of the camp (see Agamben 1998, 166–180; 1999b, 41–86) for whom the confinement rather marks the withdrawal of all potentiality in the materialization of the impossible as ‘absolute necessity’ (Agamben 1999b, 148). From this perspective, the condition of bespredel must be rigourously distinguished from Agamben’s concept of the camp, which, after all, is defined precisely by the limits that bespredel lacks. The tragic irony of the contemporary discourse on the overcoming of the 1990s is that its plausible problematization of the undecidable state of bespredel is not directed at the appropriation of its limitless potentialities but rather at their effacement in the ritualistic realm of pure synchrony. There is certainly something grotesque in this attempt to escape abandonment by building a camp. At the same time, it would certainly be facile, if not obscene, to suggest that the postcommunist condition marked, for all its hazards and disadvantages, a moment of liberation from the camp-like condition of Soviet ‘totalitarianism’. In the condition of bespredel freedom exists as a paradoxical conjunction of extreme potentiality and utter impossibility, whereby the absence of limits to the practice of freedom consumes the experience of freedom itself in the perpetual deferral of its actualization, resigning its subjects to a melancholic lament over the object that was lost as soon as it appeared or, rather, appeared immediately as lost (cf. Agamben 1993a, 16–21). While in the Soviet period the impossibility of practicing freedom within the confines of the formal public sphere led to its reassertion as pure (i.e. non-positive) potentiality in the para-Soviet practices of disengagement, the immediate post-Soviet period was marked by the opposite tendency, whereby the very expanse of potentialities in the postcommunist bespredel brought about little more than the materialization of negativity, in which the potentiality of freedom was actualized in the mode of its inaccessibility. As Agamben remarks, ‘nothing is bitterer than a long dwelling in potential.’ (Agamben 1995, 65)

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It is precisely this ‘disconsolate gloom [derived] from an incessant postponement of the deed’ (ibid.) that characterizes most of the songs on the Russian Album, including the song that explicitly makes use of the notion of bespredel. ‘Horses of Limitlessness’ evokes the tragic experience of living through the turbulent years of Perestroika only to arrive at the desolate landscape of the postcommunist bespredel. We were traveling from hill to hill, But lost an axle from a wheel along the way. We went out dancing, our uniforms frilled; Little soldiers of love, all blue eyes. Well, they took us and they led us by strange roads; Yes, they led us and look where they brought us. There sits a pale bird with devilish eyes; Well, sing for me, birdie, maybe I’ll dance. Sing me, birdie, how is it for a soul without a body? Is it easy to be a bird but not be able to sing? Oh Lord, harness me the horses of limitlessness. I would like to walk, but it looks like I am running out of time. [...] Here are all my friends, vodka without bread, My brother Sirin, my brother the Saviour. And the third one wanted to walk all the way to heaven, But got drunk, got wasted – and that was that. Hey, there flew out a bird, but did not fly very far. The dove got pecked by the hawk. The horses of limitlessness were harnessed for me, And stampeded me far away from you. (‘Horses of Limitlessness’, The Russian Album, 1992) The process of socio-political change during the 1980s is described as a forced movement of ‘being led’ that led to the catastrophic arrival at a desolate scene and an encounter with a ‘pale bird with devilish eyes’, not improbably the swallow that did not heed the advice in the eponymous song. Scary as the bird is, it is itself the victim of bespredel; indeed, its plight of being ‘a soul without a body’, of ‘being a bird and not being able to sing’ is a perfect description of the disjunction between potentiality and actuality that we have described as the quintessential experience of early postcommunism. The same disjunction characterizes


the narrator’s ‘friend’, whose quest for heaven was arrested at an early stage by his ‘getting drunk and wasted’; a bird whose flight was stopped by the violence of the stronger (‘the dove pecked by the hawk’); and, finally, the narrator’s being taken away from his loved one by the mysterious ‘horses of limitlessness’. The line ‘I would have liked to walk but it looks like I am running out of time’ recalls our description of the temporality of the early 1990s in terms of timelessness. Wherever the song’s hero might be going, he is always already running late, his walking always failing to catch up with the mad stampede of the ‘horses of limitlessness’. What the conjoined experiences of timelessness and limitlessness point to is a temporality that has lost all sense of rhythm. While, as we have argued above, para-Soviet practices unfolded in the circular rhythm of habitual worklessness against the background of the progressivist chronology of the Soviet official discourse, the postcommunist ‘timelessness’ destroys both forms of existential rhythm, ushering in an era of dizzying change that cannot attain any finality and thus remains forever ‘in progress’ without any signs of progress being made and with no clear idea of a direction this progress could take – a situation observed for the most part of the 1990s. In this experience of time, one is always already late without knowing what one is late for, as everything that happens is thwarted and unfulfilled, returned to its status of a potentiality. What is materialized as impossible in this setting is not freedom qua potentiality per se, which is certainly there to an extreme degree indicated by the ‘stampede’ of the ‘horses of limitlessness’, but rather its actualization, the achievement through practices of freedom of a certain finality. It is important to note that while in its everyday use the notion of bespredel as a limitless possibility primarily designated the perception that ‘nothing is sacred anymore’, we should not infer from this the understanding of bespredel as a space of total profanation in Agamben’s sense of the word (2007b, 75–77). While for Agamben profanation refers to the return of what has been separated as sacred to the sphere of everyday habitual use by human beings, the trouble with bespredel is not its profane character, but, on the contrary, the sheer impossibility of profanation that it marks. ‘Being a bird without being able to sing’, ‘wanting to walk but running out of time’, being ‘a soul without a body’, ‘flying out but not flying far’ – all of these figures of plight reiterate that the possibilities of profane use in the aftermath of the collapse of everything sacred have been marred by the very limitlessness in which they present themselves to the postcommunist subject. Rather than point to the triumph of the profane over the sacred, bespredel arguably consecrates the unprofanable itself.

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The Barge Hauler’s Aporia At the same time as they depict a catastrophic scene that warrants little jubilation, Grebenshikov’s songs of the early postcommunist period hint at a more complex relation to bespredel that will become even more pronounced in the late 1990s. A simple and self-evident solution to the problem of extreme potentiality, posed by the condition of bespredel, would consist in its gradual overcoming through the institution of a hegemonic project that actualizes certain of its infinite possibilities and proscribes others in the name of some teleological end-state of a ‘bright future’, in which all human potentiality is expected to find fulfillment. The deployment of such a project by postcommunist authorities would have amounted to a disavowal of the end of history or, in the terms introduced in Chapter 1, an acceptance of the ‘first’ end of history (the collapse of communism) that conceals its second end (the subtractive negation of the teleo-ideological field). As we have argued in Chapter 2, the Russian politics of the 1990s was marked by a plethora of such gestures of disavowals, none of which was able to attain the hegemonic status they attested to. On the societal level, one could observe a similar situation of the proliferation of numerous soteriological recipes for overcoming bespredel through devising a new project of redemption, none of which succeeded in escaping the status of a minor, if frequently bizarre, subculture. Among the abundant examples we might note the postSoviet society’s brief fascination with parapsychology and extrasensory perception, the flourishing of the most diverse religious cults, ‘alternative medicine’, meteoric careers of charlatans of all guises, etc. While none of these soteriological devices succeeded in overcoming the undecidability of bespredel (and actually contributed to it by virtue of their very multiplicity), it is impossible to deny the widespread temptation in the early 1990s to escape the messianic suspension of history by a retreat into the security of a teleological project, even if the latter could only be conceivable as a simulacrum. Grebenshikov’s poetry of the early 1990s is best grasped as a successful struggle against this temptation. In full accordance with Hölderlin’s maxim, Grebenshikov looks for ‘saving power’ precisely where ‘danger grows’, that is, within bespredel itself. Moreover, as Heidegger notes, ‘it may be that any other salvation than that, which comes from where the danger is, is still within non-safety.’ (Heidegger 2001, 118) We find this dialectic in numerous philosophical orientations of modernity: Marx’s account of capitalism as its own gravedigger, Nietzsche’s promotion of the ‘overman’ that is born from within the experience of nihilism, Heidegger’s Ereignis that follows


the expiry of the epochal sendings of Being, Derrida’s imperative of justice that follows the deconstructive revelation of the undecidability of law, Agamben’s own affirmation of ‘whatever being’ amid the expropriation of communicability in the planetary triumph of the society of the spectacle, etc. Similarly, for Grebenshikov, whatever salvation there is must be found within the experience of bespredel, whereby limitlessness and timelessness no longer function as the conditions of separation and disempowerment. The extreme potentiality that characterizes bespredel must not be effaced, minimized or regulated, but brought into actuality, that is, used in actual social practices rather than disavowed as a fearsome absence of all limits. In Agamben’s terms, abandonment must no longer be viewed as a divine or human punishment but rather as a quest for the appropriation of that very hazardous freedom that tempts with its presence but resists its grasp (cf. Wall 2005). In ‘Wolves and Ravens’, a ballad that forms the centrepiece of the Russian Album, the characters’ quest for the ‘warm star’ unfolds in the space of utter undecidability, characteristic of bespredel: ‘this is either a blessing or a trap, feels good to touch but gives the soul a shiver’ (‘Wolves and Ravens’, The Russian Album, 1992). On this quest, we are not aided by the traditional authorities of salvation: the icons all ‘look unfamiliar’, the candles ‘are all bought up’ and the pure spirit that could be lit up to light the way is ‘nowhere to be found’. The only help in this quest comes from ‘wolves and ravens’, not the usual agents of the good in the Russian folklore: Maybe it is true that there is no way but the hard way, And there are no hands for miracles, except those that are clean; But the only ones to warm us up were wolves and ravens, Who blessed us all the way to the warm star. (‘Wolves and Ravens’, The Russian Album, 1992) The overcoming of bespredel is thus possible solely within its coordinates and with the help of the very negative features that make it intolerable. Thus, from the early 1990s, in Grebenshikov’s lyrics the search for the way out of the ruinous experience of the postcommunist disaster is entirely bereft of all ideological or religious mirages and remains immune to all promises of exiting this condition through a recommencement of the historical process. As we have argued above, any such recommencement can logically only take the form of Terror that must reinstate the Master–Slave opposition before any historical project can even be articulated by the latter. Similarly, any attempt to

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order the space of postcommunist bespredel in the post-historical condition of the deactivation of the teleo-ideological condition produces nothing other than the camp, which is precisely the locus of ‘ordered bespredel’, in which what is confined within authoritatively established limits is limitlessness itself. Rejecting any solution that confronts bespredel from the perspective of its opposite, Grebenshikov’s poetry probes the possibility of redemption without a trace of utopianism, the redemption that introduces nothing new to our present condition and precisely for this reason remains within our reach. In this manner, the experience of early postcommunism in Grebenshikov’s lyrics acquires a complexity that is irreducible to any of the numerous positions in the inoperative ideological field, synthesizing despair and hope, revulsion and revelling, fear and recklessness. The saving power is sought in the very same domain where danger is, and salvation itself is deemed to be in infinitesimal proximity, though as yet unidentifiable. Thus, ‘Elizabeth’ is able to combine the bitter disappointment in the political activity of Perestroika and the intimation of a workless bliss entirely at odds with the otherwise dark disposition of the Russian Album: Tell me what the statues were falling down into the wires for, Tell me why we were shooting and went forth with our necks to the lash. She put her finger on my lips and whispered: ‘Do what you want but remain silent, words are death.’ And our bodies will open up like doors to the sky, Where we can fly freely and glide slowly, Where there is always Sunday, and candles, And celebration, and summer and that, which is not allowed . . . (‘Elizabeth’, The Russian Album, 1992) Thus, the radical disappointment in the ‘liberal-democratic’ ideals of the anticommunist revolution does not lead to the abandonment of the postcommunist bespredel for yet another historical project but rather to the expression of the messianic anticipation of the post-historical ‘eternal Sunday’, marked by the deactivation of all historical distinctions between the permitted and the prohibited, whereby whatever is ‘not allowed’ is returned to free use in the time of celebration, a celebration of nothing other than the bespredel itself. This disposition of celebrating one’s freedom in the midst of the most abject catastrophe permits Grebenshikov to conjure yet another


typological relation with Russian history that disturbs the transitionalist narrative of postcommunism. The song ‘Barge Hauler’, which completes the Russian Album and was the closest this album came to producing a hit single, synthesizes many of the themes we have discussed so far in a powerful image of the barge hauler (a line of work usually reserved for the serfs in the early 19th-century Russia), caught halfway between law, which he irrevocably leaves behind, and God’s love, which he is on a quest to find. The subject of postcommunism is thus portrayed as a runaway serf in the midst of his exodus that he attempts to transform into the quest for absolution: A lonely barge hauler is trudging down the Volga, Trudging along, tied to the celestial planes. The Lord above is shaking his fist at him, While he just laughs, there’s cocaine in his fist. Downstream there rides the Golden Horde, Upstream there are ladies watching from the shores, Oh the goat’s brew, the water of life, Let my blood out, blue snow. How winter pacified us with iron and ice, And itself turned into spring as soon as it did. When the snow starts to melt, what will happen then; When the ice moves, what will happen to me? (‘The Barge Hauler’, The Russian Album, 1992) In the first verse we encounter the barge hauler, who, having abandoned his work as well as his community, is trudging down the Volga, immortalized in the 1873 painting by Ilya Repin, in the movement across the limitless ‘celestial planes’. The disoriented and undecidable condition of liberation is metaphorized in the rather conventional terms of the advent of spring (akin to the proverbial ‘Thaw’ of the late 1950s), yet with an important ironic twist. It is now winter itself, the stable and virtually immutable order that previously succeeded in ‘pacifying’ the subjects that existed beside it, that now turns into spring at the moment of its apparent invincibility, making the collapse of the Soviet order entirely unexpected and intelligible only retroactively (cf. Yurchak 2006, 282–297; Groys 2006, 113–123). Nonetheless, the undecidability of the postcommunist condition is not exhausted by the trauma of the sudden demise of the order that laid its own claim to the teleological end of history, but is rather contained in the aporetic coexistence in the postcommunist present of radically heterogeneous elements that disables

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any meaningful vision of the postcommunist order and guarantees the perpetuation of the condition of bespredel. The aporia at stake concerns the impossibility of adjudication between diametrically opposed interpretations of the same phenomenon, which destroys all hope of fixing its meaning and thereby exiting the state of bespredel through the articulation of a hegemonic structure. The postcommunist experience is characterized by the suspension of meaning between two mutually exclusive interpretive solutions, whereby any resolution of the deadlock remains perpetually deferred: neither this nor that, but always both at the same time. The condition of possibility of something is thus simultaneously the condition of its impossibility as a self-identical entity or an unproblematic unity. Jacques Derrida famously described this experience of undecidability in a series of quasitranscendental concepts (trace, diffèrance, supplement, pharmakon, hymen, gift, autoimmunity, etc.) that all point to the same condition of a non-dialectical coexistence (or, in Deleuze’s terminology, a disjunctive synthesis) of the most disparate: poison and cure, lack and excess, presence and absence, the sacred and the profane, damnation and salvation, destruction and creation, violence and law, etc. (see e.g. Derrida 1984, 1988, 1998, 2005). As all things are simultaneously contaminated by their own opposites, nothing can attain the slightest degree of stability, all meaning ending up consumed in the mad stampede of the ‘horses of limitlessness’. In the first verse of the song we find the barge hauler finding funny the divine wrath, as the Lord that shakes his fist at him is holding ‘cocaine’ in this very fist. Similarly, the healing ‘water of life’ is immediately re-described as ‘goat’s brew’, while the winter’s ‘pacification’ is undertaken in a strangely belligerent manner ‘with iron and ice’. The final verse radicalizes this paradoxical structure of the postcommunist experience in a portrayal of the contemporary condition as the whirlwind of bespredel, in which the most heterogeneous elements enter a zone of indistinction: And so our life goes, in Secam or in Pal, Head-down in the field or with the Saviour in your head. I went out to reach the origin of all things, but got drunk and fell down, end of story. Now the ravens are silent and the ladies are screaming Like wolverines or like faithful sisters, A healing fast or a healing poison, But I am knocking on your door, open up! So count us as angels or count us as beasts,


Just say something, I cannot do without fire. And wherever I go I keep knocking at your door, So Lord have mercy on me! (‘The Barge Hauler’, The Russian Album, 1992) This verse provides numerous illustrations of the Derridean aporetic formula: a life lived in between incompatible colour encoding systems Pal and Secam, ladies screaming ‘like wolverines or little sisters’, fasting appearing as poisoning, human beings existing in the zone between angels and beasts, etc. The effect of this dwelling in undecidability is evidently the destruction of the very possibility of a historical finality that we have addressed in Chapter 2. The barge hauler’s quest (‘to reach the origin of all things’) ends up just like in the ‘Horses of Limitlessness’, that is, in mere drunken slumber. The entire quest for salvation, whose direction is chaotic and indeterminate, consists in lingering before the door of the Lord, which recalls the travails of Kafka’s ‘man from the country’ at the door of the Law. ‘The Barge Hauler’ singularly describes the combination of the experience of radical freedom and the impossibility of actualizing its infinite potentialities. All kinds of things, however heterogeneous, take place in the postcommunist limitlessness, yet none can achieve a stable or final actualization owing to the ceaseless movement of diffèrance that makes everything non-coincidental with itself and thwarts every attempt at stabilization and consolidation. In the Derridean messianic logic of the ‘patient perhaps’ (Derrida 2005, 91), criticized by Agamben as ‘a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic’ (2005b, 103), the advent of parousia is forever deferred, leaving us with nothing but the traces of the ineffable messianic event. Similarly to Gershom Sholem’s conception of the messianic, which Agamben describes as a ‘life lived in deferral and delay, in which nothing can be brought to fulfillment and nothing accomplished once and for all’ (Agamben 1999a, 166), Derrida’s logic exemplifies the condition of dwelling within extreme potentiality that has been barred from actualization – the condition of bespredel whose logic we have presented above. Derrida’s thought may thus be grasped as the multifarious expression of the radical inaccessibility of the eschaton. For example, in Derrida’s discourse on the ‘democracy to come’ (1992, 1994, 1996, 2005), the messianic dimension refers to the temporal structure of democracy as a promise that is indefinitely deferred and, by virtue of its very semantic structure, may never be actually fulfilled: a democracy to come will never be actually present in any future. ‘The “to-come” not only points to the promise but suggests that democracy will never exist, in the sense of present existence, not because it will be deferred but

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because it will always remain aporetic in its structure.’ (Derrida 2005, 86) In this type of messianism, in which ‘every gesture has become unrealizable’ (Agamben 1999a, 169), the social order is revealed in its ‘zero degree’ condition of being in force without significance, but its ultimately meaningless and purely formal existence is deemed impossible to transcend, hence the barge hauler’s permanent oscillation between Pal and Secam, a healing fast and a healing poison, which appear entirely indistinct. From this perspective, we might take issue with Derrida’s translation (on the advice of his unnamed Soviet colleagues) of ‘perestroika’ as ‘deconstruction’ in his Moscow lectures in 1993 (see Derrida 1993, 53). Nothing in Gorbachev’s doomed attempt at reinventing and restarting the historical project of Soviet socialism resonates with the Derridean pathos of perpetual deferral. Instead, what made Derrida’s thought so popular (and liable to vulgar misreadings) in post-Perestroika Russia is the curious resonance between the anomic experience of post-Soviet bespredel and the equally limitless logic of diffèrance. Just as Grebenshikov’s in 1987, Derrida’s ethico-political thought is stuck halfway between law and love, but unlike Grebenshikov, whose entire oeuvre during the 1990s is directed towards the overcoming of this situation, Derrida’s philosophical stance precludes from the outset any possibility of an actual exit from the condition of undecidability and proscribes it ethically, because such an exit is only thinkable in his scheme as the hypocritical evasion of diffèrance, whose political embodiment is inevitably a violent ‘ontopological politics’ that seeks to attain the impossible fullness of presence (see Derrida 1994, 82). In many ways, therefore, Derrida functioned as the therapist of the postcommunist intelligentsia in the 1990s, his philosophy giving a quasi-transcendental respectability to what appeared to many as an intolerable empirical condition of the ‘time of troubles’ (see Dmitriev 2005). Agamben differs from Derrida in his refusal to be content with dwelling in the undecidable negativity of diffèrance as the ‘unfounded foundation’ of human praxis (see Mills 2004; Thurschwell 2005; Johnson 2007). In his frequently esoteric polemic with Derrida, which can be traced back to his earliest writings (1991, 1993a) and continues to this day (2005b), Agamben has argued that Derrida’s deconstruction dismantles all positive foundations, presupposed by the metaphysics of presence, only to affirm at the end negativity itself as the unsurpassable foundation. ‘[Derrida] believed he had opened a way to surpassing metaphysics, while in truth he merely brought the fundamental problem of metaphysics to light. Metaphysics is always already grammatology and


thus is fundamentology in the sense that the gramma functions as the negative ontological foundation.’ (Agamben 1991, 39) The insufficiency of the deconstructive gesture has also been addressed by Jean Luc Nancy, who succinctly sums up Agamben’s line of criticism in the following manner: It is not enough to say that there is an undecidable in discourse. It does not suffice to decide the fate, structure or power of discourse. Today, the undecidable is to be found everywhere as an answer, one which one would like to substitute for the old answers to this or that truth, or to Truth . . . . The signs of the decomposition, dislocation and dismemberment of the system – that is, of the entire architectonics and history of the West – which for example are called ‘text’, ‘signifier’, ‘lack’, ‘derivation’, ‘trace’, etc. have been converted into values; they have thus been erected as truths and hypostatized as substances. (Nancy cited in Agamben 1999a, 113) Just as Agamben’s ontology of language, which we shall address in more detail below, ventures to move beyond Derrida to advance a purely affirmative experience of language devoid of all negativity, his vision of messianism abandons the very idea of constitutive deferral in emphasizing the possibilities of post-historical, inoperative praxis in the here and now that no longer depend on the contingency of the ‘perhaps’ and do not require (im)patient waiting (cf. Johnson 2007). Agamben’s position is thus distinct both from the literally reactionary strategy of seeking salvation from bespredel by retreating within the positivity of a historical order, however ritualized or meaningless it has become, and the Derridean strategy of dwelling in the undecidability of the order in force without significance in the mood of messianic hope. Just as the way out of the state of exception through the perfection of the rule of law is in Agamben’s argument utterly impossible (1998, 126–135, 187–188; 2000, 63–64; 2005a, 87–88; cf. Kisner 2007), the strategy of making freedom usable through the construction of a positive order that would establish the conditions for its practice is clearly inadequate, insofar as it was the para-Soviet practice of freedom that produced the state of bespredel in the first place by ebbing away at the foundations of the Soviet public sphere. In all its debilitating horror, the postcommunist bespredel is entirely of our own making and it is the recognition of this fact that both undermines all attempts at translating the overcoming of bespredel into yet another historical project, and, as we shall see, conditions the possibility of the ethical reappropriation of its elusive freedom. Just

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as the messianic redemption of humanity that Agamben seeks must be found within the state of exception alone, the appropriation of freedom in the postcommunist condition is thinkable only in the space of bespredel. This affirmation distinguishes the search for the ethics of postcommunism from any version of utopianism: while utopian thought easily provides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, as its site is by definition a non-place. In contrast, the ethics that we shall reconstitute in the remainder of this book avoids the utopian temptation of ‘other’ ‘better’ places, to which transition can take us, and instead poses the question of how bespredel can be transformed into our dwelling place. On the other hand, remaining within bespredel does not entail any sense of resignation about the possibilities of bringing the radical potentiality of limitless freedoms into the actuality of our existence. Thus, the Derridean option of perpetual deferral of presence and the relegation of messianic time to the order of the ‘to come’ is rejected by Agamben in favour of a Benjaminian gesture of bringing about a ‘real’ state of exception (Agamben 1998, 50–55; cf. Benjamin 1969a), which in the postcommunist context obviously entails the rejection of any discourse of consolation that defers the actual experience of freedom until later. Bespredel must be overcome but this overcoming must find its resources in bespredel itself, not in the chimerical visions of Russia’s ‘future’ proposed by the discredited teleo-ideologies of the past two centuries. Agamben’s position is thus distinct from both the ‘theistic’ reading of messianic salvation and its deconstruction in Derrida’s ‘paralyzed messianism’. Against the conservative valorization of order as a condition for freedom, freedom must be sought right here in the bespredel, and against the Derridean pathos of deferral, it must be sought right now. Grebenshikov’s problematization of the aporetic condition of postcommunism similarly attempts to navigate between the Scyllus of finding refuge from bespredel in tradition, religion or ideology and the Charybdis of the Derridean quasi-transcendental recasting of bespredel as an ineradicable negative foundation. It is in this context that we must address Grebenshikov’s fascination with religion in the lyrics of the early 1990s. The religious themes of the Russian Album do not point towards a theological solution to the postcommunist disaster, either literally or figuratively in the sense of embracing an ontopolitical essentialism that posits new foundations in the midst of bespredel. As the many quests of the Russian Album demonstrate, Grebenshikov does indeed seek a way out of the deconstructed bespredel of postcommunist undecidability but his idea of salvation does not consist in things attaining their finality by exiting the perpetual movement of diffèrance and history beginning


again in the framework of a new order after its messianic suspension in the early 1990s. Instead, as we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, Grebenshikov’s use of religious themes invokes an idiosyncratic understanding of salvation that recalls many of the themes of Agamben’s affirmative philosophy that find the conditions of post-historical praxis in the disastrous terrain of contemporary nihilism.

A Prayer for the Irreparable Let us now consider Grebenshikov’s vision of redemption in more detail with reference to two songs written in 1990–1991 and appearing on compilation albums released in the early 1990s. Combining the thematic of disaster with the absurdist humour, characteristic of the Akvarium of the early 1980s, ‘The Angel of Universal Hangover’ points to the gradual displacement of the tragic pathos of much of the Russian Album in the vision of salvation that appears strikingly profane: The 7th of November has passed, The sound of loud festivities has vanished. But something keeps moving round in circles where I stand. It must be the angel of universal hangover. His wings are hanging like a wet moustache, There is a smell of something sad and sour. But the central tower clock is ringing loudly And the citizens of the country long for beer. Sometimes you cannot think of anything to say; Reality is wingless and crumpled. It is impossible to make a step or even just stand up And we are all defenseless as little kittens. And the enemy tries to poison our vodka And disturb both our feast and our sleep, But someone is flying all over the country, blessing whoever comes around. We are all saved by the angel of universal hangover. (‘The Angel of Universal Hangover’, Library of Babel, 1993) The disaster of postcommunism is in this lyric described as a scene of ‘universal hangover’, a rather typical metaphor for the postrevolutionary state of mind, which is a far cry from the nightmarish premonitions of civil war and the apocalypse in the songs of the Russian

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Album. The horses of limitlessness have stopped their stampede; the war, from which the little swallow was being dissuaded, did not take place, and it appears that one can indeed breathe underwater. And yet, this scene has nothing triumphant about it, especially if we consider the figure that brings us salvation, the angel of universal hangover, who most resembles the ‘para-Soviet’ representatives of the ‘janitor generation’ in early Akvarium’s songs, from Ivanov to Watchman Sergeev. The figure of the angel is utterly desublimated both in his manner of appearance (wings like a wet moustache, a smell of ‘something sad and sour’) and in his modus operandi, whereby the angel keeps flying all over the country with no aim or intention, ‘blessing whoever comes around’. Indeed, desublimation marks the overall mood of the song, from its setting in the aftermath of November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution), which points to the closure of the revolutionary era as such, to the cessation of historical struggle and the onset of the post-historical era, unsympathetically described as a ‘wingless and crumpled reality’ in which it is difficult to make a step or find anything meaningful to say. In this song, the experience of bespredel is devoid of the romantic connotation of the limitless whirlwind of potentialities, and the emphasis is put rather on their ultimate unrealizability, the impossibility of both meaningful speech and meaningful movement. With historical movement deactivated and discourse stopped in its tracks, the only danger that the unnamed ‘enemy’ brings is that of maliciously disturbing our profane activities of ‘feast and sleep’, as there is no longer any struggle in which one could attain either victory or defeat. The same vision of desublimated salvation is espoused in one of the most popular songs of Akvarium in the early postcommunist period, ‘God Save the Polar Explorers’, which calls for a similarly minimalist gesture of divine intervention:

Lord have mercy on the polar explorers, with their endless day, With their portraits of the Party that warm up their abode, With their orange paint and their plan for the year ahead, With their tickets to paradise on a ship that is falling through the ice. [...] Oh Lord, how do they sleep when you grant them their dreams? With the premonition of starvation and fear of civil war, With their fuel ethanol and questions directed at Heaven, Which you respond to, without knowing it.


So save them as the hungry ones, whose barns are full, As the lovers who fear the light of moon. And when you save them and reward their love and honour, Please double their ration of ethanol and leave them as they are. (‘God Save the Polar Explorers’, Feudalism, 2007 [1989]) This song features a remarkable combination of the tragic themes of the postcommunist disaster, characteristic of the Russian Album (‘tickets to paradise on a ship that is falling through the ice’, ‘premonition of starvation’, etc.), with the irony that would become more characteristic of Grebenshikov’s poetry of the 1990s. The abode of the polar explorers is kept warm by the ‘portraits of the Party’, which immediately suggests that the latter are burned to heat the explorers’ lodgings – a practice that, however uncommon, did occasionally take place in the dismal economic conditions of the early 1990s. The vision of salvation, proffered in the song, is just as minimal and desublimated as the one offered by the ‘angel of universal hangover’: ‘double their ration of ethanol and leave them as they are’ appears a far cry from the barge hauler’s quest for the origin, particularly insofar as the troubled dreams of the explorers continue to be marked by the ‘premonition of starvation and fears of civil war’ that mark the catastrophic landscape of postcommunism. The final verse of the song is particularly important for grasping the specificity of Grebenshikov’s rethinking of the idea of salvation. The condition of the polar explorers is presented as singularly paradoxical: they are ‘the hungry ones’ presumably left without access to their own ‘full barns’. Moreover, as lovers, they fear the light of the moon, which, as centuries of the romantic canon teach us, marks the time that properly belongs to lovers and thus cannot be expected to elicit fear on their part. Both metaphors suggest that the plight of the polar explorers consists in their inability to access or use that which is proper to them, both in the sense of property (the first example) and propriety (the second example). This alienation from the proper evidently recalls the themes of the inaccessibility and the perpetual deferral of presence that we have discussed above with reference to Derrida’s deconstruction and the postcommunist condition of bespredel. The plight of the polar explorers is conditioned by the gap between potentiality and actuality that makes their freedom inaccessible to them, the hope for jubilant liberation reduced to troubled dreams of starvation and civil war. From this perspective, salvation must be rendered in terms of the reappropriation of

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the proper, whereby freedom becomes available for use. However, this logic of salvation is much more complicated than a mere prayer for the actualization of a certain possibility among others. The final line of the song explicitly contradicts any idea of a determinate transformation and rather, quite puzzlingly, asks the Lord to leave the polar explorers ‘as they are’, albeit with an enhanced ration of ethanol. How can we combine the desire for salvation with the affirmation of being ‘as one is’? Is it possible to think salvation without any positive content? The first step in rethinking salvation along the lines of non-positive affirmation is to rigourously dissociate the question of the reappropriation of the proper from the problematic of identity. The condition of unusable freedom that defines the bespredel of early postcommunism does not, against facile readings, involve any kind of ‘identity crisis’ in the sense of the quest for the discovery and fulfillment of an ‘authentic’ Russian identity. To recall Grebenshikov’s ‘Electric Dog’ and other songs of the early 1980s, such identitarian maneuvers were characteristic of the late-Soviet sphere and already exhibited their fruitlessness in that period, failing to become instruments of socio-political mobilization in the post-Soviet period. For Grebenshikov, the subjects of postcommunism do not suffer from a lack of identity but rather from the perception of their identity (as ‘post-Soviet’, ‘transitional’, ‘democratic Russian’ or what not) as improper, contributing to the debilitating inaccessibility of freedom that defines their condition. The paradoxical condition of the polar explorers, described in the final verse, is not a condition of an identity crisis but, on the contrary, an effect of being tied to an improper identity that arrests the potentiality that is proper to the subjects of freedom, be they lovers or barn owners. The reappropriation of the proper is thus nothing other than the affirmation of potentiality beyond any determinate identity, that is, not the actualization of some possibilities to the detriment of others but rather the entry of potentiality as such into one’s existence as something that is most proper to it. This idea of potentiality preserving itself in actuality is central to Agamben’s complex reconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality, which remains a guiding thread throughout his work from the early 1970s onwards. For Agamben, something is potential not simply because it is capable of being, but, more importantly, because it has a capacity not to be (see Agamben 1993b, 35–38; 1998, 45–47; 1999a, 249–250. See also Edkins 2007; Gulli 2007). In contrast to the ‘material’ or ‘possible’ potentiality of, for example, a child who cannot write but may potentially become a poet, ‘perfect potentiality’ is only accessible through the image of a poet, who already


can write poetry but does not do so (Agamben 1999a, 247). The passage of the potential into the actual must therefore remain entirely contingent for the distinction to have any force; otherwise the potential would simply merge with the actual as its future form. To be worthy of the name, potentiality must retain its potential for being impotential, for not passing into actuality. In other words, potentiality is constitutively tied to inoperosity, necessarily ‘[maintaining] itself in relation to its own privation, its own steresis, its own non-Being’ (ibid., 182). For Agamben, it is precisely this ‘experience of privation’ that makes potentiality the ‘root of freedom’, which we have discussed above as nothing other than the materialization of potentiality in actual existence, which must be rigourously distinguished from its actualization. ‘If a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.’ (Agamben 1999a, 183) Indeed, to overcome the alienation of what is proper to them, the hungry ones need not necessarily become sated and the lovers need not consummate their love under the light of the moon. What is crucial is rather the overcoming of the gap that separates them from the use of their potential being, be this the inaccessibility of their barns or their debilitating fear of the moon. The existence of potentiality in actuality has nothing to do with the actualization of specific possibilities in a determinate form of identity that would fulfill and thus efface potentiality but rather concerns the availability of the infinite range of possibilities for use. To come into possession of one’s own potentiality through such reappropriation is to refuse the temptation of one’s self-possession in the form of a fixed identity. This is the reason why salvation conceived as the reappropriation of potentiality logically entails the absence of any transformation of those to be saved, who remain inoperative beings that have nothing to do. The polar explorers are to be ‘left as they are’ precisely because they are always already, in their proper mode of being, potential beings. Agamben’s (1999a, 164) frequently used notion of a ‘small displacement’, after which things remain ‘almost the same’, but which nonetheless makes all the difference, becomes fully illuminated in this example. Salvation does not consist in becoming other but rather in the reappropriation of the irreducibly potential character of one’s existence. The salvation of the polar explorers would consist in the recovery of

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the full force of the potentiality that their being already contains, hence there is little that ‘divine intervention’ should actually do in this respect. This is why in Grebenshikov’s song salvation takes the form of a minimal, if not less gracious, gesture of ‘doubling the ration of ethanol’, which is a purely formal action designating the very event of salvation, which has no positive content whatsoever but merely illuminates the already existing ‘as it is’, thereby enhancing the experience of being beyond any identity. The very notion of ‘being as one is’, which connects with Agamben’s favourite anaphoric terms ‘being-thus’ and ‘being-such’ (1993b), reorients the discussion of postcommunist subjectivity away from the identitarian discourse with its inevitable inscription of positive content into the being of the subject: ‘being-thus, being one’s own mode of being – we cannot grasp this as a thing. It is precisely the evacuation of any thingness.’ (Agamben 1993b, 102) While the identitarian discourse conceives of the subject by presupposing certain definitive predicates that are constitutive of its positivity, Agamben’s idea of anaphoric ‘whatever being’ emphasizes the possibility of an experience devoid of all presuppositions (1993b, 52–55), which he terms exposure: Exposure, in other words being-such-as, is not any of the real predicates (being red, hot, small, smooth, etc.), but neither is it other than these (otherwise it would be something else added to the concept of a thing and therefore still a real predicate). That you are exposed is not one of your qualities, but neither is it other than them (we could say, in fact, that it is none-other than them). Whereas real predicates express relationships within language, exposure is pure relationship with language itself, with its taking place. (Agamben 1993b, 96) Absolutely exposed in the absence of any presuppositions, the polar explorers find their salvation precisely in the appropriation of the irreparable character of their being-as-they-are (Agamben 1993b, 90), which is irreducibly potential and cannot be contained within any identity. This is why salvation may only be found within the condition of bespredel that calls for it: the saved subject is defined precisely by the limitlessness that it must assume as what is most proper to it. There is nothing to be gained by the exhaustion of the extreme potentiality of bespredel through the construction of a positive order, in which select potentialities are actualized at the expense of others. The benefit of the post-historical condition of postcommunism is that it makes manifestly clear the absence of any way out of bespredel that would be a way back


into the security of confinement within a hegemonic historical narrative. More precisely, given the nullity of the historical process, any such hegemonic project is immediately revealed to be a chimera that invites us to Agamben’s ‘camp’, in which bare life itself is abducted by power as the instrument of its bio- or thanato-political rationalities. The end of history allows neither progress nor retreat; hence the only space for social praxis in its aftermath is the ruinous landscape that it reveals. The profane, inauthentic and improper space of bespredel must be appropriated by its subjects and its limitless freedoms made available for use. Just as Heidegger famously described authentic existence as a modified way of taking hold of the inauthenticity of everydayness (Heidegger 1962, 224), Agamben approaches the proper as nothing other than the appropriation of the improper (1999a, 204; 2005b, 34), a different manner of experiencing the impropriety we inhabit that affirms, at one and the same instant, the irreparability of its being-thus and its potentiality for being-otherwise: [Being-thus] is not a substance of which the thus would express a determination or a qualification. Being is not a presupposition that is before or after its qualities. Being that is irreparably thus is its thus; it is only its mode of being. This would be the only correct way to understand negative theology: neither this nor that, neither thus nor thus – but thus, as it is, with all its predicates (all its predicates is not a predicate). Not otherwise negates each predicate as a property (on the plane of essence) but takes them up again as im-properties or improprieties (on the plane of existence). (Agamben 1993b, 94. Emphasis original) All positive identities (i.e. concrete actualizations of potentiality) are thus approached as improprieties to be transcended, yet this transcendence does not in any way transform one’s being-thus, but rather restores to it its originally potential character, making it possible to reappropriate the improper as the proper, to save what is irreparable. From this perspective, we may understand Grebenshikov’s blunt refusal of a more traditional vision of salvation and ‘paradise’ in ‘The Last Turn’, a song which fully illuminates the dialectic of the proper and the improper: My home is all weeds and wormwood, A hole in the head is my new clothes. The good cuts through me like a knife, I am at home where all is screwed.

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What the hell do I need your City of Gold for? Why the hell should I sing in tune? There has been a fire in my soul for seven hundred years; To forget it all would be enough. And if tomorrow I am taken By the arm to pure paradise, Apostle Peter, Father Nicholas, Please let me out of there. (‘The Last Turn’, Navigator, 1995) ‘Pure paradise’ is bluntly, if not blasphemously, refused in this lyric in favour of the continuation of dwelling in the improper condition (‘where all is screwed’), which the protagonist has made his home. In an ironic invocation of his own refusal of cult status in post-Soviet rock music, Grebenshikov invokes the ‘City of Gold’, his widely popular cover version of a song by Alexei Khvostenko, which was featured on the soundtrack to Sergei Soloviev’s film Assa (1987), which first introduced Akvarium to a mainstream audience. Just as Grebenshikov himself did his best to evade the celebrity status in the post-Soviet period through ceaseless experimentation at odds with the increasingly stringent ‘format’ of mainstream pop music, his protagonist refuses to ‘sing in tune’ and abandon his dwelling in the impropriety of ‘weeds and wormwood’. Nonetheless, this refusal of paradise is not a pseudo-heroic gesture of preferring the profane to the sacred, which would sustain this very opposition by stubbornly clinging to its ‘dark’ side in a quasiBataillean affirmation of transgression. Insofar as there is any preference in this lyric, it is nothing other than Bartleby’s ‘preference not to’, which seeks no other transformation than a simple ‘forgetting’ of the ‘fire in one’s soul’ that has raged for centuries. What should be forgotten is the gravity of the historical heritage, understood as a series of teleological projects of struggle and sacrifice that ultimately turned our dwelling place into the ruinous scene of ‘weeds and wormwood’, where all is indeed ‘screwed’. In a bitter play on the traditionalist image of Russia as a ‘Motherland’, Grebenshikov depicts this landscape of ruins, which nonetheless remains the only site of the appropriation of our freedom: Eight thousand and two hundred miles of emptiness, But you and I still cannot find a place to spend the night. Joyful would I be if it were not for you, If it were not for you, my Motherland. (‘8200’, Kostroma Mon Amour, 1994)


This improper space of our existence can be appropriated by bringing to end the debilitating struggle of contending visions of the teleological end of history, that is, by inflicting on it its ‘second death’ that destroys the symbolic coordinates in which the historical dialectic unfolds. It is evident that this approach excludes any political mobilization for any task; as such mobilization would do nothing other than return us to the violent clash between identities that effaces our potentiality and consigns us to what Agamben has termed the ‘deficit of existence’, a condition that he bluntly characterizes as ‘evil’ (Agamben 1993b, 44). The reappropriation of potentiality is only conceivable at the end of history and through the inoperative praxis that the latter makes possible. With this ethical standpoint in mind, let us now address Grebenshikov’s singular response to the key juncture in postcommunist Russian politics, the proverbial ‘events’ of October 1993.

October 1993 The violent showdown between President Yeltsin and the left-patriotic opposition on October 3–4, 1993 arguably exemplifies a miniaturized (and thus, in Agamben’s terms, ‘playful’) version of civil war, whose premonition defined the popular culture of the early postcommunist period. While a detailed consideration of these events deserves a book of its own, whose advent is ever less likely owing to the embarrassed silence on the ‘October events’ in the contemporary Russian discourse, we must briefly address this critical juncture of Russian postcommunist politics to understand Grebenshikov’s response to the messianic deactivation of the teleo-ideological field in Russia. The defeat of the August 1991 coup attempt by the members of the Soviet government and the consequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 left the Russian Federation with a syncretic political regime of ‘dual power’. On the one hand, the Soviet-era constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), amended incessantly during 1990–1993, continued to vest all power in the country in the Congress of People’s Deputies and its second-tier ‘parliament’, the Supreme Soviet. On the other hand, the March 1991 referendum introduced the post of the President of the Russian Federation, occupied by Boris Yeltsin after the June 1991 elections. The competence of the president was nonetheless not inscribed in the constitution and depended entirely on the powers granted by the Congress. Thus, in late 1991, when Yeltsin’s resistance to the coup made his authority virtually unassailable, the Congress granted him extraordinary ‘rule by decree’ powers to undertake radical economic reforms. However, as soon as the dissatisfaction

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with the ‘shock-therapeutic’ reforms, which led to a drastic decline in living standards, began to ebb away at Yeltsin’s approval ratings, the Congress, in which liberal reformers constituted a slim minority, gradually mounted an attempt to strip the president of all his powers and ultimately to impeach him for repeated violations of the constitution. The period of power struggle in 1992–1993 marked the culmination of political antagonism in postcommunist Russia, as the political space became increasingly polarized between the pro-Yeltsin executive branch and the Congress, dominated by the syncretic ‘left–right’ opposition of orthodox Soviet communists and the emerging national-patriotic forces, united in the National Salvation Front (NSF). Strengthened by his victory in the April 1993 referendum on confidence in his policies, on September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued the infamous Decree 1400 that dissolved both the Congress and the Supreme Soviet and scheduled for December 12 the elections to the State Duma, which, in a characteristic case of retroactive legitimation, itself was to be introduced only on the basis of the approval of the new constitution. On the same day, the Supreme Soviet, led by Ruslan Khasbulatov, impeached Yeltsin for gross violations of the Constitution, swore in Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi as the new president and appointed its own security ministers entrusted with suppressing ‘the Yeltsin coup’. After two weeks of street clashes between the Congress supporters and the police, on October 3 the opposition forces broke through the blockade of the Congress building and seized a number of administrative buildings in Moscow. The peak of the rebellion was the attempt to seize the Ostankino television station, which ended in bloodshed that created a pretext for the intervention of the military forces. Late on October 3, Yeltsin introduced the state of emergency in Moscow, and the troops of the Ministry of Defense suppressed the rebellion during the following day, which ended in the all-too-familiar scene of the shelling of the parliament building that brought home Yeltsin’s ultimate victory the cost of which was officially estimated in the death toll of 156, contested by the opposition, whose own estimations ranged from 300 to 2000 killed (see Oktyabr’ 1993). In December the Duma elections took place as stipulated in Decree 1400, along with the referendum on the new constitution, which shifted the balance of power strongly in favour of the presidency. Thus was born the postcommunist Russian state. This dry chronological rendering of the October events fails to do justice to their significance for the Russian postcommunist politics and social praxis. Paving the way for the introduction of the postcommunist


constitutional order, the crisis of October 1993 simultaneously serves as the foundational moment of the new Russian statehood and its ‘birth trauma’. Such contemporary tendencies in Russian politics as the denigration of the legislative branch of government, the disproportionate political influence of the security apparatus and indiscriminate police violence against public protesters all have their genealogical point of descent in this pivotal moment, in which the postcommunist bureaucracy and the rising financial-industrial oligarchy demonstrated their capacity to defend the post-August 1991 regime against the challenge of the popular rebellion. On the other hand, the aftermath of the suppression of the rebellion, when its leaders were amnestied by the State Duma and were able to pursue political and business careers in the new regime, points to the transformation of the tragedy into a farce, making the solemn invocation of ‘October 1993’ as the moment of heroic resistance in the discourses of the institutionalized left opposition appear ridiculous if not obscene. Indeed, the post-October development of the Russian political order may be viewed as a perverse synthesis of the two opposed positions on the foundation of bureaucratic capitalism, legitimized by a half-hearted statist patriotism and the depoliticized rhetoric of ‘efficient management’. Thus, any assessment of the October rebellion must navigate between the implausible legitimation of Yeltsin’s constitutional coup as a regrettable yet necessary step in Russia’s advance to liberal democracy and the naive valorization of the Congress as the locus of genuine constituent power, unceremoniously destroyed by the consolidated postcommunist nomenklatura. The object of struggle in October 1993 was not democracy, treated with equal contempt by both sides, but rather history and the possibility of its recommencement. It is notable that despite attracting many representatives of the younger generation, the anti-Yeltsin opposition was symbolically dominated by the figures of the past. Russian monarchists, anti-semitic chauvinist heirs of the pre-revolutionary Black Hundred, Orthodox Christian fundamentalists, radical workers’ unions, neo-Stalinist conservatives, student activists and avant-garde artists comprised this unique alliance of the left and the right, which created an uncanny impression that the true subject of the October rebellion was nothing other than history itself in a last gasp of defiance that sought to arrest its end. Rather than being a mere conflict between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ forces, the antagonism of October 1993 rather pitted the proponents of the recommencement of Russia’s history in accordance with various teleological visions against the regime that, having inherited the ruins of Soviet socialism, made a point of preventing their

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appropriation by the partisans of the resumption of the historical process. Indeed, the only criterion that allows us to group together the disparate multiplicity of the anti-Yeltsin rebels is their commitment to historical struggle, to history as such as a field of struggle. It is the experience of the defeat of this paradigm of historical struggle that is evoked in Grebenshikov’s song ‘Moscow, October’, the only explicitly political song by Akvarium in the postcommunist period: Forward, forward, oh balding herds, Children of the regiment, grandsons of the sarcophagus. Let us proudly converge around our flag And let the water boil under the bridge. [...] The always drunken squad has all but fizzled out, And, as if out of spite, the reconnaissance is all dead. The bayonets, screws and bolts are growing moss, And in the sky naked women are flying around. French cream is shining on their breasts; They pry with the shamelessness of an alligator. Oh burn, oh burn, my chandelier, Or else they will peck me to death. (‘Moscow, October’, Kostroma Mon Amour, 1994) Both musically, as a pastiche of a Russian folk song, and lyrically, in its archaic imagery (‘bayonets’, ‘chandeliers’, ‘children of the regiment’), the song presents the forces of the opposition as belonging squarely to the historical tradition of struggle, best exemplified by the Russian civil war, which they seek to recommence, making the ‘water under the bridge’ (utekshaya voda, literally, ‘the flown water’) boil. Interestingly, the other side, the antagonists of this ‘force of history’, is not presented in the song at all – the ‘always drunken squad’ fizzles out by itself and the ‘reconnaissance’ has apparently perished of natural causes. The only enemy, encountered by the protagonist of the song, are the mysterious ‘naked women’ that fly around, prying and threatening to ‘peck to death’ the poor hero. Risking overinterpretation, we may suggest that this metaphor alludes to advertising images (e.g. of the unidentified ‘French cream’), which in the early 1990s divided the conservative Soviet society, whose exposure to advertising had been minimal in the Soviet period, owing to the frequently risqué, if not outright pornographic character of such images. The bayonets, screws and bolts are evidently not a proper weapon for confronting this purely virtual and


grotesque enemy and are thus set aside to grow moss. The imagery of the lyric highlights the way the rebellion is a priori doomed to fail, that history itself as a field of struggle has receded into history and thus truly ended, ‘fizzled out’ or, in T. S. Eliot’s famous words, ended ‘not with a bang but with a whimper’. This pathetic demise permits to understand the rather sympathetic irony that the author reserves for the rebels – the fact that has not gone unnoticed in the aftermath of the October tragedy. Grebenshikov’s sympathy was quite at odds with the prevailing attitudes among the ‘democratic’ Russian intelligentsia at the time, expressed in the infamous open letter published in Izvestia on October 5, 1993. The letter of 42 well-known authors entitled ‘The Writers Demand Decisive Action from the Government’ (Izvestia 1993) called for a complete ban on communist and nationalist parties and newspapers and severe sentences for all participants of the rebellion, demonstrating the degree of bloodthirstiness and fawning before authority not witnessed since Stalinist purges that were similarly accompanied by the thunderous applause of the ‘cultural elite’. Standing precisely for what Grebenshikov seeks to forget and make inoperative, that is, the paradigm of historical struggle, the October rebellion itself carries a flair of an a priori defeat, of impotentiality carried into its very act. The unthinkable alliance of diverse historical forces in resistance to Yeltsin’s ‘sovereign dictatorship’ testifies to the fact that what was at stake in this confrontation was not the contest between Yeltsin and Rutskoi over the position of the president, let alone the future course of economic reforms, but rather the final attempt of the paradigm of historical struggle to reassert itself in the condition of the messianic suspension of all teleological efficacy. Yet, when it is history itself that becomes the rebellious actor, its antagonist (i.e. the advent of its own end, i.e. its death) becomes as evasive and invincible as Grebenshikov’s ‘naked women in the sky’. History ‘as such’ is only attainable in the experience of its end and may therefore never be the subject of its triumph but only, as in Grebenshikov’s song, the subject of its own mourning, in which diverse historical forces are summoned up in the here and now for a summary judgment. The aftermath of the defeat of the October rebellion is similarly understandable in terms of the messianic suspension of history. It is not that the suppression of the anti-Yeltsin opposition violently excluded these divergent forces from political activity as the ‘democratic intelligentsia’ eagerly advised. On the contrary, in the ‘lingering of the political’ during the 1990s all these oppositional orientations survived and participated in the diffuse spectacle of mediatic politics, some of the participants of

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the October rebellion (e.g. Eduard Limonov, Victor Anpilov) continuing to do so today in the more restrictive conditions of Putinism. What makes October 1993 a key watershed is not the suppression of particular figures or parties but the radical deactivation of the teleo-ideological dimension as such. It is as if the defeat of the rebellion continues to cast its shadow over the political field, making every attempt to restart history a ‘lost cause’ from the outset. For the proponents of radical or revolutionary politics, the October defeat was a catastrophic event that indicated the profound impossibility of recommencing any grand political projects that initially appeared possible with the democratization of public life during Perestroika. It is this demise of history as such rather than the political failure of such long-forgotten renegades of Yeltsinism as Rutskoi and Khasbulatov that accounts for the morbid fascination of the Russian Left with the October events, which resonates with a more global tendency of the transformation of radical politics into a melancholy art of celebrating defeat.

Emptiness All Around In the studies of Russian politics the defeat of the October 1993 rebellion and the following constitutional referendum are conventionally viewed as the beginning of a relative socio-political stabilization in Russia. While, as we have argued above, the phenomenon of the ‘lingering of the political’ entailed the deactivation of all properly historical, that is, teleo-ideological, politics and, consequently, deprived numerous political events of their efficacy, it was nonetheless evident that the Yeltsin regime has secured for itself a stable constitutional footing and, despite a permanent ‘intra-systemic’ clinch with the oppositional parliament, has eliminated all extra-systemic challenges. Yet, if history itself suffered a shattering defeat in 1993 and no positive order was instituted on the basis of the new Constitution, what exactly was stabilized after the turbulent period of 1991–1993? Arguably, it was nothing other than the post-historical condition of bespredel itself, whereby, to recall Remizov’s tropes, the ‘structural degradation’ of the post-Soviet condition in politics, culture and the economy gradually became ‘crystallized’ as an ‘objective reality’, which one must adapt to or reconcile oneself with. The postcommunist order, marked by the lingering of the void of the political, is simultaneously chronically unstable in the sense of the messianic suspension of the ordered rhythm of chronological historicity and capable of acquiring an impressive degree of stability or even immutability that, moreover, may function as its sole condition


of legitimacy. In this manner, Yeltsin’s re-election campaign in 1996 emphasized the need for maintaining the existing ‘course of development’ against the alleged threat of ‘restoration’ posed by the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, without pondering the question of what the current ‘course of development’ actually was and what ‘restoration’ could possibly mean, given the Communist Party’s integration into the regime after 1993. The stability of the order, characterized by limitlessness and the presence of the void, simply consists in the absence of any claim to institute limits through the formation of a new hegemony. Recalling our comparison of the postcommunist bespredel with the austere ontology of the Derridean diffèrance, doesn’t Derrida’s deconstructive logic, which disrupts and destabilizes particular versions of metaphysics of presence, remain entirely immutable in the uniformity of its own operations, incapable of being destabilized or ‘deconstructed’? It is this stabilization of bespredel that is thematized in Grebenshikov’s lyrics of the mid-1990s, in which the tragic traversal of the postcommunist wasteland gives way to a much more diverse combination of moods, from the acidically ironic commentary on the absurdities of postcommunist realities to the increasingly hermetic romance songs, whose content is so completely detached from the contemporary Russian realities that they could have well been written a century or two ago. The variety of moods is also reflected in the stylistic experimentation during this period, as the brief flirtation with Russian folk music is abandoned in favour of the integration of the latter into a much wider context, from adaptations of African or Indian musical traditions to ambient electronic experiments. In the remainder of this chapter we shall trace the key themes of this wildly eclectic period to identify the strategies employed in Grebenshikov’s lyrics to practice the reappropriation of potentiality, which we have designated as the sole content of post-historical redemption. In the middle of the 1990s, the newly reformed Akvarium released a series of highly acclaimed albums: Kostroma Mon Amour (1994), Navigator (1995) and Snow Lion (1996). In contrast to the uniformly brooding Russian Album, these albums lack anything like an overriding mood or style, oscillating between absurdist ditties and bucolic ballads. For all their diversity, however, the songs of this period are marked by the abandonment of all apocalyptic premonitions of ‘starvation’ and ‘civil war’ and the conception of the postcommunist bespredel as an accomplished post-historical condition rather than a ‘transitional’ moment to something better or worse, salvation or total disaster. The ethos of postcommunism is now to be sought in this heterotopia of the messianic

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suspension of historicity rather than in a chimerical future, be it utopian or dystopian. It is this coming to terms with bespredel that also characterizes the post-1993 Russian society as such: as we have discussed in detail above, no teleo-ideological project of exiting the postcommunist condition, be it liberal, nationalist or socialist, managed to attract popular or elite support during the Yeltsin period and even less so under Putin. All these projects of the resumption of history in accordance with any specific ideological vision failed to attract the postcommunist society that preferred not to re-enter the realm of the political and thus persisted in the state of bespredel. And yet, the recognition of the postcommunist bespredel as one’s only possible dwelling space does not, in this period, lead Grebenshikov to the abandonment of the ethics of disengagement but rather to a much more nuanced observation of postcommunist social life that, unlike in the late-Soviet period, does not subject new practices and discourses to an ironic displacement into the domain of the absurd but rather points out their own absurdity and integrates it in the already absurd lifeworld of Grebenshikov’s lyrics. Rather than ridicule the postcommunist world from the perspective of the omnipotent romantic irony (subjective consciousness detached from the empirical world), Grebenshikov’s commentary on its absurdities is a first step towards the eventual appropriation of this world. The insistent marking of the void of meaning in the postcommunist social order is undertaken from an enunciative position that is not deluded about its own self-identity and fullness of presence but rather itself arises ‘from a shining void’ (‘From a Shining Void’, Kostroma Mon Amour, 1994). While the persistence of the figure of the void in Grebenshikov’s writings may be attributed to his long-standing interest in Buddhism, such an interpretation would be radically insufficient and has in fact been neutralized in the author’s own explicit equation between the void of Buddhist meditation and the immediate experience of Russian politics. In ‘Don’t Scythe Me’, Grebenshikov’s use of religious references once again exhibits the minimalism we have discussed above, as the sacred and the profane practices turn out to yield entirely the same effects:

However much I steal, my hands are empty, However much I drink, the wine does not run out. You can either go and vote or join the Buddhists, But when you wake up in the morning, there is emptiness all around. (‘Don’t Scythe Me’, Navigator, 1995)


Grebenshikov’s recourse to religious imagery – Buddhist, Orthodox Christian or otherwise – should be analyzed in the context of bespredel, in which religious and cultural traditions are no longer separated by identitarian boundaries but are rather simultaneously present in the postcommunist symbolic universe, albeit in the recapitulated manner that, just as in the case of political ideologies, deprives them of performative force and thus renders them inoperative in their canonical function. In the ‘Great Railroad Symphony’ (Snow Lion, 1996) we encounter ‘Buddha [walking] around Golgotha, screaming Allahu Akbar’. Similarly, in ‘If It Weren’t For You’ (Lilith, 1997) ‘the thirst of Jihad is poured into the chalice of the Testament’. What takes place in this summary recapitulation is, on the one hand, the distillation of the purely formal and minimal notion of salvation from diverse religious traditions (of the kind addressed in our discussion of ‘God Save the Polar Explorers’) and, on the other, the reduction of the semantic content of religious traditions to a purely constative aspect, whereby it becomes available for use in a decidedly profane context (see Agamben 2007b, 77). In Agamben’s argument, profanation ‘frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred without simply abolishing it. The use to which the sacred is returned to is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption.’ (Agamben 2007b, 76) What is at stake in Grebenshikov’s strategy of profaning the sacred and sublimating the profane is not the submission of either to a calculative or to an instrumental use in reordering the catastrophic scene of postcommunism but rather a localization of possible modes of use of both the sacred and the profane amid the condition of bespredel that, as we have argued above, is characterized precisely by the debilitating separation of potentiality and actuality, in which an infinity of possibilities remains frozen in an ‘unusable’ state. In order to overcome this separation it is perfectly sufficient to practice negligence with respect to the existing division between the sacred and the profane and keep citing them ‘out of context’, which, as we have discussed with respect to the work of both Sorokin and Grebenshikov, serves to transform ritual into play: ‘It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stand in opposition to religion, but “negligence”, that is, a behaviour that is free and “distracted” (that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation, or, rather, puts it to a particular use.’ (Agamben 2007b, 75)

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This strategy recalls Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the radically subversive potential of citation, which violently disrupts the original context of the functioning of the statement and in this manner affirms its ‘truth-content’ while destroying its ‘subject-matter’: ‘[to] quote involves the interruption of context.’ (Benjamin 1969b, 151. See also Agamben 1999d, 104–105; 2005b, 138–141) In Grebenshikov’s lyrics, the citation of the sacred in the context of the profane (and the other way round) serves the dual purpose of affirming the ‘truth content’ of the minimal gesture of messianic redemption and neutralizing by profanation the sacred ‘subject matter’ of these themes or objects. And yet, the indistinction of the sacred and the profane is not merely a matter of Grebenshikov’s artistic achievement but rather a strategy that mirrors the wider context of social praxis of Russian postcommunism where exactly the same developments may be observed, albeit privileging the desublimation of the sacred over the sublimation of the profane. While in the late-Soviet period Akvarium’s recourse to the absurd served to alleviate the gravity of the rituals of the Soviet ideological discourse, in the postcommunist period the public sphere itself has imploded into absurdity, which makes Grebenshikov both an absurdist and a realist at the same time. In ‘Maxim the Forester’ this levelling of all hierarchies is described with comical references to many of the novel phenomena and symbols of early postcommunism: Either the fuse has been blown or the time is out of joint. The lords have befriended the scum of the earth. On the Holy Mount of Montmartre there lives a magic Simeon, Who exchanges our aces into sixes and trash. Once the Lord was riding high above, And the little devil jumping down below. Nowadays we are all equal, all anonymous. Through a hole in sky there rides in a white Mercedes, Giving us three roubles each and moving on . . . Chalices with wine and poison are balanced on the scales. Oh Themis, where’s your sword, where have you been before? My inspiration is roaming naked in the woods, Now it looks at me, now it looks way farther. (‘Maxim the Forester’, Snow Lion, 1996) Recalling the theme of the proximity of opposites, first articulated in ‘The Barge Hauler’, the song both depicts and performs a radical


levelling of hierarchies between the sacred and the profane: Holy Mount (Athos) is conjoined with Montmartre, wine and poison are balanced on the scales, the ‘lords’ have befriended the scum of the earth, etc. In a more direct invocation of this indistinction, the hierarchical order with God riding above in heaven and the Devil ‘jumping down below’ is levelled down to reveal complete equality and anonymity. In the sky, where the Lord used to ride, there now drives a white Mercedes, which in the 1990s became a symbol of the Russian nouveaux-riches, whose descent from the late-Soviet shadow economy entailed the rise to public prominence of forms of life associated with the underworld. The superficial reversal of values in the early 1990s, whereby a doctrinaire Marxism–Leninism was unceremoniously scrapped in favour of a similarly doctrinaire valorization of capitalism, was not confined to the narrowly conceived political realm but concerned the most mundane aspects of everyday existence, in which the desublimation of the sacred and the sublimation of the profane were easily observable. To use an example, alluded to in the song, a ubiquitous sight in Russian cities during the 1990s was private currency exchange kiosks, in which many of the nouveaux-riches made their first fortunes. It deserves to be reminded today that in the USSR dealing in foreign currency was one of the most heinous crimes, punishable by death penalty, since the notorious Rokotov–Faibishenko trial in 1961, the year usually viewed as the peak of the liberal Thaw of Khrushev’s rule. In the early 1990s, this formerly prohibited activity became one of the most lucrative occupations in the emergent private sector. We may view this change as either the profanation of the sacred (whereby the formerly tabooed becomes acceptable in everyday life) or the sacralization of the profane (whereby a disgraceful activity becomes an exemplary model of social praxis). Either way, we observe a radical reversal of hierarchies paradigmatic of early postcommunism as such: the primacy of politics supplanted by the valorization of economic exchange; official patriotism giving way to the authoritative discourse of self-immolation; the formerly ridiculed ‘careerism’ reinscribed as the valorized ‘competitiveness’; proscribed art forms becoming respectable and even forming the new canon; etc. Yet, by virtue of the phenomenon of the lingering of the political and, more specifically, the drastic fall in the electoral fortunes of neoliberal reformers from 1993 onwards, this reversal never managed to be stabilized into a new hierarchy, which would of course amount to a recommencement of a historical project. Instead, as we have seen, the postcommunist condition has been characterized by the elimination of the very paradigm of construction and the subjection to historical tasks that this notion implies. Rather than speak of a reversal of the

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hierarchies of the sacred and the profane, we should speak of their indistinction, with the old hierarchy levelled down but no new hierarchy able to emerge due to the deactivation of the teleo-ideological aspect of politics. The ‘chalices of wine and poison’ are thus held in a stable balance that does not permit us to distinguish between salvation and disaster. The ‘lords’ and the ‘scum of the earth’ have not changed places but have begun to inhabit the same space in proximity to each other, just as God and the ‘little devil’ now occupy the same terrain of the anonymous equality in bespredel. Time is indeed out of joint in this zone of indistinction, yet Grebenshikov clearly evades the task of ‘setting it right’, as indeed he does with every historical task. Nothing would be easier than criticizing this situation and calling for the restoration of a moral hierarchy of whatever kind for the restoration of order pure and simple. When today’s liberals, communists and nationalists speak in unison about the 1990s being a time of bespredel (with a purely negative connotation), the desire for limits that animates every historical teleo-ideology and thus provides for the affinity between the most disparate political orientations is rendered fully explicit. It is therefore not surprising that not a single political force in Russia has shown any interest in appropriating the 1990s as its privileged temporal reference point, as an era either of heroic struggle (the left-patriotic opposition) or of victorious achievements (neo-liberals). The moralizing claims of teleo-ideology about the ‘loss of values’ and ‘moral disorder’ in the Russia of the 1990s raise a question of the enunciative locus from which its protagonists speak: if the disorderly indistinction between the sacred and the profane is universal, might not we suspect that those who pontificate on the decline of values have also lost all capacity to tell the sacred from the profane, their own claims to innocence always already betrayed by the proximity of the ‘lords’ to the ‘scum of the earth’, that is, by the very levelling of hierarchies that they decry? Rather than decry the postcommunist bespredel from the standpoint of a stable order, which in the post-historical context is only accessible in the abysmal figure of the ordered bespredel of the camp, Grebenshikov’s lyrics, devoid of accusatory pathos, pose the question of the possibilities this indistinction offers for the process of appropriation of both the sacred and the profane for use in social praxis that is liberated from all hierarchies and delimitations. Such an appropriation is only possible insofar as the levelling of all hierarchies is perceived as irreparable and all work on their (re)construction is rendered inoperative.


How to Play with Lost Objects The recognition of the irreparable indistinction between the sacred and the profane is central to ‘Ancient Russian Blues’, a key Akvarium song of the 1990s, which paints an unsavoury portrait of postcommunist Russia as a scene of general and complete disorder that nonetheless does not collapse into outsider sarcasm or empty moralizing but ends in a certain auto-critical gesture as the protagonist chastises himself for his perpetual ‘blues’ (toska):

Where are you rushing, troika? Where are you headed now? The coachman is drunk again or just drowsed away, The wheels were given to a museum; the museum was hauled away, In every home you hear either a song or a groan. Just as the saints have augured, everything hangs by a thread, And I am watching all this in my ancient Russian blues. In the ancient battlefield there are no more spears and bones, They were all given away as souvenirs for tourists and guests. Dobrynya has given up on Russia and is fixing gas in Milan, Alyosha the priest’s son sold off the Iconostasis. Only Ilya keep scaring girls, galloping around in one sock, And I am watching all this in my ancient Russian blues.1 Yaroslavna2 is in trouble; she’s got no time for weeping. She’s in the office from 6:30; at 5 she’s got a briefing. All the boyars in Toyotas publishing Playboy and Vogue, They sold timber and oil to the West and SS-20s to the East, Prince Vladimir, cursing loudly, is heading out to sea on a surfboard, And I am watching all this in my ancient Russian blues. At the monastery walls, there’s panic going on again, Along a shallow river there swims a fourteen-armed God. The monks wave their stakes and curse, as they try to save him. While God looks at all this mess and just shouts, ‘Let go!’ The abbot is jumping in the sand in a woman’s dress, And I am watching all this in my ancient Russian blues In the meantime scaffolds climb into the sky over the stoned Moscow; Turks are building replicas of Holy Russia in half an hour. The guardians of holy sites have their fingers on the trigger. The sign of a 10-rouble bill appears on icons,

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Where the saints’ faces used to be. Hare Krishnas march around the Arbat and Tverskaya, I fear that I am fed up with the ancient Russian blues . . . (‘Ancient Russian Blues’, Snow Lion, 1996) Evoking numerous clichés of the Russian cultural tradition (troika, the three battle heroes (bogatyri), Yaroslavna’s weeping, boyars, Prince Vladimir, etc.) in the context of the ‘wild capitalism’ of the early 1990s with its own privileged signifiers (Playboy, Vogue, Toyota, office briefings), Grebenshikov depicts the scene of postcommunist bespredel in a comical fashion, making moral criticism entirely inappropriate as a mode of discourse on postcommunist realities. The song recycles the familiar staples of journalistic criticism of the ‘reforms’ of the 1990s (the economy based on export of weaponry and natural resources, the political instrumentalization of religion, the reduction of cultural values to products of the tourist industry, etc.) but deactivates the pathos of such criticism, as the usual solutions to this ‘moral crisis’ are entirely inadequate. Prince Vladimir, the baptizer of Ancient Russia, to whom one might turn for salvation, surfs out to sea, cursing loudly, while the monks, on whom one might count for the preservation of some sense of good and evil, also engage in illicit practices, from swearing to crossdressing. The three Russian battle heroes, the characters of numerous fairy tales and paintings, have followed suit, Dobrynya Nikitich emigrating to Milan, Alesha Popovoch (the priest’s son) selling off church property, while the strongest of them all, Ilya Muromets, finding nothing better to do than gallop around in one sock for the entertainment of the ‘scared girls’. It is not surprising that in these sorry conditions, even God, here depicted as fourteen-armed, struggles to liberate himself from the monks with spears and leaves this place, making it truly ‘god-forsaken’. Given this absurd landscape, what is this mood of ‘ancient Russian blues’ that constitutes the enunciative modality from which the lyric unfolds, and why does Grebenshikov abandon it in the end, being ‘fed up’ with it? Although it has become customary to translate the Russian toska in the title of this song as the Anglo-American ‘blues’, especially taking into consideration the musical context, semantically toska is probably best translated as ‘melancholy’, longing for a lost or otherwise unattainable object of desire. Evidently, the ‘blues’ in question is the longing for the Ancient Russia, in which monks, boyars, battle heroes and even God himself did not dwell in this radical impropriety,


a Russia in which the sacred and the profane are safely separated. It is this Ancient Russia that is perceived as irrevocably lost, inaccessible even by means of the reproduction of cultural and religious traditions. The replicas of ‘Holy Russia’ are built in half an hour by Turkish construction workers, yet they fail to provide any consolation whatsoever to an indifferent and ‘stoned’ Moscow. And yet, the blues is not merely a longing for Ancient Russia but is itself Ancient Russian, supporting the suspicion that it is in fact entirely coextensive with the existence of Russia, while the mythical ‘Ancient Russia’ has never existed at all other than in the form of ‘Turkish replicas’. Thus, the Ancient Russian blues reproduces the originary structure of the melancholic or fetishist appropriation of the lost object, as discussed by Agamben in Stanzas (1993a). Both the melancholic and the fetishist fix their desire on unattainable objects and derive satisfaction precisely from their unattainability, appropriating the object of desire as ‘lost’. ‘[T]he withdrawal of melancholic libido has no other purpose than to make viable an appropriation in a situation in which none is really possible. Melancholy would not be so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost.’ (Agamben 1993a, 20. Emphasis added) Thus, the object of melancholy is lost and appropriated at the same time, appropriated as a ‘lost property’. In this manner, melancholic praxis ‘opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marks out a scene in which the ego may enter into relation with it and attempt an appropriation such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten’ (ibid.). Indeed, as a ‘lost property’, Ancient Russia may be appropriated in its very unreality and forever spared from loss or expropriation, making its possession a priori guaranteed: ‘only what is ungraspable can truly be grasped’ (ibid., 26). In terms of Agamben’s distinction between ritual and play, this attainment of the unattainable after the end of history may nonetheless take two radically different forms, corresponding to Agamben’s logics of ritual and play, both of which are observable in postcommunist Russia. First, the lost object may be turned into the object of ritual, its historicity transformed into pure structure and synchrony and its function becoming that of ordering the post-historical social terrain, guaranteeing its formal immutability. In this manner, which recalls Kojève’s description of the post-historical ‘society of snobs’, the objects belonging to the historical tradition are separated from their transmissibility, becoming pure structural forms whose incessant accumulation as the signifiers of the past is intended to prove that a society whose everyday praxis unfolds in the unsavory condition of bespredel still possesses

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a ‘great culture’ (cf. Magun 2008, 65–75). As Agamben argues, ‘when a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents and, on the other hand, a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past.’ (Agamben 1999d, 108) This description resonates strongly with the contemporary (in)experience of culture in Russia, particularly in the Putin period, whose overall tendency is, as we have argued, to transform all events into structures in the snobbish reign of synchronous ritual. With its penchant for expensive grand ceremonies (from the celebration of the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg to the June 2006 G8 summit, hosted by Russia) that crassly imitate Imperial and Soviet rituals at the same time, the postcommunist elite attempts to ground itself in the tradition that nonetheless melts down beneath its feet, making these ‘repossessions’ of history even more effective in desublimating it than are any purposefully subversive gestures of postmodern art. The celebration of ‘Great Russian culture’ in its ritualized, accumulated, aggregate form in the context of the spectacle of ‘official patriotism’ entails two consequences. First, owing to its ritualistic celebration as an accumulated presence, the cultural tradition is no longer accessible even as a ‘lost object’, in whose unattainability we may perversely find satisfaction. Instead, ‘the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat, in which he can in no way recognize himself’ (ibid., 108). This ritualistic celebration of the ‘cultural heritage’ is, to recall Benjamin, ‘more insidious than its disappearance could ever be’ (Benjamin cited in Agamben 1999a, 153). As Agamben argues with reference to the ‘museification’ of the world under contemporary global capitalism, ritualized cultural forms are marked precisely by a radical impossibility of use: ‘everything today has become a Museum, because this term simply designates the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing.’ (Agamben 2007b, 84) Second, given the empirical indistinction between the sacred and the profane in the postcommunist bespredel, what is ritualized and accumulated in this official celebration of ‘great culture’ is precisely the sacred insofar as it has already been profaned. The operation of museification that separates something from the sphere of free use and thus attempts to render it ‘unprofanable’ is, in the postcommunist context, always already a second-order operation, whose object is located in the zone of


indistinction between the sacred and the profane. Just as the Communist Party’s ritualistic invocation of Lenin in today’s political discourse cannot but evoke the memory of Kurekhin’s performance discussed in Chapter 2, the postcommunist regime’s inane attempts at grounding itself in the Russian tradition have nothing to rely on other than the already profaned images of the battle heroes, Prince Vladimir or Yaroslavna. The ‘great culture’ that the regime valorizes as its foundation is always already a ‘Turkish replica’ and its traditional heroes are either dressed in drag or selling off the national heritage on the black market. In its eagerness to negate the negativity of the postcommunist bespredel, the post-1993 regime has merely fortified the reign of nihilism by purposefully or unwittingly sacralizing its very products. Thus, in the strategy of snobbish ritualization the experience of loss gives way to a loss of experience as such and the melancholic mood of longing for the lost gives way to an absolute anesthesia, whereby the postcommunist subject surveys indifferently the accumulated cultural ruins that no longer mean anything to him and are therefore radically useless despite their official valorization. Having become a legitimating ritual for the authority that can no longer secure its grounding in the present, the cultural tradition becomes yet another means of oppression that must be liberated from the ceremonial mode of its transmission to regain its usability in social praxis: ‘[the history of culture] may well increase the burden of the treasures that are piled up on humanity’s back. But it does not give humankind the strength to shake them off, so as to get its hands on them.’ (Benjamin 1979, 361) It is this snobbish version of the Ancient Russian blues, which decries the demise of tradition but is only capable of opposing it by the withdrawal of ‘cultural heritage’ from any meaningful use, that Grebenshikov is so fed up with. His alternative consists in consuming the historicity of the lost object in the activity of play that dissolves all structures into events and transforms the objects of the cultural tradition, already subjected to the machine of sacralization and profanation, into toys. This is also a second-order operation that necessarily unfolds in the domain in which the sacred and the profane have already been rendered indistinct by the limitlessness of bespredel. By subjecting to profane play the space of bespredel itself, Grebenshikov’s poetry dismantles the ritualistic structures of separation and frees the contents of tradition from anything like a canonical or ‘proper’ mode of use. In this manner, every object of tradition is transformed into a miniaturized ‘Turkish replica’, whose use in the activity of play no longer seeks to question the object with regard to its belonging either to the sacred or to the

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profane. As children treasure the toys of villains at least as much as they do those of heroes, and toy versions of non-existent objects are at least as exciting as the miniaturized objects from ‘real life’, toys are quite literally ‘beyond good and evil’ and perhaps even ‘beyond Being’ as such, their utter unreality in no way hindering the enjoyment derived from their use. Transforming the objects of the tradition, which can no longer be sacred or profane but are always necessarily both at the same time, into toys, this strategy makes it impossible to continue to transmit the content of the tradition and retain its ordering function, but, unlike the strategy of authoritative ritualization, leaves intact transmissibility as such, ‘independently of the thing to be transmitted’ (Agamben 1999d, 114). This playful transmission of the sheer ‘profanability’ of cultural objects certainly cannot provide the postcommunist subject with anything like a historical grounding – if anything, it contributes to its complete uprooting. What it does, on the other hand, is maintain the very ‘living meaning’ of culture that snobbish ritualization destroys, by opening up new avenues of use rather than accumulating devalorized values in the ‘museums’ of officialized culture. In this manner, culture loses all its authority but retains its vitality, that is, its translatability into the present context, which permits the postcommunist subject to recognize himself in it. A good example of such reaffirmation of vitality is Grebenshikov’s song ‘Dubrovsky’, which subjects the lead character of Alexander Pushkin’s 1832 novella to a radical sublimation, whereby a disgruntled young noble who goes on a rebellious rampage after losing his estate to a villain aristocrat becomes the embodiment of the new Messiah that preaches the cessation of historical struggle: When there is a scent of trouble in our reckless times, In this midnight hour, quiet and indiscernible, From the woods there walks out an old man, But look closer, he’s not old at all, On the contrary, this is a handsome young man, Dubrovsky. ‘Wake up, my Kostroma! Do not sleep, Saratov and Tver’, Enough of living in grief and crying over bread.’ Dubrovsky takes his airplane, Dubrovsky flies up And flies over the sinful Earth, writing in the sky: ‘Do not cry, Masha, I am here! Do not cry, the sun will rise. Do not hide your eyes from God, Otherwise how can he find us?


The heavenly city of Jerusalem Still stands through cold and ice And now he stands among us And waits for us . . .’ He dropped his sword and his shield, Threw his Nagant pistol into the ditch. He understood there is no one to take revenge on And breathes joyfully. In the hard times for the Motherland His airplane is flying above us, Beautiful like an iconostasis, And writes on . . . (‘Dubrovsky’, Snow Lion, 1996) Grebenshikov’s Dubrovsky is evidently quite different from the protagonist of Pushkin’s novella, which, as we recall, ends with Dubrovsky escaping abroad and his lover Masha, the daughter of Dubrovsky’s nemesis, undergoing the ordeal of an arranged marriage to a man she does not love. Pushkin’s novella is the story of a revenge gone wrong and his Dubrovsky is not a person averse to vengeful violence. In a sense, Grebenshikov’s lyric could be read as a happy sequel to Pushkin’s story, telling of the return of Dubrovsky no longer as a righteous rebel on a spree of vengeance, but as an apostle of the messianic suspension of the very paradigm of historical struggle, joyfully carrying the message that ‘there is no one to take revenge on’. Contrary to Grebenshikov’s usual practice of playing with the tradition by locating figures of the sacred in an utterly profane context, in this song it is the profane figure of the rebel in Pushkin’s novella that is subjected to a radical sublimating gesture. The return of Dubrovsky is marked by a recapitulation of the past – the character’s ‘farewell to arms’ gesture involves the weaponry of different centuries, from sword and shield to the Nagant pistol, while his message of the end of the cycle of vengeance is written in the sky by the traces of an airplane. Thus, the original Dubrovsky, the early 19thcentury Russian Robin Hood, enters into a typological relation with the subjects of postcommunism, which elevates this historical figure to the apostle of the end of history. Just as the more familiar desublimating gestures of profanation, this sublimation finds its condition of possibility in the playful dissolution of the cultural ‘heritage’, whereby the work of Pushkin, whose 200th anniversary was officially celebrated in 1999 in a crass manner more appropriate to a presidential campaign, is stripped of its museified status of a ‘classic’ and is opened to experimental use.

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While the official strategy of ritualization seeks to prop up the authority of historical culture by depriving it of all living meaning and turning it into the ‘monstrous archive’ (Agamben 1999d, 108) entirely alien to the experience of the contemporary subject, Grebenshikov’s play with the tradition recognizes the fact of its utter destruction but appropriates its ruins as toys, available for use in the here and now, precisely because there is no longer any possible canon of their use nor any goal to which their use must be directed. In this appropriation, there is no longer any desire to negate the postcommunist bespredel, which can only throw us back into nihilism. Instead, by virtue of the suspension of all negating action (work), the negativity of bespredel becomes the site of an affirmation of the free use that retains the vitality of culture, while abrogating the authority of its contents. The activities of art, play and love that Kojève left to the post-historical humanity may therefore unfold in the absence of any snobbish ritualization, yet they are not elevated to the Bataillean quasi-heroic operation of ‘unproductive expenditure’. In Grebenshikov’s play with the figures of tradition, ‘negativity without use’ is converted into pure use without a trace of negativity.

From Identity to Habit What began as an experience of loss in the conditions of the postcommunist bespredel is thus reconstructed as the appropriation of the lost as an overwhelmingly affirmative experience. In this manner, Agamben’s theory of play points to the possibilities of going beyond the logic of perpetual deferral of appropriation best exemplified by the Derridean deconstruction. As we have argued above, the Derridean space of undecidability is marked by the ineradicable coexistence of opposites, whereby the sacred and the profane enter a zone of indistinction and function as the subversive supplements of one other. Yet, where the Derridean logic finds the irreducible paradoxicality of existence that accounts for the impossibility of parousia, whereby we are forever resigned to perpetual movement of diffèrance, Agamben’s approach finds the possibility of deactivating this field of paradoxicality, turning the zone of extreme ontological tension into a dwelling space, where, as in Grebenshikov’s ‘Plane’, we may ‘repeat the words devoid of all meaning, but without tension’. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Russia has been no stranger to paradox. As Boris Groys (2006, 42–76) reminds us in his timely reassessment of dialectical materialism, the latter was quintessentially a political philosophy of paradoxicality, which elevated the paradox to


the principle of life itself. This principle founded a totalized system of political praxis, based on the affirmation of contradiction and the elimination (frequently physical) of anything challenging the ‘total logic of paradox’ with particularistic and thus logically non-contradictory doctrines, be it Trotskyism or social democracy, naturalism or surrealism. Although liberating in the sense of explicitly recognizing the self-contradictory nature of things, this ideology was also remarkably violent in making of the paradox the overall principle of life: it is evident that the only political form that dialectical materialism can assume is that of a permanent civil war, open or concealed. Even in the latter case, Soviet citizens, faithfully reiterating ideological maxims in the public sphere, could never be certain that their perfectly innocent reproduction of the precepts of Marxism–Leninism would not at some point be denounced as a ‘formalist’ heresy, which is precisely an attempt at a non-contradictory and coherent interpretation of theological dogmata (Groys 2006, 54). Similarly, in the Stalinist reign of the paradox, political positions and artistic perspectives were regularly dismissed as ‘onesided’, ‘formal’, ‘non-dialectical’ and thus alien to the spirit of dialectical materialism. Thus, ‘[communism] promised not an idyll, but life in a permanent self-contradiction, in a situation of a permanent internal split and tension’ (ibid., 75). By the same token, the bespredel of the early 1990s, in which contradictory elements existed side by side without hope for any Aufhebung and things were barred from identity with themselves in the permanent movement of diffèrance, doomed the postSoviet subject to a life of undecidability and indeterminacy in which the only consolation was provided by the melancholic attachment to integrity and coherence, constituted as a priori ‘lost properties’. The ‘wholesale’ transformation of the postcommunist bespredel into a scene of play achieves the Aufhebung of this generalized paradoxicality in the manner addressed in Chapter 3 with reference to Agamben’s reading of Pauline epistles. The Pauline katargesis of the law simultaneously leaves it intact and renders it inoperative. Similarly, the appropriation of the entire field of bespredel as a scene of play leaves the paradoxes of postcommunism intact but deprives the experience of paradoxicality of all tension or internal conflict. Chalices of wine and poison can therefore remain in balance, just as God can coexist with the devil, because in the practice of play everything that happens is deprived of finality and thus seriousness – the game can always be resumed or played back and its rules can change along the way, wine turning into poison and the ‘scum of the earth’ becoming the new lords. Moreover, as we have stressed above, the objects of play are defined by the suspension of

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their canonical use, which entails an extreme degree of their malleability depending on the context of the game in question. Cross-dressing monks, Playboy-publishing boyars, Princess Yaroslavna as an office manager and, with some thought, even the fourteen-armed God can be found some use for in this playground. ‘The activity that results from this thus becomes a pure means, that is, a praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as such, as a means without an end. The creation of a new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.’ (Agamben 2007b, 86) Reappropriated as pure means that are from the outset not identical to themselves, the predicates of the tradition also cease to determine the identity of the subject who claims to possess them, but rather define the possible parameters of their use, available to anyone engaged in the activity of play. The being of toys is entirely exhausted in their being-thus, the ‘thus’ in question being nothing more than their infinite potentiality of being used in unforeseeable ways. In this sense it recalls the features of what Agamben, drawing on the polysemy of the Latin term ‘species’, has termed ‘special being’ (2007b, 55–60), which is irreducible to any substance but is rather in the process of continuous generation, depending on the use to which it is put. ‘[Special] being is absolutely insubstantial. It does not have a proper place, but it occurs in a subject and is in this sense like a habitus or a mode of being, like the image in a mirror. A being is special if it coincides with its own becoming visible, with its own revelation.’ (Agamben 2007b, 57) While special being coincides with its appearance, that is, with the pure manifestation of its existence, ‘personal’ being or identity contains this appearance by anchoring it in a certain substance: Something is personalized – is referred to as an identity – at the cost of sacrificing its specialness. A being – a face, a gesture, an event – is special when, resembling any other, it resembles all the others. Special being is delightful, because it offers itself eminently to common use, but it cannot be an object of personal property. But neither use nor enjoyment is possible with the personal; there can be only appropriation and jealousy. (ibid, 59) The ethical orientation of Grebenshikov’s poetry since the early 1980s consists in the inversion of this reduction of the special to the personal, of existence to identity, of use to possession. Bringing to a standstill both the canonical use of the tradition and its expropriation from


use through a pseudo-sacralizing ritualization, these songs attempt, against all odds, to inspire delight in the very scene of bespredel that so anguished the Russian society in the 1990s. When the deconstructed contents of tradition become available for new, experimental modes of use, the space of postcommunist bespredel finds absolution in being left ‘as it is’, that is, taken solely in the aspect of its special being-thus. Through a simple yet fundamental shift of perspective, the dangers of undecidability are deactivated, as the latter becomes the positive condition of the free use of heterogeneous and contradictory elements of the postcommunist social field in unpredictable ways and is no longer perceived as an ‘identity crisis’ but rather as a source of serenity and joy. In ‘Garcon no. 2’ (Navigator, 1995) this absolution of bespredel is presented with a new-found sense of serenity that is clearly dissonant with the tragic moods of the Russian Album. In this song, Grebenshikov plays with his own historicity, performatively declaring his liberation from the status of a ritualized figure of the ‘greatest Soviet rock poet’, exiting the mausoleum of ‘contemporary classics’ and reclaiming his vitality by means of a perpetual play with a variety of traditional and contemporary cultural elements: This is the table at which I drank, here is my whiskey on the rocks. The drink became dust, the table was taken to a museum, And behind the glass are the mummies of my best friends, While I just went out, for a moment, to buy some cigarettes. I went for a walk to the Latin Quarter, turned at Camden Lock Towards Nevsky and Tverskaya. I went out spiritual and came back worldly, I could have perished, but, hey, I did not. [...] The ringing of the bells flows like chrism; Oh my soul, stop and pray, where do you rush? Here it is all nice and quiet – icons of the Beatles, incense and hashish, But I don’t care as long as you see the light. (‘Garcon no. 2’, Navigator, 1995) Grebenshikov performs a humourous Aufhebung of his own oscillation between diverse religious orientations during the early 1990s, making religious identification no longer an identitarian predicate but a usable practice. Venturing out of the museum of late-Soviet culture ‘for a moment’, which becomes his own kairos that ruptures from within Akvarium’s chronological standing in the history of Russian rock, the

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singer begins his ‘walk’, in which the most distant places (Latin Quarter, Camden Lock, Nevsky Prospect and Tverskaya Street) are harmoniously articulated along with completely incompatible cultural elements. It is therefore entirely possible to go out ‘spiritual’ and return ‘worldly’ or, for that matter, the other way round, as the two attributes no longer define one’s identity but, having been rendered idle, are rather potentialities open for use in various ways. While in the identitarian discourse one’s revocation of the spiritual and the entrance into the sphere of the profane does indeed present the risk of ‘perishing’, in the discourse of profane use this danger subsides, as there is no longer any meaningful difference between ‘spirit’ and ‘world’ in the scene of messianic recapitulation. Instead, all historical traditions enter a merry-go-round of absolution, that, leaving them in their being-thus, absolves them of their foundational character and endows them with infinite potentiality for use, no longer as profound predicates of one’s being but rather as objects of one’s having, that is, as habits pure and simple. The notion of habit is central to Agamben’s attempt to overcome the logic of negative foundation that in his argument characterizes Western metaphysics from its inception to the latest attempts at its overcoming by, for example, Heidegger and Derrida. In Language and Death (1991), Agamben demonstrates the intimate cobelonging of linguistics and metaphysics, whereby the linguistic concept of utterance, that is, the act of putting language into action in speech, corresponds exactly to the metaphysical concept of being: That which is always already indicated in speech without being named is, for philosophy, being. The dimension of meaning of the word ‘being’, whose eternal quest and eternal loss constitute the history of metaphysics, coincides with the taking place of language; metaphysics is that experience of language that, in every speech act, grasps the disclosure of that dimension, and in all speech experiences above all the ‘marvel’ that language exists. (Agamben 1991, 25) The problem with the metaphysical marvel at the pure existence of language is that it is always already characterized by a double negativity that Agamben terms the Voice, capitalized to accentuate its difference from voice as mere sound, emitted by a living being. First, the Voice as the indicator of the taking-place of language is characterized by the removal of the voice as the natural sound in the anticipation of signification and is thus located in the gap between the having-been and the


not-yet. Second, the Voice cannot itself be spoken in a discourse whose existence it indicates, that is, it cannot itself be brought to speech that it makes possible (ibid., 84). Thus, the human experience of having language is characterized by negativity and a consequent scission between being and entity, nature and culture, phone and logos, etc. In a strict parallel to Agamben’s conception of sovereignty and bare life, the Voice as pure intention to signify is included in language only in the manner of its exclusion or ‘ban’: ‘Everything that is presupposed for there to be language [ . . . ] is nothing other than a presupposition of language that is maintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from language.’ (Agamben 1998, 50. Cf. Thurschwell 2005, 174–177) Agamben’s philosophy may then be described as an attempt to traverse this space of negativity and return (Agamben 1999a, 116–137) to a human experience of language deprived of all negativity and of all attempts at a foundation: ‘only if language no longer refers to any Voice [ . . . ], is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death.’ (Agamben 1991, 95) Thus, Agamben ventures to bring the unspeakable, that is, the ‘thing itself’, enunciated in language to speech as such. For Agamben, ‘the thing itself is not a thing; it is the very sayability, the very openness at issue in language, which, in language, we always presuppose and forget, perhaps because it is at bottom its own oblivion’ (Agamben 1999a, 35). The ‘idea of language’ is therefore entirely contained in the existence of language itself, the existence of communicability as such. What is at stake is thus an experience of language that prioritizes having over being, that is, the appropriation of language by humanity as its habit rather than as an elusive negative foundation. [I]f that which has always already been is, in the words of Hegel, a non-being, then won’t ethos, the habitual dwelling place of humanity, necessarily lie beyond being and its Voice? Is it possible that being (ontotheology with its component negativity) is not up to the level of the simple mystery of humans’ having, of their habitations or their habits? And what if the dwelling to which we return beyond being were neither a supercelestial place nor a Voice, but simply the trite words that we have? (Agamben 1991, 94. Emphasis original) The idea of the habitual experience of language provides us with a point of entry into the post-historical ethos of postcommunism, which

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we shall address in detail in the final chapter. Let us now recapitulate the argument developed so far. As we have shown in Chapter 3, the paradigm of the ethos of postcommunism was already established in the late-Soviet practices of disengagement, which cultivated autonomous forms of life beside the official public sphere. In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, brought about by the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms to re-engage the society in Soviet politics, this para-Soviet orientation found itself in an uncomfortable position in the undecidable field of postcommunist bespredel, where it no longer enjoyed the stable background of the formal public sphere that functioned as the locus of negative identification. In this time of existential disorientation, diverse attempts to delimit the space of bespredel by laying positive foundations, whether cultural, historical or religious, were all marred by the contamination of these principles by their opposites in the never-ending flux of diffèrance. In Grebenshikov’s songs of the early 1990s, this undecidability was initially perceived as a tragic impossibility of the appropriation of authentic existence from the ruinous improprieties of bespredel, yet this mood gradually shifted to the experimental attitude of finding in these ruins themselves the ground for a possible reappropriation of what is most proper to human existence, that is, freedom in the sense of potentiality. Rather than negate the negativity of bespredel, if only to have something positive from which to disengage oneself once more, the late-Soviet ethics of disengagement finds a way out of the impasse of the early 1990s by suppressing all negating action and affirming bespredel as a habitual dwelling place in which the remnants of the historical process are returned to free experimental use. It is therefore the very expiry of the epochal sendings of Being, that is, historical forms of politics, culture and tradition, in the condition of bespredel that opens the possibility of the profane use of these forms outside of any epochal context: ‘This is why we do not want new works of art and thought; we don’t want another epoch of culture and society: what we want is to save [them] from their wandering in tradition, to grasp the good – undeferrable and non-epochal – which was contained in them.’ (Agamben 1995, 88) The postcommunist subject as conceived in Grebenshikov’s poetry disengages itself from the very desire for a stable postcommunist identity, for salvation understood as a determinate ‘epochal’ condition, for the re-establishment of hierarchical distinctions between the sacred and the profane, for grasping the negative foundation of diffèrance and thus mastering the postcommunist bespredel. Instead, the entire postcommunist reality becomes an object of play, in which the most diverse cultural


and historical traditions are recapitulated and subjected to a katargesis that maintains them in an inoperative, deactivated state in which they lose all performative force but retain their availability for use in noncanonical ways. Thus, the long quest for the absolution in the wake of the postcommunist disaster, which we have traced in Grebenshikov’s songs from the Russian Album onwards, may now end in a return of the kind described by Agamben with reference to the appropriation of the pure experience of language after a long onto-theological quest for Being: ‘We came as close as possible to language, we almost brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn back, untroubled, toward home. So, language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics’ (Agamben 1991, 108). And yet, this return is, in accordance with Agamben’s paradoxical formula, a return ‘to that which never was and that which [we] never left’ (ibid., 97). On the one hand, the ethos of postcommunism is that very space of bespredel which we tried in vain to abandon in our quests to ‘the warm star’, ‘the origin of all things’, ‘there, where is it always Sunday’, etc. On the other hand, our dissolution of the immobile structures of bespredel into events through the activity of play radically reshapes this field, making it indeed ‘that, which never was’. Its very limitlessness now becomes a positive condition of experimental use that is free from all tasks of historical transformation. Similarly, its diffèrantial undecidability no longer functions as an epistemological obstacle to our self-discovery but becomes a positive ontological condition of the freedom of social praxis which can only unfold in what is without foundations and hence without limits. ‘The ethos, humanity’s own, is not something unspeakable or sacer that must remain unsaid in all praxis and human speech. Neither is it nothingness, whose nullity serves as a basis for the arbitrariness and violence of social action. Rather, it is social praxis itself, human speech itself, which have become transparent to themselves’ (ibid., 106). Yet, how can we envision social praxis that is contained entirely in the experience of language? What is this paradoxical community held together only by the absence of any presupposition? Most critically, do the practices generated by such an ethics achieve any real change in the socio-political domain, presently characterized by the opposite tendency of the autocratic ritualization of bespredel that freezes social life in a debilitating state of exception? In the final chapter we shall elaborate the functioning of the ethics of postcommunism in the wider socio-political space by tracing its development in Grebenshikov’s contemporary poetry.

5 The Invisible Victory: Experimentum Linguae and the Appropriation of Anomie

The Anomie of Law In November 2003 President Putin awarded Boris Grebenshikov the Order of Merit for the Fatherland (4th degree). A number of artists have received such a decoration in the postcommunist period, but hardly ever anyone with an ‘underground’ reputation such as Grebenshikov’s. Many of Grebenshikov’s fans were horrified by his acceptance of the Order, expecting him to use the opportunity of refusal to make a public statement of his opposition to the regime. Nonetheless, Grebenshikov’s own explanation of his decision to accept accords strongly with the ethics of disengagement and play addressed in the previous chapters. Responding to the question of the Moscow News interviewer whether he received the award with gratitude or irony, he replied: I received it with childish pleasure and the humour of the situation will follow me to the grave. It was an adventure for me, to see if I can get the state to splash out on such a thing. But, I wanted an order with a ribbon so I could wear it like a necklace, and the ribbon was what I did not get. (Sotnikov 2005) In his acceptance of the Order, Grebenshikov clearly followed the same principles that motivated his refusal to become the icon of Perestroika counter-culture and the judge in the postcommunist court. Neither a pro-regime ‘activist’ nor a self-righteous ‘dissident’, Grebenshikov accepted the state award as an object of play, a toy, the discourse about which quickly slides from the solemn matters of ‘merit to the Fatherland’ to the preference for a ribbon, on which it could be worn. To the 198

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extent that Grebenshikov’s acceptance of the award demonstrates his return to the public sphere after decades of disengagement, the very movement of this return transforms this public sphere in its profane play, destabilizing its rituals and opening its contents to new forms of use. In the ‘New Song about Motherland’, first recorded in 1998, Grebenshikov describes the transformation of the experience of postcommunism from the tragic lament over the undecidable flux of bespredel into the reappropriation of the space of bespredel as the new abode of the postcommunist subject. Nothing in this movement of return connotes the heroic pathos of newfound patriotism, which was the first to be rendered inoperative in the late 1980s. Instead, the figure of return to the ‘field’ of postcommunist social reality is itself presented in a desublimated manner: Is it right for a handsome young man to remain unmarried? Having languished for thirty years, he shook his head And went out into the field, cotton in his ears, Not to be bothered by the greedy screams of the girls. At night the field feels like a grave. All bones and rust and the squeak of raven wings. ‘You have been languishing too long’, told him the eagle owl, ‘The girls are all in London, there is no trace left of them here.’ On the icon there lived a God, he jumped out of the window, His traces were covered by golden dirt. My sweetheart sought protection from the black rouble, But couldn’t find protection from herself. (‘New Song about Motherland’, Territory, 2001) The song begins, in an already familiar manner, as a play on the Russian folk tale, in which the hero (modeled on the bogatyr Ilya Muromets, who famously ‘slept on the furnace’ for 33 years before venturing out for his heroic deeds) decides to get over his ‘languishing’ and finally get married. Yet, his venture out into the ‘field’ at night reveals a bleak and desolate landscape, in which the ‘greedy screams of the girls’ are no longer to be heard. In a characteristic gesture of the recapitulation of the past and present, the eagle owl informs the hero that the ‘girls are all in London’, the favourite destination of post-Soviet emigration. This setback ironically targets the very ethics of exodus that has been constitutive of Grebenshikov’s ethical and artistic disposition. Having strayed

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too far into the ‘beside’ of the system, the practitioners of the ethics of disengagement have been oblivious to its catastrophic demise and, on their reluctant return, observe nothing but the desolate scene of disaster, populated by ravens and the admonishing eagle owl. The chorus depicts this desolation in terms of a rather unceremonious ‘taking-leave of God’, whose traces are, in a reference to the wild capitalism of the 1990s, covered by ‘golden dirt’. Yet, the final two lines point to a reassessment of the postcommunist catastrophe as initially presented in, for example, ‘The Horses of Limitlessness’. Rather than being an effect of wrongful policies, intended or otherwise (‘look where they brought us’), the postcommunist catastrophe now appears entirely self-inflicted, as the ‘sweetheart’ Motherland turned out to be a danger to herself, exceeding even that of the ‘black rouble’ (cherny chervonets). The scene of bespredel, in which in the early 1990s it was difficult to recognize anything like a homeland and which many observers likened to a bizarre nightmare, is now recognized as the very Motherland, who ‘could not find protection from herself’ and thus is the only homeland that is available in the present conditions. Indeed, the accusatory tone with regard to the Motherland in ‘8200’ gives way to an ironic sense of pride in the second verse: ‘There is no such Motherland anywhere else in the world; everyone dreams of living like this but they don’t have the guts’ (‘New Song about Motherland’, Territory, 2001 [1998]). What arouses pride is the very fact of Russia’s daring to undergo self-destruction in the revolution of 1991, which plunged it into the ruinous state of bespredel. In the words of ‘Garcon no. 2’, we ‘could have perished but did not’; and it is this survival of the postcommunist disaster that now opens the way for the appropriation of the ruins of the Soviet order that turns the threatening expanse of inaccessible potentialities into the space of their habitual use. Where does this ethics of habitual use bring us in terms of the distance between law and love, in whose midst Grebenshikov found himself in the late 1980s? While our dwelling in this ethos definitely takes us away from the law, it is not yet clear how it might help us, in Grebenshikov’s words, ‘make it to love’. In the remainder of this chapter we shall attempt to illuminate this movement from law to love by elaborating the contrast between the mode of the reappropriation of bespredel in Grebenshikov’s lyrics with its ritualization in the post-transitional realm of Putinism, characterized by the valorization of synchrony and structure. As we have argued in Chapter 2, the postcommunist condition is marked by the deactivation of the teleo-ideological dimension of politics and in this sense exemplifies the messianic katargesis of the law


that Agamben identifies in the Pauline epistles as a singular prototype of the Hegelian Aufhebung. Yet, our analysis of the notion of bespredel attunes us to the fact that this deactivation of the law (metonymically used to denote the entire political order) does not do away with it but maintains it ‘in force without significance’ – a characteristic of the state of exception familiar from Agamben’s more explicitly political writings (1998; 2005a). For Agamben, the ‘state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law’ (2005a, 48). Similarly, the postcommunist bespredel is not marked by a blissful experience of the absence of law or by the repressive experience of its full application, but precisely by its standstill that is best captured with the notion of anomie, ‘in which all legal determinations – and above all the distinction between public and private – are deactivated’ (ibid., 50). As Agamben famously argues, anomie is necessary to the very existence of the law as such as its ground or, more correctly, its constitutive void: ‘It is as if the juridical order contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force’ (ibid., 31). To maintain its relation to life, that is, to ensure its applicability, law must always maintain a relation to the anomic space of its own inoperosity, in which law itself blurs with life: The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting the threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas. [ . . . ] What the ark of power contains at its centre is the state of exception – but that is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to the law stands before a norm with no relation to life. (Ibid., 86) It is evident that the postcommunist bespredel is precisely a materialization of this constitutive void of the law as that which remains when the teleo-ideological normativity, by which power legitimizes itself, has been rendered inoperative. There are two possible responses to this anomic inoperosity of the law that correspond to the Hegelo–Kojèvian ‘ritualistic’ and the Agambenian ‘playful’ versions of the end of history. We shall first consider the former in an analysis of the mode of being

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of power under Putinism and then proceed to the elaboration of the Agambenian response to the post-historical anomie through a reading of Grebenshikov’s lyrics. As we have argued in Chapter 2, in the ritualistic post-transitionalist politics of Putinism the inoperosity of the law, itself a result of the messianic suspension of history, is itself to be subjected to a second-degree suspension through a ritualistic arrest of all events and their conversion into immutable structures. This suspension maintains the law in force without significance and is thus similar to Gershom Scholem’s position in the debate with Walter Benjamin on Kafka’s Castle, reported by Agamben (1999a, 160–174). In Scholem’s understanding, messianic time reveals the nullity of the law but does not transcend this empty form, resigning us to a life ‘in deferral and delay’, which corresponds to the ontological structure of bespredel, reconstituted in Chapter 4. This understanding of the state of law in messianic time is also similar to Derrida’s vision of messianism that Agamben considers a ‘petrified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception’ (Agamben 1999a, 171). For Agamben, Derrida’s critique of the law in the name of infinite and undeconstructible justice produces nothing but ‘a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it’ (Agamben 2005a, 64). While it would probably be too much to claim that Agamben accuses Derrida of being a ‘false messiah’ (cf. Thurschwell 2005, 174), it is undeniable that the emancipatory promise of this version of messianism is manifestly false, as the claim that law in the state of exception is still law serves to freeze the unraveling of law into life and is therefore quintessentially conservative. In the late 19th century, the period of the accelerated capitalist development in Russia, marked by revolutionary societal dislocations, the conservative philosopher Konstantin Leontiev famously suggested that ‘Russia must be frozen in order not to rot’. The suspension of the messianic in the post-transitional regime of the Putin presidency follows precisely this logic, wagering on the survival of the law in its pure form, devoid of all historical meaning. This is the true sense of the uncanny slogan of Putin’s first term, ‘dictatorship of the law’, which supplements the ‘proper’ (legal) power of the law with its very opposite (‘dictatorship’) that reveals that the former has been rendered inoperative and requires the facilitating force of the latter to maintain the semblance of the existence of the law. In terms of Schmitt’s classic distinction (1994), ‘dictatorship of the law’ exemplifies a ‘commissarial’ type of


dictatorship, in which the application of the law is suspended to salvage the concrete order that the law inscribes (see Agamben 2005a, 32–40, 53–60). In this manner, it is the very suspension of the law by a ‘dictatorship’, or, more correctly, a ‘state of exception’, that permits the ultimate vacuity of the law in the post-historical time to remain concealed and ensures the survival of the figure of the law in an inoperative state. Yet, as every variant of conservatism eventually finds out to its disappointment, what ‘must be frozen in order not to rot’ has always already begun to rot, hence the anxiety about its ‘conservation’, which would hardly arise, were the phenomenon in question safe in its proper and authentic existence. Reconstituting what is already destitute, the contemporary regime remains as post-historical as Yeltsin’s in its evacuation of all historical tasks from the sphere of politics, yet, unlike the Yeltsin presidency, ventures to order the field of postcommunist bespredel through the proliferation of purely ritualistic manifestations of authority that maintain a semblance of order amid the generalized state of exception. The strategy of saving ‘great culture’ through its deprivation of all living meaning, discussed in the previous chapter, is thereby applied across the entire political terrain, resulting in the perpetuation of anomie under the guise of the stability of canonical forms that are nonetheless entirely useless. In this manner, the formal maintenance of the law is ensured by rendering it inapplicable or, in Agamben’s fortunate expression, ‘unobservable’ (Agamben 2005b, 106–108). Just as Kafka’s Joseph K is incapable of understanding the law, whose content is only revealed to him in the form of the pornographic pictures between the pages of the law book, postcommunist legality only presents itself to our experience through its self-suspension that reveals the obscene figure of sovereign violence where the normativity of law should be. Thus, Putin’s slogan of the ‘dictatorship of the law’ unwittingly reveals what Agamben considers to be the arcanum imperii of modern politics (Agamben 2005a, 86): the law cannot rule, that is, it has no access and no relation to life that it takes as its object, and, to establish this access, it must produce its own opposite (anomie, state of exception or ‘dictatorship’) in the guise of its application.1 In the following section we shall trace the operation of this logic in the ritualistic politics of Putinism.

Cratocracy While the discourse of anti-Putinite opposition is certainly plethoric both inside and outside Russia, it remains manifestly incoherent, as proponents of practically all ideological orientations may be found

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both on the side of the regime and on the side of the opposition. We may thus easily find both pro- and anti-Putin liberals, communists and nationalists, which only serves to confirm the exhaustion of these ideologies in the post-historical realm. In fact, as the acclaimed writer and political activist Zahar Prilepin has argued, the Putin regime can be a vehicle for any ideological content whatsoever, effectively disarming the opposition by adopting all of its slogans as its own: [E]verything sensible that the opposition has proposed is immediately expropriated and profaned. Because power is colourless, it can at any given time adopt flags of any colour, red or brown, why not . . . . Today, it is impossible to oppose power from an ideological perspective; it is everywhere. Any slogan can be appropriated by the authorities at any time and will be chanted a hundred times louder than it is by the opposition. (Prilepin 2007) It is notable that this description of the regime’s free use of ideology parallels exactly the logic of messianic katargesis: all ideological orientations are rendered inoperative by their adoption by the authorities in the manner that neutralizes their mobilizing force. The very references to ‘profanation’ and ‘expropriation’ in Prilepin’s text point to the paradoxical reliance of the current regime on the modes of praxis, appropriate to the messianic politics that nullifies all constituted authority. This is what distinguishes Putinism from all hitherto known forms of authoritarianism of the left and the right, which limit themselves to the repertoire of some ideological orientations that are deployed against others in a Schmittian friend–enemy distinction. In terms of Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) theory of populism, which he presents as a transcendental structure of the political as such, politics necessarily involves the process of articulation of particular demands into equivalential chains around ‘empty signifiers’, whose polysemy permits them to serve as quilting points for diverse and frequently divergent values, interests or ideologems. Yet, every process of articulation must presuppose the existence of signifiers that do not enter the equivalential chain, but rather function as the ‘other’ or even the ‘enemy’ of the newly constituted political unity. Thus, in the late 1980s the anticommunist movement in the Soviet Union was constituted by the articulation around the empty signifier ‘democrats’, personified by Boris Yeltsin, of such disparate political identities as monarchists, neo-liberals, anarchists, social democrats


and environmentalists, whose unity was momentarily enabled by their opposition to all things ‘communist’. The indisputable advance of Putinism over this logic of populism is precisely its utter indifference to the contents of ideological maxims, which are incessantly combined into most bizarre constellations without any need for the construction of the antagonistic frontier and the determination of the ‘other’. What Putinism achieves is something that is barely possible to grasp in the terms of Laclau’s theory, that is, a situation of total equivalence of diverse demands or, better, their radical indistinction. Just as Grebenshikov’s songs rendered inoperative all authoritative discourses of tradition through their combinatory use in bizarre heterotopias, the Putin presidency appropriates the entire ideological terrain with no regard for its internal tensions and contradictions. In this sense, the contemporary Russian state is a cruel parody of Kojève’s post-historical state, embracing the universality of the ideological terrain and rendering it wholly homogeneous. However, this dexterous solution to the problem of ideological contestation is only possible because all these elements of the teleo-ideological field have already been deactivated from the late 1980s onwards. This means that they are now only available either for play, abundant examples of which we find in Grebenshikov’s songs, or ritual, which is precisely their fate in the Putin regime. The symbols that formerly derived their meaning from a determinate ideological context have become converted into static ceremonials that glorify power rather than allow for its use: the restored melody of the Soviet anthem, the Imperial coat of arms, G8 membership, Victory Day parades, the Day of National Unity, etc. Thoroughly ritualized, the ideologies of Russian nationalism, Soviet socialism and global capitalism are entirely useless for public mobilization, yet neither are they helpful tools of government, aside from serving to disorient the hapless opposition that no longer can find a spot in the ideological spectrum that is not always already expropriated in a crass and inane manner by the official mass media. Thus, the ideological omnivorosity of the regime does not succeed in governing the disengaged society but merely spares us the effort of the critique of ideology, as the late-Soviet joke revived in Putin’s Russia concisely demonstrates: an opposition activist is arrested in the Red Square while handing out leaflets, which, on inspection, turn out to be blank sheets. When asked during the interrogation why the leaflets are blank, the activist responds: ‘What is there to write? It is all patently clear to everyone.’ As we have argued with respect to the ‘dictatorship of the law’, the very inoperosity of the law in the post-historical time requires its supplementation with something extra-legal that can substitute for its lacking

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force. This logic of supplementarity permits us to duly appreciate a key thesis of the anti-Putin opposition, which asserts that the contemporary political regime in Russia has no ideological content whatsoever and consists simply in the reign of power as such, of power as brute force rather than authority. In April 2007, Putin’s former economic advisor Andrei Illarionov published an article entitled ‘The Force Model of the State’ (Illarionov 2007), in which he argued that the current regime is a materialization of the state of exception, sustained by the use of violence, not limited by any legal mechanisms. Similarly, Mikhail Delyagin (2007) has argued that the ‘commercial’ oligarchy that emerged in the course of the privatization programme of the early 1990s has given way to the ‘force oligarchy’ (silovaya oligarkhia) that comprises the representatives of the repressive apparatus of the state that controls the key sectors of Russia’s economy. For Delyagin, this oligarchic regime is more prone to the direct recourse to violence than the ‘commercial’ oligarchy that reproduced itself in the 1990s through a complex competitive game involving private media and security structures, covert links between state officials, political parties and organized crime, etc. As the most consolidated force in this game, the repressive apparatus gradually succeeded in dominating both political and economic activity in Russia in the private interests of its representatives. In a less sensationalist manner the same thesis is presented in the studies of Olga Kryshtanovskaya (2005), which demonstrate the tendency towards the composition of the Russian political elite from the representatives of law enforcement and security services as well as Vadim Volkov’s (2002) work on the formation of the economic elite from the representatives of what was once known as ‘organized crime’ or, in Volkov’s terminology, ‘violent entrepreneurship’. Even if we accept these staggering claims about the reduction of political power in Russia to pure force, the question remains as to whether this tendency should be interpreted in terms of the strengthening of the regime. Faced with the ‘force model’ of the state, we must rather recall Nietzsche’s (1998, II § 10) argument that recourse to brute violence and cruelty is a symptom of the weakening of power, of its incapacity to perform its operations without recourse to intimidation or direct coercion (see Ojakangas 2005; Prozorov 2007a, chapter 6; 2007c). Similarly, Foucault’s unforgettable descriptions of the violent operations of sovereign power in Discipline and Punish (1977b) should not obscure his insight into the radical ineffectiveness of this ‘power of death’, which led to its subsequent envelopment in the network of disciplinary and biopolitical rationalities. Thus, rather than view Putin’s post-transitional regime in terms of plenitude of power in its sovereign


majesty, we should rather pay attention to its utter impoverishment when it comes to governmental instruments, insofar as it is entirely deprived of a teleo-ideological project that grants positive content to the exercise of power. Illarionov’s elevation of extra-juridical violence to a distinct ‘model’ of the state performs a sleight of hand that permits him to criticize the Putin regime from the perspective of an apparently ‘normal’ state, founded on rule of law, constitutional principles, etc. Yet, there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ state that does not contain at its foundation the state of exception that alone gives it access to its object, that is, the life of its subjects. As Agamben (2005a, 84–88) has demonstrated, the state of exception is the ‘secret ark’ at the foundation of every state. Thus, the difference of the Putin regime from Western liberal democracies or, for that matter, the Soviet Union does not amount to a separate alternative ‘model’ but rather consists in the reduction of state power to its pure form of sovereign inoperosity, whereby positive governmental interventions into social life are rendered inoperative and all that remains is the ceremonial display of its own power that endlessly glorifies its potentiality of self-cancellation through recourse to brute force (cf. Agamben 2008, chapter 8). Perceiving itself as illegitimate in the absence of any historical project, authority in postcommunist Russia manifests itself through a snobbish redoubling of its own power, as the power of those who hold power or, to use Andrei Fursov’s (1991, 2007) fortunate and unduly forgotten neologism, as cratocracy. Yet, the vulgar display of the power of the powerful should not deceive us as to the effectiveness of this regime, whose flaunting of its potential for the use of force and even its exemplary actualization in, for example, the persecution of the opposition and the disloyal business elite, merely serve to conceal the fundamental impotence of its ordering capacities and the vacuity of its legitimizing rhetoric. This is the crucial difference of the current regime from any stage of Soviet authoritarianism, which retained elements of its ideologically established legitimacy even in its most embarrassing gerontocratic phase. In 2007, Alexei Balabanov’s critically acclaimed film Freight 200, a grim portrayal of the moral decay in a provincial Soviet town in 1984, launched a curious discussion of whether this period of the utmost degradation of the Soviet system was, against all official narratives of Russia’s ‘revival’, not similar to the present. In the argument of a celebrated novelist Dmitry Bykov, the contemporary situation is identical to the USSR in 1984 but lacking any of the positive features of the Soviet system, from social solidarity to the perception of participating in a grandiose historical project, that were still visible in the final years of the USSR (Bykov 2007).

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Despite innumerable shortcomings of the Soviet Union in 1984, the system could at least be criticized in its own terms, as failing to deliver on its promises, or, as Soviet dissidents were always keen to point out, as not abiding by its own laws, norms and declared values. We need only recall the fact that the rise to prominence of Boris Yeltsin and the anticommunist ‘Democratic Russia’ movement in the late 1980s began with the protest against the ‘privileges’ enjoyed by state and party officials, which contradicted the ritualistic invocations of equality in the official Soviet discourse. In contrast, while the privileges in question certainly pale in comparison with the hyperbolically sumptuous lifestyle of the postcommunist elites, including the renowned ‘democrats’ themselves, the ubiquitous criticism of the new oligarchy in the 1990s did not have similarly far-reaching consequences, simply because there was no longer any stable discursive background against which these extravagant excesses would appear inappropriate. By the same token, campaigns against corruption that brought down many incumbent officials during the late-Soviet period have been highly ineffective in the postcommunist period, not merely owing to the evidently selective character of law enforcement, but, more importantly, because ‘corrupt’ practices no longer exemplify the transgression of the rule but rather the rule itself. Criticizing in its own terms the system that emerged during late Yeltsinism and was consolidated under Putin is therefore practically impossible. Having suspended the messianic suspension of history, but without thereby succeeding in putting history back into motion, the existing regime lacks the very terms in which it could be subjected to a critique, that is, it is devoid of any set of values or ideological content that it could then be accused of perverting. While the Soviet system from Stalin onwards is conventionally perceived as a perversion of the socialist ideal, postcommunist politics makes perversion itself its own ideal, obliterating any distinction between the ideal and the real and thus making it logically impossible for Putinism to ever ‘go wrong’ or be ‘improved’. In 2000, Putin launched his policy of economic reforms with a selfconsciously humble slogan of ‘catching up with Portugal’ (at the time the poorest EU member-state), much to the chagrin of communists and nationalists who continued to frame their vision of the ‘Russian idea’ in rather more cosmic terms. After the two terms of the Putin presidency, Russia has not only ‘caught up’ with Portugal in economic terms but also regressed politically to resemble Salazar’s Portugal, which Badiou has aptly described as a ‘dreary authoritarianism, bringing nothing but the preservation of things and an avaricious, well-policed hoarding, entirely


alien to the flamboyance of fascism’ (Badiou 2007b, 113). Lacking anything resembling a developmental project, the Putinite cratocracy fetishizes the sheer manifestation of power that can find no outlet for its application and therefore inevitably fails to appropriate its object. In terms of Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, cratocracy consists in the infinite oscillation between the two poles of law and life, whereby power can never apply itself to its object as law (because ‘as law’ it is nothing more than a lifeless assemblage of ritualized forms) but only attains it in the brute facticity of its own force as life. Cratocracy can surely threaten its subjects with use of force or even actualize this threat in exemplary acts of violence. What it can never do is govern its subjects insofar we understand government in the Foucauldian sense of positive and productive use of power. Beneath every exhibition of the grandeur of the Russian Estado Novo, we may catch a glimpse of the tragicomic figure of Vice-President Rutskoi, the embodiment of power that is ‘relieved of all assignments’ and can therefore do nothing but manifest its very existence. We should not underestimate the potential stability of this paradoxical form of power – after all, the centuries of romance poetry or the diversity of contemporary fetishist practices demonstrate the possibility of a mode of praxis that is sustained by the very withholding of its application or the absence of its fulfillment (see Agamben 1993a, 20–26, 129–130). Insofar as postcommunist governments are content with abiding in the glory of their inoperative sovereignty at an unbridgeable distance from their subjects that can only be traversed by the conversion of formal sovereignty into physical force, nothing can disturb the stability of such a system. However, just as neither courtly love nor the kinkiest form of fetishism usually yields any offspring, cratocratic power is fundamentally fruitless, which entails that it functions as, ironically, a perfect correlate of the post-historical society that has rendered itself utterly inoperative. The only manner of being proper to state power in the post-historical condition of postcommunism is the very impropriety and obscenity of its cratocratic exhibitionism.

As Not While the postcommunist state responds to the post-historical anomie through the snobbish ritualization of bespredel and the reduction of political authority to the cratocratic manifestation of power qua pure force, the alternative response, based on the Agambenian messianic version of the end of history, consists in the appropriation of the

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postcommunist anomie as an object of play, whereby the stable synchrony of ritualistic forms is dissolved and they become literally de-formed, liberated from their canonical function and open to unpredictable strategies of use. Yet, while the examples from Grebenshikov’s lyrics, discussed above, demonstrate how the praxis of play is capable of using disparate elements of the cultural tradition in both sublimating and desublimating ways, it is difficult to imagine what the free use of anomie might possibly look like. Agamben’s own suggestions on this matter in his political writings remain elusive, yet acquire greater intelligibility in the context of his more first-philosophical works, particularly his reinterpretation of Pauline messianism. For Agamben, ‘to show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of “politics”. Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as “constituent power” (i.e. the violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law.’ (Agamben 2005a, 88) Agamben’s ‘coming politics’ (2000, 12) is entirely contained in social praxis that is no longer tied either to law or to history and is freed from the imperative to articulate nomos and anomie in the state of exception and thereby confine anomie within the formal legal edifice. Instead, law in its anomic inoperosity is revealed as entirely indistinct from life (2005a, 63), which paves the way for the appropriation of anomie in social praxis. To say that in the state of exception law becomes indistinct from life simply means that it has become pure factum, a dead letter, a nonsignifying form, that can easily enter new relations of signification as a ‘thing’ that can be brought to speech in innumerable non-canonical ways. This entails neither the destruction of the law (or political order more generally) nor the appropriation of its power for an alternative historical project but rather the profane dissociation of the general and unconstrained ‘usability’ of the law from its ordering performative force. For Agamben, the paradigm of this ethical disposition is provided by the Pauline expression ‘as not’ (hos me), used in the First Letter to the Corinthians to describe messianic time as a ‘contracted’ or recapitulated mode of temporality:

But this I say, brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not


weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. But I wish you to be without care. (I Cor 7: 29–32, cited in Agamben 2005b, 23)

The formula ‘as not’ must be distinguished both from the affirmation of the identity of the opposites (e.g. weeping is the same as not weeping) and from the identification of one term with another (e.g. weeping is actually rejoicing). Instead, its significance is contained in the tension within the concept itself, which is undermined from within by the revocation of its content without altering its form. The ‘as not’ should thus be kept rigorously distinct from the rather more familiar form of ‘as if’, which, from Kant onwards, was widely used in philosophy, for example, in Adorno’s ‘post-Auschwitz ethics’, to posit fictitious conditions as ‘regulative ideas’ guiding action in the present (Agamben 2005b, 36–37. See also Taubes 2004, 53–54, 74–76). In contemporary political philosophy, this logic is operative in the Derridean version of messianism, whose above-discussed slogan of ‘democracy to come’ presupposes, precisely by virtue of its clear distinction from something like a ‘future democracy’ (see Derrida 1994, 2005), that it is never actually going to arrive (i.e. it will remain ‘to come’ at any point in the future) but must rather motivate contemporary praxis as if it were already here. On the contrary, the Pauline ‘as not’ does not leave the subject any vantage point from which one could profess the ‘as if’ fiction of the already redeemed humanity: ‘The messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entire subject’ (Agamben 2005b, 41). The subject of the messianic vocation experiences precisely the Aufhebung of every ‘as if’, every ‘regulative idea’ in its coincidence with factical reality, the saved being entirely coextensive with the irreparably ruined, which in the messianic time is ‘released from itself to allow for its use’ (ibid., 43). Rather than being endowed with a privileged, though entirely fictive, perspective, from which to imagine the scene of redemption, the subject of messianic time is internally undermined by the coincidental operation of the logics of conservation and nullification. It is in this sense that the Pauline formula ‘as not’ resonates with the definition of parody offered by Agamben (2007b, 48): just as parody only attains its object by its relocation to an improper context, in which it appears deformed or ‘beside itself’, so the messianic disposition of ‘as not’ permits one to dwell in the same factical condition, whose

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force is nonetheless revoked or put into question. Just as parody is marked by ‘language’s inability to reach the thing and the impossibility of the thing finding its own name’ (ibid., 50), so messianic praxis deactivates from within any substantive calling or vocation that the subject finds itself in. As opposed to the fictional orientation of the ‘as if’, which elevates its object to the sublime status at the cost of its ultimate unattainability, the ‘as not’ disposition, whose many examples we have provided in Grebenshikov’s parodies of both the Soviet and the post-Soviet realities, attains its object precisely through its profaning deformation, the duplication of its being in an inoperative state (cf. Virno 2008, 151–163). It is this condition that Paul invites the members of the messianic community to use rather than to possess. The messianic vocation is not a right, nor does it furnish an identity; rather, it is a generic potentiality that can be used without ever being owned. To be messianic, to live in the Messiah signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-factical property [ . . . ] under the form of the as not. This expropriation does not, however, found a new identity; the new creature is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old. (Agamben 2005b, 26) We should pay attention to the intricate dialectic of expropriation and appropriation at work in this logic. What we have termed above the appropriation of bespredel is the appropriation of that which has already been expropriated with regard to its positive content, the proper having no content other than the free use of the improper. We could therefore speak of both the expropriation of all propriety in the sense of stable identitarian predicates defining one’s vocation and of the appropriation of the gesture of expropriation itself, whereby forms of vocation, emptied of all content, are retained as objects of use. The postcommunist appropriation of anomie should therefore not be viewed as leading to the emergence of the new definition of the ‘proper’ that would become the ground of a postcommunist identity: any such definition is a priori rendered inoperative in the limitless expanse of bespredel (cf. Agamben 2005b, 34). Instead, the very expanse of bespredel, with all the recapitulated historical forms in their ‘improper’ condition, is rendered available for free use, its undecidable limitlessness no longer functioning as an obstacle. Let us illustrate this


logic with an analysis of a fragment from Grebenshikov’s ‘Northern Colour’: Crowberry is on the porch, In the house there sleeps a beast, In the house there waits an angel. In the house it is far from the morning. Crowberry is on the porch, She is on the other side of the glass, And I would open the door for her, If I knew where it was. [...] No one will read the list of ships to the end. Who needs to see their own name in it? We walked to the wall, to where there should be a wall, But there is only morning there and the shadows of your face. (‘Northern Colour’, Sister Chaos, 2002) The first verse evokes the experience of suspension and undecidability of bespredel, marked by the perpetual deferral of the ‘morning’ and the coexistence of ‘beasts’ and ‘angels’. In this condition, redemption, incarnated in ‘Crowberry’ (empetrum, a berry used for medicinal purposes to heal sore eyes), remains at hand (‘on the porch’) but radically inaccessible, as we cannot even recognize the door that leads to it. It is this debilitating sense of the unattainability of redemption, addressed in Chapter 4, that is transcended in the second verse. The first two lines make a reference to Osip Mandelstam’s famous poem ‘Insomnia, Homer, Taut Sails’ (1915), which itself alluded to Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad, which features a long and somewhat tedious catalogue of battleships of the Achaean army sailing to Troy. While the subject of Mandelstam’s poem ‘[has] read the list of ships halfway’ and enters a dreamlike state, in which insomnia is overcome through an immersion into a literary landscape, Grebenshikov’s allusion produces a rather different effect that relates to awakening rather than overcoming insomnia. The ‘list of ships’ is never read to the end, because what one is bound to discover there at some point is nothing but one’s own name, insofar as one’s existence remains captured within the paradigm of historical struggle. Recalling our reading of Grebenshikov’s Perestroika-era lyrics in Chapter 3, it is this condition of ‘being stuck in the struggle’ that

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resigns the late- and post-Soviet subject to the confinement ‘between law and love’ in the state of bespredel. As long as we continue to read the interminable battleship catalogue that we ourselves are, the ‘morning’ of the appropriation of our own freedom remains inaccessible. On the contrary, the interruption of the historical process that leaves the catalogue ‘read halfway’ dislocates the obstacles that the undecidability of bespredel, addressed in Chapter 4, poses to its reappropriation. In the context of the ‘as not’ disposition the path that seemed to be a guaranteed dead-end (‘where there should be a wall’) is suddenly revealed as leading to the sought-after ‘morning’ and the promise of reunion with the elusive loved one (‘shadow of your face’). It appears that the very existence of the wall (first postulated as a fact and then immediately revealed as a presupposition) was only posited by and for ourselves to restrain our movement, much as every conservatism gains adherents not so much by its praise of the reality to be conserved but by convincing us that every attempt at transforming it is doomed from the outset, certain to end in a ‘dead-end’. Dwelling in the mode of ‘as not’, negligent towards the obstacles posed by any constituted authority, the postcommunist subject is able to overcome the condition of the unattainability of the proper that marks the space of bespredel. Recalling Paul’s injunction to his followers in I Cor. 7 (‘I wish you to be without care’), Grebenshikov concludes ‘Northern Light’ with a declaration: ‘I see no reason to be careful’. Thus, the ethics of ‘as not’ entails radical political consequences. In its negligent deactivation of all constituted authority, it illuminates ‘the substantial illegitimacy of each and every power in the messianic time’ (Agamben 2005b, 111). Agamben’s original interpretation of the famous passage in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the katechon that restrains the advent of the Antichrist asserts that rather than grounding something like a Christian ‘doctrine of State power’, as Carl Schmitt (2003, 59–60) famously suggested, this passage harbours no positive valuation of the katechon whatsoever. Instead, the katechon (i.e. all forms of constituted power) serves to conceal the ‘absence of law’ that already characterizes messianic time and thus does nothing other than defer the moment of the messianic Aufhebung of the law. In the Pauline logic this semblance of the law (i.e. its being in force without significance) must be stripped off and all power revealed as the ‘absolute outlaw’ (Agamben 2005b, 111. Cf. Rasch 2007; Virno 2008, 56–65). It is here that the ethics of postcommunism clearly enters a field of tension with the ritualistic tendency of the Russian political regime since 1993, which embodies the idea of the katechon,


its sole justification being precisely the maintenance of a semblance of order amid the facticity of bespredel that conceals the general anomie that defines postcommunism. We may now formulate the central dynamic of postcommunist politics in terms of the relation between two modes of coming to terms with the end of history, the Kojèvian ritualistic statism and the Agambenian playful social praxis. While the cratocratic state attempts to ward off its own dissolution by the ritualization of the anomie of bespredel and the supplementation of the lost force of law with extra-juridical force, the social ethics of inoperosity, descending from the late-Soviet praxis of disengagement, consists in the reappropriation of bespredel for profane, free use in non-canonical contexts. Neither engaged in a frontal antagonism with the postcommunist cratocracy nor simply apolitical, this ethics may be conceived as a constitutive limit of postcommunist politics in the narrow, statist sense. As we have concluded in Chapter 2, Putinism is both enabled and limited by the fundamental prohibition on any productive governmental intervention in the life of the Russian society. The guiding principle of social praxis from the late-Soviet period onwards has been the disengagement from the public sphere, which left the political domain entirely free for appropriation by the postcommunist bureaucratic oligarchy, which then secured its hold on it by means of a series of authoritarian and depoliticizing measures during the Putin presidency. Yet, this societal disengagement was not a case of ‘exile’ or ‘internal emigration’ but rather a purposive strategy to release the grip of power on one’s existence, that is, to externalize power (see Prozorov 2007a, chapter 5). Such an externalization has nothing to do with the seizure of power in the attempt to replace the postcommunist cratocracy with an alternative form of political order. As we have argued in Chapter 2, the only possible successor to the ritualistic reign of Putinism is the diffuse spectacle of Yeltsinism, which, as both the suppression of the October 1993 rebellion and the 1994–1996 Chechen War remind us, was not exactly averse to violence either. Neither of these modes of the post-historical state of exception is of any use to the reappropriation by the postcommunist society of its ‘being-thus’, as both of them are conditioned by the illusion that the end of history does not simultaneously augur the end of the state and that the sheer existence of the state qua cratocracy is sufficient to ground the identities of postcommunist subjects. The alternative to the maintenance of inoperative statehood in force without significance in a diffused or concentrated manner is a thoroughly non-statist ethico-political imperative that relegates state power

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into a position of utter exteriority to the social being-in-common. To externalize state power from social praxis is not to defeat it on its own terrain; it is rather to leave it to its own devices, to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, with the proviso that outside the terrain of teleo-ideological governmentality there is little rendered unto Caesar except a pure presence of formal sovereignty that can never be applied other than through a paradoxical self-cancellation, whereby law merges with life through the actualization of its power of death. To the state power that cannot be used, there stands opposed the mode of social praxis that consists in free use without possession. This mode of praxis evidently resonates with the Pauline idea of the power that ‘realizes itself in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:9, cf. Taubes 2004, 55–56; Agamben 2005b, 136–137). While ritualized sovereignty manifests itself without realizing itself, that is, maintains itself as a pure form dissociated from the life of its subjects, the practice of free use realizes or expends its own power precisely in its activity of play. To expend power is certainly to diminish it, yet this does not mean that our activities end in frustration and failure. The playful use that consumes the ritualized forms of teleo-ideology, law or tradition is not an exercise in production and accumulation, but rather a workless and hence unproductive expenditure of force, so that a certain exhaustion or weakening is its necessary outcome. Nonetheless, this exhaustion or ‘powerlessness’ that Agamben calls ‘the impotent omnivalence of whatever being’ (Agamben 1993b, 10) is not an abject state of privation, but rather an accomplishment of a life that has reached the ‘perfection of its own power’ (Agamben 2000, 114). Given Agamben’s messianic emphasis on the suspension or destruction of hierarchies, we should understand ‘perfection’ not in the sense of excellence or supremacy, but rather in the sense of fruition, achievement or realization. The perfection of the power of life is precisely its weakening through realization. In this manner, realized power or potentiality survives its actualization in the form of weakness or, in other words, achieves itself as weakness (Agamben 2005b, 97). Another, non-reflexive way of grasping the Pauline idea approaches weakness as the effect of the exercise of power on its object. As opposed to sovereign power, which realizes itself through its self-cancellation in the use of violence, messianic power is not realized through destruction or elimination but through rendering inoperative, that is, weakening, its antagonist. This reading returns us to the already familiar theme of the messianic katargesis. Power is realized through dwelling in the mode of ‘as not’ that weakens the figures of authority, be it law, ideology or


cultural tradition, deactivating their performative force and rendering them available for use as either signifiers (forms) or signifieds (semantic contents) that enter into previously unthinkable relations and produce most unorthodox combinations. Rather than engage in the oppositional work against the existing authority, this strategy un-works authority itself without thereby introducing any new authoritative content (cf. Nancy 1991, 31). Combining these two understandings, we end up with the figure of social praxis that consists in the realization (expenditure and weakening) of its own power through the weakening (rendering inoperative, deactivation) of constituted authority: This is the remnant of potentiality that is not consumed in the act but is conserved in it each time and dwells there. If this remnant of potentiality is thus weak, if it cannot be accumulated in any form of knowledge or dogma, and if it cannot impose itself as law, it does not follow that it is passive or inert. To the contrary, it acts in its own weakness, rendering the word of law inoperative, in de-creating and dismantling the states of fact or of law, making them freely available for use. (Agamben 2005b, 137) This power of inoperosity weakens itself by weakening its object and is thus wholly contained in weakness, which is both its instrument and its effect. There is thus little sense in opposing the postcommunist cratocracy with an alternative project that it will certainly incorporate into its ritualized edifice and thus fortify itself. Foregoing any mobilization and frontal antagonism, inoperative praxis rather arrives at a weakening of both its own and its adversary’s power.

The Secret Wisdom of the Dancing Girls Yet, what is this mode of praxis that is contained entirely in weakening all forms of constituted authority without any claim to the constituent power of its own? What is it that acts ‘in its own weakness’, and what concrete form does such an action take? We shall address these question in a reading of two Akvarium songs of the late 1990s, that both employ the metaphor of dance to describe inoperative praxis. ‘On the Way to Damascus’, dedicated to Georgy Zyablitsev, an Orthodox priest murdered in Moscow in September 1997, begins with a familiarly

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bleak description of the postcommunist bespredel that is no longer recognizable as one’s homeland: Over the River Moskva there rises a Dog Star, But you cannot afford to look up. In Moroccan ports the renegades of Islam Wait for you to pay off your debts. In all of Smolensk there is no cocaine. It is a temporary shortage of raw materials. You will not recognize the places where you grew up When you come around. The resurrection of the remnants of the Holy Beatle, The display of forgotten relics. You bang your head against the wall, screaming ‘She Loves You!’ But who can remember Latin here? And white people’s songs here sound Like the screams of the ravens; You will need a guide and an interpreter When you come around. And the girls still dance, Fourteen in a row. And you can’t understand that you only see them Because they want you to. Ask them why their spring is wiser than your September. (‘On the Way to Damascus’, Lilith, 1997) Crucially for Grebenshikov, for whom rock music was a decisive influence in ethical self-formation, even the Beatles have lost all living meaning in the postcommunist terrain, being reduced to ‘forgotten relics’ and comparable to Latin as a dead language. Despite this dreary scenery, the third verse breaks with the mood of detached criticism of the low morals of the day in a clear affirmation of the superiority of the ‘wisdom’ of the dancing girls to the laments of a disenchanted returnee. The content of this wisdom is never specified by Grebenshikov, which leads us to suggest that it must consist in the dance itself that is opposed to the external position of a critical observer, whose very distance from the reality he is surveying prevents him from ever succeeding in his quest for the appropriation of postcommunism as his ethos. It is hardly fortuitous that the ‘secret’ of the postcommunist ethos is to be found in dance, which is a singular form of art that is entirely


contained in the act itself. ‘The paradigm of a vanishing art, dance does not produce works in the ordinary sense of the term’ (Badiou 2007b, 159). Dance is a work of art that consists in the instant effacement of itself, that does not leave a trace in the form of a message that could be separated from the act. In this sense, dance fulfils the dream of 20th -century avant-garde art to move beyond the substance of the ‘work’ towards a form of art, entirely contained in the act itself and thus merging entirely with life (ibid, 157–160. See also Groys 2003, 33–52). The wisdom of the dancing girls thus consists in manifesting something that is present in every work (the act of its production) but formalized in its purity only in dance, which possesses no content other than its own act. For Agamben, dance is the paradigm of the inoperative non-instrumental praxis that he variably terms ‘gesture’, ‘special being’ or ‘means without end’: ‘[dance] is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporeal movements’ (Agamben 2000, 58). Dance is neither a means to an end that is external to it (e.g. the production of a work, poiesis) nor an end in itself (praxis), but rather a singular mode of poiesis that is entirely exhausted in its own praxis. As a ‘gestural’ phenomenon, dance neither produces nor acts but rather exposes its means, thus communicating nothing other than communicability itself (Agamben 1999a, 83–85). Marked by the absolute superiority of doing over saying, of form over content, dance is a perfect exemplar of the paradoxical notion of the pure performative that we have discussed at length above. Following the logic presented in Chapter 3, dance merges entirely with life, becoming no longer a dictum (as opposed to e.g. a poem or a film that can be analyzed as being about something, as statements about an extrinsic event) but a factum, that is, the event itself as pure means. The wisdom of the dancers that Grebenshikov tries to impart to his interlocutor therefore consists in the affirmation of pure, inoperative praxis, abandoned to itself and eluding its mobilization in a project that would endow it with meaning or foundation. In his reinterpretation of Heidegger’s thought of Ereignis, Agamben invokes this idea of abandonment to oneself as the characteristic of the end of the history of Being: [Being] no longer destines anything, having exhausted its figures (the figures of its oblivion) and revealing itself as pure destining without destiny and figure. But, at the same time, this pure destining without destiny appears as the Proper of man. What thinking must confront here is no longer tradition or history – destiny – but rather destining itself, [which is] pure abandonment of the self to what has neither propriety nor destiny; it is pure accustoming and habit.

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But this abandonment of the self to itself is precisely what destines humankind to tradition and to history, remaining concealed, the ungrounded at the ground of every ground, the nameless that, as unsaid and untransmissible, transmits itself in every name and every historical transmission. (Agamben 1999a, 131) The habitual praxis of ‘pure means’ is the source of all tradition and all history that is disconcealed only at the point when history arrives at its end, when transmission no longer transmits anything besides itself and all traditions are rendered inoperative. To recall Agamben’s critique of deconstruction, the ineffable foundation of tradition and history is not to be thought negatively as the abyss of diffèrance, whereby ‘the absence of destiny and ground is thus transformed into an infinite destiny and ground’ (Agamben 1999a, 134). Instead, this foundation, as the instance of the non-historical at work in every historical epoch, is revealed by Agamben to be nothing other than praxis itself in the sheer facticity of its being-thus. Similarly, in the domain of language the ineffable foundation of all speech is nothing other than what Agamben calls factum loquendi, that is, the fact of the existence of language as such, before and beyond all particular languages, which linguistics must always silently presuppose as an axiom in its study of any individual language as an object (Agamben 1999a, 66–68; 2000, 66). Similarly, the secret wisdom that Grebenshikov’s dancing girls impart consists in nothing more than the affirmation of the priority of the facticity of human speech and praxis to any historical tradition or project, to any identity or cultural form, to any political regime or governmental rationality. It is the concealment of this ‘foundational facticity’ under the veneer of historical epochs that initially led to the disorientation of postcommunist subjects in the early 1990s, as the end of history was received in apocalyptic terms and the limitlessness of bespredel was perceived as an abyss of negativity. This perception brought about a radical alienation and escape from the field of social praxis, which, precisely in its limitlessness and unfoundedness, is readily available for free use. This misrecognition of postcommunist bespredel as one’s dwelling place is brilliantly described, using the same principal metaphor, in ‘Girls Are Dancing Alone’: We have closed our eyes not to know how bad it is, And we no longer care if it is night or day. In an antiquarian fire, there quietly burns out the epoch,


While there is a waltz playing at the barber shop, And the girls are dancing alone. [...] All the icons are sewn up, there is no place for holy images, And the Holiest of the Holy is dumped in the dust. In the altar, like a candle, there fades a lively bride, But there has been a trend shift, So the girls are dancing alone. From the caves of Katmandu to the bridges of San Francisco, The East is colored in pink and in the shadows there glimmer The doors to Eden that are always too close, But we were too lazy, And so the girls are dancing alone. Teach me to sing against all hope, To take off and fly through the curtains of the Earth. Let all that was before burn brighter than a thousand Suns. A new day begins, And the girls are dancing alone. (‘The Girls are Dancing Alone’, Prayer and Lent, 1999) Similarly to ‘On the Road to Damascus’, this song is based on the contrast between the external stance of the observer, whose discourse documents the disastrous scene of postcommunism, and the ‘dancing girls’ who dwell in this domain, their existence entirely contained in the instantly vanishing act of dance as a pure factum of being-thus. The external discourse focuses on the substance of what postcommunism is and, finding it to be nothing more than the pure negativity of bespredel, ‘closes it eyes’, no longer caring to distinguish night from day or Being from Nothingness, insofar as the two are indeed revealed as indistinct. Posing the question of the essence of postcommunism, this discourse arrives at the only possible answer that this essence is contained in pure negativity, the ‘burning out’ of the epoch in an ‘antiquarian fire’. What remains in the aftermath of this fire that consumes the epochal sendings of Being is the scene of utter destruction, already familiar to us from Grebenshikov’s works of the 1990s (‘sewn up icons’ with the ‘Holiest of the Holy dumped in the dust’, ‘the fading bride in the altar’ who has become unwanted owing to a ‘trend shift’). Yet, in contrast to those earlier songs, the author’s attention is now focused on the girls that continue their dance throughout this time of the end, the ‘passing of the

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world’, apparently quite negligent with regard to the consummation of history. In the final verse, the author himself abandons all care in letting ‘all that was before burn brighter than a thousand suns’ in an appeal that has an evident resonance with the Pauline invocation of ‘hope against hope’ (Romans 4: 18): ‘teach me to sing against all hope’. Yet, unlike in the songs of the early 1990s, in which redemption, however minimal in a substantive sense, remained withheld from the postcommunist subjects, in this song it is available in the here and now. In the fourth verse Grebenshikov presents a powerful image of the ‘doors to Eden that are always too close’, inaccessible to us only because of our ‘laziness’. What is this Eden that is always too close and thus remains inaccessible to us by virtue of its very proximity? It is evident that the girls are dancing alone precisely because of our reticence to join them, our purposeful cultivation of the distance from the domain of bespredel. It is easy to see why this distance has been cultivated by the practitioners of para-Soviet ethics: as our discussion of the ritualization of cultural heritage in Chapter 4 demonstrated, any attempt to negate the negativity of bespredel merely leads to the exacerbation of social nihilism under the ludicrous veneer of stabilization. Having established what postcommunism is (i.e. bespredel, the post-historical machine running on empty, a nihilistic cratocracy – in short, Nothing), we, including Grebenshikov himself in his poetry of the early 1990s, were ‘too lazy’ to take one step further and affirm the sheer facticity of its existence as a site for the reconstitution of our habitual ethos: ‘in the exhaustion of the dimension of being, the figure of humanity’s having emerges for the first time in its simple clarity’ (Agamben 1991, 81. Emphasis original). This figure is precisely what awaits us beyond the doors of Eden and what is tirelessly communicated by the idle gestures of the dancing girls. As pure gesture that communicates nothing but communicability itself, their dance is the site of what Agamben has termed experimentum linguae, the experience of the existence of language as such, the exposition of the factum loquendi that serves as the unspeakable foundation of all languages: [The] age in which we are living is the age, in which, for the first time, it becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence – to experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but the fact itself of speaking. The experience in question here does not have any objective content and cannot be formulated as a proposition referring to a state of things


or to a historical situation. It does not concern a state, but an event of language; it does not pertain to this or that grammar but to the factum loquendi as such. (Agamben 2000, 116) The experimentum linguae seeks to eliminate the unspeakable negative foundation of all speech by bringing it to speech as such. In this manner, social praxis becomes devoid even of a negative foundation, exposing us simultaneously to the utmost privation of ‘not even being Nothing’ and the infinite potentiality of existence that is truly ‘whatever’. How is it possible to bring this unspeakable presupposition to speech, given the non-existence of anything like a meta-language? Presupposed in every act of speech, the experience of the existence of language must be suspended from its own transmission for signification to be possible, for language to pass into discourse. How can we then conceive of a language that ‘having eliminated all of its propositions and names, and, no longer having anything to say, now simply speaks’? (Agamben 1999a, 60) To grasp this experience we need to return to the idea of a pure performative in the context of messianic time. Agamben’s notion of experimentum linguae resonates strongly with his more recent reconstruction of the gospel (euaggelion) or the ‘word of faith’ in Pauline messianism: ‘[The] experience of the word of faith does not entail the experience of a denotative character of the word, its referring to things, but enacts its meaning through its utterance’ (Agamben 2005b, 131). The word of faith is thus a performative act; yet, insofar as in the messianic logic it does not sustain the law but renders it inoperative, it is a singular form of the performative that Agamben terms performativum fidei. Both the traditional notion of the performative that he terms performativum sacramenti (deployed to inaugurate and reproduce the nomos) and the ‘word of faith’ are nothing other than ‘a revelation of language itself, an experience of a pure event of the word that exceeds every signification’ (ibid., 134). Yet, while the ‘sacramental’ performative attempts to encapsulate this excess by articulating it in precepts and semantic contents, [using it] as a means to ground contract and obligation’ (ibid., 134–135), performativum fidei maintains this excess beyond any determinate signification, ‘open[ing] up the space for gratuitousness and use’ (ibid., 135). For both law and religion to function, both performative operations are necessary: ‘if the performativum fidei is completely covered by the performativum sacramenti, then the law itself stiffens and atrophies and relations between men lose all sense of grace and vitality’ (ibid.). This is precisely what happened in the transformation of Soviet ideology

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into the pure sacramental performative and what is arguably happening in today’s post-transitional cratocracy, in which the law is a ‘dead letter’ that can only maintain its own semblance by putting itself under erasure in the state of exception. While its dissociation from faith leads to the degradation of the law, the ‘word of faith’ can on the contrary exist in the absence of all nomological prescription as an ‘[experience] of the word, which – without tying itself denotatively to things or taking itself as a thing – manifests itself as a pure and common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world’ (ibid., 135–136). Thus, the ‘word of faith’ clearly does not produce, actualize or perform anything but a pure potentiality of saying that cannot coincide either with any constative semantic content or with the ordering force of the sacramental performative. Neither a true-or-false proposition about the world nor its juridical ordering by an authoritative speech act, the performativum fidei is rather spoken by a ‘voice that, without signifying anything, signifies signification itself’ (Agamben 1999a, 42). It is therefore formally identical to the inoperative performative that we have introduced with respect to the formulae of the Soviet official discourse, but, in contrast to the latter, it derives its power from its very weakness and for this reason is untroubled by its lack of ordering force. Performativum fidei is the experience of language that profanes itself, that is, transforms its inoperosity in the realm of nomos into the potentiality for use in the sphere of habit and play. Thus, performativum fidei may be grasped as nothing other than the performativum sacramenti that, just as the Slave in our reconstruction of Kojève’s conception of the end of history, no longer works, not merely in the sense of its failure to perform but also in the sense of the reorientation of its function from using language to produce determinate effects in the real to manifesting the factum loquendi, the existence of language as such.

Free time and the Politics of Decreation If this affirmation of the power of pure sayability that realizes itself in weakness is barely conceivable as a political strategy, this is only because it is entirely heterogeneous to our predominant conception of politics, in which victory is equivalent to taking power through the seizure of the state. Yet, if the revolutionary experiences of the 20th century teach us anything, it is that the state, in Badiou’s brilliant expression, ‘does not change save hands and it is well-known that there is little strategic signification in such a change’ (Badiou 2005a, 110). On the other hand, we have seen that it was possible to bring down the Soviet order by a


purely negative gesture of disengagement from its public sphere and the profaning parody of its rituals in para-Soviet spaces of freedom. Similarly, the maintenance of this mode of praxis in the 1990s succeeded in deactivating the entire teleo-ideological dimension of early postcommunism, stopping in their tracks both the victorious ‘integration’ into the capitalist world economy and the nationalist retreat into a variably defined ‘Russian tradition’. It is from this perspective that we must consider Grebenshikov’s strikingly optimistic assessment of the effects of his ethical praxis: ‘we have already won, it is just not yet noticeable’ (‘While they are Bringing Sake’, Psi, 1999). At first glance, this statement, which sounded incredible in its original articulation in 1999, is even less believable in 2008, amid the full consolidation of the Putin–Medvedev regime and the utter degradation of social life under the dreary dominance of official patriotism and mindless consumerism. It would be evidently absurd to propose that the ethics of postcommunism that we have reconstituted in the analysis of Grebenshikov’s lyrics somehow dominates in the contemporary Russian society. Nonetheless, it is important to recall that domination is precisely what this ethical disposition opposes and seeks to render inoperative. We must therefore avoid assessing this singular ethics by the criteria of conventional political imagination and rather probe the effects that the practices it generates elicit in the absence of any domination or hegemony. Given the expiry of the entire teleoideological terrain after the demise of the Soviet order, any attempt to ‘overcome’ Putinism by negating action from the standpoint of an alternative project would necessarily come down to a tired replay of the diffuse elitist spectacle of the 1990s. As long as we search for the way out of bespredel through the negation of its negativity, we are bound to remain within its nihilistic coordinates: nothing is more nihilistic than a negation of nihilism. A genuine alternative to the opposition between Yeltsinism and Putinism, that could be termed the ‘third way’, if the metaphor of the ‘way’ were not completely inappropriate for the post-historical condition, is the profane reappropriation of the postcommunist bespredel that renders state power inoperative and reduces it to its pure form that we have defined as cratocracy. In this reappropriation that draws on its own weakness to weaken its adversary the work of negation is suspended and state power is left to its own devices. It is only by rendering inoperative the governmental control over ever wider zones of sociality (e.g. applying the gesture that so successfully deactivated Soviet and post-Soviet ideological power to the state apparatus as such) that cratocratic sovereignty may be pushed into utmost solitude,

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in which the ritualized majesty of power would find no outlet for its exercise. As Grebenshikov succinctly put it: ‘Great is the Emperor, no doubt, but he is like a DJ off the air’ (‘Zabodai’, Zoom Zoom Zoom, 2005). Almost echoing this description, in a June 2007 interview with the international press corps on the eve of the G8 summit President Putin entered into a sardonic tirade about himself as an ‘absolute democrat’ that ended in a baffling admission: ‘After the death of Mahatma Gandhi there has been nobody I could talk to’ (News.Ru Editorial 2007). Leaving aside the obscene humour whose function we have already addressed in Chapter 2, we may suggest that this solitude of the sovereign is a direct effect of the reduction of political power to a cratocratic exhibitionism that desperately attempts to assure itself of its own existence by flaunting its capacity for violence. Left out in the cold with his ghostly interlocutors, the sovereign finds himself deprived of the very transmissibility of authority, which has little to do with formal control over the media but rather requires capacity for productive intervention that mobilizes the subjects for the tasks imposed by governmental rationalities. It is this capacity that the contemporary regime manifestly lacks, and it is difficult to imagine how it can be restored amid the anomie, which is the condition of the regime’s own existence, and the societal withdrawal from the public sphere, which the regime has fostered and accelerated. Yet, as long as this capacity is lacking, the cratocratic state remains radically alienated from the existence of the postcommunist society, being merely one of the numerous hazards in the anomic space of bespredel rather than an ordering structure of authority. While the ‘oppositional’ political discourse in Russia remains trapped in the meaningless debate on whether Putinism is best-resisted by an anti-systemic assault on the state or some form of conditional incorporation within its structures, our approach highlights the possibilities of free social praxis that is neither within nor against the state, but rather beside it, dwelling in its inoperative potentiality and entirely negligent with regard to the state’s own inoperative reign. From this perspective, the ‘invisible victory’ that Grebenshikov proclaims has nothing to do with the hegemonic expansion of the ethics guiding his lyrics to the entire Russian society, let alone the use of this ethics for the construction of a ‘better’ form of state. As we have emphasized in Chapter 2, the idea of a poetic paradigm of the ethics of postcommunism should be rigorously distinguished from elevating poetry to the status of a privileged horizon of social praxis or its point of suture. The ethical disposition that guides Grebenshikov’s poetry is not an example that must be followed as a normative principle, but rather an


example that manifests, by being placed beside itself, the practices that already characterize the postcommunist society in a variety of domains, which only share with Grebenshikov’s poetry the orientation towards disengagement and the playful use of bespredel. There is thus nothing utopian whatsoever in this disposition, which draws on no other resources than the negativity of bespredel that it converts into a positive ethos. Yet, if this is a victory, what exactly is won by the postcommunist subjects that dwell in the ethos of inoperosity and play, disengaged from the ritualized edifice of the anomic state? What are the social implications of the experimentum linguae? The experience of pure sayability that signifies nothing is strictly analogous to Agamben’s more famous, if also elliptic, figure of ‘happy life’ or ‘form-of-life’ as an experience, for which nothing but living itself is any longer at stake, a ‘profane mystery, in which human beings, liberating themselves from all sacredness, communicate to each other their lack of secrets as their most proper gesture’ (Agamben 1999a, 85). Just as it is possible for speech to unfold without saying anything, so it is perfectly possible for human beings to exist without being anything, or rather being only their thus, whatever this is. Contrary to numerous critics, who accuse Agamben of evading the question of the possibilities of escaping the apocalyptic political condition he depicts (see e.g. Kalyvas 2005; Norris 2005; Laclau 2007), in the final pages of Homo Sacer (1998, 188) Agamben explicitly proposes this experience of ‘being without being anything’ as a solution to the lethal paradoxes of sovereignty: ‘Today bios lies in zoe exactly as essence, in the Heideggerian definition of Dasein, lies in existence.’ Recalling the argument in Language and Death (1991, 25–26) about a strict homology between Heidegger’s ontological difference and the difference between the factum loquendi and the signified content of speech, we may identify Agamben’s form-of-life, ‘this being that is only its own bare existence’ (1998, 188), as a precise social correlate of the experimentum linguae. The analogy is all the more forceful, insofar as both the pure experience of language and the pure experience of existence are made possible by the end of history, in which the epochal sendings of Being expire and humanity can finally stop ‘wandering through traditions’ (Agamben 1995, 98): ‘[This] simple figure of fulfilled humanity – which is to say, human humanity, would be what is left to say for speech that has nothing to say; it would be what is left to do for praxis that has nothing to do’ (Agamben 1999a, 135. Emphasis original). Agamben identifies the end of history with the beginning of what he calls the ‘universal history of humanity’, whose advent the

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dialectical process that constituted history as we know it has perpetually deferred: History as we know it up to now has been no more than its own incessant putting off, and only at the point in which its pulsation is brought to a halt is there any hope of grasping the opportunity enclosed within it, before it gets betrayed into becoming one more historical-epochal adjournment. In our stubborn effort to give ourselves time, we mislay the meaning of this gift, just as what gets lost in our incessant breaking into speech is the very reason for language. (Agamben 1995, 88. Emphasis added) Just as the existence of language that remained concealed as an ineffable foundation of discourse is brought to speech as such in the experimentum linguae, so the ‘universal history of humanity’ may be grasped as the coming to presence of the form of life that conditions every possible ‘historical-epochal adjournment’, while remaining concealed in it. As an extra-historical foundation of the historical process, this form of life unfolds in the ‘anarchic historicity’ of the kairological time of potentiality and freedom that is no longer actualized in any chronological epoch, even an epoch of nihilism. For this very reason this form of life has ‘nothing to do’ and is for the first time truly able to ‘give itself time’ and live in its ethos: There is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible – there would be only tasks to be done. (Agamben 1993b, 42) The end of history is thus nothing other than the liberation of time that the inoperative humanity is able to give itself by virtue of having nothing more to do. What does this liberation mean in the concrete existential sense? Our everyday experience readily provides an answer to this question in the commonly used phrase ‘free time’, which refers to the period that is taken out of the temporal economy of work and may be used (or not) in whatever way for whatever purpose. The notion of free time demonstrates that potentiality and inoperosity are mutually conditioning to the point of being indistinct, insofar as our being able (not) to do something depends on our not having to do anything else. It


is immediately clear that inoperosity is the very opposite of ‘doing nothing’, passivity and inaction – in fact, for most of us ‘free time’ is the only time in which we can really do whatever and happiness thus remains a permanently available possibility. The end of history in its messianic sense is then nothing more and nothing less than the transformation of all time into free time, the dissolution of the historical economy of work, which leaves us with nothing but free time on our hands. The end of history brings about neither passivity nor stagnation but the subtractive negation of the very dimension of epochality that endowed human beings with tradition at the same time as it expropriated their potentiality for the free use of time. Just as the workless Slave appropriates the inoperosity originally restricted to the figure of the Master, the lateSoviet society has wrestled its originary inoperosity away from the state power that in the Soviet period captured it in the teleo-ideological apparatuses of government and obliterated every possibility of its recapture during the postcommunist period. We must reiterate that this affirmation of inoperative potentiality is the very opposite of the logic of perpetual deferral in Derrida’s deconstruction: while deconstruction makes presence and fulfillment forever unattainable and resigns one to the undecidable existence within the orbit of the law in force without significance, the inoperative praxis of the free use of time, modeled on the experimentum linguae, renders this law inoperative in its Bartlebyan refusal of work and thus ‘decreates’ the existing order, dissolving it into absolute contingency, in which potentiality and actuality are wholly indistinct (Agamben 1999a, 270–271). Rather than marking the impossibility of the actualization of the limitless freedom of the human being, this decreation fully restores human existence to its potential status, itself being nothing other than the actual experience of the possible, ‘potentiality to not not-be’ (Agamben 1993b, 105), a lived experience of existence as such: The existent no longer refers back to being; it is in the midst of being, and being is entirely abandoned in the existent. Without refuge and nonetheless safe – safe in its being irreparable. Being, which is the existent, is forever safe from the risk of itself existing as a thing or of being nothing. The existent, abandoned in the midst of being, is perfectly exposed. (Ibid., 100) This idea of a being that is only the existent, a form of life exhausted in its potentiality for ‘whatever being’, returns us to the minimalist understanding of redemption in Grebenshikov’s songs of the early 1990s.

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Having nothing to do, Grebenshikov’s polar explorers are indeed saved precisely in their irreparable existence ‘as they are’. As the positive content of their being-thus has been nullified in their suspension of work, their existence is impossible to objectify as a substance, yet the potentiality restored to their existence by the liberation of time ensures that they are indeed safe from the risk of being nothing. Similarly, the barge hauler finds his salvation precisely in suspending his work and existing as nothing but his own possibility in the limitless terrain of bespredel. Yet, there is no longer any trace of negativity in this terrain, which is converted into a site of a purely affirmative experience of ‘whatever being’, an inoperative and thus irreducibly potential life, in which bios and zoe coincide completely. Indeed, the suspension of work qua negating action leads these and other characters of Grebenshikov’s songs out of the impasse of the ‘deficit of existence’, in which the only choice was between being something (confined within a particular identity, whose nullity has already been exposed by the diffèrance of bespredel) and notbeing. Instead, the affirmation of the power of existence as such recalls the carefree ethical disposition of the ‘electric dog’ in the 1982 song, which, to recall, was ‘not preoccupied with the question of what and why it must be’.

The Generic Community Being entirely ‘without what’ and ‘without why’, the ethics of postcommunism affirms the inoperosity of ‘whatever being’ as the originary dwelling place of humanity and in this manner nullifies every identity, every historical task and every tradition. Just as Yeltsin relieved Rutskoi of all assignments in 1993, this ethics relieves the formal political domain of all force and significance and thus abandons the post-transitional cratocracy to itself, to its own inoperative dwelling in its useless majesty, in which it can do little more than wither away, perhaps endlessly but no less irrevocably. Postcommunist social praxis is thus infinitely heterogeneous to any form of constituted authority and identitarian order but rather opens the possibility of a community, that can only be universal and non-exclusive to be adequate to the limitlessness that it appropriates as its ethos. Starting from the early 1980s, Agamben repeatedly posited the experimentum linguae as a ‘model’ for the coming community that is not grounded in any presupposition of identity, norm or value but is rather entirely exposed in its being-thus: ‘There can be no true human community on the basis of a presupposition – be it a nation, a language, or even the a priori of communication of which hermeneutics speaks.


What unites human beings among themselves is not a nature, a voice or a common imprisonment in a signifying language; it is the vision of language itself and therefore the experience of language’s limits, its end. A true community can only be a community that is not presupposed’ (Agamben 1999a, 47. Emphasis original. See also Agamben 1999a, 60–61, 115). Just as Grebenshikov’s search for redemption in the postcommunist bespredel eventually led him to the appropriation of its very limitlessness itself, Agamben’s vision of community is not a speculation on a radically different future but is rather conditioned by a ‘small displacement’ in the actual state of affairs in contemporary global politics, whose degradation into a permanent state of exception is itself an indicator of our time being pregnant with the messianic promise: [If] instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects. (Agamben 1993b, 64. Emphasis added) In Agamben’s argument, the messianic ‘time of the end’ is thus accelerated by the destructive power of the global ‘society of the spectacle’ itself, which ‘all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities’ (Agamben 1993b, 82). Once this destruction is carried to completion, we will be able to become ‘first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State’ (ibid.). Just as the experimentum linguae testifies to nothing more than the elementary and taken-for-granted factum loquendi, the political experiment at work in Agamben’s rethinking of community testifies to the factum pluralitatis (Agamben 2000, 66) of the existence of a human community beyond all identity and beyond all hope of identification that would permit the constitution of a ‘people’: Languages are the jargons that hide the pure experience of language, just as peoples are the more or less successful masks of the factum pluralitatis. [ . . . ] It is only by breaking at any point the nexus between the existence of language, grammar, people and state that thought and praxis will be equal to the tasks at hand. (Ibid., 70)

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It deserves to be emphasised that in this logic the ‘coming community’ is not something that is to be created in yet another historical project that once again puts human existence to work. Instead, the factum pluralitatis indicates that this community always already exists and it is this existence that is concealed by the postulation of such identitarian essences as the ‘people’ or a ‘nation’. The coming community is thus not to be established but rather subtracted from every essentialist project, which separates essence from existence, much as, in Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998), bios is isolated through the exclusion of zoe. Through such a subtraction that suspends the force of every identity, we arrive at a community, whose essence is exhausted in the facticity of its existence, or, in Agamben’s terms, ‘a form of life, wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe’ (1998, 188). Using the concept developed in Alain Badiou’s meta-ontology (2005a), we may term this non-exclusive and stateless community generic. Although Agamben rarely deploys this term in his work (Agamben 2000, 116; 2007b, 58), his numerous alternative terms (e.g. ‘being-such’, ‘being-thus’, ‘gesture’, ‘face’, ‘special being’ and ‘whatever singularity’) evidently resonate with Badiou’s concept of the generic and share a philosophical trajectory, as Agamben regularly refers to Georg Cantor’s concept of ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ and Russell’s paradox, which gave rise to the axiomatization of set theory that forms the foundation of Badiou’ philosophical project (Agamben 1993b, 71–77, 75; 2000, 89). In Badiou’s description, the generic multiple ‘contains a little bit of everything [but] only possesses the properties necessary to its existence as multiple in its material. It does not possess any particular, discerning, separative property. At base, its sole property is that of consisting as pure multiple, of being. Subtracted from language, it makes do with its being’ (Badiou 2005a, 371. Emphasis original). This notion echoes Agamben’s description of special being, which, ‘without resembling any other, resembles all the others’: ‘special being does not mean the individual, identified by this or that quality which belongs exclusively to it. On the contrary, it means a being insofar as it is ‘whatever being’, a being such that it is – generically and indifferently – each one of its qualities, adhering to them without allowing any of them to identify it’ (Agamben 2007b, 58). The notion of the generic sums up the features of a series of Agamben’s concepts that try to reclaim the problematic of community from identity politics and other essentialist forms of communitarianism: ‘Among beings who would always already be enacted, who would always already be this or that thing, this or that identity, and who would have entirely exhausted their power in these things and


these identities – among such beings there would not be any community but only coincidences and factual partitions’ (Agamben 2000, 10). It is evident that such a community, whose content is exhausted in the shared exposure to the sheer factum of being-in-common, is, to recall Jean Luc Nancy’s (1991) influential thesis, entirely ‘inoperative’, simply because ‘whatever singularities’ that inhabit it have bracketed off all presuppositions that might have constituted its ‘work’. The appropriation of the postcommunist bespredel as a space of habitual use by subjects that have deactivated their identitarian predicates and reappropriated them as objects of play does not install any limits to this space and thus does not establish it as a positivity, but rather, by virtue of its nonexclusive character, permanently threatens the global dissemination of this very limitlessness. It is in this sense that the experience of postcommunism may be understood as properly universal. Besides carrying socio-political consequences of global reach, the demise of the historical project of Soviet communism has opened a space, in which the universal human community appears thinkable as the only meaningful mode of being-in-common, given the expiry of all historical narratives that would endow the community with the foundation of a ‘common being’ in the substantive sense (see Nancy 2000, 5–41). While this claim might appear counter-intuitive, given the numerous ‘ethnic’ conflicts in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR (see Derlugian 2005), the very existence of such conflicts exposes the utter bankruptcy of the very idea of the ‘people’ or a ‘nation’, whose positivity can only emerge supplemented by the violent extermination of the excess that resists its reduction to an identity, either ‘national’ or ‘minoritarian’ (Agamben 2000, 29–36). Rather than exemplify the revival of primordial ethno-cultural identities in the aftermath of the collapse of the system that sought to dispense with them in a global project of communist universalism, these conflicts demonstrate, if additional proof were necessary, the expiry of the ordering force of the idea of the nation and its degeneration into a discursive counterpart to sacrificial or genocidal violence (see Agamben 1998, 38, 174–180). Reducing community to the self-immanence of ‘communion’, the discourse of peoples and nations contains no other possibility of being-in-common than that of communion in death: ‘political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the community that is governed by it’ (Nancy 1991, 12). Even when the violence of the constitution of the people is tempered by the liberal-democratic rhetoric of globalization, the

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problem persists, as in this terrain of global capitalism that the postSoviet ‘nations’ are striving to reach in their ‘transition’, the question of what peoples are for and what they could possibly do in the absence of all historical tasks reveals the utmost degree of substantive vacuity and ethical bankruptcy of all identitarian communities. [One] of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt. Every people has had its own way of going bankrupt, and certainly it does make a difference that for the Germans it meant Hitler and Auschwitz, for the Spanish it meant a civil war, for the French it meant Vichy, for other people instead it meant the quiet and atrocious 1950s, and for the Serbs it meant the rapes of Omarska; in the end, what is crucial for us is only the new task that such a failure has bequeathed us. Perhaps, it is not even accurate to define it as a task, because there is no longer a people to undertake it. (Agamben 2000, 142) However, the awareness of the bankrupt status of the mythologemes of peoples and nations is not in itself sufficient to disrupt their being in force without significance, that is, their ritualistic and meaningless reproduction in the state of exception. The continued manifestation of these ‘bankrupt’ cultural forms in a spectral, ‘undead’ status testifies to the ultimate blockage of the historical machine, its inability to bury its dead and thereby ensure the transformation of the present into the pure synchrony of the past (see Agamben 2007a, 92–95). A society that is incapable of doing away with its vacuous symbols of ‘common being’, be it ‘great culture’ or ‘the national idea’, will only be able to reproduce itself as a ‘killing machine’ (Agamben 2005a, 86) that sacrifices the present existences to keep alive the phantoms of the past. The 2004 massacre in Beslan mercilessly demonstrates that the price for refusing to bury one’s dead, to banish the ghosts of past glories, is, inevitably, having to bury one’s children. In Agamben’s argument, the only possibility of jamming this killing machine consists in the profanation of these phantoms, which removes them from the separate sacred sphere and restores them to nonconventional use. In this manner, the continuing existence of peoples and nations in their spectral state of bankruptcy is rendered inoperative, the ritualized ‘common being’ dissolved in the generic community of ‘whatever being’, which is always ‘being-in-common’ owing to the absence of any identitarian predicates that could specify the criterion


of commonality. These practices of the profanation of all particularistic communities do not merely reveal the nullity of the onto-political categories that continue to structure conventional political discourses but also disturb the grip of sovereign power on human existence. The universal generic community that renders inoperative every figure of the people, every particularistic invocation of a ‘common being’, therefore posits the most serious danger to the state, which Agamben discusses in ‘Tiananmen’, the moving final fragment of The Coming Community: ‘Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common, there will be a Tiananmen, and sooner or later tanks will appear’ (Agamben 1993b, 86). For Agamben, what is absolutely threatening to the state, what the state ‘cannot tolerate in any way’, is not any particular claim for identity, which can always be recognized, but rather the possibility of human beings co-belonging in the absence of any identity: ‘A being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State’ (Agamben 1993b, 85). As the Hegelo–Kojèvian figure of the post-historical ‘universal homogeneous’ state demonstrates, the problem for constituted authority is not the demand for recognition, but rather the presence of an ‘absolutely irrelevant’ excess of indiscernible and hence anarchic sociality that can never be mobilized in any historical project and remains both entirely ungraspable by the rationalities of government and entirely indifferent to the temptation of appropriating the state for its own project: ‘Whatever singularities cannot form a societas, because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition’ (ibid., 86). The strategy of disengagement, whose development we have traced from the late-Soviet period to the contemporary situation, permits us to concretize this deactivation of the struggle of recognition in generic social praxis. From the late 1970s onwards, the ‘informal’, para-Soviet forms of life were manifestly not interested in being recognized by the state, either as a narrow, well-policed zone of permitted ‘impropriety’ in the Soviet period or as the emblem of ‘progressive’ culture in the Perestroika and the early 1990s. What was at stake was not the recognition of alternative culture by the state but rather its practitioners’ non-recognition of themselves in this state and the consequent cultivation of the distance that marks their alienation from it. Similarly, the reappropriation of bespredel that we have traced in Grebenshikov’s later writings neither requests recognition from the postcommunist state nor

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recognizes itself in its cratocratic self-presentation. While the paradigm of recognition seeks to efface the excess of the factum pluralitatis in an ordered distribution of identities, the postcommunist ethics of inoperosity nullifies the content and suspends the force of these identities and is thus able to let this excess of sociality manifest itself as such, that is, as the fragment of the generic humanity, which appropriates all particular predicates as habits in its existence as its own potentiality. As opposed to the logic of the statist pacification of social life through universal recognition of identities, a genuinely pacific human community requires not the recognition but rather the deactivation of all identities in the pure affirmation of sociality with neither telos nor arkhe: There is not and can never be a sign of peace, since true peace would only be there, where all the signs were fulfilled and exhausted. Every struggle among men is in fact a struggle for recognition and the peace that follows such a struggle is only a convention instituting the signs and conditions of mutual, precarious recognition. Such a peace is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a fiction of the recognition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war. Not the appeal to guaranteed signs or images but the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any sign or image: that is peace [ . . . ] in non-recognition. Peace is the perfectly empty sky of humanity; it is the display of non-appearance as the only homeland of man. (Agamben 1995, 82. Emphasis added) While any peace struck as a deal between rival identities is an effect of its opposite (war) and can always relapse into it, Agamben’s figure of peace consists entirely in the absolute exposure of beings to one another in their being-thus, irreparably estranged from and inaccessible to each other yet sharing the intimacy of manifesting to each other their singular existence. In this infinite proximity, the peace of the generic community renders inoperative all figures of the law, including the identities it prescribes, and, in this manner, fulfils the law in love (Romans 13:10).

Being in Love We have now arrived at the endpoint of our inquiry into the ethics of postcommunism, the endpoint known to us in advance both from Pauline epistles and Grebenshikov’s songs. Departing from the


late-Soviet experimental cultivation of forms of life beside the law and traversing the multiple experiences of social praxis ‘halfway between law and love’ in the postcommunist bespredel, we may now understand the way in which the reappropriation of this space as an ethos of inoperative existence of the generic community finally fulfils the messianic promise that has animated the entire journey. In an enigmatic remark, Alain Badiou has once suggested that ‘love begins where the political ends’ (Badiou 2006, 151). While this is certainly so insofar as we continue to view politics in terms of a pluralistic antagonism between identitarian collectives, Agamben’s political thought rather reveals an affinity between the two ‘truth procedures’,2 insofar as politics qua identitarian antagonism is rendered inoperative at the end of history, which inaugurates the possibility of a universal generic community that fulfils the law precisely as love. In this case, love is what becomes of politics after the end of history. Let us attempt to grasp what is at stake in this becoming with the help of an early lyric by Grebenshikov. He heard her name, he waited for it to be repeated. He threw into the fire all that he did not regret. He looked at her traces, longed for her water, Walked on forth in the light of her star, And in his hands, snow turned into steel. He stood at the river to whet his thirst with silence, To wash it all off and once again stay alive, To find her voice, to enter her darkness, To become a stranger on her long journey, And in his hands, water turned into smoke. And when his day ended silently and strangely, And his horses were at ease for the first time, Then the flame of her candles, the rings of her keys The marble of her shoulder, tender as the night, Silently fell into the stone of his hand. (‘Why the Sky Does Not Fall’, Acoustics, 1982) In the words of Julian Barnes, the experience of love necessarily presupposes the refusal to ‘surrender to the history of the world and to someone else’s truth’ (Barnes 1990, 242). Having ‘left the law behind’, one ‘makes it to love’ by means of the suspension of all historical identities (‘washing it all off’) and the affirmation of the sheer power of existence as such (‘once again staying alive’), of ‘whatever singularities’ co-existing

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in the limitless realm of actual possibilities. In this affirmation, the subjects of inoperative praxis encounter each other neither as carriers of particular identitarian predicates (Russians, communists, liberals, Akvarium fans or Putin supporters) nor as vacuous ‘individuals’, defined solely by their participation in the market or population statistics, but rather as simply thus, such as they are. However trivial such an encounter might appear at first glance, it is in fact extremely rare, as most of human interaction unfolds in the space between one’s abstract humanity (the ‘as such’ reduced to the status of an indistinct individual) and one’s positive identity (the ‘as such’ reduced to a select set of relevant identitarian predicates, from hair color to academic degree). Indeed, approaching someone in their ‘special’ being-thus, taking up as relevant only one’s being as one is (rather than one’s being someone or something), is perhaps the closest we can get to a definition of love: ‘to love another being means to desire its species, that is, to desire the desire with which it desires to persevere in its being’ (Agamben 2007b, 58). Agamben introduces his notions of ‘whatever singularity’ and beingthus with an explicit reference to love: Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of an insipid generality (universal love): the lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. (Agamben 1993b, 2. Emphasis original) In terms of the Hegelian dialectic of love, discussed in Chapter 3, lovers indeed ‘recognize’ each other’s particularity universally, that is, take as loveable all the particular predicates of each other, but this very recognition does not constitute the lovers as individual totalities but rather exposes them to each other in their merely ‘manifest’ (rather than realized) being-thus. Comparing the experience of love with that of faith, Agamben maintains that just like faith is never reducible to a belief in something about something (e.g. the statement that ‘Jesus is the Messiah’), so ‘love does not allow for copulative predication, it never has a quality or an essence as its object’ (Agamben 2005b, 128). Yet, neither do lovers exhibit indifference to each other’s qualities and essences – instead, all of these predicates taken together constitute one’s beingthus as a loveable singularity (Agamben 1993b, 2), as one longs for all possible attributes of the other: ‘the light of her star’, ‘the flame of her candle’, ‘the rings of her keys’, ‘water’, ‘darkness’ and so on to infinity.


It is in this sense that love can only be absolute: ‘The measure of love is love without measure. The condition, under which love is possible, is that love be given without conditions, unconditionally’ (Caputo 2000, 183). However, to speak of the absolute is not to sanctify love, elevating it above the everydayness that is its only possible site. Agamben maintains his unwavering opposition to the sacralization of human life (as inevitably leading to a sacrificial politics) in viewing love as an absolutely profane experience of generic being-in-common that knows no dignity (Agamben 1999b, 68–69) and does away with all distinctions between the proper and the improper, authentic and inauthentic, good and evil: Lovers go to the limit of the improper in a mad and demonic promiscuity, they dwell in carnality and amorous discourse, in forever-new regions of impropriety and facticity, to the point of revealing their essential abyss. Human beings do not originally dwell in the proper; yet they do not (according to the facile suggestion of contemporary nihilism) inhabit the improper and the ungrounded. Rather, human beings are those who fall properly in love with the improper. (Agamben 1999a, 204) Against the ‘fusional’ conception of love as a blissful synthesis of the two subjects in the image of an amorous couple,3 Agamben approaches love as an experience of a radical disjunction between singularities that are neither subjects of an intersubjective relation nor objects of each other’s self-affirmation through negation but rather ‘whatever beings’, completely exposed to each other in their mutual indiscernibility, which makes all lovers ‘strangers’ on each other’s ‘journey’: To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent, so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, that the ever open place, the unwaning light, in which that one being, that thing remains forever exposed and sealed off. (Agamben 1995, 61) As opposed to the Hegelian dialectic of love, the amorous encounter remains without synthesis, and in their ‘mutual recognition’ the lovers only expose to each other their being-thus. It is for this reason that for all their intimacy lovers must remain ‘unapparent’ to each other,

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as their love has little to do with the knowledge of each other’s positive predicates (the task it would be wiser to leave to the police) but with the use of all of these predicates, which, taken in the sheer intelligibility of their ‘thus’, forever elude their grasp, making it impossible to ever fully possess the loved one. As Grebenshikov’s ‘Fastest Airplane’ poignantly demonstrates, love is precisely an experience of enjoying that which can never be possessed: It seems silly to just stand here and kiss for no reason. I would fly like a white dove but the sky is dark. All that is left to do is to drink wine and marvel. If it weren’t for you, I would have left long ago. All that could be wished has long been fulfilled. I would walk into the dark forest, but I cannot stray off this path. Oh, I know why I got no sleep last night; You must be around, but my eyes are blind. So, enough of harnessing, enough of chasing fate, Enough of sailing ships around the pure blue sea in vain. The fastest airplane will never catch up with you, But when you land, I will wave you from the ground. (‘The Fastest Airplane’, Navigator, 1995) Love is constituted by the affirmation of the impossibility of ever ‘catching up’ with the loved one, which must remain unapparent and elusive. ‘[To] be sure, in their fulfillment the lovers learn something of each other that they should not have known – they have lost their mystery – and yet have not become any less impenetrable. Bare or clothed, they are no longer either concealed or unconcealed, but rather unapparent’ (Agamben 2004, 87). Nonetheless, there arguably exists a possibility to bring this very experience of intimacy with the indiscernible to speech, as it corresponds in its formal structure to the experimentum linguae. In Stanzas (1993a, 63–123) and Language and Death (1991, 66–81) Agamben presents medieval Romance poetry as the site of the experience of language that is heterogeneous to the Western metaphysics of presence, in which language always rests on the ineffable negative foundation. The 12th-century poetry of the troubadours does not treat language as always-having-been, already complete with all its figures given and available for memorization and use, but rather deals with the experience of the very advent of language. ‘Here man is not always


already in the place of language, but he must come into it; he can only do this through appetitus, some amorous desire, from which the word can be born if it is united with knowledge. The experience of the event of language is, thus, above all an amorous experience’ (Agamben 1991, 68). The poetic word is thus brought into being by desire and all poetry, irrespectively of whether it explicitly deals with love or not, is always already an experience of love and is marked by the same longing for the unattainable. Just as lovers encounter each other solely in the facticity of their existence, the advent of language is poetically grasped as the limit of signification, at which language signifies nothing but its own taking place. Nonetheless, this ‘attainment of the unattainable’ (ibid., 78) is unthinkable in terms of possessing the event of language, consolidating it into a substantive property. Just as Grebenshikov’s ‘fastest airplane’ that always fails to catch up with the loved one, any attempt to appropriate the event of language as a substance only achieves its withdrawal into negativity. As its sole substance consists in the expropriation of all signified content in the pure transmission of signification as such, the only appropriation that this event allows is the appropriation of expropriation itself, that is, the free use of the improper. Agamben illustrates this logic in a reading of Giacomo Leopardi’s idyll ‘The Infinite’ (L’infinito), which describes the movement of thought that begins with the rupture of the habitual ethos by the experience of the event of language and attempts to grasp it, holding the unattainable in suspense, but failing to do so, ‘drowning’ in the very immensity of the being of language (Agamben 1991, 74–81). Rather than indicate the fall of the subject of the enunciation into the abyss of pure negativity, in Agamben’s argument this ‘drowning’ of thought is no longer a negative experience, but rather marks the return and the ‘extinguishing’ of thought in the very same habitual ethos that it left with the rupture of the event of language (ibid., 80). While any attempt to negate the negative foundation of language and thus finally come into possession of it merely plunges us deeper into nihilism, the use of language as the unattainable converts its frightening abyss into one’s dwelling place. As all poetry is amorous and all amorous events are poetic, the experiences of language and love are strictly homologous. Just as the attempt to appropriate the event of language leads to its withdrawal and reappearance as a negative foundation, so in amorous experience grasping the elusive alterity of the loved one is only possible by its reduction to a set of identitarian predicates, which is the surest sign of having ‘irrevocably stepped out of love’ (Agamben 2005b, 128). Similarly, just as

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poetry comes to terms with this unattainability by giving up on seizing the being of language and making do with dwelling in it, love is only possible as the experience of having-one-another by the beings that remain completely unapparent to and ungraspable for each other, the experience of the being-in-common of strangers, intelligible only in the sheer facticity of their existence that ‘no longer refers back to being’, which itself ‘is entirely abandoned in the existent’ (1993b, 100). The being of love, its ontological status, is nothing other than the abandonment of being itself in love, its dispersion in the reciprocally exposed existence. From this perspective, the experience of love does not designate any ‘deeper’ or ‘more intense’ sense of community than the shared inoperosity that characterizes the Agambenian conception of the end of history. Love, as opposed to the intricate art of courtship or the tedious work on the ‘relationship’, is an experience of otium, the absence of work: ‘In their fulfillment, the lovers who have lost their mystery contemplate a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative – the inactivity and désoeuvrement of the human and of the animal as the supreme and unsavable figure of life’ (Agamben 2004, 87). The knowledge that lovers acquire about each other is exactly the same as that revealed to humanity at large at the end of history, namely the absence of any mystery to the human being that could be discovered and of any historical task whose fulfillment would realize the essence of being human. Insofar as the being of lovers is, for both Hegel and Agamben, exhausted in the manifestation of their existence, what is manifested therein is nothing other than the inoperative potentiality of the human condition. The end of history is thus thinkable as the fulfillment of law in love because it opens a horizon of social praxis in which human beings encounter each other as ‘whatever singularities’, liberated from all historical work, who no longer seek or grant recognition but rather remain exposed as they are in their being-in-common, that is, as potential lovers with time on their hands. It is obvious that the post-historical condition is furthest away from the vapid utopia of the universal reign of love, which can only be posited as a perpetually deferred end-point of a transitionalist eschatology. As we have seen, love is only one of the possible responses to the end of history, which also include its opposites, from the snobbish propping up of particularistic identities to a cratocratic valorization of violence. The invisible victory of love over history does not consist in establishing a new kingdom but in rendering all reign inoperative, making it possible for us to re-appropriate the anarchic sociality of our ‘whatever being’, the sole aspect of our existence that is loveable, as our dwelling place.


We may therefore conclude that the post-historical ethos of postcommunism is nothing other than the being-in-common of singularities that remain disjointed but for this reason capable of community; forever eluding possession but for this reason open to use; indiscernible but for this very reason perfectly sayable in every word that is said. In this ethos, humanity need no longer ‘wander’ through historical traditions, nor is it stranded amidst their ruins in the debilitating limitlessness of bespredel, but may drop the burden of its historical heritage off its back and put it into play, using it to create barely imaginable new forms while never reducing itself to any of them. Dwelling in its ethos, this post-historical humanity, saved in its irreparable being-thus, remains as unapparent and elusive as the object of Grebenshikov’s superlative love song ‘Winter Rose’. In this nine-minute ballad Grebenshikov declares his love to the mysterious ‘Winter Rose’ in a narrative that introduces a vertiginous myriad of references to cultures and traditions, which may be individually intelligible (we leave this as an exercise to the interested reader), but whose combination, in the idle play of associations, utterly neglects their signifying aspect, exposing them solely in the ‘thus’ of their existence. The beguiling strangeness of the adventures of Grebenshikov’s Muse, which are only thinkable as purely phantasmatic, that is, created by the playful power of imagination and communicated by the free use of language, leads us to a hypothesis that the loved one in this song is none other than the ‘as such’ itself, the sheer power of existence: We met in 1973, colleagues on the Diamond Way. Back then you had a squat at the Louvre, With a storage of DMT down in the cellar. You father called from Baikonur To say he had bought passes and bribed the guards; It is a pity the guys from Baader Meinhof Sold off your software and got drunk. You had a habit of talking in your sleep, That’s how I found out about your hijab, But you know you can rest easy, I will never tell a soul. Remember you had a Japanese boyfriend From the Joshi Enro tea school. Together you tried to dig up The relics of Marilyn Monroe at Yukotan. You told me: ‘Keep what you’ve got And leave no traces.’

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And like Savonarola you left for Antarctica, Melting among eternal ice. But I kept your things, Even this head from St. Tropez. I knew that sooner or later the stars would line up And we would meet on the same path. If the world were a thousand years older, It still could never read you, I don’t care, I love you as you are. (‘Winter Rose’, Fisherman’s Songs, 2003) It is precisely the unattainability of the Winter Rose that makes it lovable. The loved one forever eludes its lover(s)’ grasp, dwelling in the mysterious space in which the cellars of the Louvre stock DMT; the relics of Marilyn Monroe can be sought for at Yukotan; and leaving for Antarctica can somehow be analogous to the actions of Savonarola. The only space, where all of this is perfectly possible, is of course language itself; yet, even in language the loved one may not be possessed, pinned down and reduced to determinate properties. Throughout the song, the chorus is reproduced with a variation of the conditional clause (‘if the world were a thousand years older’, ‘if the world were a thousand times cleverer’ and ‘if the world were a thousand times better’), only to reiterate that ‘the world’ could never ‘read’ the Winter Rose, dispelling all hopes for a hermeneutic grasp of the loved one. Instead, the song is a declaration of love for the ‘as such’ of the Winter Rose (‘I love you as you are’), which is not an empty gesture of recognizing, in bitter resignation, the impossibility of ever making the loved one fully apparent, but rather an affirmation of the only dimension or ‘path’ in which lovers can encounter each other. In this space of irreparable being-thus, lovers throw off their backs both the burden of the past (as the ordering performative force of tradition is deactivated) and the even more unbearable burden of the future (as there is no longer any historical task that must be performed to actualize the proper essence of humanity): I do not know where I come from, I do not know where I am heading. When I hear someone say ‘All shall be well’, I do not know what they mean. (‘Winter Rose’, Fisherman’s Songs, 2003)


This experience of abandonment in the pure present that is cut off both from the past and from the future no longer comprehends ‘things being well’ or happiness in the modality of the promise, because it already dwells in happiness and is entirely immune to the lure of gaining it in the future through work in the present. To choose love over history, as Grebenshikov proposed in ‘Commissar’, is to destroy all the mirages of happy life in the future by suspending every historical project and thereby appropriate one’s potentiality for happiness in the present. It is this very choice that constitutes the ethical substance of postcommunism, whose development in Grebenshikov’s poetry we have traced from the early 1980s onwards. The demise of the allegedly omnipotent political regime with a global reach and a claim to fulfill the historical process reveals what lovers have known all along: the unattainable can only be attained by ceasing all attempts to possess it and rather letting both the self and the other be, be nothing but one’s manners of being, not ‘united in essence’ but ‘scattered in existence’ (Agamben 1993b, 19). The redemption that we have sought from the late-Soviet period onwards has nothing to do with the attainment of the lost or the sacred but rather consists in the appropriation of the profane as one’s proper ethos: ‘Redemption is not an event, in which what was profane becomes sacred and what was lost is found again. Redemption is, on the contrary, the irreparable loss of the lost, the definitive profanity of the profane’ (ibid., 102). The quest for transcendence that animated the epochal projects of humanity, including Soviet communism, thus ends in the discovery of transcendence in the very immanence of our being-in-common.

Conclusion The ethical possibilities opened up by the event of postcommunism are rendered practically invisible by the state-centric political imagination that finds in contemporary Russian realities little more than an ideologically vacuous and increasingly cynical bureaucratic-oligarchic state, imposing itself on the slavishly acquiescent, intimidated or simply indifferent society. In this book we have challenged the understanding of postcommunist social praxis in purely negative terms of passivity, indifference and inactivity, not by arguing the opposite, but by reassessing these terms themselves, through a dual reading of Agamben’s political philosophy and Grebenshikov’s rock poetry in the context of late- and post-Soviet social praxis.

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While we began by taking Agamben’s version of the end of history as an initial cautious hypothesis, we may now propose that this hypothesis requires no further verification beyond its initial acceptance. The end of history is literally a self-fulfilling wish, insofar as the very wager that there are no tasks for humanity to achieve liberates one from the work on these tasks and permits one to enter the ethos of inoperative existence. Thus, in our analysis of Grebenshikov’s poetry we have neither proven nor refuted the thesis on the end of history but rather tried to describe the path by which it is brought about in a mode of praxis that first disengages itself from the existing social order to risk itself in the emptiness that is revealed in its ruins and finally appropriates this emptiness as its own ethos. We may therefore conclude that the end of history cannot be proven (if only because the production of such proofs would be a historical task par excellence), nor can it itself be a proof of anything other than its own permanent possibility. The end of history can only be practiced. Just as Kojève’s Hegel must have abandoned the dialectical method to perceive the fulfillment of the dialectic of the Real, just as Bartleby must have stopped writing to affirm his inoperative potentiality of ‘preferring not to’, so the postcommunist society must have suspended its attempts to master the historical process for the ‘second’ proper end of history to take place. Starting from the late-Soviet practices of disengagement from the public sphere, we have traced the way this ethics traversed the negativity of the postcommunist disaster only to return, in a singular movement of re-appropriation, to these realities, no longer perceived as the frightening materialization of nihilism but rather as the dwelling space whose very limitlessness makes possible the emergence of a non-exclusive generic community, wholly exposed in its ‘whatever being’. The shift in Grebenshikov’s poetry from a tragicomic experience of the impossibility of redemption in the post-historical condition to the affirmation of the sheer power of existence in inoperative praxis, modeled on the experimentum linguae, is analogous to Agamben’s own overcoming of the logic of ‘negative foundation’ in Derrida’s deconstruction. In this manner, a permanently thwarted and suspended messianic promise can find fulfillment in the appropriation by the postcommunist society of its own potentiality, which marks the end of history, no longer understood as its fulfillment but rather as its profanation, the return of temporality to the free use by human beings. We therefore conclude that the state-centric image of postcommunist Russian politics must be inverted, rendering in positive terms the societal dwelling in its inoperative ethos and instead grasping the


post-transitional regime in Russia as a purely negative force, which suspends the messianic experience of postcommunism, yet remains entirely within its orbit owing to the deactivation of the teleoideological dimension of politics. Carrying no developmental project whatsoever, the postcommunist state has been reduced to a pure cratocracy, a mode of power deprived of all productivity and reduced to flaunting its capacity to actualize itself as brute force. To the extent that one still views politics as a regulated contest between rival historical projects, postcommunist Russian politics, in the form of both the disorder of Yeltsinism and the stability of Putinism, cannot but appear utterly impoverished. Yet, this impoverishment is as good a reason as any to abandon the ‘historical’ vision of politics itself and to raise the question of what politics might be in the absence of any mobilization of humanity for historical tasks of bringing about a ‘bright future’. It is here that our reconstruction of the ethics of postcommunism connects with the contemporary debates in critical political theory. Such different authors as Slavoj Zizek (2006), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), Alain Badiou (2006) and Simon Critchley (2007), to name just a few, have recently decried contemporary tendencies in global politics, which, incidentally, took its current form in the postcommunist period, as lacking in emancipatory orientations of a genuinely universal character. The grand conflict between capitalism and communism as two incommensurable visions of the world’s future has allegedly given way to a post-political reign of liberal globalization. The only form of dissenting political praxis now takes the form of identity politics, a debilitating particularism that can easily be incorporated into the existing order that no longer operates through the prerequisite of sameness but itself actively promotes differences in a hollow valorization of multiculturalism (Zizek 2002, 2007b; Badiou 2003a). Indeed, the descriptions of the current eclipse of politics by these and other authors cannot but bring to mind the final pages of Fukuyama’s End of History, describing the post-historical society of ‘last men’, no longer capable of radical negating action and obsessed only with their own security and wellbeing. To the extent the contemporary society is held to hold any values other than that of profit, these relate to the purely biological existence of the individual as, in Badiou’s words (2001, 8–17), a ‘human animal’ with its rights, needs and interests but no longer with any truths. With politics proper reduced to biopolitics and ethics reduced to the affirmation of the ‘human rights’ of those deprived of all rights, humanity has indeed become post-historical and politics as we knew it appears impossible, deployed in critical discourse only as a nostalgic figure.

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In contrast to this mourning of politics, our reconstruction of an Agambenian alternative to Kojève’s canonical version of the end of history seeks to affirm the possibilities of a genuinely universal political praxis that are conditioned precisely by the deactivation of the teleo-ideological dimension of social life and hence do not require the articulation of a new utopian project of emancipation. As we have seen, the disengagement of para-Soviet subjects from the Soviet order was not followed by a recommencement of history in a project of ‘building capitalism’, nor is the postcommunist ethics of the appropriation of bespredel characterized by the valorization of biological existence, health and security. On the contrary, what is at stake in it is precisely the affirmation of human existence as such, of a life inseparable from its own form and thus no longer fractured into the political and the biological. While contemporary biopolitical capitalism may be grasped as a mode of governmentality proper to Kojève’s post-historical society of ritualized snobbery, the ethics of inoperosity rather attempts to reappropriate the entire social field for free use, no longer regulated by historical tasks, including those of managing life itself. Having already brought down one global vision of teleological politics, this strategy appears highly pertinent as a model of resistance to today’s biopolitical capitalism – after all, as Heidegger (1961, 31–38) has scandalously argued, ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Americanism’ are ‘metaphysically identical’ precisely because of their orientation towards the mobilization of existence and the mastering of temporality. For this reason, our reconstitution of a mode of social praxis that by virtue of its own demobilization brings about the second death of history and fulfils all figures of authority by making them inoperative, appears to be a timely intervention into the contemporary debates on the fortunes of politics under global capitalism. The wager of this book is that such debates can benefit from a due appreciation of the way in which the late-Soviet society successfully resisted the most ambitious historical project ever and undermined every possibility of the recommencement of history during the 20 years of postcommunism. While at this point the victory of the ethics of postcommunism might indeed appear invisible and happiness might be out of reach for many of its practitioners, we have arguably found the dwelling place in which it is possible, the place to which no historical telos can lead and which we have never left, as it is nothing other than our anarchic sociality without identity or direction: As we are.

Notes 1 Universal postcommunism: Kojève and Agamben on the end of history 1. See Franchi 2004, 32–35 for the discussion of various translations of this concept, which are genealogically related to Kojève’s notion of worklessness (désoeuvrement). 2. Although a detailed discussion of Agamben’s and Badiou’s readings of Paul is beyond the scope of this book, it ought to be emphasized that the difference between them is rather more modest than is usually suggested. While Agamben (2005b, 51–58) rejects Badiou’s reading of Paul’s messianism as universalist and proposes an alternative notion of the remnant as the difference of every identity from itself, his dismissal of Badiou’s universalism ignores the latter’s singular understanding of the universal in generic terms as an indiscernible subset of the situation that cannot be reduced to any identitarian predicate and deactivates established differences (Badiou 2005a, 335–337). From this perspective, Agamben’s own understanding of Paul appears to accord with Badiou’s logic of generic universalism – an affinity that Badiou (2005b, 39–40), unlike Agamben, explicitly recognizes.

2 A time like no other: Russian politics after the end of history 1. The writings of Alexander Prokhanov, a novelist and a founding editor of the national-Communist weekly Zavtra which has been the primary forum of radical opposition, are particularly illustrative of this tendency. In Prokhanov’s symbolic universe, postcommunism is the scene of a total existential catastrophe that can barely be resisted, hence his literary description of the post-Soviet left-wing opposition, which he occasionally supported in election campaigns, is no less disparaging than that of the representatives of the new regime. See for example, Prokhanov 2006. 2. The notion of the ‘party of power’ was originally launched in the journalistic discourse in the run-up to the 1995 parliamentary elections but has since then become a conventional term in the studies of Russian politics. The party of power is not a party that is constituted prior to its assumption of power and may subsequently become a governing party through elections, but rather a party that is formed by the representatives of the government solely for the purpose of using their hold on the executive power to obtain a majority in the legislature. While conventional political parties may alternate between being in government and in the opposition, the party of power is solely thinkable as a governing party, a party of those who already govern and thus logically unthinkable as oppositional. 249

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3. Agamben (2005b, 64–67) specifies this notion with reference to the linguistic concept of ‘operational time’ developed in the work of Gustave Guillaume. While the human mind is only able to form its representation of time with recourse to the spatial imagery of an infinite continuum, this representation or time-image is flawed, insofar as it takes no account of the time that it takes to construct this image. Operational time is thus defined as the time the mind takes to construct a time image. This entails that the thought of time and its representation may never coincide due to the necessary recourse of thought to the operational time, which cannot be represented in the representation which it makes possible. On the basis of this notion, Agamben defines messianic time as the ‘internal’ time that testifies to the disjunction between the human being and its representation, which is the very reason that human beings can appropriate or take hold of time in a kairological moment. 4. See Virno (2008, 43–65, 107–125) for the discussion of jokes as a paradigm of innovative action that consists in the heuristic praxis in the linguistic ‘state of exception’, in which the normative and the empirical, the semiotic and the semantic, the rule and its application are rendered indistinct. Despite being grounded in an idiosyncratic naturalism, Virno’s innovative action, whose political epitome is exodus (2008, 148–149), is analogous to both Badiou’s subtractive negation and Agamben’s inoperosity. 5. It is important to rigorously distinguish neo-liberal governmentality in the Foucauldian sense from any version of neo-liberal ideology, which is manifestly lacking in the discourse of Putinism, which, as we have argued above, borrows the most disparate elements from incommensurable ideological orientations. As the field that we have termed teleo-ideological has been rendered inoperative in the messianic temporality of postcommunism, actual practices of government since the early 1990s have unfolded in the absence of any ideological support, which does not deprive them of their own immanent rationality that could be grasped with the help of the Foucauldian analyses of governmentality. See Prozorov 2004a and 2007b for the example of such an analysis and Prozorov 2004b for a more general discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of the governmentality approach. 6. The argument about the substantive continuity between the Yeltsin and the Putin presidency is not restricted to the left-conservative circles, but has also been voiced by liberal commentators, critical of the rhetoric of ‘overcoming the 1990s’ that became particularly shrill during Putin’s second term and the beginning of the Medvedev presidency. See for example, Radzikhovsky 2007 for a detailed discussion of the paradox, whereby the current elite, which gained both its wealth and its power during the Yeltsin period, ‘legitimizes itself by means of its own delegitimization’, that is, founds its being in power by claiming to dismantle its own foundations. 7. In exactly the same manner, Putin’s ‘absolute conservatism’ retains the substance of the postcommunist (dis)order of the 1990s, while rhetorically effacing its origin in a revolutionary event of 1991. See Radzikhovsky 2007.

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3 The Janitor Generation: The ethics of disengagement in the late-Soviet period 1. Belomor, an abbreviation of Belomorkanal (White Sea Channel), was a cheap brand of Soviet filterless cigarettes. 2. Our notion of ‘para-Soviet’ praxis is close to Simon Critchley’s (2007, 111–128) presentation of his ‘anarchic metapolitics’ in terms of the cultivation of the ‘interstitial distance’ within the state, a gesture that neither seeks to abolish the state nor resigns itself to the participation in the game, whose rules the state defines and enforces, but rather resists the saturation of social life by the state’s rationalities of government and opens alternative spaces of freedom. 3. For a detailed discussion of non-signifying acts in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis see Pluth (2007); Chiesa (2007, 46–58, 125–138). In terms of Pluth’s distinction between two forms of non-signifying speech in psychoanalysis (‘free association’ and ‘working through’), Grebenshikov’s lyrics correspond to the latter. While the better-known practice of free association emphasizes the way in which the spontaneous production of chains of signifiers that are at first glance non-sensical may, in the course of psychoanalytic treatment, reveal latent sense through interpretation, the practice of working through takes the opposite direction and emphasizes the conscious, nonspontaneous production of meaninglessness, the generation of signifiers that are divorced from the symbolic and are therefore only present in the materiality of the ‘real’. What is produced in this ‘artificial, exaggerated use of language’ Pluth (2007, 22) is, in Marcel Duchamp’s words, ‘not even nonsense’ (Duchamp in Pluth 2007, 23), insofar as the latter is always liable to interpretation. Similarly, the profane use of the Soviet discourse by the counter-culture seeks to convert the already nonsensical ‘dead letter’ performative formulae of the official discourse into pure signifiers that are ‘beyond nonsense’ and hence become usable in artistic praxis. 4. All citations from Pauline epistles in this book follow Patricia Dailey’s translation in Agamben (2005b), which translates the Pauline text as close as possible to Agamben’s own original translation. See Agamben (2005b, ix–x). 5. This analogy between the revelatory policies of glasnost and pornography may also be supported by more literal examples of the convergence between the two in the Soviet social praxis of the late 1980s. Besides functioning as a formal epitome of the new era of ‘openness’, pornography, or more generally the domain of the erotic, was also its privileged content. Starting from Vasily Pichul’s landmark film Little Vera (1988), which combined naturalistic social criticism with erotic scenes, whose candour was unprecedented in Soviet cinema, sexually explicit content, frequently presented in bleak or outright macabre contexts, became an inescapable feature of any politically ‘progressive’ Soviet art, which individualized its author as an independent and innovative artist. We must also recall the extraordinary popularity of European erotic films, from the Emmanuelle series to the works by Tinto Brass, in the Soviet ‘video salons’ of the late 1980s. Along with Hong Kong action movies, these films, banned before 1986, offered the first exposure of the Soviet audience to the officially reviled Western ‘mass culture’.

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6. From this perspective, the failure of Perestroika also constituted the ‘second death’ of the communist project. Despite its evident drawbacks, the ‘real socialism’ of the post-Stalinist period still held out the promise of reforming the Soviet system in accordance with variably defined ideals of ‘socialism with a human face’. It was precisely when such a reform attempt, which was initially received as a dream-come-true by the non-Soviet Left worldwide, failed miserably that the communist ideal itself was rendered utterly problematic and the long tradition of dissident discourses on ‘democratic socialism’ was arrested, replaced by a mimetic discourse of ‘transition’ to liberal democracy.

4 From a Shining Void: The dialectic of bespredel in postcommunist social praxis 1. Dobrynya Nikitich, Alesha Popovich and Ilya Muromets are three Russian mythical heroes, most famously depicted in Viktor Vasnetsov’s painting Bogatyrs (1898). 2. Yaroslavna, wife of Prince Igor of Novhorod-Siversky, is a character in the 12th-century Russian epic The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Most famous is the fragment ‘Yaroslavna’s Weeping’, which has become a proverbial expression.

5 The invisible victory: Experimentum linguae and the appropriation of anomie 1. From this perspective, the phenomenon of endemic corruption in postcommunist Russia must be understood not in terms of episodic transgressions of the law but rather as an indicator of its dependence on an ‘illegal’ supplement, exemplified by bribery, nepotism or abuse of public office in the private interest. The very extent of these activities, which permits us to speak of ‘meta-corruption’, demonstrates that rather than being unfortunate exceptions to the functioning of the legal system, they are themselves essential to the reproduction of the very order that the transgressed law institutes and regulates. Rather than ‘corrupt’ the law, these activities sustain its formal presence precisely by instituting themselves in its place as the mechanisms for maintaining order. It is therefore not a coincidence that in contemporary Russia officials at such sites as the police, hospitals, universities or courts are frequently bribed not to violate the law but rather to execute it properly or refrain from habitually transgressing it. Postcommunist corruption does not therefore weaken the law by violating it but rather sustains the illusion of its presence by supplementing its impotence through extra-legal measures. 2. In Badiou’s metaontology (2005a, 327–343), science, art, politics and love form a finite set of ‘truth procedures’, for which philosophy, which does not itself produce any truths, provides a common space of coexistence. 3. For a similar rejection of the fusional conception of love see Badiou (1996; 2003c), Nancy (1991, 82–109).

Appendix

Boris Grebenshikov’s Discography All cited lyrics are published on the official Akvarium website: http://aquarium.ru/discography/index.html.

‘Pre-historic Akvarium’ (home recordings) The Temptation of Saint Akvarium [Iskushenie Svyatogo Akvariuma] (1973) Minuet for the Farmer [Menuet Zemledeltsu] (1973) The Tales of Count Diffusor [Pritchi Grafa Diffuzora] (1974) From the Other Side of the Mirror [S Toi Storony Zerkalnogo Stekla] (1976) All Brothers are Sisters [Vse Bratja – Sestry] (1978) – with Mikhail ‘Mike’ Naumenko

Akvarium Albums The Blue Album [Siny Albom] (1981) Triangle [Treugolnik] (1981) Electricity [Elektrichestvo] (1981) Acoustics [Akustika] (1982) Taboo [Tabu] (1982) Radio Africa [Radio Afrika] (1983) Ichtiology [Ihtiologia] (1984) Day of Silver [Den’ Serebra] (1984) Children of December [Deti Dekabrya] (1985) Ten Arrows [Desyat’ Strel] (1986) Equinox [Ravnodenstvie] (1987) Feudalism [Feodalizm] (1989) – a ‘lost album’ eventually released in 2007 The Favourite Songs of Ramses IV [Lybimye Pesni Ramsesa IV] (1993) Sands of Petersburg [Peski Peterburga] (1994) – newly recorded versions of unreleased songs written during 1976–1986 Kostroma Mon Amour (1994) Navigator (1995) Snow Lion [Snezhny Lev] (1996) Psi (1999) Sister Chaos [Sestra Haos] (2002) Fisherman’s Songs [Pesni Rybaka] (2003) Zoom Zoom Zoom (2005) Carefree Russian Tramp [Bespechny Russky Brodyaga] (2006) 253

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Akvarium Anthologies (collections of previously unreleased material) The History of Akvarium, Archive, vol. 3. [Istoria Akvariuma, Arhiv, t. 3] (1989) The Library of Babel [Biblioteka Vavilona] (1993) The Chamber of Curiosities [Kunstkamera] (1998)

Film Soundtracks Assa (1987) The Black Rose is an Emblem of Sadness, The Red Rose is an Emblem of Love [Chernaya Roza – Emblema Pechali, Krasnaya Roza – Emblema Lybvi] (1990)

Grebenshikov’s Solo Albums Radio Silence (1989) Radio London (1990) – released in 1996 The Russian Album [Russky Albom] (1992) The Letters of Captain Voronin [Pisma Kapitana Voronina] (1993) The Songs of Alexander Vertinsky [Pesni Aleksandra Vertinskogo] (1994) Forelock [Chubchik] (1996) Lilith (1997) Boris Grebenshikov and Deadushki (1998)

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Index

cratocracy, 207, 209, 215, 222, 224–5, 230, 236, 242, 247 Critchley, Simon, 117–18, 247, 251

abandonment, in Agamben’s philosophy, 78, 151, 155, 219–20, 242, 245 anomie, 36, 80, 148, 198–203, 210, 215, 226 Another Russia, 81–2, 84 Aristotle, xi, 56, 166 August Revolution (1991), 34, 42, 47, 53–4, 75–8, 171, 173 Badiou, Alain, 16, 21, 32, 87, 132, 208–9, 219, 224, 232, 237, 249, 252 bare life, 11, 57, 169, 195, 232 Bartleby the Scrivener, 31, 59, 246 being-thus, 7, 58, 168–9, 192–4, 215, 221, 230–1, 236–9, 243–4 Belkovsky, Stanislav, 39 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 8, 14–16, 55, 162, 180, 186, 202 Bespredel, 35–6, 148–53, 160–2, 176–81, 200–3, 207, 212–15, 230–3, 243, 248 Biopolitics, 7, 11, 57–8, 247–8 Bios, 12, 14, 27–8, 227, 230, 232 Bykov, Dmitry, 207 camp, in Agamben’s philosophy, 57, 151, 156, 169, 182 Camus, Albert, 118 Caputo, John, 113, 239 Cavell, Stanley, 106 community in Agamben’s philosophy, xiii, 15, 36, 197, 230–7, 242 in late-Soviet counterculture, 107, 145 conservatism, 46, 48–50, 65–7, 73, 122, 143, 148, 162, 173–4, 202, 211, 214, 250 contingency, xi, 44, 48, 161, 167, 229

Day of National Unity, 75–6, 205 Debord, Guy, 48 decreation, 105, 110, 224, 229 Delyagin, Mikhail, 72, 206 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 39, 45, 102, 155, 158–62, 165, 177, 190–1, 194, 202, 211, 229, 246 destruction, as mode of negation, 8, 19–22, 52–3, 129 diffèrance, 158–60, 177, 190, 196, 220, 230 disengagement, ethics of, 34–6, 79, 83, 89, 96–7, 100, 108–11, 115, 121, 130–2, 135, 137, 144, 178, 200, 215, 225, 246, 248 dissimulation, 97–9, 101, 132 end of history Agamben’s concept of, 7–8, 10–17, 27–30, 43–5 in Kojève’s reading of Hegel, 9–14, 18–20, 22–6 as ‘second death’, 11, 53, 171, 248–52 and studies of postcommunism, 3–9, 28–36 Esposito, Roberto, 55, 57 ethos, 21, 30, 36, 84–8, 95–122, 142, 177, 195, 200, 218, 222, 227, 243–6 experimentum linguae, 222–3, 227–31, 246 factum loquendi, 220–2, 227, 231 factum pluralitatis, 231–2, 236 fetishism, 49, 63, 68, 185, 209 Foucault, Michel, 7, 41, 57, 86–7, 96–113, 126, 149, 206

263

264

Index

Fukuyama, Francis, x–xii, 3–6, 8, 53, 247 Fursov, Andrei, 207 generic politics, 212, 232, 235–7, 246, 249 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 35, 41, 46, 83, 102, 119, 125, 133–6, 139 governmentality, 68, 97, 216, 248, 250 Grebenshikov, Boris and dialectic of bespredel, 147–63 on love, 126–9, 237–44 on October 1993 rebellion, 173–6 Perestroika-period poetry, 130–6 and profanation of Russian tradition, 176–90 and Soviet counterculture, 89–101, 112–19 Groys, Boris, 53, 72, 93, 100, 108–10, 135, 157, 190–1, 219 habit, in Agamben’s philosophy, 153, 192–6, 200, 219–22, 239, 241 happiness, in Agamben’s philosophy, 12, 14, 16–18, 33, 43, 57, 118, 227, 229, 245, 248 Hardt, Michael, 28, 247 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xi, 2–3, 5–12, 15, 17, 21–7, 43, 52, 70, 85, 122, 127–9, 195, 201, 235, 242, 246 hegemony, 6, 49, 64, 71, 78, 148, 177, 225 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 57–8, 154, 169, 194, 219, 227, 248 Heterotopia, 126, 130, 177, 205 Huntington, Samuel, 4–5, 65, 73 Illarionov, Andrei, 206–7 inoperosity and bankruptcy of peoples, 233–4 and history, 15, 55–8 and love, 236–7 and potentiality, 166–7, 228–9 of power, 80–4, 201–2, 207–10 and social praxis, 55–7, 215–17, 224–7, 248

intellectual in Kojève’s reading of Hegel, 22–6 as post-historical subject, 27–8 ‘janitor generation’, the, 92, 96, 99, 106, 121–3, 164 kairos, 43–5, 52, 54, 61, 69, 83, 88, 122, 143–4, 228, 250 katargesis, 122, 191, 197, 200, 204, 216 katechon, 214–15 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 53, 97–8, 101–2, 130, 132, 144 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 82 Kojève, Alexandre, xi, 3, 6–27, 48, 51–4, 80, 85, 102, 127–9, 147, 185, 201, 205, 215, 224, 235, 246, 248 Kryshtanovskaya, Olga, 206 Kuhn, Thomas, 86–7 Kurekhin, Sergei, 59–60, 63, 71, 187 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 78, 96, 251 Laclau, Ernesto, 32, 150, 204–5, 227 Lefort, Claude, 45 Lenin, Vladimir, 1, 41, 59–60, 63, 75, 94, 104, 105, 125, 187 Letov, Yegor, 104 Limonov, Eduard, 82, 176 Love and history, 70, 122–6, 127–30 ontology of, 236–42 Magun, Artemy, 4, 55, 63, 77, 110, 149, 186 Master–Slave dialectic, 9–28, 128–9, 136 Medvedev, Dmitry, 38–40, 94, 132, 225, 250 melancholy, 33, 149, 151, 176, 184–5, 187, 191 messianism Agamben’s concept of, 14–18 and eschatology, 51–4, 62, 72, 81, 159, 242 and profane, 16–18, 178–82 and Putinism, 69–78

Index 265 in Russian politics of 1990s, 40–54 and temporality, 40–8, 71–3 Mouffe, Chantal, 39, 55 Nancy, Jean Luc, 32, 87, 161, 217, 233, 252 negative foundation, in Agamben’s philosophy, 11, 80, 162, 194–6, 223, 240–1, 246 Negri, Antonio, 28, 47, 247 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 117, 154, 206 nihilism appropriation of, 56–8, 200, 212, 215, 226–9, 248 of modern politics, 55–8, 117, 154, 228 negation of, 190, 222, 225, 241 in postcommunist politics, xiii, 68–9, 73, 82, 187, 225, 246 ‘as not’, logic of, 209–12, 214, 216 October rebellion (1993), 44, 47, 79–81, 146, 171–6, 215 October Revolution (1917), 1–2, 44, 60, 75–7, 135 Ojakangas, Mika, xiii, 206 paradigm, xii, 11, 16, 31, 34, 40, 75, 84–8, 123, 125, 137, 175–6, 181, 196, 213, 219, 226, 240 Para-Soviet society, 111–19, 131–2, 134, 142–5, 150, 164, 222, 235, 251 passivity, as political praxis, xii, 31–2, 55, 58, 79, 229, 245 Pavlovsky, Gleb, 38, 67 Pelevin, Victor, 46 Perestroika, 29, 35, 40, 59, 66, 83, 89, 102, 108, 119–22, 130–6, 148, 152, 156, 160, 198, 213, 235, 252 Performative speech act performative shift, 101–3, 107–9, 132 Performativum fidei, 223–4 Performativum sacramenti, 223–4 pure performative, 100–7

Play in late- and post-Soviet politics, 70–4, 176–90, 227–9 and ritual, in Agamben’s philosophy, 59–63, 70–1 poiesis, 86–7, 219 political, the, 45–50, 85, 204–5, 237 postcommunism, as universal condition, 31, 53 potentiality Agamben’s theory of, 7, 33, 165–71, 222–4 existence of, 227–30, 242 and identity, 112–16 in state of exception, 122–3, 148–52, 179, 215–17 praxis, xii, 13, 18–19, 23, 26, 35–6, 57–8, 85–8, 160, 161, 169, 195–7, 219–23, 230, 242, 246–8 Prilepin, Zahar, 204 profanation, 16, 61, 71, 104, 110, 153, 179–81, 187, 204, 234–5, 246 project, as criterion of historical action, 18–19, 48, 52–5, 59 Prokhanov, Alexander, 249 Putin, Vladimir, 33–4, 38–41, 63–79, 85, 132, 138, 142, 176, 178, 200, 203–9, 215, 225, 238, 250 recapitulation, 50–1, 53, 64, 78, 130, 179, 189, 194, 199 Remizov, Mikhail, 48, 49, 66, 67, 69, 176 ritual and Putinism, 69–75 ritualization of culture, 176–90, 198–208 Rutskoi, Alexander, 79–80, 83, 172, 176, 209 St. Paul, 16–17, 50, 100, 122–3, 143, 191, 201, 210–211, 214, 216, 223, 226, 249, 251 Sakwa, Richard, 30, 48, 64, 65 Schmitt, Carl, 7, 39, 45, 47, 55, 68, 123, 202, 203, 214 Scholem, Gershom, 33, 202

266

Index

snobbery, 26, 70–1, 76, 80, 85, 102, 185–8, 207, 209, 242, 248 Sorokin, Vladimir, 104, 179 sovereignty, 7, 12, 29, 38, 47, 58, 65, 68, 78, 83, 130–1, 195, 209, 216, 225, 227 Stalin, Joseph, 60, 70–1, 82, 93, 101–2, 133, 135, 175, 191, 208, 252 State of exception, 7, 33, 62, 80, 123, 150, 160–1, 197, 201–3, 206, 210, 224, 231, 250 Subject of the enunciated, 96, 109, 111, 116, 118, 125 Subject of enunciation, the, 96, 111, 116 Subtraction, 20–2, 28, 109, 232 Surkov, Vladislav, 66, 72 Taubes, Jacob, 16, 122, 143, 211, 216 Teleo-ideological politics, 33, 62, 71, 81–2, 125, 131–2, 145, 150, 171, 176, 200–1, 206, 216, 248, 250 Temporality and freedom, 227–9 messianic, 14–18, 40–8, 70–3, 178–82 of postcommunist politics, 40–54, 69–78, 92–3, 99–101, 153 Terror, as resumption of history, 18, 21, 71, 80, 83, 135, 155 Timelessness (bezvremenie), 40–2, 52, 62–4, 71–4, 82–4, 137–8, 149, 153–5 totalitarianism, 4, 31, 56–8, 71, 97, 151

traditionalism, 4–5 transitionalism, 4–5, 72–84, 200–2, 206, 242 Use, in Agamben’s philosophy, 15, 30, 61, 104–5, 167, 186–8, 192–200, 212–17, 226–9, 234, 240, 243, 246, 248 Virno, Paolo, 109, 212, 214, 250 voice, in Agamben’s philosophy, 194–5 Volkov, Vadim, 4, 206 weakness, of messianic power, 216–17, 224–5 whatever being, 7, 58–9, 63, 83–5, 155, 168, 216, 229–30, 232, 239, 246 work in Hegelian dialectic, 9–12, 22–4 in late-Soviet society, 89–95, 230 suspension of, 12–18, 24–8, 56–7, 153, 156 Yeltsin, Boris, 38–49, 69–82, 140–1, 147–8, 171–6, 203–4, 208, 225, 230, 250 Yurchak, Alexei, 4, 60, 62, 92, 93–5, 101–10, 132, 157 Zinoviev, Alexander, 131 Zizek, Slavoj, 5–6, 11, 21, 31, 39, 141, 247 Zoe, 12, 14, 27–8, 58, 227, 230, 232 Zyuganov, Gennady, 46, 80, 177

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