Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.

      The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to say “daddy”; their wives, too, must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the revolution to its destiny. The circle of their friends is limited strictly to the circle of comrades in the revolution. There is no life outside of it.

      In these circumstances one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.²²

      Guevara is struggling here precisely with the relationship between eros (personal love) and agape (political love): he posits their mutual exclusion—revolutionaries “cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice,” in other words their love must remain “one and indivisible,” love of the people, to the exclusion of all “pathological” attachments. While this may appear to be the very formula for a “totalitarian” catastrophe (a revolutionary killing real individuals on behalf of the abstraction: “the people”), there is another, much more refined, way to read Guevara’s position. One should start with the paradox that singular erotic love, taken precisely as the absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as a form of undeserved grace. The point is not that “there are more important things than love”—an authentic amorous encounter remains an absolute point of reference in one’s life (to put it in traditional terms, it is “what makes one’s life meaningful”). But the hard lesson to be learned is that, precisely as such, love (the amorous relationship) should not be the direct goal of one’s life—when one confronts the choice between love and duty, duty should prevail. True love is modest, like that of a couple in a Marguerite Duras novel: while the two lovers hold hands, they do not look into each other’s eyes; they look together outwards, to some third point, their common Cause. Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment should the revolution demand it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bent on suspending all their terrestrial links and obligations in order to burn out in a night of unconditional passion—if anything, they love each other more.

      The question is thus: how does an emancipatory-revolutionary collective which embodies the “general will” affect intense erotic passion? Not surprisingly, we find an answer in Rousseau, the theoretician of the general will. His Julie, or the New Heloise delivers a similar message. Since (in an unfortunate sign of our contemporary barbarism) Rousseau’s extraordinary novel no longer has the status of a well-known classic, here is the brief outline of the story. Set principally by Lake Geneva, the novel centers on a young tutor, Saint-Preux, and Julie, his female pupil, who fall in love. But he is a commoner, and Julie’s noble father will not hear of their relationship. Forced to keep their passion a guilty secret, the couple succumb and become lovers. Julie hopes to force her father to consent by becoming pregnant, but she has a miscarriage. At this point, Lord Eduard Bomston, an immensely rich English peer and a friend of Julie’s father, appears. He takes a great liking to Saint-Preux, but the latter suspects him of having designs on Julie. In a jealous rage he challenges Lord Eduard to a duel. This disaster is finally averted and Lord Eduard’s generosity is proven by his efforts to persuade Baron d’Etange to permit the marriage. But Eduard also fails: Julie’s father demands that she renounce Saint-Preux and accept the husband of his choice, his own companion, the older Wolmar.

      At this point of despair, another character intervenes to resolve the deadlock: Claire, Julie’s level-headed cousin who eventually has everyone’s confidence and who acts as a sort of one-woman chorus throughout, observing, predicting, and lamenting. To save Julie’s reputation, Claire sends the tutor away; his friend Lord Eduard takes him to Paris. While they are gone, Julie’s mother discovers their correspondence and is very upset, and soon after she falls ill and dies. Even though the two events are unrelated, Julie feels guilty and thinks that she is to blame for her mother’s death. In this state of mind, she consents to renounce her lover and to marry Wolmar. During the wedding, she undergoes a profound inner change, a conversion to virtue. She now feels ready to accept her duties as a wife and mother. In her pursuit of virtue, she is at every step helped by her extraordinary husband, a man as wise as he is good. Although she cannot bring herself to tell him of her relationship with Saint-Preux, he nevertheless knows and forgives her everything. In return, Julie embraces her new state, breaking entirely with her lover who eventually flees Europe.

      But the story continues, or, rather, begins again: ten years later, Saint-Preux returns and is made welcome by Wolmar and his wife. Julie now has two children and her life is wholly devoted to them and to running a model estate at Clarens with Wolmar. The rest of the book describes these efforts, Julie’s virtue, Wolmar’s wisdom, the beauty of their English garden, and the prosperity of their estate.²³ Julie’s only sorrow appears to be that Wolmar is an atheist. He never speaks of it, and always attends church for the sake of appearances, but he is a convinced unbeliever. This disturbs Julie, although Wolmar never tries to alter her faith. The more beneficent Wolmar is, and the more he does to cure Saint-Preux of his old infatuation, the more religious and miserable his wife becomes. But why? As was clear to Rousseau, the excess of religious commitment is a displaced return of the repressed sexual passion: the true factor of de-sexualization is not religious spirituality but the atheistic Enlightenment which dissolves passion with cold utilitarian understanding, reducing it to a pathological excess to be properly cured. No wonder that, in these conditions, sexual passion can only return in a religious guise, as the “irrational” awareness of misery and sin.

      In the end, once it seems certain that Saint-Preux will marry Claire and settle down at Clarens to become tutor to the Wolmar children, Julie tells him of her profound malaise and boredom. The novel ends with an unexpected accident which nonetheless reveals a deeper deadlock: having plunged into the lake to save her younger son from drowning, Julie catches cold, falls ill, and dies an exemplary death. She was never really “cured” of her love for her former lover, and the only way out of her predicament is death. Julie is thus very happy to die, because she is now perfectly aware that all her virtue has not helped her to forget Saint-Preux: she loves him as much as ever. As she dies, she gives an account of her tolerant and loving religious beliefs, but her greatest hope is to be reunited in heaven with Saint-Preux.²⁴

      While the novel’s subtitle draws the parallel with the medieval story of Abelard and Heloise, a young girl and her tutor who also succumbed to passion, one should focus on the difference between the two stories. Rousseau depicts the era of the Enlightenment, where the punishment which follows the sexual transgression is no longer castration for the man and the nunnery for the woman: the new Heloise virtuously takes up her duties as wife, mother, and, together with Wolmar, the beneficent parent to everyone on their model estate; while, rather than suffering the cruelty of castration, the tutor is invited by the understanding husband into the ideal family in order to be cured of his pathological infatuation. The message could not be clearer: marriage is the contemporary form of sexual renunciation. In a first approach, the inner movement of Julie effectively appears as “a kind of two-stage negation” in which “the passionate rejection of false and conventional desires” is “followed by the virtuous or rational rejection of the unconventional passions themselves”:²⁵ Julie is “the story of two lovers . . . whose passionate love first rejects the falsity of existing conventions but who then—through their membership in a community formed by Julie’s husband, Wolmar—undergo a second development in which they virtuously abstain from those passions themselves.”²⁶

      The problem is how to read the return of passion at the novel’s end, when Julie confesses her inability to compromise her desire and