°Heroics
The final paragraph of Alberto Moreiras’ “A God Without Sovereignty - Political Jouissance - The Passive Decision”, CR, 4.3, 2004:
In his analysis of The Theory of the Partisan, Jan-Werner Müller notes that “the partisan was essentially a reincarnation of the romantic figure of the hero — a selfless individual who left his individuality behind in the service of the national collective” (Müller 2003, 149).
At the same time, however, if “the revolutionary partisan … clearly marked another decisive stage in the destruction of the supposedly humane form of European interstate conflict,” “by definition, the partisan was a totalitarian figure—existentially and totally absorbed in his struggle” (150). The maximum intensification of partisan sovereignty is partisan ipseity — the partisan deals with the enemy, the absolute enemy, through a radical existential negation, which is the other side of total self-affirmation, no matter how mediated by the party, the coming state, or the national community.
The definition of the political in terms of the friend-enemy antithesis reverts into a conflict of subjective catastrophes. Another order of the political can only mean an order not decided by subjective jouissance. Is a step back possible in this connection? A step back toward the arrival of something beyond the purview of either the hero or the ordinary man? As Heidegger put it, “Das Schwierige liegt in der Sprache” — the difficulty lies in language (Heidegger 1988, 154).
