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Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism
Slavoj Zizek
London Review of Books | Vol. 21 No. 21 dated 28 October 1999 Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts by John Keane · Bloomsbury, 532 pp,
Vaclav Havel's life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography 'A Political Tragedy in Six Acts'? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication of Havel's political texts and became a friend. He also did much to resuscitate Havel's notion of 'civil society' as the site of resistance to Late Socialist regimes. Despite this personal connection, Keane's book is far from hagiography - he gives us the 'real Havel' with all his weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. He divides his Life into six stages: the early student years under the Stalinist regime; the playwright and essayist of the Sixties; the defeat of the last great attempt at 'socialism with a human face' in the Prague Spring of 1968; the years of dissidence and arrest which culminated in Havel's emergence as the leading spokesman for Charter 77; the Velvet Revolution; and finally the Presidency. Along the way, we get an abundance of 'endearing foibles', which far from tarnishing Havel's heroic image, seem somehow to make his achievement all the more palpable. His parents were rich 'cultural capitalists', owners of the famous Barrandov cinema studios ('bourgeois origins'). He has always had unreliable habits (a fondness for eau de toilette, sleeping late, listening to rock music) and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia's most important dissident - when a potential rival emerged, doubtful rumours would start to circulate about the rival's links with the secret police. As President he uses a child's scooter to zoom along the corridors of the huge Presidential palace.
Slavoj Zizek on The London Review of Books on John Keane's Havel - Page 1 of 10
The source of Havel's tragedy, however, is not the tension between the public figure and the 'real person', not even his gradual loss of charisma in recent years. Such things characterise every successful political career (with the exception of those touched by the grace of premature demise). Keane writes that Havel's life resembles a 'classical political tragedy' because it has been 'clamped by moments of . . . triumph spoiled by defeat', and notes that 'most of the citizens in President Havel's republic think less of him than they did a year ago.' The crucial issue, however, is the tension between his two public images: that of heroic dissident who, in the oppressive and cynical universe of Late Socialism, practised and wrote about 'living in truth', and that of Post-Modern President who (not unlike Al Gore) indulges in New Age ruminations that aim to legitimise Nato military interventions. How do we get from the lone, fragile dissident with a crumpled jacket and uncompromising ethics, who opposes the all-mighty totalitarian power, to the President who babbles about the anthropic principle and the end of the Cartesian paradigm, reminds us that human rights are conferred on us by the Creator, and is applauded in the US Congress for his defence of Western values? Is this depressing spectacle the necessary outcome, the 'truth', of Havel the heroic dissident? To put it in Hegel's terms: how does the ethically impeccable 'noble consciousness' imperceptibly pass into the servile 'base consciousness'? Of course, for a 'PostModern' Third Way democrat immersed in New Age ideology, there is no tension: Havel is simply following his destiny, and is deserving of praise for not shirking political power. But there is no escape from the conclusion that his life has descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. Rarely has one individual played so many different parts. The cocky young student in the early Fifties, member of a closed circle which holds passionate political discussions and somehow survives the worst years of the Stalinist terror. The Modernist playwright and critical essayist struggling to assert himself in the mild thaw of the late Fifties and Sixties. The first encounter with History - in the Prague Spring - which is also Havel's first big disappointment. The long ordeal of the Seventies and most of the Eighties, when he is transformed from a critical playwright into a key political figure. The miracle of the Velvet Revolution, with Havel emerging as a skilful politician negotiating the transfer of power and ending up as President. Finally, there is Havel in the Nineties, the man who presided over the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and who is now the proponent of the full integration of the Czech Republic into Western economic and military structures. Havel himself has been shocked by the swiftness of the transformation - a TV camera famously caught his look of disbelief as he sat down to his first official dinner as President. Keane highlights the limitations of Havel's political project, and the Havel he describes is sometimes remarkably naive, as when, in January 1990, he greeted Chancellor Kohl with the words: 'Why don't we work together to dissolve all political parties? Why don't we set up just one big party, the Party of Europe?' There is a nice symmetry in the two Vaclavs who have dominated Czech politics in the past decade: Slavoj Zizek on The London Review of Books on John Keane's Havel - Page 2 of 10
the charismatic Philosopher-King, the head of a democratic monarchy, finding an appropriate double in Vaclav Klaus, his Prime Minister, the cold technocratic advocate of full market liberalism who dismisses any talk of solidarity and community. In 1974, Paul Theroux visited Vietnam, after the peace agreement and the withdrawal of the US Army, but before the Communist takeover. He writes about it in The Great Railway Bazaar . A couple of hundred US soldiers were still there deserters, officially and legally non-existent, living in slum shacks with their Vietnamese wives, earning a living by smuggling or other crimes. In Theroux's hands, these individuals become representative of Vietnam's place in global power politics. From them, we gradually unravel the complex totality of Vietnamese society. When Keane is at his best, he displays the same ability to extract from small details the global context of what was going on in Czechoslovakia. The weakest passages in the book are those which attempt to deal more conceptually with the nature of 'totalitarian' regimes or the social implications of modern technology. Instead of an account of the inner antagonisms of Communist regimes, we get the standard liberal clichés about 'totalitarian control'. Towards the end of his book, Keane touches on the old idea of the 'King's Two Bodies' and points to the equivalent importance of the Leader's body in Communist regimes. A 'pre-modern' political order, he writes, relies on having such sacred bodies, while the democratic system, in which the place of power is supposedly empty, is open to competitive struggle. But this contrast fails to grasp the intricacies of 'totalitarianism'. It is not that Keane is too directly anti-Communist, but that his liberaldemocratic stance prevents him from seeing the horrifying paradox of the 'Stalinist Leader'. Lenin's first major stroke, which he suffered in May 1922, left his right side virtually paralysed and for a while deprived him of speech. He realised that his active political life was over and asked Stalin for some poison so that he could kill himself; Stalin took the matter to the Politburo, which voted against Lenin's wish. Lenin assumed that because he was no longer of any use to the revolutionary struggle, death was the only option - 'calmly enjoying old age' was out of the question. The idea of his funeral as a great state event he found repulsive. This was not modesty: he was simply indifferent to the fate of his body, regarding it as an instrument to be ruthlessly exploited and discarded when no longer useful. With Stalinism, however, the body of the Leader became 'objectively beautiful'. In 'On the Problem of the Beautiful in Soviet Art', an essay from 1950, the Soviet critic Nedoshivin wrote: 'Amid all the beautiful material of life, the first place should be occupied by images of our great leaders . . . The sublime beauty of the leaders . . . is the basis for the coinciding of the "beautiful" and the "true" in the art of socialist realism.' This has nothing to do with the Leader's physical attributes and everything to do with abstract ideals. The Leader in fact is like the Lady in courtly love poetry cold, distanced, inhuman. Both the Leninist and the Stalinist Leader are thoroughly alienated, but in opposite ways: the Leninist Leader displays radical self-
Slavoj Zizek on The London Review of Books on John Keane's Havel - Page 3 of 10
