Return to Lenin ; Lenin’s Externality & Politics

There are two features which distinguish Lenin’s intervention.

First, one cannot emphasize enough the fact of Lenin’s externality with regard to Marx: he was not a member of Marx’s “inner circle” of the initiated, he never met either Marx or Engels; moreover, he came from a land at the Eastern borders of “European civilization.”

It is only possible to retrieve the theory’s original impulse from this external position; in exactly the same way St Paul, who formulated the basic tenets of Christianity, was not part of Christ’s inner circle, and Lacan accomplished his “return to Freud” using a totally distinct theoretical tradition as a leverage.

So, in the same way that St Paul and Lacan reinscribe the original teaching into a different context (St Paul reinterprets Christ’s crucifixion as his triumph; Lacan reads Freud through the mirror-stage Saussure), Lenin violently displaces Marx, tears his theory out of its original context, planting it in another historical moment, and thus effectively universalizes it.

Second, it is only through such a violent displacement that the “original” theory can be put to work, fulfilling its potential of political intervention. It is significant that the work in which Lenin’s unique voice was for the first time clearly heard is What Is To Be Done? – the text which exhibits Lenin’s unconditional will to intervene into the situation, not in the pragmatic sense of “adjusting the theory to the realistic claims through necessary compromises,” but, on the contrary, in the sense of dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation.

The return to Lenin is the endeavor to retrieve the unique moment when a thought already transposes itself into a collective organization, but does not yet fix itself into an Institution (the established Church, the IPA, the Stalinist Party-State). It aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the “good old revolutionary times,” nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to “new conditions,” but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of initiating a political project that would undermine the totality of the global liberal–capitalist world order…

- 『On Belief』, Slavoy Zizek

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