Inadequacy

Inadequacy is a beautiful word. Inadequacy, the lack of adequation, the interruption of truth understood as adequatio, as the relationship between a statement and a state of affairs. As though it were a matter of tumbling into this gap and, falling, of being seized not by falsehood pure and simple, but a kind of errancy, an exile which carries thought far from itself. As though thinking were also a matter of being seized by such an errancy, by the force of error.

Is this not irresponsibility itself: the disappearance of accountability, a high-minded nihilism which erodes the possibility of collective action and rational thought? I think of Marx and those who today remind us of his words: truth is universal, although it is only a universality of which the proletariat would be capable; awaken to this universality and the revolution, too, might awaken.

Zizek’s Lenin is a rational man of action, a calculator, but also a risk-taker, the one who knows when to leap and who then leaps; the one who burns, in that moment, with absolute ardency. How would he have appeared to his contemporaries? Like a madman, Zizek says, and he is thinking, too, of Kierkegaard’s Abraham, the Abraham of Fear and Trembling who does not speak because he fears what is called the ethical sphere of existence whose gentle tyranny allows you to speak but steals the words from your mouth as you speak (perhaps Marx would say they become words of the bourgeois universal, hypocritical words, words born from the streaming of capital). When speech can never be the speech of a madman, it is better to be silent. Abraham does not speak (but the poet Silentio speaks …)

Does democracy, our worldwide democracy, belong to what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere of existence – that sphere of universality where to speak is always to speak in the language of the banal, the universal? Dream with Marx of a new universal, the truth to which only the proletariat can awaken. But it cannot be merely a matter of dreaming: it is necessary to work, to build new collectives.

Still the desire to call someone, comrade, as if, when I said that word, every revolutionary in the world would also speak and would have spoken. Yes: comrade, where in this word would resound a kind of pledge, an engagement from the future, from the call that would summon each of us as it reveals the usurpation through which we come to ourselves. Where what resounds is the placeless opening whose place each of us has usurped, that utopia which opens only when the other is met, welcomed, as the other.

Is it a matter, here, of the truth of what Kierkegaard calls the ethical sphere or the truth only Marx’s proletariat could realise? What if, alongside the truth and the movement towards truth, alongside solidarity, comradeship there was an experience of another comradeship – a friendship, now, with the one who arrives as though from the place you have always usurped? Or a friendship where what is held in common is the experience of inadequacy you know only as you fall from your tasks and fall from work?

Lenin summons the workers and leaps with them into the revolution. The revolution is the leap, the turning of the world, the blazing wheel. But what of the ‘other’ Lenin who reaches you when you are far from the possibility of the collective and the universal? The dream-Lenin who, with Kierkegaard (a dream-Kierkegaard), addresses you in your weariness, out of your weariness: the Lenin who whispers: comrade, to fall is also to leap?