On Criticism

At the end of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest the main character dies in agony. Pain in the stomach (the kind which, years later, Kurt Cobain would have) has been already for a long time unbearable, just as unbearable as the people who go out of their way to make priest’s last days hell.

And yet, before his last sigh, the priest, with great peace and certainty, utters the famous sentence: Whatever it is, everything is God’s grace.

This is the moment when one completely renounces critical approach, renounces question, renounces, answer, when one abandons every familiar model of analysis and every self-made interpretive model, and the question of one’s death and the purpose of one’s life, the entire life story with all its possible meanings is delivered into the hands of the great Other.

Slavoj Žižek claims that totalitarian is not the one who has all the answers, but the one who has all the questions.

Q&A form, conceived as democratic, is actually totalitarian.

As long as the game of asking questions is on, as long as we can convince ourselves that out there, somewhere, there is someone who can give an answer, our symbolic order is preserved. The guarantee of its entirety is the great Other.

In life, the hysteric has all the questions – that’s why in democratic societies public opinion is permanently hystericized – “it has the right to know”, therefore it has all the questions. Equally hystericized are people in temples, with countless questions “oh why” directed at God, who has obviously abandoned the world, running away as a special kind of political emigrant from the repressive order he created himself wherein he is submitted to 24 hour interrogation.

In death, from the Christian perspective of Besson’s priest, God has all the answers – it is to him that we will have to answer for every thought and look, particularly for all the questions we addressed to him. And vice versa, every asker will be asked: on the onset of democracy, the defeated will have to answer for the crimes of ancien régime, the interrogators will be publicly interrogated.

Let us now imagine the situation which was pointed out to me by Aleksandar Bečanović: let’s imagine that we have convinced ourselves that critical thinking doesn’t lead to answers, even less to the change of unbearable social, economic and existential situation which seems to be made of reinforced concrete; let’s imagine that after the life long struggle with the world and ourselves, tired of everything, we utter on the death bed: well ok, whatever it is, everything is God’s grace; utter that like a desperate gambler, who has already lost everything, when playing his last ace.

Let’s imagine that we say this, that in the end we utter those words which are supposed to solve everything. We utter. And then, … nothing. Everything remains the same: so many questions and not a single answer.

Isn’t it absolute horror? The moment when it’s too late for fight, because we have already given up, but too late for giving up too, because giving up doesn’t mean anything either, because we have nothing to give and we have nobody to give it to.

The question of faithfulness to critical thinking, therefore, needs to be posed like this: it is not about what we will gain (in the sense of intervention in the field of social, in the sense of the change our critical writing will generate), but about what we may lose.

Which leads us to the position of the one who writes: which position, even at its most aggressive, is actually defensive. Critical thinking and writing are par excellence reactionary activities: ultimately, we do them not to change the world, but not to be destroyed by the world. Not how to change, but how to survive the world. Brain function eventually doesn’t differ significantly from liver function: it is its job to process all the poisons that with every look, touch, thought we take in.

To be faithful to one’s own critical thinking – it is not an easy thing. Because the results will necessarily fail, the world will, anyway, remain deaf to all our analyses, projections and warnings; all those pages and sentences that you filled with great effort and passion, that you filled with great hope will silently sink into the printing ink black opaque ocean at which bottom already await countless lost works of spirit. No matter how bravely you shout, the answer will be indifferent silence. And when it seems that you have changed something, you will only be fated to watch those who mould the society according to your ideas creating a freak – in the end you will be condemned to watch the thing that was supposed to be a monument to your ideas turning into an unconvincing condemnation of those ideas.

Yes: it is likely that by continuing critical struggle we will not gain anything. But by giving up, we may lose everything.

Being faithful to your own critical position, notwithstanding all objections which can be given to you from personal to impersonal, thus becomes a mighty weapon: there is tremendous force in what happens despite everything.

Finally, and despite everything, critical thinking is a matter of style. You know the rest: style is taste, taste is character, character is fate.

So if the role (or choice, as Wilde says: a true gentlemen always fights for an already lost cause) of critical intellectual is to be defeated, because s/he is a bee which resents other bees while they are pollinating flowers, because s/he is an ant which resents other ants their excessive submission and discipline, because s/he is a wolf which resents other wolves their bloodthirstiness, even so, one is free to chose the style of one’s defeat.

It is not nothing. It is everything.

Andrej Nikolaidis

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