“The true life is absent.” But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. […] The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (transl. Alphonso Lingis)
In May 2008, during the Cannes Marché du Film, a screening of Pascal Laugier’s torture-horror film Martyrs allegedly led to walkouts, fainting, and vomiting. The film begins with the escape from torture of a young girl, Lucie, who later murders a family she suspects of having been somehow responsible. After Lucie’s escape, she befriends another young girl, Anna, who is eventually captured by the same group that tortured Lucie. Anna is told that the purpose of the torture was to send the victim, through suffering, into a state of transcendent ecstasy (that the group calls martyrdom), from which they could return to tell of what they have witnessed, beyond death. Anna becomes a martyr, and reports back to the leader of the group what she has seen. Suffering, perhaps the paradigmatic experience of one’s materiality and finitude, is absolutized here to gain access to the other world upon which all visions of “the other world” are analogically modeled: the afterlife.
We might say that the title of Idris Robinson’s new book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, reflects the central problematic that animates its discussion. This quasi-theological discourse of the absolute beyond is combined, rather covertly, with heavenly bodies in a different sense: those of an eclipse. That the transcendent can only ever be figured in immanent terms is the recurrent problematic for works of liberatory political philosophy such as Robinson’s, just as the relation between divine eternity and the fleeting contingencies of human language is such a problem for theologians.
The book’s episodic structure reflects the difficulty of mediating the immanent and the transcendent. Ten of the twelve chapters broadly follow in the stylistic steps of Robinson’s best-known work, a lecture titled “How It Might Should Be Done”, first delivered in July 2020; the other two chapters, near the book’s end, are addressed in a more traditional philosophical style. Of course, the distinction between these parts of the book is a difference in mode of address, not of subject matter: Robinson wants abstract “philosophical concepts” to “deal an equally devastating blow” in the concrete (class) struggle.
The opposition between “abstract” and “concrete” reappears several points through the text, and is allied to another opposition, “the contemplative and the practical,” at the opening of Robinson’s most “abstract” moment, an essay on Giorgio Agamben, Aristotle, and Walter Benjamin. This return to the abstract and contemplative is justified methodologically by the central concept of that chapter, “destituent power.” Destituent power was initially formulated as a response to Antonio Negri’s notion of constituent power, which replaced the Marxist concept of crisis’s theorization of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production with a crisis internal to the social itself (though its intellectual and practical roots are alleged to run deeper than 1970s Italy). Robinson offers a remarkably succinct exposition of the case for destituency, primarily drawing upon Agamben’s theorization, though departing from it regarding the compatibility of a broadly anarchist politics of destituent power with violent revolt.
Negri’s theory of constituent power involves an accompanying concept of constituted power, the state of things, that finds a radicality to be the potentiality of another constitution in this immanent constituent power that thus undermines all that has been constituted. For anarchists like Agamben and Robinson, constituent power “always arrives back at the constituted power of the state” in spite of its “emancipatory pretensions.” This argument is made through a reading of Aristotle’s work on the categories of actuality and potentiality in which they find an argument that the possible must be absolutely separated from what actually is. For nearly two decades now, liberatory political philosophy has asserted the potentiality of being otherwise against the calcified politics of the post-Soviet era. It is perhaps in these moments, rather than in any discussion of the events of 2020, that this book reveals itself to be mostly a collection of essays written at that particular time. It is surely hard to think now that change is impossible, and the question must really be how the world can be made better, and not simply different.
For Agamben, potentiality always carries the presence of impotentiality, whereas the generative force of constituent power seems to only fulfill its potentiality in actualizing it. In essence, this is why Robinson rejects constituent power: it fails to be otherwise than what already actually is. Destituent power is then located outside all that has been actually constituted. For Robinson, such is the nature of the violence in the George Floyd revolt. It was “a militant nationwide uprising” whose occurrence had to be denied, since there is something about this destituent violence that renders it inappropriable by the state.
Opposed to Agamben’s own strategies of destituency as desertion, Robinson offers a model of destruction based on Walter Benjamin’s allegedly messianic politics. Much of Benjamin’s work involves the claim that concepts of politics and of history involve an idea of eternity at every moment, whose proper comprehension shatters the banal continuum of everyday life. The revolt, for Robinson, stands in the place of Benjamin’s pure and divine violence, a violence that is law-annihilating. Robinson thus adds to the growing number of writers (Marcello Tarì and Agamben himself for example), who find in Benjamin’s philosophy a remarkably coherent politics, generally taken to be anarchistic. However, one wonders whether Benjamin is quite the correct source for this, given that his Messianism concerns the structure of politics and history themselves, rather than prescribing action. For Benjamin, since the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle, and this class struggle has not yet resulted in the liberation of those oppressed in this struggle, human history is equally the history of catastrophe. But this catastrophic judgment can only be understood from the point of view of a struggle that could be won, that is, the standpoint of redemption. This is the meaning of Benjamin’s claim in “On the Philosophy of History” that “the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” Indeed, a quotation from Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” that Robinson himself cites, concerns the declining possibility of an absolute outside to politics, and holds that the image of the Messiah is a necessary but essentially illusory standpoint that modernity has resoundingly abolished.
It is not that Robinson has, in my view, misread Benjamin in order to offer an intellectual backdrop for his own Messianic politics of concrete transcendence, but rather that this politics itself seems increasingly limited. Revealingly, Robinson equivocates between mediation and reform, despite the fact that the latter is a policy or commitment of a political project, whereas the former is more plausibly a fact, that things are only determined to be what they are through processes of differentiation, opposition, and contradiction. In a tantalizing moment, Robinson suggests that Benjamin’s theory of destruction will be presented as a strategy, but then the question of strategy does not reappear. Indeed, it cannot reappear, lest the difficult considerations of strategic action bring Robinson too close to his constantly effaced actuality. This has the consequence that Robinson’s central categories of martyrdom and the revolt are conceptually undetermined and, as such, persistently abstract: rather little can actually be said about them at all. Instead, we are presented with a repeated series of assertions of the radicality of the George Floyd uprising, and the importance of a truly concrete engagement in violent struggle.
Several of the chapters end with a reassertion of a commitment to the revolt: “overcome […] white guilt with a fist, a stone, and a Molotov cocktail”, “begin to settle accounts once and for all”, “to partake in their [the dead’s] struggles is to partake in that eternal life that they’ve created”, “every step of a real movement is more important than a dozen articles and essays”… With so little said about what makes this kind of activity more real or concrete than any other, or indeed more than merely repeating that there was a violent uprising, the “concrete” here appears predominantly as an affective or emotional state, a kind of transcendent ecstasy not far from that sought by the antagonists in Martyrs. Robinson even, at one point, aligns the conditions of revolt with a “universal suffering”, beyond mere individuals. At the end of Laugier’s film, an individual is told of what lies beyond death, truly out of this world, and shoots herself rather than share it with any of her comrades. I hope that Robinson’s incommunicable revolt finds its lessons easier to share with us; otherwise we might find ourselves with a Messiah with the capacity to save the world, but in an act of commitment to the absolutely potential, refuses to do so. According to The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, we have a Messiah, and its name is revolt. The fact that this revolt is done by people, who are nevertheless always part of this world, is generally left out. Rather little time is given to actual difficulties of politics, the question of how to give no quarter to the powers that be, while nonetheless enacting a politics that might save us from suffering, and so on. Idris Robinson’s commitment to radical politics is without question, and what little conceptual elucidation the book offers is often illuminating (even if not always convincing). That said, the actual, concrete, perhaps even material force of this text is not yet communicated. Perhaps it truly is incommunicable.
Billie Cashmore
Billie Cashmore is a PhD student at Kingston University, working on the problem of value between Marx and the Black radical tradition.