THE PLANK IN OUR OWN EYES

Photograph by Nadav Kander for The New Yorker

Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; Politics midweek, Culture or Bonus Obscenities on the weekend.

If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin announced that he will seal some great works of art by Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Andres Serrano and more (he acquired them legally) in a safe designed to destroy them all with acid should WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. As expected, this plan was instantly rejected by a whole series of comments, dismissed as “a pathetically banal stunt for our shallow times”… Reactions like these really bear witness to our shallow times: they focuse on the similitude of this gesture with other similar ones (from Dada to Banksy and some “eco-vandalists”) while ignoring the crux of the matter: the fate of Assange. Molodkin is not performing an act of modern art, he is trying to save a human life. Plus he is not alone in this: behind him stands a collective of artists and owners of the works of art animated by a profound insight: do we have the right to enjoy in seclusion great works of art ignoring the horror out of which they emerged? Walter Benjamin wrote in his “Theses on the History of Philosophy”:

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”

The act of the community of artists and collectors heroically makes visible this barbarism. Their act is desperate and brutal, of course, but what if this is the only way we can raise the awareness of what goes on in the Belmarsh prison? The true question is therefore: why is Assange such a thorn in the side of the knaves of our political establishment? Because he is not a fool like the majority of the critical Left. In his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan elaborates the distinction between two types of the contemporary intellectual, fool and knave:

”The 'fool' is an innocent, a simpleton, but truths issue from his mouth that are not simply tolerated but adopted, by virtue of the fact that this 'fool' is sometimes clothed in the insignia of the jester. And in my view it is a similar happy shadow, a similar fundamental 'foolery,' that accounts for the importance of the left-wing intellectual. And I contrast this with the designation  for that which the same tradition furnishes a strictly contemporary term, a term that is used in conjunction with the former, namely, 'knave.' Everyone knows that a certain way of presenting himself, which constitutes part of the ideology of the right-wing intellectual, is precisely to play the role of what he is in fact, namely, a 'knave.' In other words, he doesn't retreat from the consequences of what is called realism; that is, when required, he admits he's a crook."[1]

In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it and mocks the Left on account of its "utopian" plans which necessarily lead to catastrophe, while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court-jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in the way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counter-productive sentimentalism, while the fool is a postmodern cultural criticist who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to "subvert" the existing order, actually serves as its supplement.

A joke from the good old days of Really-Existing Socialism perfectly illustrates the futility of fools. In the 15^th century Russia occupied by Mongols, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife; he then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get dirty!” After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy; the surprised wife asks him: “how can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust!” This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents: they thought they are dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people… Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position? Among today’s names for softly smearing with dust the balls of those in power are definitely Cancel Culture wokists and the Western guardians of “individual freedoms.”

Our task is to discover how to make a step further – our new version of Marx’s thesis 11 should be: in our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power, the point is to cut them off. And nothing less than this is what Assange did. To cut a long story short, Assange is our Antigone, for a long time kept in the position of a living dead (isolated solitary cell, very limited contacts with his family and lawyers, with no conviction or even official accusation, just waiting for the extradition). The snare around his neck is gradually but, so it seems, inexorably pulling shut. In the case of Assange, time is on the side of US and UK: they can afford to wait, counting on the fact that the public interest will gradually dwindle, especially due to other global crises that dominate our media (Ukraine and Gaza wars, global warming, the threat of AI…). What is happening to Assange is thus more and more something reported on the margins of our big media: the fact that he sits in solitary confinement for years is just part of our lives…

Assange has to be mentioned always when we are tempted to praise our Western democratic societies with their human rights and freedoms, or when we criticize the Muslim, Chinese, or Russian oppression: his fate is a reminder that our freedom is also seriously limited. Assange is thus the victim of the new apolitical neutrality: he is not prohibited to mention, we just no longer care for him, his imprisonment goes on in growing indifference.

Some liberals criticize Assange for focusing just on the liberal West and ignoring the even greater injustices in Russia and China, but they miss the point. First, Wikileaks also exposed many documents that bear witness to the horrors outside the liberal West. However, these injustices are highly visible in our media, we read about them all the time. The problem with the West is that we tend to ignore countries with sometimes even greater injustices (suffice it to mention Saudi Arabia which is definitely worse than Iran). Sometimes we feel free because we ignore our unfreedoms, while in Russia and China people are fully aware of their unfreedoms. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”(Matthew 7:3) Assange taught us to pay attention to the plank in our own eyes. More precisely, Assange taught us to see the hidden complicity between the planks in our eye and in our enemy’s eye. His approach allows us to discover the solidarity and parallels between opponents in the big struggles that pervade our media. For our own good, we should not allow that Assange himself will fall into this darkness of invisibility.

So you think Molodkin’s gesture is wrong and counterproductive? OK, but then don’t lose time analyzing it as an artistic gesture but rather search for more efficient ways to help him. In the situation he is, nobody with clear conscience has the right to think engage in distanced aesthetic judgments – our fate is at stake. 

---

[1] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 182-183.