History as the “Tact of Natality”

Czechoslovak Spartakiade, Prague, 1985. Photograph from the practice for the event.

Time and again I have asked myself and have been asked by others why the Soviet social experiment was so short-lived and collapsed so easily. The most obvious explanation is: this experiment contradicted human nature because it did not sufficiently reward hard work and innovation and, thus, was not competitive enough. Indeed, the Soviet Union was a much more egalitarian society than the West. Whatever one did, one’s lifestyle remained close to the social average. Thus, the incentive to work hard remained low. Of course, there was a system of bureaucratic privileges, but these privileges could not be converted into private property: if one lost one’s bureaucratic position, one also lost the privileges connected with it. This created a sense of insecurity even in the souls of relatively successful Soviet citizens. Soviet citizens had no private property; in this sense, they, indeed, could not lose anything beyond their chains. The bourgeoisie is conservative and cares about the stability of the state because it is interested in the maintenance of its property. However, as the Soviet state collapsed, Soviet citizens did not lose anything. On the contrary, they got a chance to privatize a piece of the Soviet collective pie.

This explanation sounds persuasive as far as it is applied to Soviet history. But what about other long-term political projects? Old European empires also collapsed. Fascism collapsed. And, in an interesting way, anti-fascism also collapsed. The dominant postwar political order can be described as ideologically based on the formula “never again”; however, today we observe the rise of neofascist parties. This indicates that in the times of modernity (and, for that matter, postmodernity), all long-term, intergenerational political projects fail. What is the reason for this? There are many reasons why the next generation abandons the political orders and institutions installed by their parents’ generation. This phenomenon is well known and has been analyzed thoroughly: the conditions of living change, technology changes, the structure of society changes. Every new generation has to adapt to new realities—and, thus, abandon the traditional way of life. It is a phenomenon that is not limited to modernity. Historically, all established social orders experienced decline—and then ended. Mostly this process of decline and disappearance took many generations. Several generations shared a certain sociopolitical project—Christian, or Islamic, or the project of Enlightenment—and then this project was slowly abandoned.

Communism was the last of these long-term historical projects. The building of communism was from the beginning understood as a project that would take a long time and many generations to be realized. This meant that, until this goal was finally achieved, every generation was supposed to work without a chance of seeing the communist project fulfilled. It could be expected—and was even predicted by some authors—that the generations following the communist revolution would become tired of this effort that brought no visible result. However, history has taught us that generation after generation lived under the same political and social conditions—even if they did not like these conditions. But why? Simply because they could not imagine a different, alternative order that they could install after they abolished the inherited order. And it is in this respect that modernity brought a decisive change in intergenerational relationships.

Indeed, modernity valorized a revolt of a new type against the inherited order—a revolt that was not supposed to bring about any new order. The project of old was replaced by desire. Now it was enough to have a desire for a different future, for a break with inherited traditions, for a struggle against the powers to be. No longer was there a need to have a project for the time after—because such a project would mean betrayal of the desire for the radically different. Indeed, every project is based on a compromise, whereas desire can be absolute. Accordingly, in modernity new generations are required to revolt against their parents not because they have to adapt to a new set of living conditions or want to establish better laws but simply because they are young—and their parents are old. To be young means to be driven by desire, by vital energy. According to Freud every male child wants to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Or at least kill his father and eat him (sharing this food with his brothers). Here we have a formula for a revolution that has nothing to do with the class structure of society, with technological progress, or with a sociopolitical project. One revolts against the old simply because one is young—and wants to prove that to others. To revolt against one’s parents’ generation becomes a duty that no young person has a right to ignore.

It is obvious that this kind of revolution does not have the goal of establishing a new political order or new political power. It is, rather, directed against any kind of political power in the name of the vital power of a young body and its desires. The celebration of the health and vitality of the young body starts with Nietzsche. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, it takes the form of a cult. In our time this cult has become institutionalized. It is obvious that in our society sports occupies a central place, as the celebration of young, healthy, powerful bodies. Pop singers also occupy a privileged position, as they demonstrate physical strength by singing and dancing for hours under truly inhuman conditions of noise and heat. They are the saints of our culture, which proposes and accepts them as “role models.” It is these sporty bodies that one has in mind when one celebrates the young and healthy as a promise of a bright future.

Here we have a cult that, like every cult, annuls history. Health and desire return in every new generation according to the Nietzschean law of the eternal return of the same. The nature of the political order against which vitality and desire are directed is irrelevant, as is the kind of political order to which the new explosion of desire will lead. What is important is only that new healthy and desiring bodies are born—and start the eternally same revolt against everything old. Of course, after a certain period of time, these bodies become old and weak—but then the bodies of the next generation are healthy and full of desire. And if we believe that the only real power is the power of desire—and our society believes precisely this—then everything old should be destroyed simply because it is old. In place of the old, the new should emerge, which will be destroyed in turn. In this way, vital energy and desire remain always present in our world—an thus can bend this world to their will.

This eternal return of vitality and desire is that what modernity sees as its true promise. It is captured well by the figure of “natality” introduced by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition. Arendt sees in every beginning a new “promise,” a possibility of a new and better world. This beginning is a birth:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the tact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.

It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”1

One can act because one is born. And one should act as far as one is young, healthy, and full of vital energy and desire. One should be creative and work not for here and now but for the future. The future is future generations. The new beginning is not a new faith, a new technology, or a new ideology. It is a new human body—a new influx of vitality and desire that create action and change the world. However, the desire to work for future generations does not presuppose the existence of these generations; otherwise it would be a project and not a desire. And of course, childcare is a very conservative activity.

The desire of which we speak here is a desire for what then? Obviously, it is a desire for desire—of feeling oneself desiring. This feeling is not a project; it cannot be handed over to another generation as an institution or a social and political goal. However, we assume that through the grace of nature every generation has a moment in which it feels itself vital and desiring. History becomes “the tact of natality,” as Arendt writes—repetitive beginnings without ends, desires for desires without fulfillment. In fact, this is the historiography that we currently practice. This historiography knows only generations—baby boomers, X, Y, Z etc. Every generation enters history during its desiring, active phase—and then leaves it without offering anything that the next generation could embrace. On the contrary, in its second phase—after a life full of disillusionment and frustration—every generation presents itself to the next generation as historical garbage that has to be removed to make way for a new desire. It is obvious that this “tact of natality” excludes the possibility of any transgenerational project, beyond the eternal return of the desire for such a project. Thus, the return of communism is as improbable as the return of any other transgenerational project. At the same time a return of the desire for communism is not only possible but almost unavoidable.