By VLADIMIR SAFATLE*

Author's preface to the recently published second edition

“This is how the world ends: not with a lament, but with a parody.”

This book was first published in 2008. I would like to believe that every experience of critical theory has something of a seismography. Writing emerges from a place where tendencies are felt that may become hegemonic in subsequent times. The fact is that the world has accelerated in the last fifteen years. Social agreements that seemed solid have dissolved into thin air, social antagonisms have become unbearably evident.

Faced with a system of connected crises that stabilizes as a crisis and gains global dimensions (ecological, demographic, social, political, economic, psychic, epistemic crises), the world is witnessing the consolidation of authoritarian alternatives that, in many cases, are based on the history of national fascist movements, normalizing open forms of social violence that we might have considered unlikely until recently.

In this horizon of social decomposition, there were many analyses that insisted on trying to account for the dynamics of strong popular adherence to fascist and far-right perspectives as expressions of some form of moral deficit (hate speech), psychological deficit (resentment, frustration) or cognitive deficit (belief in fake news, denialism, obscurantism). In all these cases, it was as if regressions were making the normal functioning of our societies unfeasible in times of crisis and instability.

There was no shortage of those who thought it would be a good idea to re-enact the age-old conflict between civilization and barbarism, between enlightenment and superstition. It would have been better to begin by asking how much barbarism exists within civilization and how much superstition is inseparable from enlightenment. A little dialectic of enlightenment at these times would be good and would have saved us many supposedly edifying discussions that only served to feed our illusion of moral and intellectual superiority while the alternatives for real transformation were, to a large extent, thrown out of the field of progressivism.

In other words, it is much more convenient to imagine that supporters of the far right are motivated, for example, by resentment, since this gives us a moral superiority over them and guarantees that our indignation, in turn, would not be resentful. It would be just, even if impotent. However, these readings that rely on the identification of forms of deficit in the subjects who close ranks with fascism and the far right actually say much more about the way the observer would like to see himself than about the object to be described.

The hypothesis of this book was to reject such readings of the contemporary rise of authoritarianism. Discussions about processes of social rationalization that operated in a “cynical” way had already been raised by other authors. But this book sought to show that the normalization of such social pathology was an important phenomenon for understanding how authoritarian dynamics were not the result of social “regressions,” but rather the results of the “normal” ways in which the processes of socialization and individuation function.

In other words, it was a question of defining the problem of cynical rationality as a fundamental sector of theories on contemporary fascism. It was not possible to understand anything about the rise of fascism in our times without integrating the problem of the generalization of models of cynical rationality.

It would then be worth remembering how the thesis of social regression normally starts from the belief in the resurgence of some form of archaism as a condition for authoritarian shifts within liberal democratic societies. This is an encouraging thesis, since it seems to guarantee that the potential for realizing democratic forms of life would already be present in our processes of social modernization. There would therefore be no reason to criticize them in a structural way.

In this sense, the thesis of cynicism starts, on the contrary, from the observation that authoritarian shifts within liberal democratic societies are a “normal” phenomenon. The so-called “illiberalism” is a constituent pole of liberalism, not its opposite. The real question is another, namely: where does liberalism allow its “illiberalisms” to emerge? In normal situations, they appear wherever exceptional situations, dual structures of legislation, and the flexibilization of norms are authorized. That is, normally in colonies, peripheries, and in violence against insurgent groups.

But in a situation of structural crisis, as we see today, such forms of authoritarianism become widespread throughout society. This generalization is possible because there is an authoritarian matrix in the very constitution of individuals in liberal democracy. Individuals are no guarantee of democratic normality. They are no guarantee that we live in a society in which individual freedoms are fundamental, in which tolerance for the multiplicity of interests and ways of life can prevail.

In fact, individuals are constituted in such a way as to be always open to authoritarian discourses, segregation practices, stabilization of violence and erasures. This is what I sought to explain in this book through an ontogenesis of the practical-cognitive capacities of subjects based on the problem of cynical rationality.

In this sense, it would be worth remembering that discussions about cynicism allow us to better understand the current processes of stabilization of social decomposition. This is one of the main research problems that I have set myself since then, namely, to understand how such stabilization occurs and what its consequences are. One of the first theses that I defended in this regard consisted of affirming that, given the explicit decomposition of social promises of integration, the reduction of such promises to a mere social appearance, society would enter a dynamic of increasingly generalized cynical functioning.

Saint-Just used to say: “Celui qui plaisante à la tete du gouvernement tend à la tyrannie"[those who play at the head of the government tend towards tyranny]. In other words, there is nothing more authoritarian than a power that laughs at itself. For a normativity that functions cynically is one that carries within itself its own negation, the awareness of its own impasse, the figure of its own criticism, without such contradiction preventing it from functioning.

This means that people are aware of the powerless nature of the statements they themselves support, but such statements must continue to be said, must continue to circulate, mixing seriousness and irony, as if we were in a situation of absolute ironization of behavior. And it will not be by chance to discover that the current figures of authoritarian leadership are, for the most part, “comic”, “parodic”.

Many of them came from or spent long periods in the world of mass communication, as characters who deliberately play with caricature and stereotyping, who laugh at themselves all the time, who make us constantly doubt whether they are serious or not. For cynical comedy is a successful compromise formation. It allows us to preserve the most brutal behaviors while at the same time opening a possible distance between statement and enunciator, between received discourse and the position of the receiver.

Far from being something restricted to the modes of functioning of discourses, this phenomenon showed something deeper; namely, it made explicit a form of psychic structuring of subjects. This may help to understand why Cynicism and Critical Failure it was, in its own way, a first settling of accounts with what we could call the “domestication of critical theory”, from the second generation of the so-called Frankfurt school.

For it was a question of showing the futility of a critique based on the identification of performative contradictions, on the belief in specters of communicational rationality circulating somewhere in our lifeworlds, as Jürgen Habermas proposed. It was only possible to operate with such a restricted horizon of critique by ignoring the generalization of modalities of cleavages of the self and of new hegemonic forms of agency of psychic conflicts that cynical rationality made very explicit.

The subjects presupposed by communicational rationality – with their personality units, their coherent conduct, their privatized language that could be subject to the expansion of the unitary horizon of understanding consciousness, of translatability into public language – simply do not exist. In their place, what we find are subjects who deal with unstable structures of cleavages of the self and who organize their conduct based on the permanence of such cleavages. They are subjects capable of “sustaining two opposing ideas in their heads and continuing to function,” as Scott Fitzgerald once said.

Therefore, it was a question of starting from an analysis of the libidinal economy of contemporary capitalism and its regimes of subjectivity. Regimes that did not generate conflicts in a tendential way based on the dynamics of neurotic denial, with its divisions of the psychic apparatus into a true topology of separate spaces (conscious/unconscious, I/it/superego, etc.), but from the perverse denials so clearly present in structures such as fetishism.

Denials that showed the permanence of cleavages that were organized without the need for repression or repression. Cleavages that, in turn, operate not between psychic instances, but within the self itself. This situation led subjects to learn the inherent flexibility of norms, the continuous game with the figures of a duplicated consciousness. Therefore, cynicism is a reactive and desperate way of stabilizing a deep psychic crisis, in which the traditional forms of psychic synthesis, individuality and identity no longer have the strength to impose themselves.

Well, one could accuse such a strategy of sinning due to a “sociological deficit,” as Axel Honneth did with Theodor Adorno. Too much psychoanalysis and not enough sociology, in short. For my part, I have always found and continue to find a fundamental materialist deficit in not being able to start from modifications in the processes of socialization and individuation as the basis for the real functioning of ideology.

The thesis of a “sociological deficit” merely hides how some are no longer willing to ask themselves how the paradoxical development of psychic structures within capitalist societies makes individuals and their personalities privileged spaces for the foundation of authoritarian structures because they are ready for a cynical rationality that is the real condition of authoritarianism. In other words, they are sleeping a kind of anthropological sleep, believing that they can still presuppose potentially unitary individuals, immanent autonomy, structured and non-contradictory personality, in which none of this exists in this form.

This project, in contrast, was articulated within a historical horizon of failure of certain regimes of criticism that seemed to guide us until then. The first of these was the failure of criticism as unveiling; criticism as the explication of the forms of production of appearance. This explication was mobilized in the hope that in this way we would break the dynamics of fascination of false consciousness.

When I first presented this thesis, I had no real understanding of what such a failure meant. Today, it would be appropriate to start from the defense that the critique of ideology, in order to function and not be a form of cognitive limitation of social consciousness to be overcome, of an inability to correctly grasp the genesis of structures of thought, needs a double foundation – namely, a diagnosis of social suffering and a kind of theological-political horizon.

To begin with, it must start from the defense that current power relations are producers of suffering. This is what Karl Marx does when he defends criticism as listening to social suffering, when he starts from alienation as the fundamental result of socialization in capitalism. Therefore, the topic of alienation is not a mere remnant of a Hegelian-Feuerbachian philosophical anthropology, as Louis Althusser and his followers would have it.

It is the fundamental axis of the organization of social criticism, since it allows the emergence of criticism from listening to social suffering: the only concrete and real basis for the motivation for revolutionary action. In this sense, György Lukács is much more consistent in constructing the concept of reification as a central operator of social suffering, in addition to being a result of the dynamics of ideological inversion.

The critique of ideology, however, does not only require a diagnosis of social suffering that leads subjects to question the structures of thought and institutional reproduction of society that appear as “natural.” It also requires the defense of a possible transformation of the proletariat into an offensive force against capital, and this requires a self-understanding of the proletariat as a figure that carries a world to come. We can speak of theological-political force because the revolutionary process thus mobilizes the capacity to project the future, the belief in a secular redemption, as a political strategy of rupture and social transformation.

Since the peasant revolt of the Anabaptists in 1525, history has seen the need for such mobilization. With this dimension lost, the awareness of the critical nature of the situation remains present, but without the strength to act. It is no longer a potential awareness of struggle, but rather a melancholic, disenchanted acceptance of the current law of the existing. This explains why Theodor Adorno insisted that ideology did not lie in the masking of the dynamics of power and domination that produced the hegemonic structures of thought, but in the absolute acceptance of the existing, even when the relations of power and violence that characterize it are made explicit.

It is through this resigned acceptance that consciousness begins to function cynically. It ends up affirming the necessity of what is, even if the current state produces profound experiences of violence, suffering and injustice.

One can then ask what makes the proletariat lose this theological-political strength. This is a major problem in contemporary political philosophy. Mario Tronti has written some beautiful pages on this subject. First, it would be worth remembering that the proletariat as a potential political subject still exists. Labor continues to be central as an operator of socialization, in a certain way even more evident in view of the horizon of decomposition of the labor defense system with the advent of neoliberalism.

The work regimes have intensified with brutal reductions in wages and an increase in social insecurity. However, for this proletarian potential to come into existence, a generalized disidentification with institutions, social places and identities is necessary: ​​the only condition for the proletarian dispossession, its helplessness, to become a force for projecting the future. In other words, an experience of negativity is necessary that makes the uprooting in relation to all representation and all natural place the condition for another form of social action, one that aims at the collapse of the current world and the opening to emancipation.

This perhaps explains why, after this book, I have come a long way and tried to think about the conditions for a recovery of dialectical negativity as a way for critical theory to think about structural ruptures. This path is mainly part of the books Grand Abyss Hotel^[I] e Giving body to the impossible.^[ii] At the same time, today I dedicate my research to problematizing what we should understand by “emancipation”.

The horizon of crises in which we find ourselves also implies the crisis of what has been hegemonically sold to us as “freedom” and “emancipation.” This negativity that makes uprooting in relation to all natural representation the condition of another form of social action must be pushed to the point where the very grammar we use to define ourselves and our ideals collapses.

I began to think more systematically about this problem with At one with the momentum.^[iii] Further developments of this research will come soon.

Finally, it would be worth remembering that such problems linked to cynical rationality and its developments continue to arise in an increasingly urgent manner, as we perceive how the contemporary resurgence of fascism is a resilient and rising dynamic.

It requires a more precise understanding of the unfolding of cynical rationality, its forms of authorization of violence, and the horizon of “stabilization in decomposition” that we currently know with the crises that have transformed into true regimes of government. This is what I intend to do in my next work.

To the reader of this book, I would also like to say that I would revise several of its elaborations if it were written today. But this is a trivial statement. There are those who write as if they have a limited set of problems to explore in depth. These are animated by a kind of writing by deepening, writing by excavation.

Over time, those who write in this way realize that their way of presenting problems undergoes a certain metamorphosis. Certain propositions are written as provisional paths. Precisely for this reason, I decided to preserve the text of this book as it was written. A bit like someone who thinks it is best to preserve the marks of a path that they know still has a long way to go.

*Vladimir Safatle He is a professor of philosophy at USP. Author, among other books, of Ways of transforming worlds: Lacan, politics and emancipation (Authentic) [https://amzn.to/3r7nhlo]

Reference

Vladimir Safatle. Cynicism and the failure of criticism. 2nd Edition. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2024, 222 pages.https://amzn.to/4isG4SB]

Notes

[I] Vladimir Safatle, The Grand Abyss Hotel: towards a reconstruction of the theory of recognition (São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2020).

[ii] Idem, Giving Body to the Impossible: The Meaning of Dialectics from Theodor Adorno (Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2019).

[iii] Same, At One with the Momentum (Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2022).

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