Violating Failures: Rosa LuxemburgsSpartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin

Anti-manifestation

Eve Katsouraki

In the following pages of this article, I will be looking at failurescapacity to act as a mode of (political) resistance firmly rooted inrevolutionary politics and radical anarchist cultural projects. As Idlike to argue, failures radical properties found in acts of determinatenegation1 exhibit a profound anti-conformist ideology that aims toshatter conventional standards of hegemonic value and seeks toreshape and loosen the boundaries that determine lived experience ona socio-political and artistic level. If the key importance of the last trulyrevolutionary explosion of the twentieth century resides, indeed, infailure and is therefore negative, then we have much to gain byuntangling the dynamics of the aesthetic dimension of such properlypolitical acts. One such act is the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin of 1919which will concern me here as a failed revolution that becomes acatalyst for dadas political commitment to art and its deeply rootedconnection to the highly politicised culture of socialist radicalism andagitation. There is good reason, we should note, why these politico-cultural projects employed the genre of the manifesto as an embodiedpractice of negative poiesis carried in the shape of agitation, socialistpropaganda or proclamation and often engaged in the performedactivity of manifestoing2. The often overlooked violent tensionembedded in the manifesto that seeks to subject to the real, asBabiou puts it, all the powers of form and semblance (2008: 137), isright at the centre of its artistic activity and marks artistic praxis onto

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the political moment with such a creative vigour as if in violentlyseeking the arrival of the new world and its making. For isnt it, afterall, the brutal imposition of a new order the most violent act of all?This properly violent dimension of every authentic democraticexplosion that often leaves its mark in the most violating failureswhich describe the most anarchist revolutionary projects of thetwentieth century history? On this premise, my examination offailure will seek to confront failure as an integral part of theagonal that is, struggle as daily struggle, and struggle as the greatworld transformation that is also key to any understanding of the genreof the manifesto. When confronted with failure, as I would like tosuggest, failure is being embodied as a progressive alternative thatopenly seeks to shape the present, the immanence of a violentbecoming that resides in the political everyday. This is when emphasisshifts from end-result to process, form meaning to representation, and fromdefeat to what Badiou calls resurrection. At this point we may witness whatseems to be a leap of faith which continuously reconnects therevolutionary subject with every single battle even if only for losingonce more. But it is then, through failure itself, that we come closer toan understanding of the subjects making towards an Event, or even ofthe Event itself.

Failure & the manifesto

The manifestos renewed importance for anti-imperialist and anarchistcultural movements such as Dada Berlin, and much related to therevolutionary radicalism of the manifestos internationalism3, wasjustified by the manifestos agonistic placement within the ideologicalframework of radical democratic politics. Historically, the moderntradition of the manifesto is attributed to Marxs and Engelss4

Manifesto of the Communist Party written in 1848. Taken to be atransparent expression of public will, a manifesto can be understood asthe testimony of a historical present tense combined with a sense offuturity, always spoken in the impassionate voice of its participants.Let the ruling class tremble at a Communist revolution, we read inthe Communist Manifesto. The proletarians have nothing to lose buttheir chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALLCOUNTRIES, UNITE! (2010: 271) By activating the symbolic force ofthe genre that connects the writing of the manifesto with the subjectsparticipation, however discursive, with the history of struggle againstoppressive forces, the manifesto produces, as it intensifies, the urgencyof its particular imperatives.5 And by displaying a programmatic

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element invested in a complex, convention-laden, ideologically format,it projects an antagonistic6 intent whose polemical value becomesa matter of finality, of prospective conditions, of a promise. (Badiou2008: 137). But if the manifestos agonistic positioning is justified byconnecting to the historical continuity of bodies in struggle ratherthan simply ideas in contention, and thus legitimating the polemicalvoice of a new civic we, it is the perspective of the agonal embedded inthe genre of the manifesto which also presupposes failure not only asa logical, even though unwelcome, consequence of any struggle, but,on the contrary, as a radical agent that presupposes and determinesultimate success the final victory. Let us look at this prospect moreclosely by examining the broader context of the agonal in the mannerthat is utilised by Rosa Luxemburg in particular. This will allow us tobetter understand dada Berlins connection to Rosa Luxemburgspolitical radicalism which includes failure as a vital part of realpolitical progress. It is also from this point of view that we will be ableto understand the radical properties of failure in the performativebody of the Spartacus Manifesto as fundamentally a violating body,a body of pain and negation, capable of immense affectivity andantagonistic, confrontational power. But first, a brief historical accountof the Spartacus Uprising is in order before we are able to examinemore closely how the perspective of the agonal interacts with failure.

Spartacus Uprising a historical context

That the Spartacus revolution failed to deliver victory to the Germanproletariat of January 1918 in Berlin is hardly surprising. Beingdeprived from a fully organised leadership, since its two main leaders,Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were imprisoned moreoften than not throughout the period of the war, Spartacist activitywas necessarily limited to bursts of agitation carried out in strictsecrecy. Founded in 1916 under the name of Spartacus League, theorganisation stood for an anti-war revolutionary movement of theextreme left. Its first attempt to mount a mass demonstration came onthe May Day of the same year Spartacus was founded, yet it was onlywhen the war started to clearly turn against Germany that frequentstrikes broke out at home with considerable intensity and effect.Finally, the November 9 (1918) general strike forced the Chancellor,Prince Max of Baden, to hand over his powers to Elbert, therepresentative of the SPD, before he fled with the Kaiser who wasalso forced to abdicate. A call for elections was soon issued to decideon a new National Assembly but many Spartacists, including

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Liebknecht, was against it. Fearing further compromise to the SPD whohad continued to vote for war bonds, Karl Liebknecht requestedthe separation of Spartacus from the USPD7 and the formation of theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD). The Russian model was playingstrongly in everyones mind and revolution was brewing in the streetsof Berlin. But not all of the leaders of Spartacus were in favour of thismove. Rosa Luxemburg, fearing that the partys growing purismwould essentially disconnect it from the masses of the working classpeople and the trade unions, defended Spartacuss participation in thevote, despite her knowing how important the question of participationor not was for the future of the revolution.8 Yet she was unsuccessful inaverting abstentionism and, following the formation of the CommunistParty of Germany (KPD), events moved rapidly. In January 1919,workers took arms and occupied the offices of Vorwarts (a SocialistDemocrat paper that was publishing hostile articles to the Spartacists)and other newspapers, as well as police buildings and the railway.(Scott 2008: 28). Although the uprising itself had not been instigatedby the Spartacus League, a rushed Revolutionary Committee was puttogether that consisted of member representatives from the SpartacistsKPD, the USPD and Revolutionary Shop Stewards. Following muchdebate and disagreement within the leadership, a call to arms wassigned by the Revolutionary Committee which included Liebknecht,yet unbeknownst to Luxemburg who was against this action. Yet soonshe also came to side with the uprising. Armed combat followedbetween January 4 and January 15 1919, but the uprising was sooncrushed by state troops with the aid of Freikorps9. Rosa Luxemburg andKarl Liebknecht were arrested and murdered in custody.

Rosa Luxemburgs aporetic & failure

Being a fierce advocate for the sustained mass activity of the workingclass a commitment to the working people, and towards politicalagitation, Luxemburg had written extensively about the thespontaneous co-ordination of the conscious political actions of thebody of [workers] (1970: 119). And despite Lukacs argument, herconception of spontaneity never seemed to denote the kind ofimpulsive and voluntarist revolutionary utopianism that he claimed.Rather, it functioned as a form of a living political school (1970: 172)aimed to fasten the formation of class divisions and educate theproletarian (including liberal, radical and reactionary) parties againstabsolutism. This is the kind of spontaneity, in other words, and mostsignificantly, that allows, as Gillian Rose rightly points out, for all forms

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of the agonal (from political to the economic, from trade union tomass, from organised to unorganised workers and vice versa in eachcase) to take place and become the mediator and educator ofrevolution. (1992: 214) And it is for this reason that it cannot becontrolled or conducted. This position becomes more easily apparentby looking at Luxemburgs socialist thinking in relation to theformation of the political. Once more Rose is useful here forpointing out that any such formation in Luxemburg does not occurby appealing to spontaneous revolutionary action as utopian: u-topia without a place thereby implying an idealised place, but by attendingconsistently to the equivocation of the ethical the perduringinversion of the law, or else, what may be called the aporetic:a-poria without a path, (1992: 201) which involves and requestfailure as part of it, as just another path. To put it in Luxemburgs ownwords, the difference is not in the what but in the how [one shouldlead] (1970: 57) Agon here intrudes aporia, but aporia, as a properradical activity, relies for Luxemburg not on doctrinate collectivism(whether that is in the form of bourgeois reformism or sectarianism),but by adopting an aporetic perspective which, she warns us, is not sosimple a thing. (1970: 88). For an aporetic perspective is definableonly oppositionally. She writes,

The social democratic movement. . . must grope on its road ofdevelopment between the following two rocks: abandoning the masscharacter of the party or abandoning its final aim, falling into bourgeoisreformism or into sectarianism, anarchism, or opportunism. (1970: 75)

The main problem, therefore, of the insinuation of the agonal andaporetic struggle is that it may in fact lead to the inversion ofintentions; for example, the argument for socialism becomes the callof bourgeois morality and the possibility of revolutionary action isdissipated in the objective judgement that action is obsolete. To bemore specific, as Luxemburg points out in her analysis of BernsteinsEvolutionary Socialism, his developed method actually turns on thesocial and political equivocation of the idea of socialisation whileLenins method, in a much similar manner even though diametricallyopposed ideologically, turns on the equivocation of discipline. Yetin either case, the refusal to recognise ambiguity as inherent in theaporetic amounts to a refusal of the equivocation of the ethical,the perduring inversions of the law whose acknowledgement is centralin Luxemburgs radical political thought of the left. But if such arefusal is perpetuated as an overturn of the meaning of agon frommarking a truly radical activity to merely becoming a case of

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opportunism or absolutism from both the left and the right, then it isLuxemburgs equivocation of the ethical that preserves struggle inthe aporetic as that kind of inherently violent activity of the negativethat resides in every failure, not as an accident, neither as simply theconsequence of misled and miscalculated political action, but asa strategically conscious act of negation. In Badious terminology,this takes the shape of determinate negation. The ordering task ofbuilding a new world order, he claims, also involves a type of thereturn of the repressed. (2009: 75) Yet this process does notnecessarily equate to his theory of the repressed only, but also, andmost significantly, to the repressed of the political event itself whichfailed precisely in this task of ordering.10 But such ordering, forLuxemburg, cannot fix any path in advance of the daily struggle: onlythrough aporia (without a path) is it possible to cultivate consciouspolitical acts that are willing to be premature, to act on faith with whatknowledge they can muster, to educate and assimilate, and to also fail:

The peculiar character of this movement resides precisely in the fact thathere, for the first time in history, the popular masses themselves, inopposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will, but they musteffect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society.11

(Luxemburg 1970: 88)

If, in Luxemburgs aporia, therefore, there is always an inversionthat encloses failure as just another path found outside and beyond,in opposition, and always temporally inside and within, continualbut not continuous, (Rose 1999: 206207) then setbacks in proletarianconquest of state power cannot be regarded as evidence of afailed revolution or premature tentative, for there is no definite,mechanical development of society, and no victory for the workingclass outside and independent of the class struggle. (Luxemburg1970: 83) Rather, in agonistic politics, as Luxemburg believed, therecommendation for struggle even if it is a struggle to fail, or astruggle against the failing of struggle itself from becoming a cultureof revisionism or of despotic centralism is entailed in the agonalitself. Yet failure, embedded in the agonal, is to always discursivelycomprehend it to oppose it and to let it be.

Failure as negative poiesis

Now, in light of this brief analysis, it may seem easier to decipher thedeeper meaning of Luxemburgs eventual siding with the Spartacus

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Uprising despite her contrary position. Keeping true to whatshe perceived as the true purpose of leadership which wasother than issuing commands according to ones inclinations,(1970: 188) but maintaining precisely an adroit adaptability to thegiven situation while sustaining the closest possible contact with themasses (1970: 188) the Spartacus revolution must have indicatedfor her that kind of spontaneity produced by a mass movement, asthat which she had frequently referred to, and which comes directlyfrom the working classes. As she believed, it was, indeed, in suchspontaneous mass action that the key to true revolution was to befound, not because of its possible victory, but equally, if not because of,its defeat. Following the bloodshed crashing of the Spartacistrevolution, Luxemburgs reflections written in her article OrderReigns in Berlin (1919), help us elucidate the real significanceattached not only to the failed revolution of Spartacus but to thefunction of failure itself in the context of radical revolutionary politics.She writes:

The leadership failed. But the leadership can and must be createdanew by the masses and out of the masses. The masses are thecrucial factor; they are the rock on which the ultimate victory ofthe revolution will be built. The masses were up to the task.They fashioned this defeat into a part of those historical defeatswhich constitute the pride and power of international socialism.And that is why this defeat is the seed of the future triumph. (1971:409)

A fashioned defeat is a set failure. It implies a calculatedshift in the intention of the production of meaning. As such, itattends to the value of brokenness in the form of representation; tobe acted out rather than to be forced on. The implication of thisis that failure, as an act, becomes embodied merely at ones will.For as representation, failure now denotes only a kind of playwhich reassures its participants that none of this carries any realconsequences other than that of ones willing acceptance: almostlike in suspending disbelief, its dramatization, whose acted outdrama, the drama of failure itself, reassures them of its fictitiousness.From this, however, a further, and most crucial, implication follows:failure, as representation, by claiming to be purposefully staged inreal time rather than to have taken place in actual reality, is able toalso assert itself as an aggressive confrontational stance. Failuresnegative, and its possible stigma, is now reversed, to be used as a

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tool of political confrontation. On this point, we may defend,therefore, a thesis whose only recourse resides in failure as a negativepoiesis a creative disposition, be it vital or artistic, that involves themaking of the negative, enclosed in failure, into an affirmativealternative, not out of necessity, as we shall see in due course, butout of the subjects fidelity to the process that heralds, or is in itself,the Event. And yet there is violence in failure, whether Evental ornot. So the crucial lesson is to know how to endure it for vitalintensity on the basis of condescending exposure to the negative asa form of opposition. For in the experience of the negative, there isalso the possibility of violence as a matter of reversal. Not in themanner that transmutes the weight of failure into a negative sign ofresponse, reversing its progression, but in reclaiming the violencecontained in the inevitable and insurmountable nature of failure asa creative affirmative of negation in other words, a negative poeisis.

In the ideological framework of anarchist and revolutionarypolitics, the context of negative poiesis, which in Badious terms canbe seen to signify the state of the subjects rebellious acceptance,(2008: 143) is concerned with bodies of failure. For bodies of failureare anti-heroic bodies, self-negating bodies of resistance. Dada,and especially Dada Berlin, adopted the artistic programme ofmaking the medium of the body the message, and it made themessage a political one. To be sure, that body could not be the samebody introduced by Fascism and aestheticised by Italian Futurism intothose battling, enthusiastic emotionalised, vibrating, explosivebodies that is to say, heroic (Groys 2008: 131) but bodies instruggle, bodies subject to danger, ridiculed bodies, tortured bodies,bodies of self-denied. But making the body the message requiresabove all a stage or, alternatively, a medium vast enough andaccessible that the widespread of the anti-heroic body can take effect.For Dadaists, this can be done no better than through the constantactivity of manifestoing, or to be more precise, of anti-manifestation the act of employing the negative embedded in failure to embracemanifestation by negation. Once again, we encounter violenceembedded in the negative. Violence, that is, most specifically, inbeing subjected to the experience of failure that negates you, on theone hand, and on the other, violence as negating in itself, in a formalontological order of being, coming directly from failure itself as alived embodied experience of the negative. In this sense, failuredefines a fundamentally violating act. The question again is: how canthis violence be utilised in a reversal order from destabilising to

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empowering, from deprivation to stipulation, from suffering tostrength?

Ontological violence of failure

To answer this, we need to first turn to Hegels lasting observation thatthere is always a sense of violence in the very symbolisation of a thingthat almost negates it by bringing it to its mortification. Thus byreducing a thing (e.g. gold) to a single feature (e.g. wealth, power,spirituality, etc.), we simplify its natural properties. And by destroyingits organic unity, we violently extract from it a context of meaning thatis outside of it.12 But it is Heideggers well known thesis of Wesen derSprache which goes to the heart of this matter. As he tells us, languagepossesses the capacity for unconditional violence precisely because oflanguages ability for essencing (the making of essences) or, to use hisown term, Wesen der Sprache, which is the work of language. Thusthe act of essencing, that is, the making of essences, does not simplydenote that there is no stable core that guarantees the identity of athing, but also that a fundamental ontological violence exists in thisessencing ability of language. Yet because this ontological violencefound in languages power of essencing pertains to every foundinggesture of the new communal world of a people, it also exhibits anuncanny/demonic dimension (Heidegger 2000: 102) that rendershegemony inherent to language and, in effect, is what grounds theexplosions of ontic or physical violence itself. Heidegger writes Theessence of violence has nothing to do with ontic violence, suffering,war destruction, etc.; the essence of violence resides in the violentcharacter of the very imposition/founding of the new mode of theEssence disclosure of communal Being itself (2000: 60).

But if ontological violence is not something merely abstract butprecisely that kind of violence which imposes a certain disclosure ofworld and thus involves social relations of authority such as rank anddominance, (2000: 102) then there exists a link between theontological violence and the texture of social violence (of sustainingrelations of enforced domination) that pertains to language. More tothe point, it is this link that bestows negative poiesis with this type of(essential) ontological violence (Wesen der Sprache) capable of animpositional/foundational act that renders the negative with anirreverent violating power on a formal ontological level. To explorethis hypothesis further, I will now turn to the Spartacus Manifesto whosenegative poiesis utilises failures ontological violence and its foundingviolating gesture from the imagery of pain.

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The Spartacus Manifesto body of being, a tortured body

Proletarians of all countries!, the impassionate voice of the SpartacusManifesto commands: This must be the last war! We owe that to thetwelve million murdered victims; we owe that to our children; we owethat to humanity. (Luxemburg 1995: 37) Certainly, and on the onehand, the reference of the Spartacus Manifesto to the historicalcontinuity of bodies in struggle (rather than simply ideas incontention) connects to the Communist Manifestos original force ofthe proletariats agonistic purpose. Yet, on the other hand, eventhough it was written specifically in the aim of propagating a return tothe Manifestos struggle of the proletariat, its sense of sheer radicalismis being embodied through its efforts at a particular affective andexperiential intelligibility, one that crystallises as the manifestoformulates and performs a future audiences experience of, andresponse to, oppression, coming from the very context of a trulyviolent revolutionary stand the context, that is, of negation itself inits sensory rending, as a soma, tortured, in the experience andembodiment of pain. We read in the Spartacus Manifesto:

Humanity is almost ready to bleed to death from the bloodletting. [. . .]The beast of capital that conjured up the hell of the world war is notcapable of banishing it again, of restoring real order, of insuring breadand work, peace and civilization, and justice and liberty to torturedhumanity. (1995: 38)

There is good reason why Luxemburgs entire style is turnedtowards an affective appeal of the negative that makes up for thesuffering body of the proletariat. For it is in the negative as a functionof doing a negative poiesis, that the properties of the agonal can befully appropriated. And since the body of the truly revolutionary class(2005: 47), as Althusser remarked, whose drama is always staged by themanifesto, just as in the case of Luxemburgs Spartacus Manifesto wasthe calling of the German proletariat into violent action, encompassesfailure as an integral part of the agonal itself, it is then byappropriating and purposefully affirming negation in clearly bodilyterms that renders the manifesto not only into a body of violent(agonal) intent, but also and because of that, into a body of being,encompassing the tremendous capacity of languages unconditional(ontological) violence. The kind of violence, in other words, that actsoppositionally, but also, and most importantly, hegemonically, even indefeat, by imposing a set of meanings and radicalising, or essencing,the foundational force of failure into a mechanism of wholly

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transformative nature. For this reason, the bodily being of themanifesto acquires a central place, as much for the agonistic purposeof the Spartacus Manifesto as for the validity of those whose claims itrepresents. For it is this body that has been brutally mutilated by thecapitalist violence of an imperialist war, and it is this body that is nowbeing called into political combat. To achieve this, Spartacus Manifestosbodily affectivity utilises and appropriates the nature of pain as both aweapon and an expression of suffering at once;

The revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of thesoldiers, who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse for thesake of capitalistic profits, and the masses of workers, who for four yearswere exploited, crushed, and starved, have revolted. (1995: 37)

The imagery of torture, blood and pain acts as an image of the impactof pain on human consciousness. And because it is in the nature ofpain itself that a radical, anti-conformist, mode of resistanceontologically found in negation is possible, and thus capable oflegitimating the realness of the manifestos polemical voice, painsperformativity displays a negative poiesis which allows for thedramatisation of the proletariats power to unroll. Indeed, indiscussing torture, Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain,the case for pains association to the negative. The very content ofpain, she argues, is itself negation. In her words; pain is a purephysical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering ofagainst, of something being against one, and of something one mustbe against. (1985: 52) As an internal physical experience pain is thus,at once, identified as alien from ones self and as something to get ridof. But its radical capacity is revealed by its accompanied externalpolitical equivalent; the presence in the space outside the body of aself-proclaimed enemy, someone who in becoming the enemy,becomes the human embodiment of aversiveness. (1985: 52) Thisleads us to realising what Scarry calls the double experience of agencythat is embedded in pain. For if pain owns a profound sensoryrendering of against which, in effect, renders it ontologically asnegative, it is also a rendering of the something to which is against,a something at once internal and external. (1985: 52) What Scarryintends us to see here is the dual function of pains agency such aswhen someone is hurt by an external weapon (e.g. knife, nail, pin,etc.). The sufferer becomes dominated by a sense of internal agency bythe fact that pain concentrates ones awareness of ones own physicalexistence, on ones own body hurting. By contrast, a vivid sense of

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external agency arises in the utter absence of any actual external causeand is conveyed instead verbally in phrases such as knifelike pains,searing pains, stabbings, and so on, both of which are clearly at work inthe composition of the Spartacus Manifestos verbal imagery. Yet ineither case, a doubling of pains annihilating power exists in the lack ofacknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as aform of self-extension) that stands as another form of negation andrejection, the social equivalent, we may say, of the physical aversiveness.(1985: 56) But for Scarry, this is a denial which occurs in thetranslation of all the objectified elements of pain into the insignia ofpower, the conversion of the enlarge map of suffering into an emblemof the regimes strength. Now, what follows from this requires carefulconsideration.

If Luxemburgs emphasis placed on the experience of pain isaimed at heightening the vitality of the urgency of her call to actionwhich is inevitably intensified by having become embodied, it is alsoaimed at using the violence that resides in the negative as both asensory rendering of against and a physical experience of negation inthe realm of the agency of power: Socialism alone is in a position [. . .]to heal the thousand wounds from which humanity is bleeding, [. . .](1995: 38) Once pain is objectified, pain is read as power. Yet, in linewith the Heideggerian essencing ability of language, pain read aspower bestows the agency of the negative with a creative virtue, anegative poiesis, that transforms the nature of pain, found in theperformative body of the manifesto as that of the locus of pain, into themanifestos voice of the new public we as the locus of power. This isagain possible from the opposition entailed within the negative: onthe one hand, as the suffering body, and on the other, as a voice ofconfrontation that legitimates the power of a new civic we. Thus thetransformation of pain into power, in the Spartacus Manifesto, isultimately a matter of the transformation of the manifestos public weas a negated body into a we as a voice of negation in itself a reactionand expression of resistance at once, arising out of the transformationthat is possible in part out of the dissonance of the two, in part out ofthe consonance of the two.

But there is another function, equally important, if not more soperhaps, in the negative poiesis of pains textual imagery that composesthe performative body of the Spartacus Manifesto: the category ofembodiment. The idea that the only real body is the tortured body, thebody dismembered by the real, is a terrifying but ancient one, Badioureminds us in The Century. (2008: 116). And for this reason, from nomatter what perspective pain is approached, its totality is again and

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again faced in the single broad and omnipotent fact of existence thereal always ends up offering itself as an ordeal of the body. (2008: 116)As such, in encountering pain, the category of embodiment isundeniably intensified. First, by the fact that to be in pain is to bemore acutely aware of having a body. And second, that to see fromthe outside the wound in another person is to become moreintensely aware of human embodiedness. It is in this light that wecan understand the imagery of wounding in Luxemburgs negativepoiesis of the Spartacus Manifesto. It carries emphatic assurance aboutthe realness of existence (of the public body, of the proletariat), butone that for the participants inside contains nothing that makes thisrealness visible except the imagery of the wounded human body. Thewounded body thus becomes not simply an element in the act ofmanifestation; it is the manifestation. (Scarry 1985: 200) In the case ofpregnancy, it even becomes a happy form of physical increase whichLuxemburg purposefully utilizes. She writes, the proletariat ofGermany is looking towards you in this hour. Germany is pregnantwith social revolution, but socialism can be realised only the proletariatof the world. (Luxemburg 1995: 38) The implications of such aprofound sensory experience of agency of the negative areparticularly crucial for the impact of the Spartacus Manifesto as both apolitical body of combat and a violating body of being a torturedbody, that is, whose very embodiment of negation renders it at onceagonal and real. It is now time, in the light of the above analysis, toturn our attention to Dada Berlin anti-manifestation.

Dada Berlin anti-manifestation

When the First German Dada Manifesto was read at the I.B.Neumann Gallery of Berlin in February 1918 and subsequentlypublished in Der Zweemann (Hanover, 1919),13 Rosa Luxemburgpublished her own Spartacus Manifesto on that same year entitledWhat Does the Spartacus League Want?. Indicative of the Spartacistagitational spirit, Dada Berlins aestheticised approach, clearly statedin the opening paragraph of this manifesto, derived directly from therevolutionary impetus, and the violence involved, in encounteringfailure:

Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which itlives, and artists are creature of their epoch. The highest art will be thatwhich in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of theday, the art which had been visibly shattered by the explosions of last

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week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterdays crash.(Huelsenbeck 2001: 146)

Political militancy and artistic creativity had come together, in a strictlySpartacist manner, and precisely after Luxemburgs model ofembodied affectivity. Once again we read: The best and mostextraordinary artists will be those who. . . with bleeding hands andhearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. [. . .] The singers ofthis Manifesto have, under the battle cry: DADA!!!! (2001: 146)

Following the writing of the Spartacus Manifesto, the Dadaists JefimGolyscheff, Hausmann and Huelsenbeck under the name of DadaistRevolutionary Central Council, (after the paradigm of SpartacusRevolutionary Committee) published a manifesto with an equallySpartacist echo on its very title: What is Dadaism and What Does ItWant in Germany? first printed in Der Dada I (1919). Its austereprogrammatic structure was again emblematic of the militant intendthat underlined Spartacist revolutionary agency:

Dadaism demands: 1) The International, revolutionary unification of allcreative and intellectual people of the entire world on the basis of radicalcommunism; 2) The introduction of progressive unemployment throughcomprehensive mechanisation of every field of activity. Only byunemployment does it become possible for the individual to achievecertainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed toexperience; 3) The immediate expropriation of property (socialisation)and the communal feeding of all; further, the erection of cities of light,and gardens which will belong to society as a whole and prepare man fora state of freedom. (2001: 1578)

But the deeper meaning of this almost seamless continuity thatunderlines Dadaist manifestoing activity with the Spartacus Manifestosbecomes more apparent if we confront, head on, the question ofthe agonal posed extensively in Luxemburgs political writings, andembedded in the Spartacus Manifesto, in relation to our understandingof the significance of the Dadaist aesthetic of anti-manifestation.But, first, what do we mean by anti-manifestation? One way to defineits category is through its embedded opposite; that is, the contextof manifestation, which however, we should note, is also the context ofanti-manifestation itself. So if manifestation stands for the act ofmaking manifest (e.g. revelations, declarations, uncovering), andtherefore includes the revealing of truths through slogans such asDada is the central brain that oriented the world towards itself(Puchner 2006: 115) and ends with demands Bet on Dada! / The

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World is only a branch of Dadaism. We pay the amounts put up byall banks as profit (2006: 155) then such outrageous claimsplus slogans make up for the Dadaist acts of manifestation. But inanti-manifestation, which is no other but an aesthetic formula ofmanifestation, the emphasis shifts to the negation of acts ofmanifestation; to be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist(Huelsenbeck 2001: 146) the First German Manifesto (1918)concludes as it sums up a key Dadaist position. Earlier, in the samemanifesto, the very identity of Dadaists as artists has been disregarded:Under certain circumstances, to be a Dadaist may mean to be moreof a businessman, more of a political partisan than an artist to bean artist by accident. (2001: 148) Anti-manifestation, therefore, asa matter of manifesting against, whether that is against the actof proposing a programme, of making a promise, or indeed ofmanifestation itself, articulates the violence that exists in the negativein the various forms of negation, rejection, denial, through the usualDadaist self-referentiality which, in effect, invests their manifestos, astextual equivalents of violence, with a doubling obliterating power; thatof lacking internally and of being diminished externally. At first, itmay indeed seem strange to proclaim ones own self-denial as a path tocommanding ones own very being, including that of its galvanizingaudience. But the evident opposition, profoundly contradictory,contained within Dadaist negation, can barely attest to nothing lessthan an aggressive appeal of a rebellious self-sufficiency that by itsnegative uttering destabilises the domain of the status quo, artistic ornot. Hardly a parody, therefore, self-negation in dada manifesto seeksto master itself beyond submission or assimilation from the veryviolating force that has produced it. It is within this context that theuse of the term nothing also features strongly, almost proclaiming theextremity experienced in the gesture of negative excess to the pointthat evades it in an absolute sense it feels nothing, it means nothing,it is, therefore, nothing. We read in the Twenty-Three Manifestos ofthe Dada Movement (1920): no more proletarians, no more democrats,no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no morefatherlands. . . no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.(Tzara 2011: 167) Francis Picabia would even claim that Dada itself isnothing, nothing, nothing. (2011: 164)

With this in mind, we can now begin to understand the realsignificance that such chaotic signs and gestures as those imprinted indadas anti-manifestation, as evidence, not of revolutionary impotenceor bourgeois decadence, but of a kind of necessary corrective in themanner that Luxemburgs aporetic signifies; as a reaction, that is, to

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the bolshevist insistence on efficient strategy. The assumption hereis this: as Lenins instrumental reason breeds dadas chaos, Dadaistanti-manifestation celebrates the founding power of failure (throughself-negation, the gesture of nothingness, etc.) that functions,ultimately, as a critique to the lefts political efficiency (andparticularly Lenins), as well as to capitalisms value system and itsimperialist violence. Puchner goes as far as to read in such aesthetic-political trends the self-destructive forces produced by the bourgeoisieitself which are embodied in the rise of the proletariat. (2006: 142)And to a large extent, this is certainly inevitable due to the manifestoscapacity to lay open an extraordinary motion of bodies, antagonisticidentities, public struggles, class-based oppressions, and politicalpassions. Yet the aim here, it seems, is primarily twofold: first, ithelps Dadaists to differentiate themselves from other artists,particularly the Futurists. In this context, anti-manifestationfunctions as a critique to the brevity and explicitness of theprogressive dialectic employed by Marinetti and other futurist artistsin composing the futurist manifesto. And second, and mostsignificantly for our discussion here, by employing the foundinggesture of negations fundamental violence that resides in failure asboth agency and confrontation, anti-manifestation connects deeply tothe radical powers of failure as a mode of resistance in radicaldemocratic politics as has been explored so far. Lets follow this latterthought through in more detail.

By now it should be obvious that the relation of the manifesto tothe perspective of failure is a complex one. On the one hand, and mostsignificantly, it connects, on the most basic level of the manifestosprogramme, whether aesthetic or political, having failed to keep any ofits (programmatic) promise. But a programme is not a contract, andneither is it a promise that guarantees to be fulfilled. Badiou goes tothe extent of claiming for the manifesto a definition equal to that ofa rhetorical device. (2008: 138) As such, and if we accept thatthe relation to what really takes place [in the manifesto] is only everone of envelopment and protection, (2008: 139) then the real value ofthe manifesto, particularly for the avant-garde, is the activation of thisrhetorical envelopment in the form of the manifesto, yet whoseinherent performativity of a fundamentally violent nature, as wehave seen already, functions as a real rupture in the present on thepromise (or programme) of a future to come, but ultimately, a fictivefuture nonetheless. It is within this context that Dadaists challenge themanifestos inevitable inability to implement the claims of itsprogramme, yet whose implementation is right at the centre of the

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genres performativity. And by consciously rendering it instead intopure acts of manifestation of its theatrics, the manifesto ultimatelytestifies to a sense of its own (self) negation its own anti-manifestation. In other words, the act of manifestation, in dadaaction art, becomes equivalent to anti-manifestation. This isparticularly evident in Berlin due to the movements highlypoliticised identity which connects Dada anti-manifestation directlyto the Spartacus political affectivity, and particularly, its manifestos, sothat, for example, several commands could be issued in What isDadaism and What Does It Want in Germany manifesto.14 Whetherthese claims, however, were meant to materialise or not was never thereal purpose of Dada anti-manifestation. Rather, it is precisely instaging the failure of the manifesto to manifest, or materialise,anything other than the power that this failure holds, which ultimately iswhat bestows the performativity of anti-manifestation with realsignificance and an immense foundational force. It is for this reasonalso that numerous pamphlets were constantly issued and signed bythe Dada Revolutionary Central Committee. Similarly, yet to the sameeffect, Hausmann and Johannes Baader founded a Dada republic bymanifesto in April 1919 instructing the mayor of Berlin to hand overthe treasury and commanding the citys employees to obey only theorders of the joint authors.15 In either case, it is by enacting not merelya fictive future to come, or a promise to be kept, but the very consciousactivation of fictivity in the present without any real concerns of itactually happening that renders anti-manifestation with significanttransformative performative power. For in this way, as a consciouslyperformed rupture rather than a programme intended to materialise,anti-manifestation exhibits, on a formal ontological level, a violentform of being in the aspect of the real. Thus implied transformationis, in effect, inevitable. Dada would of course claim such an immensesubversive power to inform the movements definition as a whole:What is DADAISM? The word Dada symbolises the most primitiverelation to the reality of the environment; with Dadaism a new realitycomes into its own. (Huelsenbeck 2001: 147)

On the other hand and here is where we need to focus ourattention it is this same failure of the manifesto failing to keep itspromise, and which is bound to hostile criticism precisely for thiselementary failure, that we find the seeds of conversion of failure fromstasis, resignation or defeat, into an affirmative of negation whosefoundational force renders failure into a progressive alternative inradical democratic politics. This is, however, not a matter ofcontradiction, but of reversal. Just as failure is embedded in the

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agonal, inversion is entailed in the negative. The crucial point in bothcases is again a matter of knowing how not only to endure the violenceexerted from the most violating failures but in knowing precisely howto absorb the extremity experienced from the violating force of failureby turning it into forms of rebellious acceptance so that the intensitycontained within it is extorted into a violating force of negation initself. This of course requires a creative virtue which then brings us tothe function of negative poiesis once more. Yet in this paradoxicalmanner, it is the violence of failure which invigorates the whole forceof living with all its most possible intensity. This, then, leads us to acrucial hypothesis, whose commentary will conclude my currentexamination of failure: If only one could utilise the force of failureinto a function of the subjects rebellious acceptance, into consciousacts of negation acted out in a self-referential order, then it would bepossible to find in the negative the certainty that abides that we canchange it into the final victory.

Failure & the work of love

Here we are confronted with failure as that necessary process whichcontains the seeds of the Big Change that in revolutionary politics, asZizek observes, comes by taking the risk and engaging in total struggle.In that particular sense, failure is conceived as an integral part of theprocess that leads to what Badiou calls the Event, or becomes part ofthe Event itself. Now, if we were to give a concise formula to BadiousEvent, then we could define it as the emergence of the New whichcannot be reduced to its causes or conditions. In Marxian terms, thistranslates to the fact that even though the broader outlines of anyrevolutionary event can be foretold by social theorists, it still needs arevolutionary subject, if it is to take place at all. This premise becomesparticularly apparent if we accept Kants thesis that the conditions ofour experience of the object are simultaneously the conditions of theobject itself. But if it is only when there is a subject that an Event canoccur within an eventual site16, then it is the subjects manner ofrelating to the Event that also conditions its experience by the subjectwhile simultaneously conditioning the Event itself. Accordingly,Badiou distinguishes four such responses: the faithful subject(fidelity); the reactive subject; the obscure subject; and, resurrection.(2009) Curiously, the modes of subjectivities of fidelity and resurrectioncome to co-exist which then brings Zizek to make a further claim whichis most relevant for our understanding of the radical properties offailure in any bodies of revolutionary politics: an Event is necessarily

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missed the first time, so that true fidelity is only possible in the formof resurrection, as a defence against revisionism . (2009: 387)This may again explain Luxemburgs insistence on the aporeticwhose perspective incorporated failure as another path, and highlyimportant, so much for the education of the proletariats struggle andthe growth of its class consciousness as for the whole revolutionarystruggle for socialism, paved with defeats (Luxemburg 1971: 4134).Yet for a good reason. She writes:

What does the whole history of modern revolutions and of socialism showus? The first flare-up of the class struggle in Europe the revolt of thesilk weavers of Lyons in 1831 ended with a severe defeat. The Chartistmovement in England with a defeat. The rebellion of the Parisianproletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat. TheParis Commune ended with a dreadful defeat. [. . .] Revolutions havebrought us nothing but defeats till now, but these unavoidable defeatsare only heaping guarantee upon guarantee of the coming final triumph.(1971: 4134)

When confronted with repeated failure, the demand for patienceacquires particular significant. This demand is not just patient waitingfor the moment when radical change will explode with clear certainlyand clarity, but rather, the kind of patience which involves the losing ofbattles as part of the subjects work of love. As Badiou argues, wheneventual irruption takes place, it primarily functions as a break in timeand thus introduces a totally different order of temporality thetemporality of the work of love, or, in other words, of the subjectsfidelity to the Event. Yet if seen from the perspective of non-eventaltime of historical evolution, then the right moment has never come andthe revolutionary situation is always deemed, by definition, pre-mature.And for this reason, potential revolutionary moments may indeedeither be missed or failed to deliver the promised outcome, yet theystill act more Evental than had they even succeeded. The assumptionhere is that defeats result in the accumulation of a kind of utopianenergy necessary for the formation of the subjects stronger and truerfidelity to the revolutionary cause which, in effect, will explode in thefinal battle as maturation. (Badiou 2009) Yet maturation, in Zizekterms, has nothing to do with the waiting for objective circumstancesto reach maturity, (2009: 392) but with the kind of patience thatdemands persistence and perseverance and which comes from theaccumulation of defeats. This notion appears in Deleuze in hisconception of repetition as the very form of the emergence of the New.

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But it is in Badious thinking of this aspect in the form of the threesubjective destinations to which he adds, as we have seen a forth, thatfailure acquires its true radical meaning: resurrection; the subjectivereactivation, this is, of the event whose traces were obliterated,repressed into the historico-ideological unconscious (2009: 396).Badiou writes: every faithful subject can thus reincorporate into itsevental present a truth fragment which in the old present was pushedbeneath the bar of occultation. This reincorporation is what we callresurrection. (2009: 6)

Here our enquiry into failure reaches full circle; if failure hasdismantled victory into the living ruins of defeat, then it is failure thatcompels its return into a triumphant victory, demanding itsresurrection. And insofar, and Badiou repeatedly emphasises thispoint, a true Event is not merely a negative gesture, but opens up apositive dimension of the New, and the Event is the imposition of anew world, failure propels its opposite, as prefigured in Dada Berlinsanti-manifestation, that is other than acceptance of defeat but the callfor fidelity, the work of love which resides at the heart of every suchviolating failure, so that true evental change can take place that is noless but the passage from the old to the new world. Within this premise,we encounter failure as an agent of rupture and resistance whosenegative poiesis bestows the manifestos with a profoundly creativedynamism of a formal ontological order that renders them intoviolating bodies, bodies of resistance. It is at this point also that DadaBerlin anti-manifestation acquires its full meaning whose relevancemay also ring true for us today: You say yes, (Huelsenbeck 2001: 149)the volatile poetic of its rhetoric reassures us, to a life that strivesupwards by negation.

Notes1. See for a full discussion A. Badiou, (2009) The Logic of Words: Being and Event II,

London: Continuum.2. There is a very good discussion of the manifesto in M. Puchner, (2006), Poetry of the

Revolution, Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, particularly pp. 13665 for Dada manifestation.

3. The manifestos connection to internationalism, and especially theinternationalism, derived from the Communist Manifesto, and now invigorated bythe Russian Revolution, displayed a particularly polemical value that was positionedagainst its competing opposite; the nationalist internationalism. We should bear inmind, communism had situated itself, from the beginning, as an alternative tocapitalisms internationalism which Marx and Engels, in their Manifesto, heldresponsible for turning one capitalist nation against the other in a perpetuatedstruggle for colonies, markets, trade routes and territories. So in this particularsense, the manifestos internationalism stood for radicalism and opposition, as well

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as a reminder of the effects of the nationalising war. And on this basis, it wasemployed by Dada not merely as a pure aesthetic value to inform the centrepiece ofits programme, but as a model of practice that defined its networked existence. It isalso for this reason that the adjective international seems to have followed Dadaactivities everywhere, even to the point of being describing as such retrospectively.Likewise, in Berlin, and in line with Dadaism elsewhere else, the first Dadaistevent to be organised by its members was entitled the First International DadaExposition.

4. Engels credited the Communist Manifesto to Marx even though he also drafted somepart to it, he still considered Marx as its principal writer.

5. See for a good discussion of the genre of the manifesto J. Lyon, (1999), Manifestoes,Provocations of the Modern, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 945. Also A.Badiou, Century, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 13747.

6. Etymologically derived from the Latin composite of manus and fectus meaninghostile hand, the dimension of nascent fury is already embodied in the manifestoform. Almost like a fist, Lyon tells us, that strikes through the scrims of civic order,the manifesto aims to challenge false conciliation in the name of a truth that fillsthe hearts and minds of its putative constituents. (1999: 14) In this particularmanner, and by occupying the position of its potent audience and simultaneouslythe position of the antagonistic you against whom the manifestos charges arepressed, the manifesto also displays an immense capacity for affective identificationwith the manifestos we which, in turn, exerts sheer antagonistic positioning.

7. USPD stands for Independent Social Democratic Party which was formed after theSPD (Social Democratic Party) continued to vote for war bonds. Spartacus joinedUSPD initially before was finally separated to form the Communist Party ofGermany (KPD)

8. As she argued in her speech at the central committee of Spartacus, any revolutionwas the result of a long revolution, yet which could only happen if proletariats hadfirst developed a strong class consciousness through a series of struggles that wereof utmost importance to their education.

9. Volunteer military or paramilirary units.10. Badiou defines determinate negation as an aspect of the repressed.11. My italics in outside and beyond12. See S. Zizeks discussion on violence p. 52. S.Zizek, Violence, London: Profile Books.13. It was reprinted in the Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920) and reissued as the Collective

Dada Manifesto (1920).14. An abstract from the manifestos text read: The Central Council demands: a. Daily

meals at public expense for all creative and intellectual men and women on thePostdamer Platz (Berlin);b. Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachersto the Dadaist articles of faith; [. . ...] i. Submission of all laws and decress to theDadaist central council for approval.

15. See M. Puchner about the action art of manifestation in Puchner, (2006), Poetry ofthe Revolution, Marx, Manifestos, pp.14653.

16. Quoted in S. Zizek,[2008](2009), In Defence of Lost Causes, London: Verso.

References

Althusser, Luis [1969] (2005), For Marx, London: Verso.Badiou, Alain [2005](2009), The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Badiou, Alain, (2009), The Logic of Words: Being and Event II, London: Continuum.Groys, Boris (2008), Art Power, Cambridge: MIT Press.Huelsenbeck, Richard [1918] (2011), First German Dada Manifesto, in A. Danchev

(ed), 100 Artists Manifestos, From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London: Penguin Group,pp. 1469.

Huelsenbeck, Richard, Hausmann, Raul [1919] (2011), What is Dadaism and whatdoes it want in Germany, in A. Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists Manifestos, From the Futuriststo the Stuckists, London: Penguin Group, pp. 1578.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1995), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. A. Kaes, California:University of California Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1970), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. M. Walters, New York: PathfinderPress.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1971), Selected Political Writings, ed. D. Howard, London: MonthlyReview Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa (2008), The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution and The MassStrike, ed. H. Scott, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Lyon, Janet (1999), Manifestoes, Provocations of the Modern, New York: Cornell UniversityPress.

Marx, Karl (1997), Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Nye, Andrea (1994), Philosophia, the Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and HannahArendt, London: Routledge.

Picabia, Francis [1920] (2011), Twenty-Three Manifestos of the Dada Movement, in A.Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists Manifestos, From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London:Penguin Group, pp. 1645.

Puchner, Martin (2006), Poetry of the Revolution, Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes,Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rose, Gillian (1992), The Broken Middle, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Scarry, Elaine (1985), The Body in Pain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Tzara, Tristan et. al. [1920] (2011), Twenty-Three Manifestos of the Dada Movement,

in A. Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists Manifestos, From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London:Penguin Group, pp. 16788.

Zizek, Slavoy [2008](2009), In Defence of Lost Causes, London: Verso.Zizek, Slavoy [2008](2009), Violence, London: Profile Books.

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