Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin Anti-manifestation

Abstract

Some of the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures. One needs only mention the German Peasants' War, the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution while numerous others lurk behind many of the battles of the proletariat throughout the twentieth century. In the most radical political engagement, such as the Cultural Revolution for Badiou, or the Nazi Revolution for Heidegger, failure also signals the end of the traditional mode of political engagement as such. But what is failure precisely? And what our confrontation with such failures really means for revolutionary politics and anarchist artistic movements of the early twentieth century such as Dada Berlin? The aim of this articleis thus toexamine failure's capacity to act as a mode of (political) resistance firmly rooted in revolutionary politics and radical anarchist cultural projects. As I argue, failure's radical properties are found in acts of ‘determinate negation'which exhibit a profound anti-conformist ideology that aims to shatter conventional standards of hegemonic value and seek to reshape and loosen the boundaries that determine lived experience in a socio-political and artistic level. To follow through this hypothesis, I explore the embodied activity of the ‘agonal’ embedded in the manifesto in relation to the failed revolution of SpartacusUprise in Berlin of 1919 and the aesthetic attitude of ‘anti-manifestation'exhibited by the deeply politicised, andintimately aliened to the Spartacus agitational project, cultural movement of Dada Berlin. In this context, failure, I argue, is appropriated into a function of doing of the ‘negative’ –anegative poiesis, whose violent tension,already embedded in the performativity of the genre of the manifesto that seeks to subject to the real the foundational force of a future to come,marks artistic praxis onto the political moment with such a creative vigour as if in violently seeking the arrival of the new world and its making.And by looking at Badiou's theories on the four modes of subjectivities, Zizek's reflections on the formation of Badiou's Event, in relation of Heidegger's ontological violence found in the essencing ability of language and of Luxemburg's political philosophy, failure reveals a truly ‘miraculous’ proposition that is other than acceptance of defeat but the call for fidelity, ‘the work of love,’ which resides at the heart of every such violating failure.