A Theory of Permanent Sadness

Notes on Lenin’s depression and the liminality of the dictatorship of the proletariat

“In my opinion,” writes Franco Berardi in his And: Phenomenology of the End, “the fusion of Marxism and Leninism was the origin of the workers’ defeat.”¹ For Berardi, Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov was in some respects a gung-ho, Platonic leader who preached a doctrine of palingenetic purification that “has little to do with Marx’s thought” since he was so engrossed in the purity of the communist ideal. His general misgivings about the revolutionary potentials of the spontaneity of the mass led him to theorize historical contingencies from the top down, foster a cult of ideological asepticity (an element of which would subsequently become one of the principal characteristics of Stalin’s regime of terror), and become an embodiment of Russian subjectivism. To wit, the Leninist standpoint is problematic precisely because not only does purification automatically nullify self-determination and extraneousness (estraneità) but it also begets a nationalist character. The Third International, as Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev observed, was devoid of an internationalist vision. Even before the ascendency of Lenin the chronically depressed technician of statecraft, Russian culture had long been under the penumbrae of Manichean dualism. Lenin just conveniently fell heir to this occult sensibility. However paradoxical it may seem at first, Lenin’s strategic deliberation, in Berardi’s eyes, was not grounded in materialist analysis: “The workers’ movement aimed at emancipating life and territory from capitalist domination, but the Leninist breakthrough transformed the movement into a project of absolute separation from existing reality…”² Berardi, who champions workers’ autonomy above all else, goes so far as to state in his 2008 article (T)error and poetry that he is convinced “that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed.”³ Now, I like Berardi, but I do not loathe Lenin as much as he does. But the one thing I find particularly interesting about Berardi’s psychological analysis of Lenin is the frequently obscured (and rarely talked-about) aspect of Lenin’s mental health—Lenin the depressive. Via Hélène Carrère d'Encausse’s biography of Lenin (Lénine, la révolution et le pouvoir), Berardi mapped out Lenin’s cycle of depression into three psychological crises transpiring at different intervals during his lifetime: the first crisis occurred in 1902; the second happened in 1914; the third occurred in spring 1917, not long before the great insurrection that took place in October (on the Julian calendar). The first crisis occurred during the period when Lenin was writing perhaps his most influential book What Is to Be Done?, which was a therapeutic experience for him as he would soon convalesce because of it. The second crisis happened when he decided to cut ties with the Second International. The third one was during the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin’s depression exemplifies the psyche of modern masculinity, that is, according to Berardi, when male narcissism is faced with “the infinite power of capital”, it tends to avoid looking down at the terrible abyss of non-existence as long as it possibly can, resulting in it being depressed. Lenin’s intelligence was depressive; it was thrust by the will, downwards the steep, catastrophic versant of the twentieth century.

“Leninism can be considered an attempt to deny depression, an assertion of the purity of the will, and a refusal to accept the finitude of human potency.”⁴

The intermediate stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat is thus a de facto psychological process in the exact sense; the transition from a tsarist autocracy to a crude form of socialism to a degenerated workers’ state was done in the name of the depressive intelligence. Negotiation and coevolution were no longer viable options as “workers were pushed towards a totalizing form of opposition, towards civil war”.⁵ The historical waiting room in which Lenin’s crises of depression occupied was paradoxically permanent, like a Beckettian hero who waits for eternity, always in transit. In this light, Leninism was not only a catalyst that accelerated a process of transformation on the existing paradigm but also the totalizing process of historical acceleration that defined the entire twentieth century itself. It was, in other words, a rebirth (the absolute violence of palingenesis). Leninist purity was preferable to autonomous impurity, and so we can very well consider Lenin a flawed perfectionist. It was his Bolshevik voluntarism that drove the entire history of class struggle into a new cataclysmic era, the Russian metaphysical hysteria.⁶ If that is male depression, according to Berardi, what about female depression? The late Mark Fisher once speculated the difference on his Internet blog k-punk:

“A conjecture: if female depression is a response to what they are forced to endure, if, that is to say, it is contingent, then there is something Necessary about male depression, something that goes beyond the circumstantial. The death drive is stronger in the male of the species, the young men with the weight on their shoulders. If testosterone-fed Thanatos cannot slake its death lust in war, it will wage a war on, and in, the Self.”⁷

But did Lenin’s depression really possess the Freudian death drive? Here, we have to distinguish between the Leninist kind of depression and the kind of depression Fisher was talking about, which was in essence Schopenhaurian. Perhaps contrary to what the title of this post may suggest, Fisher thought Schopenhauerian depression was not sadness, but it was a “(neuro)philosophical (dis)position”. Schopenhaurian depression is a theory about the Truth of Life itself: “...depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of Spinozist dispassionate disengagement, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the Lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions.” There is an overlap between Schopenhauerian depression and the Leninist kind, of course, that is, as Fisher states in his post, “the depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.” Lenin thought he was without illusion, as did Ian Curtis. But the fundamental difference here is that Lenin’s will, albeit striving toward the communist Logos, was not entirely detached from politics (and the Lifeworld), whereas Curtis’s will was a shrug of indeterminate resignation; Lenin was a rebel with a cause, whereas Curtis was essentially James Dean. It seems cogent to me that Lenin’s depression had to be of the female kind (depression as a response to what he had to endure), if Fisher’s conjecture is even remotely true. But here is where a problematic arises between the two thinkers. Berardi thinks Lenin’s depression represents a masculine inability to deal with depression (avoiding gazing into the void), whereas Fisher thought that male depression was a withdrawal from the Lifeworld (staring into the void). As for now, more research needs to be done on Lenin’s psychical state, but one thing is certain is that we cannot mindlessly equate the purity of the will of Leninism with the purity of the will of Fascism, for the Fascist ideology is organized around the Lacanian plus-de-jouir and thus “essentially self-destructive” (Thanatos), or as Zizek puts it in his book The Sublime Object of Ideology:

“...the Fascist ideology is based upon a purely formal imperative: Obey, because you must! In other words, renounce enjoyment, sacrifice yourself and do not ask about the meaning of it – the value of the sacrifice lies in its very meaninglessness; true sacrifice is for its own end; you must find positive fulfillment in the sacrifice itself, not in its instrumental value: it is this renunciation, this giving up of enjoyment itself, which produces a certain surplus-enjoyment.”⁸

I believe Leninism is less ideological than Fascism in that it does not seek enjoyment from self-annihilation in stark terror like Fascism does, and it is not based upon a formal injunction to engage in a mind-numbing sacrifice in pursuit of surplus-enjoyment (a point I think Berardi would disagree with), despite the fact that, as Zizek expounds in his book, the primary function of ideology is only to serve its own purpose, to conceal “the surplus-enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such.”

1. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End, (Semiotex(e), 2015), 92

2. ibid., 93

3. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, (T)error and poetry, 2008

4. Berardi, Phenomenology, 95-96

5. ibid., 95

6. ibid., 96

7. Mark Fisher, NIHIL REBOUND: JOY DIVISION, 2005

8. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (Verso, 1989/2008), 89