Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburgs

Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin

Anti-manifestation
Eve Katsouraki

In the following pages of this article, I will be looking at failures

capacity to act as a mode of (political) resistance firmly rooted in
revolutionary politics and radical anarchist cultural projects. As Id
like to argue, failures radical properties found in acts of determinate
negation1 exhibit a profound anti-conformist ideology that aims to
shatter conventional standards of hegemonic value and seeks to
reshape and loosen the boundaries that determine lived experience on
a socio-political and artistic level. If the key importance of the last truly
revolutionary explosion of the twentieth century resides, indeed, in
failure and is therefore negative, then we have much to gain by
untangling the dynamics of the aesthetic dimension of such properly
political acts. One such act is the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin of 1919
which will concern me here as a failed revolution that becomes a
catalyst for dadas political commitment to art and its deeply rooted
connection to the highly politicised culture of socialist radicalism and
agitation. There is good reason, we should note, why these politicocultural projects employed the genre of the manifesto as an embodied
practice of negative poiesis carried in the shape of agitation, socialist
propaganda or proclamation and often engaged in the performed
activity of manifestoing2. The often overlooked violent tension
embedded in the manifesto that seeks to subject to the real, as
Babiou puts it, all the powers of form and semblance (2008: 137), is
right at the centre of its artistic activity and marks artistic praxis onto

Somatechnics 3.1 (2013): 5071

DOI: 10.3366/soma.2013.0078
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/soma

Violating Failures
the political moment with such a creative vigour as if in violently
seeking the arrival of the new world and its making. For isnt it, after
all, the brutal imposition of a new order the most violent act of all?
This properly violent dimension of every authentic democratic
explosion that often leaves its mark in the most violating failures
which describe the most anarchist revolutionary projects of the
twentieth century history ? On this premise, my examination of
failure will seek to confront failure as an integral part of the
agonal that is, struggle as daily struggle, and struggle as the great
world transformation that is also key to any understanding of the genre
of the manifesto. When confronted with failure, as I would like to
suggest, failure is being embodied as a progressive alternative that
openly seeks to shape the present, the immanence of a violent
becoming that resides in the political everyday. This is when emphasis
shifts from end-result to process, form meaning to representation, and from
defeat to what Badiou calls resurrection. At this point we may witness what
seems to be a leap of faith which continuously reconnects the
revolutionary subject with every single battle even if only for losing
once more. But it is then, through failure itself, that we come closer to
an understanding of the subjects making towards an Event, or even of
the Event itself.

Failure & the manifesto

The manifestos renewed importance for anti-imperialist and anarchist
cultural movements such as Dada Berlin, and much related to the
revolutionary radicalism of the manifestos internationalism3, was
justified by the manifestos agonistic placement within the ideological
framework of radical democratic politics. Historically, the modern
tradition of the manifesto is attributed to Marxs and Engelss4
Manifesto of the Communist Party written in 1848. Taken to be a
transparent expression of public will, a manifesto can be understood as
the testimony of a historical present tense combined with a sense of
futurity, always spoken in the impassionate voice of its participants.
Let the ruling class tremble at a Communist revolution, we read in
the Communist Manifesto. The proletarians have nothing to lose but
their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL
COUNTRIES, UNITE! (2010: 271) By activating the symbolic force of
the genre that connects the writing of the manifesto with the subjects
participation, however discursive, with the history of struggle against
oppressive forces, the manifesto produces, as it intensifies, the urgency
of 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 becomes
a matter of finality, of prospective conditions, of a promise. (Badiou
2008: 137). But if the manifestos agonistic positioning is justified by
connecting to the historical continuity of bodies in struggle rather
than simply ideas in contention, and thus legitimating the polemical
voice of a new civic we, it is the perspective of the agonal embedded in
the genre of the manifesto which also presupposes failure not only as
a logical, even though unwelcome, consequence of any struggle, but,
on the contrary, as a radical agent that presupposes and determines
ultimate success the final victory. Let us look at this prospect more
closely by examining the broader context of the agonal in the manner
that is utilised by Rosa Luxemburg in particular. This will allow us to
better understand dada Berlins connection to Rosa Luxemburgs
political radicalism which includes failure as a vital part of real
political progress. It is also from this point of view that we will be able
to understand the radical properties of failure in the performative
body of the Spartacus Manifesto as fundamentally a violating body,
a body of pain and negation, capable of immense affectivity and
antagonistic, confrontational power. But first, a brief historical account
of the Spartacus Uprising is in order before we are able to examine
more 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 German
proletariat of January 1918 in Berlin is hardly surprising. Being
deprived from a fully organised leadership, since its two main leaders,
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were imprisoned more
often than not throughout the period of the war, Spartacist activity
was necessarily limited to bursts of agitation carried out in strict
secrecy. Founded in 1916 under the name of Spartacus League, the
organisation stood for an anti-war revolutionary movement of the
extreme left. Its first attempt to mount a mass demonstration came on
the May Day of the same year Spartacus was founded, yet it was only
when the war started to clearly turn against Germany that frequent
strikes 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, the
representative of the SPD, before he fled with the Kaiser who was
also forced to abdicate. A call for elections was soon issued to decide
on a new National Assembly but many Spartacists, including

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Liebknecht, was against it. Fearing further compromise to the SPD who
had continued to vote for war bonds, Karl Liebknecht requested
the separation of Spartacus from the USPD7 and the formation of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The Russian model was playing
strongly in everyones mind and revolution was brewing in the streets
of Berlin. But not all of the leaders of Spartacus were in favour of this
move. Rosa Luxemburg, fearing that the partys growing purism
would essentially disconnect it from the masses of the working class
people and the trade unions, defended Spartacuss participation in the
vote, despite her knowing how important the question of participation
or not was for the future of the revolution.8 Yet she was unsuccessful in
averting abstentionism and, following the formation of the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD), events moved rapidly. In January 1919,
workers took arms and occupied the offices of Vorwarts (a Socialist
Democrat 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 instigated
by the Spartacus League, a rushed Revolutionary Committee was put
together that consisted of member representatives from the Spartacists
KPD, the USPD and Revolutionary Shop Stewards. Following much
debate and disagreement within the leadership, a call to arms was
signed by the Revolutionary Committee which included Liebknecht,
yet unbeknownst to Luxemburg who was against this action. Yet soon
she also came to side with the uprising. Armed combat followed
between January 4 and January 15 1919, but the uprising was soon
crushed by state troops with the aid of Freikorps9. Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht were arrested and murdered in custody.

Rosa Luxemburgs aporetic & failure

Being a fierce advocate for the sustained mass activity of the working
class a commitment to the working people, and towards political
agitation, Luxemburg had written extensively about the the
spontaneous co-ordination of the conscious political actions of the
body of [workers] (1970: 119). And despite Lukacs argument, her
conception of spontaneity never seemed to denote the kind of
impulsive 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 the
proletarian (including liberal, radical and reactionary) parties against
absolutism. This is the kind of spontaneity, in other words, and most
significantly, 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 to
mass, from organised to unorganised workers and vice versa in each
case) to take place and become the mediator and educator of
revolution. (1992: 214) And it is for this reason that it cannot be
controlled or conducted. This position becomes more easily apparent
by looking at Luxemburgs socialist thinking in relation to the
formation of the political. Once more Rose is useful here for
pointing out that any such formation in Luxemburg does not occur
by appealing to spontaneous revolutionary action as utopian: u-topia
without a place thereby implying an idealised place, but by attending
consistently to the equivocation of the ethical the perduring
inversion of the law, or else, what may be called the aporetic:
a-poria without a path, (1992: 201) which involves and request
failure as part of it, as just another path. To put it in Luxemburgs own
words, the difference is not in the what but in the how [one should
lead] (1970: 57) Agon here intrudes aporia, but aporia, as a proper
radical 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 so
simple a thing. (1970: 88). For an aporetic perspective is definable
only oppositionally. She writes,
The social democratic movement. . . must grope on its road of
development between the following two rocks: abandoning the mass
character of the party or abandoning its final aim, falling into bourgeois
reformism or into sectarianism, anarchism, or opportunism. (1970: 75)

The main problem, therefore, of the insinuation of the agonal and

aporetic struggle is that it may in fact lead to the inversion of
intentions; for example, the argument for socialism becomes the call
of bourgeois morality and the possibility of revolutionary action is
dissipated in the objective judgement that action is obsolete. To be
more specific, as Luxemburg points out in her analysis of Bernsteins
Evolutionary Socialism, his developed method actually turns on the
social and political equivocation of the idea of socialisation while
Lenins method, in a much similar manner even though diametrically
opposed ideologically, turns on the equivocation of discipline. Yet
in either case, the refusal to recognise ambiguity as inherent in the
aporetic amounts to a refusal of the equivocation of the ethical,
the perduring inversions of the law whose acknowledgement is central
in Luxemburgs radical political thought of the left. But if such a
refusal is perpetuated as an overturn of the meaning of agon from
marking 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 is
Luxemburgs equivocation of the ethical that preserves struggle in
the aporetic as that kind of inherently violent activity of the negative
that resides in every failure, not as an accident, neither as simply the
consequence of misled and miscalculated political action, but as
a strategically conscious act of negation. In Badious terminology,
this takes the shape of determinate negation. The ordering task of
building a new world order, he claims, also involves a type of the
return of the repressed. (2009: 75) Yet this process does not
necessarily equate to his theory of the repressed only, but also, and
most significantly, to the repressed of the political event itself which
failed precisely in this task of ordering.10 But such ordering, for
Luxemburg, cannot fix any path in advance of the daily struggle: only
through aporia (without a path) is it possible to cultivate conscious
political acts that are willing to be premature, to act on faith with what
knowledge they can muster, to educate and assimilate, and to also fail:
The peculiar character of this movement resides precisely in the fact that
here, for the first time in history, the popular masses themselves, in
opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will, but they must
effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society.11
(Luxemburg 1970: 88)

If, in Luxemburgs aporia, therefore, there is always an inversion

that encloses failure as just another path found outside and beyond,
in opposition, and always temporally inside and within, continual
but not continuous, (Rose 1999: 206207) then setbacks in proletarian
conquest of state power cannot be regarded as evidence of a
failed revolution or premature tentative, for there is no definite,
mechanical development of society, and no victory for the working
class outside and independent of the class struggle. (Luxemburg
1970: 83) Rather, in agonistic politics, as Luxemburg believed, the
recommendation for struggle even if it is a struggle to fail, or a
struggle against the failing of struggle itself from becoming a culture
of revisionism or of despotic centralism is entailed in the agonal
itself. Yet failure, embedded in the agonal, is to always discursively
comprehend 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 the
deeper meaning of Luxemburgs eventual siding with the Spartacus

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Uprising despite her contrary position. Keeping true to what
she perceived as the true purpose of leadership which was
other than issuing commands according to ones inclinations,
(1970: 188) but maintaining precisely an adroit adaptability to the
given situation while sustaining the closest possible contact with the
masses (1970: 188) the Spartacus revolution must have indicated
for her that kind of spontaneity produced by a mass movement, as
that which she had frequently referred to, and which comes directly
from the working classes. As she believed, it was, indeed, in such
spontaneous mass action that the key to true revolution was to be
found, not because of its possible victory, but equally, if not because of,
its defeat. Following the bloodshed crashing of the Spartacist
revolution, Luxemburgs reflections written in her article Order
Reigns in Berlin (1919), help us elucidate the real significance
attached not only to the failed revolution of Spartacus but to the
function of failure itself in the context of radical revolutionary politics.
She writes:
The leadership failed. But the leadership can and must be created
anew by the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the
crucial factor; they are the rock on which the ultimate victory of
the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the task.
They fashioned this defeat into a part of those historical defeats
which 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 calculated

shift in the intention of the production of meaning. As such, it
attends to the value of brokenness in the form of representation; to
be acted out rather than to be forced on. The implication of this
is that failure, as an act, becomes embodied merely at ones will.
For as representation, failure now denotes only a kind of play
which reassures its participants that none of this carries any real
consequences other than that of ones willing acceptance: almost
like in suspending disbelief, its dramatization, whose acted out
drama, 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 in
real time rather than to have taken place in actual reality, is able to
also assert itself as an aggressive confrontational stance. Failures
negative, 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 negative
poiesis a creative disposition, be it vital or artistic, that involves the
making of the negative, enclosed in failure, into an affirmative
alternative, not out of necessity, as we shall see in due course, but
out of the subjects fidelity to the process that heralds, or is in itself,
the Event. And yet there is violence in failure, whether Evental or
not. So the crucial lesson is to know how to endure it for vital
intensity on the basis of condescending exposure to the negative as
a form of opposition. For in the experience of the negative, there is
also the possibility of violence as a matter of reversal. Not in the
manner that transmutes the weight of failure into a negative sign of
response, reversing its progression, but in reclaiming the violence
contained in the inevitable and insurmountable nature of failure as
a creative affirmative of negation in other words, a negative poeisis.
In the ideological framework of anarchist and revolutionary
politics, the context of negative poiesis, which in Badious terms can
be seen to signify the state of the subjects rebellious acceptance,
(2008: 143) is concerned with bodies of failure. For bodies of failure
are anti-heroic bodies, self-negating bodies of resistance. Dada,
and especially Dada Berlin, adopted the artistic programme of
making the medium of the body the message, and it made the
message a political one. To be sure, that body could not be the same
body introduced by Fascism and aestheticised by Italian Futurism into
those battling, enthusiastic emotionalised, vibrating, explosive
bodies that is to say, heroic (Groys 2008: 131) but bodies in
struggle, bodies subject to danger, ridiculed bodies, tortured bodies,
bodies of self-denied. But making the body the message requires
above all a stage or, alternatively, a medium vast enough and
accessible that the widespread of the anti-heroic body can take effect.
For Dadaists, this can be done no better than through the constant
activity of manifestoing, or to be more precise, of anti-manifestation
the act of employing the negative embedded in failure to embrace
manifestation by negation. Once again, we encounter violence
embedded in the negative. Violence, that is, most specifically, in
being subjected to the experience of failure that negates you, on the
one hand, and on the other, violence as negating in itself, in a formal
ontological order of being, coming directly from failure itself as a
lived embodied experience of the negative. In this sense, failure
defines a fundamentally violating act. The question again is: how can
this violence be utilised in a reversal order from destabilising to

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empowering, from deprivation to stipulation, from suffering to
strength?

Ontological violence of failure

To answer this, we need to first turn to Hegels lasting observation that
there is always a sense of violence in the very symbolisation of a thing
that almost negates it by bringing it to its mortification. Thus by
reducing a thing (e.g. gold) to a single feature (e.g. wealth, power,
spirituality, etc.), we simplify its natural properties. And by destroying
its organic unity, we violently extract from it a context of meaning that
is outside of it.12 But it is Heideggers well known thesis of Wesen der
Sprache which goes to the heart of this matter. As he tells us, language
possesses the capacity for unconditional violence precisely because of
languages ability for essencing (the making of essences) or, to use his
own term, Wesen der Sprache, which is the work of language. Thus
the act of essencing, that is, the making of essences, does not simply
denote that there is no stable core that guarantees the identity of a
thing, but also that a fundamental ontological violence exists in this
essencing ability of language. Yet because this ontological violence
found in languages power of essencing pertains to every founding
gesture of the new communal world of a people, it also exhibits an
uncanny/demonic dimension (Heidegger 2000: 102) that renders
hegemony inherent to language and, in effect, is what grounds the
explosions of ontic or physical violence itself. Heidegger writes The
essence of violence has nothing to do with ontic violence, suffering,
war destruction, etc.; the essence of violence resides in the violent
character of the very imposition/founding of the new mode of the
Essence disclosure of communal Being itself (2000: 60).
But if ontological violence is not something merely abstract but
precisely that kind of violence which imposes a certain disclosure of
world and thus involves social relations of authority such as rank and
dominance, (2000: 102) then there exists a link between the
ontological violence and the texture of social violence (of sustaining
relations of enforced domination) that pertains to language. More to
the point, it is this link that bestows negative poiesis with this type of
(essential) ontological violence (Wesen der Sprache) capable of an
impositional/foundational act that renders the negative with an
irreverent violating power on a formal ontological level. To explore
this hypothesis further, I will now turn to the Spartacus Manifesto whose
negative poiesis utilises failures ontological violence and its founding
violating 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 Spartacus
Manifesto commands: This must be the last war! We owe that to the
twelve million murdered victims; we owe that to our children; we owe
that to humanity. (Luxemburg 1995: 37) Certainly, and on the one
hand, the reference of the Spartacus Manifesto to the historical
continuity of bodies in struggle (rather than simply ideas in
contention) connects to the Communist Manifestos original force of
the proletariats agonistic purpose. Yet, on the other hand, even
though it was written specifically in the aim of propagating a return to
the Manifestos struggle of the proletariat, its sense of sheer radicalism
is being embodied through its efforts at a particular affective and
experiential intelligibility, one that crystallises as the manifesto
formulates and performs a future audiences experience of, and
response to, oppression, coming from the very context of a truly
violent revolutionary stand the context, that is, of negation itself in
its sensory rending, as a soma, tortured, in the experience and
embodiment 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 not
capable of banishing it again, of restoring real order, of insuring bread
and work, peace and civilization, and justice and liberty to tortured
humanity. (1995: 38)

There is good reason why Luxemburgs entire style is turned

towards an affective appeal of the negative that makes up for the
suffering body of the proletariat. For it is in the negative as a function
of doing a negative poiesis, that the properties of the agonal can be
fully appropriated. And since the body of the truly revolutionary class
(2005: 47), as Althusser remarked, whose drama is always staged by the
manifesto, just as in the case of Luxemburgs Spartacus Manifesto was
the calling of the German proletariat into violent action, encompasses
failure as an integral part of the agonal itself, it is then by
appropriating and purposefully affirming negation in clearly bodily
terms 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 acts
oppositionally, but also, and most importantly, hegemonically, even in
defeat, 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 the
manifesto acquires a central place, as much for the agonistic purpose
of the Spartacus Manifesto as for the validity of those whose claims it
represents. For it is this body that has been brutally mutilated by the
capitalist violence of an imperialist war, and it is this body that is now
being called into political combat. To achieve this, Spartacus Manifestos
bodily affectivity utilises and appropriates the nature of pain as both a
weapon and an expression of suffering at once;
The revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of the
soldiers, who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse for the
sake of capitalistic profits, and the masses of workers, who for four years
were exploited, crushed, and starved, have revolted. (1995: 37)

The imagery of torture, blood and pain acts as an image of the impact
of pain on human consciousness. And because it is in the nature of
pain itself that a radical, anti-conformist, mode of resistance
ontologically found in negation is possible, and thus capable of
legitimating the realness of the manifestos polemical voice, pains
performativity displays a negative poiesis which allows for the
dramatisation of the proletariats power to unroll. Indeed, in
discussing torture, Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain,
the case for pains association to the negative. The very content of
pain, she argues, is itself negation. In her words; pain is a pure
physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of
against, of something being against one, and of something one must
be against. (1985: 52) As an internal physical experience pain is thus,
at once, identified as alien from ones self and as something to get rid
of. But its radical capacity is revealed by its accompanied external
political equivalent; the presence in the space outside the body of a
self-proclaimed enemy, someone who in becoming the enemy,
becomes the human embodiment of aversiveness. (1985: 52) This
leads us to realising what Scarry calls the double experience of agency
that is embedded in pain. For if pain owns a profound sensory
rendering of against which, in effect, renders it ontologically as
negative, it is also a rendering of the something to which is against,
a something at once internal and external. (1985: 52) What Scarry
intends us to see here is the dual function of pains agency such as
when someone is hurt by an external weapon (e.g. knife, nail, pin,
etc.). The sufferer becomes dominated by a sense of internal agency by
the fact that pain concentrates ones awareness of ones own physical
existence, 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 cause
and is conveyed instead verbally in phrases such as knifelike pains,
searing pains, stabbings, and so on, both of which are clearly at work in
the composition of the Spartacus Manifestos verbal imagery. Yet in
either case, a doubling of pains annihilating power exists in the lack of
acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a
form of self-extension) that stands as another form of negation and
rejection, the social equivalent, we may say, of the physical aversiveness.
(1985: 56) But for Scarry, this is a denial which occurs in the
translation of all the objectified elements of pain into the insignia of
power, the conversion of the enlarge map of suffering into an emblem
of the regimes strength. Now, what follows from this requires careful
consideration.
If Luxemburgs emphasis placed on the experience of pain is
aimed at heightening the vitality of the urgency of her call to action
which is inevitably intensified by having become embodied, it is also
aimed at using the violence that resides in the negative as both a
sensory rendering of against and a physical experience of negation in
the 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 line
with the Heideggerian essencing ability of language, pain read as
power bestows the agency of the negative with a creative virtue, a
negative poiesis, that transforms the nature of pain, found in the
performative body of the manifesto as that of the locus of pain, into the
manifestos voice of the new public we as the locus of power. This is
again possible from the opposition entailed within the negative: on
the one hand, as the suffering body, and on the other, as a voice of
confrontation that legitimates the power of a new civic we. Thus the
transformation of pain into power, in the Spartacus Manifesto, is
ultimately a matter of the transformation of the manifestos public we
as a negated body into a we as a voice of negation in itself a reaction
and expression of resistance at once, arising out of the transformation
that is possible in part out of the dissonance of the two, in part out of
the consonance of the two.
But there is another function, equally important, if not more so
perhaps, in the negative poiesis of pains textual imagery that composes
the performative body of the Spartacus Manifesto: the category of
embodiment. The idea that the only real body is the tortured body, the
body dismembered by the real, is a terrifying but ancient one, Badiou
reminds us in The Century. (2008: 116). And for this reason, from no
matter 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 the
real always ends up offering itself as an ordeal of the body. (2008: 116)
As such, in encountering pain, the category of embodiment is
undeniably intensified. First, by the fact that to be in pain is to be
more acutely aware of having a body. And second, that to see from
the outside the wound in another person is to become more
intensely aware of human embodiedness. It is in this light that we
can understand the imagery of wounding in Luxemburgs negative
poiesis of the Spartacus Manifesto. It carries emphatic assurance about
the realness of existence (of the public body, of the proletariat), but
one that for the participants inside contains nothing that makes this
realness visible except the imagery of the wounded human body. The
wounded body thus becomes not simply an element in the act of
manifestation; it is the manifestation. (Scarry 1985: 200) In the case of
pregnancy, it even becomes a happy form of physical increase which
Luxemburg purposefully utilizes. She writes, the proletariat of
Germany is looking towards you in this hour. Germany is pregnant
with social revolution, but socialism can be realised only the proletariat
of the world. (Luxemburg 1995: 38) The implications of such a
profound sensory experience of agency of the negative are
particularly crucial for the impact of the Spartacus Manifesto as both a
political body of combat and a violating body of being a tortured
body, that is, whose very embodiment of negation renders it at once
agonal and real. It is now time, in the light of the above analysis, to
turn 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 subsequently
published in Der Zweemann (Hanover, 1919),13 Rosa Luxemburg
published her own Spartacus Manifesto on that same year entitled
What Does the Spartacus League Want?. Indicative of the Spartacist
agitational spirit, Dada Berlins aestheticised approach, clearly stated
in the opening paragraph of this manifesto, derived directly from the
revolutionary impetus, and the violence involved, in encountering
failure:
Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it
lives, and artists are creature of their epoch. The highest art will be that
which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the
day, the art which had been visibly shattered by the explosions of last

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Violating Failures
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 strictly

Spartacist manner, and precisely after Luxemburgs model of
embodied affectivity. Once again we read: The best and most
extraordinary artists will be those who. . . with bleeding hands and
hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. [. . .] The singers of
this Manifesto have, under the battle cry: DADA!!!! (2001: 146)
Following the writing of the Spartacus Manifesto, the Dadaists Jefim
Golyscheff, Hausmann and Huelsenbeck under the name of Dadaist
Revolutionary Central Council, (after the paradigm of Spartacus
Revolutionary Committee) published a manifesto with an equally
Spartacist echo on its very title: What is Dadaism and What Does It
Want in Germany? first printed in Der Dada I (1919). Its austere
programmatic structure was again emblematic of the militant intend
that underlined Spartacist revolutionary agency:
Dadaism demands: 1) The International, revolutionary unification of all
creative and intellectual people of the entire world on the basis of radical
communism; 2) The introduction of progressive unemployment through
comprehensive mechanisation of every field of activity. Only by
unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve
certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to
experience; 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 for
a state of freedom. (2001: 1578)

But the deeper meaning of this almost seamless continuity that

underlines Dadaist manifestoing activity with the Spartacus Manifestos
becomes more apparent if we confront, head on, the question of
the agonal posed extensively in Luxemburgs political writings, and
embedded in the Spartacus Manifesto, in relation to our understanding
of the significance of the Dadaist aesthetic of anti-manifestation.
But, first, what do we mean by anti-manifestation? One way to define
its category is through its embedded opposite; that is, the context
of manifestation, which however, we should note, is also the context of
anti-manifestation itself. So if manifestation stands for the act of
making manifest (e.g. revelations, declarations, uncovering), and
therefore includes the revealing of truths through slogans such as
Dada 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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Somatechnics
World is only a branch of Dadaism. We pay the amounts put up by
all banks as profit (2006: 155) then such outrageous claims
plus slogans make up for the Dadaist acts of manifestation. But in
anti-manifestation, which is no other but an aesthetic formula of
manifestation, the emphasis shifts to the negation of acts of
manifestation; 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 same
manifesto, the very identity of Dadaists as artists has been disregarded:
Under certain circumstances, to be a Dadaist may mean to be more
of a businessman, more of a political partisan than an artist to be
an artist by accident. (2001: 148) Anti-manifestation, therefore, as
a matter of manifesting against, whether that is against the act
of proposing a programme, of making a promise, or indeed of
manifestation itself, articulates the violence that exists in the negative
in the various forms of negation, rejection, denial, through the usual
Dadaist self-referentiality which, in effect, invests their manifestos, as
textual equivalents of violence, with a doubling obliterating power; that
of lacking internally and of being diminished externally. At first, it
may indeed seem strange to proclaim ones own self-denial as a path to
commanding ones own very being, including that of its galvanizing
audience. But the evident opposition, profoundly contradictory,
contained within Dadaist negation, can barely attest to nothing less
than an aggressive appeal of a rebellious self-sufficiency that by its
negative uttering destabilises the domain of the status quo, artistic or
not. Hardly a parody, therefore, self-negation in dada manifesto seeks
to master itself beyond submission or assimilation from the very
violating force that has produced it. It is within this context that the
use of the term nothing also features strongly, almost proclaiming the
extremity experienced in the gesture of negative excess to the point
that evades it in an absolute sense it feels nothing, it means nothing,
it is, therefore, nothing. We read in the Twenty-Three Manifestos of
the Dada Movement (1920): no more proletarians, no more democrats,
no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no more
fatherlands. . . no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
(Tzara 2011: 167) Francis Picabia would even claim that Dada itself is
nothing, nothing, nothing. (2011: 164)
With this in mind, we can now begin to understand the real
significance that such chaotic signs and gestures as those imprinted in
dadas anti-manifestation, as evidence, not of revolutionary impotence
or bourgeois decadence, but of a kind of necessary corrective in the
manner that Luxemburgs aporetic signifies; as a reaction, that is, to

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Violating Failures
the bolshevist insistence on efficient strategy. The assumption here
is this: as Lenins instrumental reason breeds dadas chaos, Dadaist
anti-manifestation celebrates the founding power of failure (through
self-negation, the gesture of nothingness, etc.) that functions,
ultimately, as a critique to the lefts political efficiency (and
particularly Lenins), as well as to capitalisms value system and its
imperialist violence. Puchner goes as far as to read in such aestheticpolitical trends the self-destructive forces produced by the bourgeoisie
itself which are embodied in the rise of the proletariat. (2006: 142)
And to a large extent, this is certainly inevitable due to the manifestos
capacity to lay open an extraordinary motion of bodies, antagonistic
identities, public struggles, class-based oppressions, and political
passions. Yet the aim here, it seems, is primarily twofold: first, it
helps Dadaists to differentiate themselves from other artists,
particularly the Futurists. In this context, anti-manifestation
functions as a critique to the brevity and explicitness of the
progressive dialectic employed by Marinetti and other futurist artists
in composing the futurist manifesto. And second, and most
significantly for our discussion here, by employing the founding
gesture of negations fundamental violence that resides in failure as
both agency and confrontation, anti-manifestation connects deeply to
the radical powers of failure as a mode of resistance in radical
democratic politics as has been explored so far. Lets follow this latter
thought through in more detail.
By now it should be obvious that the relation of the manifesto to
the perspective of failure is a complex one. On the one hand, and most
significantly, it connects, on the most basic level of the manifestos
programme, whether aesthetic or political, having failed to keep any of
its (programmatic) promise. But a programme is not a contract, and
neither is it a promise that guarantees to be fulfilled. Badiou goes to
the extent of claiming for the manifesto a definition equal to that of
a rhetorical device. (2008: 138) As such, and if we accept that
the relation to what really takes place [in the manifesto] is only ever
one of envelopment and protection, (2008: 139) then the real value of
the manifesto, particularly for the avant-garde, is the activation of this
rhetorical envelopment in the form of the manifesto, yet whose
inherent performativity of a fundamentally violent nature, as we
have seen already, functions as a real rupture in the present on the
promise (or programme) of a future to come, but ultimately, a fictive
future nonetheless. It is within this context that Dadaists challenge the
manifestos inevitable inability to implement the claims of its
programme, yet whose implementation is right at the centre of the

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Somatechnics
genres performativity. And by consciously rendering it instead into
pure acts of manifestation of its theatrics, the manifesto ultimately
testifies to a sense of its own (self) negation its own antimanifestation. In other words, the act of manifestation, in dada
action art, becomes equivalent to anti-manifestation. This is
particularly evident in Berlin due to the movements highly
politicised identity which connects Dada anti-manifestation directly
to the Spartacus political affectivity, and particularly, its manifestos, so
that, for example, several commands could be issued in What is
Dadaism and What Does It Want in Germany manifesto.14 Whether
these claims, however, were meant to materialise or not was never the
real purpose of Dada anti-manifestation. Rather, it is precisely in
staging the failure of the manifesto to manifest, or materialise,
anything other than the power that this failure holds, which ultimately is
what bestows the performativity of anti-manifestation with real
significance and an immense foundational force. It is for this reason
also that numerous pamphlets were constantly issued and signed by
the Dada Revolutionary Central Committee. Similarly, yet to the same
effect, Hausmann and Johannes Baader founded a Dada republic by
manifesto in April 1919 instructing the mayor of Berlin to hand over
the treasury and commanding the citys employees to obey only the
orders of the joint authors.15 In either case, it is by enacting not merely
a fictive future to come, or a promise to be kept, but the very conscious
activation of fictivity in the present without any real concerns of it
actually happening that renders anti-manifestation with significant
transformative performative power. For in this way, as a consciously
performed rupture rather than a programme intended to materialise,
anti-manifestation exhibits, on a formal ontological level, a violent
form of being in the aspect of the real. Thus implied transformation
is, in effect, inevitable. Dada would of course claim such an immense
subversive power to inform the movements definition as a whole:
What is DADAISM? The word Dada symbolises the most primitive
relation to the reality of the environment; with Dadaism a new reality
comes into its own. (Huelsenbeck 2001: 147)
On the other hand and here is where we need to focus our
attention it is this same failure of the manifesto failing to keep its
promise, and which is bound to hostile criticism precisely for this
elementary failure, that we find the seeds of conversion of failure from
stasis, resignation or defeat, into an affirmative of negation whose
foundational force renders failure into a progressive alternative in
radical democratic politics. This is, however, not a matter of
contradiction, but of reversal. Just as failure is embedded in the

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Violating Failures
agonal, inversion is entailed in the negative. The crucial point in both
cases is again a matter of knowing how not only to endure the violence
exerted from the most violating failures but in knowing precisely how
to absorb the extremity experienced from the violating force of failure
by turning it into forms of rebellious acceptance so that the intensity
contained within it is extorted into a violating force of negation in
itself. This of course requires a creative virtue which then brings us to
the function of negative poiesis once more. Yet in this paradoxical
manner, it is the violence of failure which invigorates the whole force
of living with all its most possible intensity. This, then, leads us to a
crucial hypothesis, whose commentary will conclude my current
examination of failure: If only one could utilise the force of failure
into a function of the subjects rebellious acceptance, into conscious
acts of negation acted out in a self-referential order, then it would be
possible to find in the negative the certainty that abides that we can
change it into the final victory.

Failure & the work of love

Here we are confronted with failure as that necessary process which
contains the seeds of the Big Change that in revolutionary politics, as
Zizek observes, comes by taking the risk and engaging in total struggle.
In that particular sense, failure is conceived as an integral part of the
process that leads to what Badiou calls the Event, or becomes part of
the Event itself. Now, if we were to give a concise formula to Badious
Event, then we could define it as the emergence of the New which
cannot be reduced to its causes or conditions. In Marxian terms, this
translates to the fact that even though the broader outlines of any
revolutionary event can be foretold by social theorists, it still needs a
revolutionary subject, if it is to take place at all. This premise becomes
particularly apparent if we accept Kants thesis that the conditions of
our experience of the object are simultaneously the conditions of the
object itself. But if it is only when there is a subject that an Event can
occur within an eventual site16, then it is the subjects manner of
relating to the Event that also conditions its experience by the subject
while 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 resurrection
come to co-exist which then brings Zizek to make a further claim which
is most relevant for our understanding of the radical properties of
failure in any bodies of revolutionary politics: an Event is necessarily

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Somatechnics
missed the first time, so that true fidelity is only possible in the form
of resurrection, as a defence against revisionism . (2009: 387)
This may again explain Luxemburgs insistence on the aporetic
whose perspective incorporated failure as another path, and highly
important, so much for the education of the proletariats struggle and
the growth of its class consciousness as for the whole revolutionary
struggle 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 show
us? The first flare-up of the class struggle in Europe the revolt of the
silk weavers of Lyons in 1831 ended with a severe defeat. The Chartist
movement in England with a defeat. The rebellion of the Parisian
proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat. The
Paris Commune ended with a dreadful defeat. [. . .] Revolutions have
brought us nothing but defeats till now, but these unavoidable defeats
are only heaping guarantee upon guarantee of the coming final triumph.
(1971: 4134)

When confronted with repeated failure, the demand for patience

acquires particular significant. This demand is not just patient waiting
for the moment when radical change will explode with clear certainly
and clarity, but rather, the kind of patience which involves the losing of
battles as part of the subjects work of love. As Badiou argues, when
eventual irruption takes place, it primarily functions as a break in time
and thus introduces a totally different order of temporality the
temporality of the work of love, or, in other words, of the subjects
fidelity to the Event. Yet if seen from the perspective of non-evental
time of historical evolution, then the right moment has never come and
the revolutionary situation is always deemed, by definition, pre-mature.
And for this reason, potential revolutionary moments may indeed
either be missed or failed to deliver the promised outcome, yet they
still act more Evental than had they even succeeded. The assumption
here is that defeats result in the accumulation of a kind of utopian
energy necessary for the formation of the subjects stronger and truer
fidelity to the revolutionary cause which, in effect, will explode in the
final battle as maturation. (Badiou 2009) Yet maturation, in Zizek
terms, has nothing to do with the waiting for objective circumstances
to reach maturity, (2009: 392) but with the kind of patience that
demands persistence and perseverance and which comes from the
accumulation of defeats. This notion appears in Deleuze in his
conception of repetition as the very form of the emergence of the New.

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Violating Failures
But it is in Badious thinking of this aspect in the form of the three
subjective destinations to which he adds, as we have seen a forth, that
failure acquires its true radical meaning: resurrection; the subjective
reactivation, 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 its
evental present a truth fragment which in the old present was pushed
beneath the bar of occultation. This reincorporation is what we call
resurrection. (2009: 6)
Here our enquiry into failure reaches full circle; if failure has
dismantled victory into the living ruins of defeat, then it is failure that
compels its return into a triumphant victory, demanding its
resurrection. And insofar, and Badiou repeatedly emphasises this
point, a true Event is not merely a negative gesture, but opens up a
positive dimension of the New, and the Event is the imposition of a
new world, failure propels its opposite, as prefigured in Dada Berlins
anti-manifestation, 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, so that true evental change can take place that is no
less but the passage from the old to the new world. Within this premise,
we encounter failure as an agent of rupture and resistance whose
negative poiesis bestows the manifestos with a profoundly creative
dynamism of a formal ontological order that renders them into
violating bodies, bodies of resistance. It is at this point also that Dada
Berlin anti-manifestation acquires its full meaning whose relevance
may also ring true for us today: You say yes, (Huelsenbeck 2001: 149)
the volatile poetic of its rhetoric reassures us, to a life that strives
upwards by negation.
Notes
1. 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 University
Press, particularly pp. 13665 for Dada manifestation.
3. The manifestos connection to internationalism, and especially the
internationalism, derived from the Communist Manifesto, and now invigorated by
the Russian Revolution, displayed a particularly polemical value that was positioned
against its competing opposite; the nationalist internationalism. We should bear in
mind, communism had situated itself, from the beginning, as an alternative to
capitalisms internationalism which Marx and Engels, in their Manifesto, held
responsible for turning one capitalist nation against the other in a perpetuated
struggle for colonies, markets, trade routes and territories. So in this particular
sense, the manifestos internationalism stood for radicalism and opposition, as well

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Somatechnics

4.
5.

6.

7.

8.

9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

15.
16.

as a reminder of the effects of the nationalising war. And on this basis, it was
employed by Dada not merely as a pure aesthetic value to inform the centrepiece of
its programme, but as a model of practice that defined its networked existence. It is
also for this reason that the adjective international seems to have followed Dada
activities everywhere, even to the point of being describing as such retrospectively.
Likewise, in Berlin, and in line with Dadaism elsewhere else, the first Dadaist
event to be organised by its members was entitled the First International Dada
Exposition.
Engels credited the Communist Manifesto to Marx even though he also drafted some
part to it, he still considered Marx as its principal writer.
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.
Etymologically derived from the Latin composite of manus and fectus meaning
hostile hand, the dimension of nascent fury is already embodied in the manifesto
form. 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 fills
the hearts and minds of its putative constituents. (1999: 14) In this particular
manner, and by occupying the position of its potent audience and simultaneously
the position of the antagonistic you against whom the manifestos charges are
pressed, the manifesto also displays an immense capacity for affective identification
with the manifestos we which, in turn, exerts sheer antagonistic positioning.
USPD stands for Independent Social Democratic Party which was formed after the
SPD (Social Democratic Party) continued to vote for war bonds. Spartacus joined
USPD initially before was finally separated to form the Communist Party of
Germany (KPD)
As she argued in her speech at the central committee of Spartacus, any revolution
was the result of a long revolution, yet which could only happen if proletariats had
first developed a strong class consciousness through a series of struggles that were
of utmost importance to their education.
Volunteer military or paramilirary units.
Badiou defines determinate negation as an aspect of the repressed.
My italics in outside and beyond
See S. Zizeks discussion on violence p. 52. S.Zizek, Violence, London: Profile Books.
It was reprinted in the Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920) and reissued as the Collective
Dada Manifesto (1920).
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 the
Postdamer Platz (Berlin);b. Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers
to the Dadaist articles of faith; [. . ...] i. Submission of all laws and decress to the
Dadaist central council for approval.
See M. Puchner about the action art of manifestation in Puchner, (2006), Poetry of
the Revolution, Marx, Manifestos, pp.14653.
Quoted in S. Zizek,[2008](2009), In Defence of Lost Causes, London: Verso.

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