This text was originally delivered as a lecture to the New College of Sociology in London on November 7, 2018.
A day after the midterms, and given the vortex of activity which still swirls around President Donald Trump, it occurred to me that it might be appreciated by three or four dozen people to examine the question of Trump in more detail, and from a deeper perspective than the ideological media conventionally offers, namely, in regards to the sacred, from the point of view of the structures which the New College is undertaking to analyze.
Here at least, it seems to me one can say several things straight away, some of which may appear more or less obvious, but which at least cannot reasonably be claimed to have been previously discussed at great length.
First, the dimension of what one must call the charisma, or aura, which appears to envelop Trump, or which he embodies. In contrast to the interchangeable ranks of the international political class, who for a number of decades now have defined themselves as post-political managers, with poll-tested personas generated by spin doctors and brand experts, Trump emanates a powerful, virile force, which imposes itself as much on his enemies as his followers. Women fiercely opposed to Trump report having sexual dreams about him; others complain of attacks of anxiety triggered by his 2016 election victory.
However one may propose to spectrally analyze this strange power, its magical nature seems broadly consistent with descriptions of the extra-normal “sacred fluid” which animated traditional conceptions of monarchy. As Evola put it, a sacred power “consecrates and gives witness to the solar, triumphant nature of the king as it “gushes” forth from one king to another.” Bataille, on the sacred, describes “a certain force of repulsion that generally guarantees an interior silence keeping the noise of life at a distance. At the same time it possesses a force of attraction, being the object of an unquestionable affective concentration.”
It is not simply that Trump attracts some, and repulses others, but that the sacred force he incarnates divides across political lines. In the camp of his followers, the most striking example, and perhaps apotheosis, remains the now legendary video by the Twitter user Kantbot, addressing the media from Times Square on the day of Trump’s stunning election victory with a series of extraordinary statements, in particular: “Trump will complete German Idealism.” In the camp of his enemies, three months ago now, I had the experience of attending the anti-Trump protest in London organized by the opinion journalist Owen Jones, and the SocDem propaganda agency Novara. The spectacle was just as bizarre, but from the other direction. Placards were characterized by witless profanity and empty invective; the protesters themselves looked hollow and miserable.
For whose gaze were these performances staged? How to account for their differences in their intensities?
One may be reminded both of Hegel’s dictum “the newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer” and Steve Bannon’s comments, in the wake of the election, that “the media is the opposition party.” These statement may be advantageously combined. I do not forget, as it seems that many have, the role of the same media that now attacks Trump without pause in selling war in Iraq, promoting regime change in Libya and Syria, spreading lies, promoting vice and falsehood, and destroying individuals of virtue and merit; in short, serving as the irresponsible and unaccountable relays of what Debord described as “a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.” One recalls, too, Tertullian. “But there are yet other spectacles to come —that day of the Last Judgment… What a panorama of spectacle on that day!”
In short, we are confronted by a diffuse media discourse, which it does not seem hyperbolic to describe as Satanic, given its role in mimetic subversion, for whom Trump appears as an implacable enemy. This fact should alone give one pause. The enemy of your enemy may or may not be your friend, but one should avoid taking your enemy’s word for it.
Against, then, the corruption of the American political establishment, and its vectors, the question could productively be framed another way. Is it not sovereignty itself in play here? On the Right, a certain form of “regal” self-affirming subjectivity that posits no audience, and offers no justification, but instead, self-legitimates through a fatalist creativity. On the Left, a generic mechanical joylessness, recalling the bent-headed functionaries who populate Kafka’s novels.
On the one hand, free association and activity, on the other, prohibition and misery. To be sure, if among the most consistent lines of attack against Trump has been the claim, or insistence that he’s guilty of violating taboos, one is entitled to ask from where these taboos derive. What gives them legitimacy? Trump’s nomination as the Republican Party candidate was already experienced as a shocking violation of norms, while his election as president was felt as a further transgression. Normality, apparently, would have been the coronation of Clinton, the candidate of American militarism, and international corporatism, architect of a disastrous foreign policy, wife to a paragon of moral corruption. Why was this thought to be normal?
Instead of focusing on explicitly political issues, given the connection of taboos to dietary restrictions, it’s perhaps more illuminating to observe some peculiar irregularities. First, Trump’s curious fixation on Diet Coke, and his poetic meditations on it; second, his preference for steaks cooked well-done with ketchup. In remarkable contrast to the Harvard-educated Barack Obama, who, on the campaign trail in 2007 asked Iowans what they thought about the price of Arugula, Trump’s culinary habits identify him as crude and unsophisticated, that is, not truly part of the American ruling elite, despite his vast wealth.
The Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin put the dichotomy clearly in February 2016:
Trump… He is a sensation. In fact, it is a real change from the usual display. The Republicans, as well as the Democrats, are the representatives of the U.S. ruling elites. It is a special part of society, being quite far from the ordinary Americans. This elite considers not America, but the world, not society, but unbelievable sums of money, serves not people, but an abstract utopia of the world government and global financial oligarchy. The American elite is not even American. Then there is Donald Trump, who is tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid. The fact that he is a billionaire doesn’t matter. He is different. He is an extremely successful ordinary American. He is crude America, without gloss and the globalist elite. He is sometimes disgusting and violent, but he is what he is. It is true America.
Not mainly because of what he does, but because of what he is, Trump is himself taboo. He comes from the wrong caste; he’s déclassé. If the main part of the miscellaneous charges thrown against him, on the thinnest of pretexts; his sexism, racism, fascisms, Hitlerism etc, are in general explicable due to this error of birth, one also sees, beyond Trump, a glimpse of the comprehensive religious system which he negatively illuminates.
What do these terms, this trinity, of racism and sexism and fascism, like a strange reversal of liberté, egalité and fraternité, truly mean? What is their nature, and object, from where do they draw power? Despite their contemporary ubiquity, the terms racism and sexism are recent semantic constructions, whose definitions are not only ambiguous and shifting, but expansionist, while fascism, theoretically linked to the Italian political movement led by Mussolini, has degenerated into a slogan deployed by violent masked activists, and their supporters in academia, the media, and the Democratic Party, which is perhaps all the same thing, whose activity behavior appears, to an objective observer, functionally indistinguishable from the behavior they criticize.
Indeed, plausibly it’s fascism which represents the deepest layer. As Nick Land points out, on the back of the power the State assumes over the economy, Keynesianism, the root of both FDR’s New Deal, and European social democracy, may itself be described as abstract fascist economics, and before World War II was uncontroversially considered as such. But as a result of the war, in order to prosecute it, “fascism” ceased to operate as an analytical category, and became a symbol of political evil, as if the U.S. Army went to war against the Holocaust. Anti-fascism became the basis of the political legitimacy of the post-war global order, and Trump, who threatens, in his very being, the legitimacy of that order, becomes a fascist in a repetition of its founding gesture.
Why does Trump threaten that order? In the first place, he threatens the global elite, because he comes from outside it, and has an independent base of support, not least through his personal wealth. Thus, he cannot be controlled by it, and what’s more, he’s knows where the bodies are buried.
The obvious contrast is with Barack Obama, a telegenic non-entity with a dubious past, who was tapped for the presidency to execute the globalist party agenda. Of course, Trump also threatens that agenda politically, as an American nationalist critic of globalism. But the reason why Trump appears truly threatening, why Alex Jones is on the right track when he compares him to Moses, is because of his relationship with the sacred.
The element emerges most clearly during a Playboy interview with Trump from 1990:
What does all this—the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos—really mean to you?
Props for the show.
And what is the show?
The show is “Trump” and it is sold-out performances everywhere. I’ve had fun doing it and will continue to have fun, and I think most people enjoy it.
Do you think the ones who hate it are jealous?
They could be whatever—but the vast majority dig it.
Trump understands that he’s playing a symbolic role; he understands the symbolic. If this understanding marks Trump out as unusual among contemporary politicians (“inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push”), it’s worth noting that Melania, whose scene-stealing sartorial genius remains under-discussed, made a similar statement in 2005, the year she became his third wife. Asked by a student in a business class at NYU if she would be with her husband if he were not rich, she responded: “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?”
This self-awareness establishes the crucial distinction between Trump and his friends, and his enemies. Lacan claimed that it was not only the lunatic who is insane if he believes he is really the King, but the King himself is a lunatic if he thinks he is really the King. The King is the one who observes the division, and draws power from it.
The point of comparison comes from Elias Canetti, quoting Paul Du Chaillu in Crowds and Power on kingship rituals in Gabon:
It happened that Njogoni, a good friend of my own, was elected… I do not think that Njogoni had the slightest suspicion of his elevation. As he was walking on the shore on the morning of the seventh day he was suddenly set upon by the entire populace, who proceeded to a ceremony which is preliminary to the crowning and must deter any but the most ambitious men from aspiring to the crown. They surrounded him in a dense crowd, and then began to heap upon him every manner of abuse that the worst of mobs could imagine. Some spat in his face; some beat him with their fists; some kicked him; others threw disgusting objects at him; while those unlucky ones who stood on the outside, and could reach the poor fellow only with their voices, assiduously cursed him, his father, his mother, his sisters and brothers, and all his ancestors to the remotest generation. A stranger would not have given a cent for the life of him who was presently to be crowned… Njogoni bore himself like a man and a prospective king. He kept his temper, and took all the abuse with a smiling face.
“Njogoni remains calm,” writes Canetti, “for he knows that it is all transferred hostility; insofar as it is directed against his own person, it is only acted.” Trump’s equanimity in the face of comparable expressions of rage draws on the same royal knowledge.
This knowledge turns decisive politically by short-circuiting the left-right sacred axis, in the same way Alexander cuts the Gordian knot. “It is a fact,” writes Bataille, “that sacred objects, in the same way as political figures, are never consistently transmuted except from left to right.” Furthermore the “very object of religious practices consists in this essential transformation.” The ritual purifies, it never impurifies: the (impure, Left) cadaver becomes the (pure, Right) relic, but never vice-versa.
“The central nucleus of an agglomeration is the place where the left sacred is transformed into right sacred, the object of repulsion into object of attraction, and depression into stimulation,” writes Bataille. Through the practice of the potlatch on the one hand, and the doctrine of Revolution on the other, Bataille describes an escalatory spiral that is not only destructive, but sacred and purifying. It is this process driving Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, and Conquest’s Second Law that: “any organization not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing.” Gustave Le Bon announces this same force in The Crowd: “a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization.”
Hungry for sacrality that’s increasingly insufficiently pure, the political Left moves the needle right, generating ever greater toxicities from previously mundane activities, to fuel more ablations and sacrifices. Recurrent in moments of political crisis, from the last days of Carthage to the French Revolution to St. Petersburg (“When I saw it was a time for a change”) this sacred hunger invariably takes the same form: a relentless push leftwards liquidating, in the French case, first the Monarchy, then the Girondins, then the Jacobins themselves, until finally the arrival of Napoleon (or Stalin, or…) halts the escalation (or “permanent revolution”) by reestablishing normative boundaries, and arresting the Left-liquefaction by force.
In the meantime, for us, the sacred continues expanding, now with respect to the Left-sacred position on gender constructionism, which in five years has moved from a fringe academic joke to the violation of the Hippocratic oath enshrined in law in several countries, and the sanctification of refugees, against citizens, to the benefit of the state. Detailed analyses could be made of both topics, in their relation to the violation of borders, and their importance for instituting theocratic biopolitical tyranny.
But for the moment, the situation may be considered more generally. We’ve become habituated, in our arrogance, to the thought that taboos are arbitrary and unnecessary; today, we’re confronting the truth that there is nothing more real. The word means originally to “mark an intensity.” It’s not just a matter of opinion: taboos mark powers that exist for reasons that we do not understand and cannot grasp. They can only be violated, they can’t be lifted: the intensity they mark is real, and a collective failure to recognize the limitations which they impose can ultimately only end one way.
The elevation of utopia to power must inevitably and necessarily result in Thermidor. As Durkheim observes, if the mechanism for calling down the God does in fact succeed in calling them, this mechanism must be itself divine: “If the Vedic sacrifice has had such an efficacy that according to mythology, it was the creator of the gods, and not merely a means of winning their favor, it is because it possessed a virtue comparable to that of the most sacred beings.” A taboo is made to be violated, but upon violation, the violation itself turns taboo, that is to say, sacred.
Hence the violation of the taboo of sex, or the Madonna and Child, a sacred dyad throughout European history, which today has migrated to the sacredness to the mechanism of its profanation: abortion. The frenzied scenes on the steps of the Capital a few weeks ago attendant on the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, whom progressives fear will overturn Roe vs Wade, testifies to the unearthly force that still remains in play, only now with the polarity reversed. Abortion today serves as a sacrament for counter-initiation, just as marriage used to mark the entrance into adulthood and community. The sacred, simultaneously repulsive and attractive, begins to wander through the world like hell. The revolutions of 1960s, which demanded an end to all taboos (“It is forbidden to forbid” ran the slogan that appeared on the walls of the Latin Quarter, as Kenneth Clarke was filming Civilization across the River Seine) culminates, like all revolutions before it, with Saturn successively devouring each of his children in turn.