Women in Dark Times (9 page)

At the core of their struggle was the issue of power (his drive to master the world was the mirror of his mastery or refusal of the inner life). ‘You have too much faith in the magic power of the word “force” in both politics and personal life,’ she wrote to him in 1899. ‘I, for one, have more faith in the power of the word “do”.’
106
As well as a commitment-phobe, Jogiches was what today I think we would also call a control freak. He needed her success but he hated it. ‘My success and the public recognition I am getting are likely to
poison our relationship
because of your pride and suspicion,’ she wrote as early as July 1896, two years before she moved to Berlin.
107
But she is passionately involved with him, in many ways lives through and for him for the fifteen key, formative years of their affair. She submits to him, or at least says she will; she ties herself in knots trying to please him; she also relies on him for inspiration, fact-checking, editing of her work – although one of her best moments is when, on receipt of his changes to one of her articles, she writes that she ‘almost had a fit’.
108
She also turns the tables. ‘I’ve been letting it run through my head a little, the question of our relationship, and when I return, I’m going to take you in my claws so sharply that it will make you squeal, you’ll see . . . I have the right to do this because I am ten times better than you . . . I am now going to terrorise you until you become gentle. Learn to kneel down in spirit a little . . . You
must
submit, because I will force you to through the power of love.’
109

How can we not see in this struggle a rehearsal, or the grounds, of her later critique of Leninism? He was mentoring her. His entire correspondence systematically displays one ‘huge unpleasant thing’, like the letters of ‘a teacher to his pet pupil’ (Ettinger, translating directly from the Polish, uses ‘schoolmaster’, which makes the link to her critique of Lenin stronger).
110
He could be violent. When she started her affair with Kostya Zetkin he threatened to kill her. It was not an idle threat. He showed up with a gun with which he followed her down the street. He insisted on retaining the keys to the flat they once shared. Jogiches was exerting over Luxemburg the terrorising, draconian power of the night-watchman state. For Luxemburg, on the other hand, passion – like politics – was a question of freedom. ‘Blessed are those without passion,’ she wrote to her last lover, Hans Diefenbach – an affair conducted by correspondence from prison – ‘if that means they would never claw like a panther at the happiness and freedom of others.’ In fact, she continues, ‘That has nothing to do with passion [ . . . ] I possess enough of it to set a prairie on fire, and still hold sacred the freedom and the simple wishes of other people.’
111
‘You must let me do what I please and how I please,’ she wrote to Jogiches near the end of the affair. ‘I simply lead the life of a plant and must be left just as I am.’
112
True passion stakes no claim. Like democracy, it does not own, control or master the other. It lets the other be. ‘I am only I once more since I have become free of Leo.’
113

By now, it should be clear why I think that most ways of thinking about the relationship between Luxemburg’s political and private life are misconceived. The most common of these, already alluded to, is that her letters reveal the human being, the woman behind the steely revolutionary; they show, for example – as the headline to one review of the 2011 translation of her letters announced – that Rosa Luxemburg was also ‘sensuous and full of laughter’.
114
There is nothing more sensuous than Luxemburg’s writings on revolution, and laughter is as political for Luxemburg as anything else. ‘Laughter’, Hannah Arendt writes in
Men in Dark Times
,
‘helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one’s soul to it.’
115
This could also be a creed for feminism. Remember Mt. Pelee in Martinique looking down and laughing at the weeping carnivores. When the Frankfurt prosecutor asked for her immediate arrest in 1914 on the grounds that she was bound to take flight, she retorted: ‘I believe you,
you
would run away; a Social Democrat would not. He stands by his deeds and laughs at your judgements.’
116
Gillian Rose is surely right that Luxemburg raised facetiousness to a new political art.
117
Nor do I accept Ettinger’s view that Luxemburg’s political identity hardened – as well it might have given the way the world was turning – mostly as a way of compensating for failure in her personal life. I do not view her personal life as a failure. Certainly I cannot see, as Nettl has it, the years after her break-up with Jogiches as the ‘lost years’. Nor do I consider, as Adrienne Rich suggests, that Luxemburg’s life illustrates that a woman’s ‘central relationship is to her work, even as lovers come and go’.
118
We do not have to make the choice. What matters is not any sort of hierarchy between her public and private lives, but rather their profound intermeshing. And then, through that, what her immersion in the dark night of the soul brings – like Martinique, like revolution – to the surface of politics.

‘Why’, Luxemburg wrote to Kostya Zetkin in 1907, in London for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democracy Party, ‘am I plunging again into dangers and frightening new situations in which I am sure to be lost?’
119
If politics for her is at moments a torment, it is also a compulsion. Her reproach against Jogiches for his immersion in the cause is also directed at herself. With this difference – and for me it makes all the difference – that Luxemburg takes full internal measure of the force to which she submits. In the same letter to Zetkin, she describes ‘an indistinct desire’ stirring somewhere ‘in the depths’, a longing to embrace the ‘shrill chords’, to ‘plunge’ into the whirlpool of London city’s night (the German ‘
stürzen
’, used both times, means to plunge, to stream, to fall).
120
The street is full of staggering drunkards and screeching, squealing flower girls looking ‘frightfully ugly and even depraved’.
121
This is Luxemburg in anticipation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ or Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
(there is more than one way, we might say, to be a ‘watchman of the night’). It is of course a consoling myth to believe that if you open the inner portals of the mind, you will be flooded with light. Rather, the whole point of venturing down such paths is that you cannot possibly know where they will go. Luxemburg is tempted by what she cannot control. For me it is no coincidence that this so uncannily resonates with the unknowable spirit of revolution. For her deepest insights into both aspects of her life, Luxemburg plumbs the same source.

It is often argued on the left that the darkness and fragility of psychic life are the opposite of politics (indeed its greatest threat). Instead, through Luxemburg, we might rather see this domain as politics’ shadow, or even handmaiden, a type of unconscious supporter in the wings. It is not unusual, as we discover reading the letters, for Luxemburg to find herself in parts of the mind where she does not wish to tread. Joyous, she was also permanently dissatisfied with herself.
122
Luxemburg knew all too well about the link between creativity and psychic pain (the ‘gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility’).
123
Contemplating the possibility of mental illness – being driven mad by Jogiches would perhaps be more accurate – she describes the sensation of thinking and feeling everything ‘as though through a screen of tracing paper’, the sensation of her thoughts ‘being torn away’.
124
At another moment, she wrote that her life has always felt as if it was taking place somewhere else, ‘not here where I am’ – psychoanalysis would call this another scene (
ein andere Schauplatz
), the stage of the unconscious – somewhere ‘far away, off beyond the rooftops’.

In one of his most famous images, Freud used the mystic or magical writing pad to describe the psyche as a set of infinite traces. The mind is its own palimpsest. It cannot be held to a single place. You never fully know yourself or the other. Luxemburg laments that she can scarcely be her ‘own adviser or counsellor’, but how could she, she continues, given how difficult it is even for the closest friends to know and understand each other, given the fact that language fails. There is no way to capture the truth behind the words: ‘Or one may perhaps have an excellent understanding of the actual words, but the “lighting”,’
she wrote to Robert and Matthilde Seidel in 1898. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
125
Two years earlier she had included these lines from her favourite Polish writer, the romantic poet and dramatist, Adam Mickiewicz, in a letter to Jogiches:

If the tongue were true to the voice

And the voice to the thought,

How then could the word ever hold within bounds

The lightning of thought?
126

Words deceive because thought is boundless, dazzling (lighting/lightning), ‘Do you know what I mean?’ she beseeches her friends. How could they? When she has just laid on the page the fragments of her own failed understanding?

For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic that our conscious utterances betray us, something always escapes. There is a point, Freud wrote famously in
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
where all dreams plunge irretrievably into the unknown. The only chance of even getting close is to let the mind drift where it will. ‘The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation,’ he wrote, ‘cannot from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought.’
127
Like revolution or the mass strike, we might say. This is Luxemburg: ‘It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.’
128
‘The revolution’, wrote Ahdaf Souief, ‘is like the Nile in flood: try keeping that back with barriers and uniforms. The revolution, which began a year ago on 25 January, has gone everywhere. It has raged through some spaces, flowed steadily through others, and seeped into yet more. There is nowhere, nothing, nobody who has not been affected by it.’
129

That is why Freud’s only instruction to the patient – the sacrosanct but some would say increasingly neglected founding principle of analysis – was to free associate, to say whatever, however strange and unpredictable, comes into the patient’s head. For Freud the ungraspable nature of the human mind summoned the necessity of freedom. ‘The method of free association,’ writes Christopher Bollas, ‘subverts the psychoanalyst’s natural authoritarian tendencies.’
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(Compare Soueif: ‘try keeping that back with barriers and uniforms’.) A new method of thinking, he continues, free association unleashes ‘the disseminating possibilities that open to infinity’.
131
We are close to Luxemburg’s observation to Luise Kautsky on infinity
as infinity
(as opposed to a neatly centred ball). As with revolution, you have to risk lifting the lid. The world must be allowed to fall apart in order – perhaps – for it to recover itself. First appalled, almost broken by the vote for the war, Luxemburg then realised that in order to move further, ‘all of this will still have to disintegrate and come apart more’.
132
Freud was of course writing at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg. Out of the unconscious, Luxemburg lifts something I would call an ethics of personal and political life.

Luxemburg’s disagreement with Lenin can also be seen in these terms. As Nettl puts it in his biography: ‘Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, who groped for new and deeper causes hitherto unknown for a moral and political cataclysm on a unique scale, the mere understanding of which taxed her greater powers to the full, Lenin was merely preoccupied with the
size
of the problem.’
133
Luxemburg is offering a counter-erotics of revolution. It is surely no coincidence that recent feminist psychoanalytic thought likewise describes female sexuality as boundless (something other, we might say, than the size of the matter).

*

Jusqu’à outrance –
beyond the limit. There is one more crossing to make. When Luxemburg left Poland hidden in the peasant’s cart she was starting on a journey which would see her cross and re-cross national boundaries for the rest of her life. When she later moved to Germany, she arrived ‘carrying the bundle of her Jewish family’s letters, party instructions to introduce herself as a Pole, and the marriage certificate that changed her citizenship from Russian to German’.
134
Where, if anywhere, did she belong? ‘Predictably,’ wrote Ettinger, ‘the PPS [Polish Socialist Party] pointed to Luxemburg’s Jewish origin as inevitably blinding her to the real needs and wishes of the Polish nation. The same was said in 1970, at a symposium in Warsaw commemorating the 100th anniversary of her death.’
135
In 1910, the Polish nationalist newspaper,
Independent Thought
, maintained that her physical disability was an example of the degeneration of the Jews.
136