Parting Happily With the Past (Here's to...)

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

-Karl Marx

from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"It is instructive for [the modern nations] to see the ancien regime, which in their countries has experienced its tragedy, play its comic role as a German phantom. Its history was tragic as long as it was the pre-existing power in the world and freedom a personal whim--in a word, as long as it believed, and had to believe, in its own privileges. As long as the ancien regime, as an established world order, was struggling against a world that was only just emerging, there was a world-historical error on its side but not a personal one. Its downfall was therefore tragic. 


The present German regime, on the other hand--an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally accepted axioms, the futility of the ancien regime displayed for all the world to see--only imagines that it still believes in itself and asks the world to share in its fantasy. If it believed in its own nature, would it try to hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature and seek its salvation in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, who already died once for their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death--this time a comic one--in Lucian's Diologues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part happily with its past. We lay claim to this happy historical destiny for the political powers of Germany."

-Karl Marx
from "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

From Intro to Slavoj Zizek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce