Sovereignty and the Death of Communism

When Nicolae Ceauşescu delivered his final speech to the crowd gathered below Bucharest's Central Committee headquarters, he extended his “revolutionary ” greetings. Harun Farocki's documentary, Videograms of a Revolution, captures the moment when the crowd turned, and booed his words, instead of the cheers that the sovereign had become accustomed to over his 25 year tenure as Romania's dictator. When the jeering began, the cameras faltered, momentarily tilted up towards the sky from their previously fixed position on the figure of the sovereign on the balcony, before cutting out all together. Static aired for a few seconds, before the cameras once again began filming, but this time it was revolutionary footage. The brief moments of looking to the sky, followed by static, marked the transition of the nation's turn from Ceauşescu's rule to an unknown future. The sky and the static marked the moment of revolution. But were either Ceauşescu or the crowd opposing him en masse for the first time actually revolutionary? Where was the position of sovereignty located during this confrontation? Where, for that matter, was the spirit of communism? The moment when sovereign power passes from one body to another is what this essay will analyze, through three approaches: the concrete political example of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania's dictator from 1967 to 1989; Badiou's reflections on this event in his essay, “Philosophy and the Death of Communism”; and Spinoza's account of sovereign power in the Political Treaties. Through reading these examples, I will argue that the operative paradigm of interpretation which comes closest to naming the dynamics of such a transition of political power is “performative contradiction.