Slavoj Zizek - "The True Revolutionary Is Guided By A Great Feeling Of Love" (2013)

Che Guevara's statement that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love" should be read together with his much more problematic statement on revolutionaries as "killing machines": "Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy." These two apparently opposite stances are united in Che's motto: "Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamás la ternura. (One must endure -- become hard, toughen oneself - without losing tenderness.)" Or, to paraphrase Kant and Robespierre again: love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is a blind, short-lived passion. Guevara is here paraphrasing Christ's declarations on the unity of love and sword -- in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence -- it is this link which raises love "over and beyond the natural limitations of man." Has this topic any relevance for our late capitalist predicament?