Julia Hell Remnants of Totalitarianism

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We cannot simply distance ourselves from our comrades of the urban guerilla, because we would then have to distance ourselves from ourselves, because we suffer from the same contradiction, vacillating between helplessness and blind activism.1

Joschka Fischer (1976)

This article deals with two different but related attempts to reinvent poli-tics as a radical revolutionary act, made by two intellectuals from the former Soviet Bloc, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the East German playwright Heiner Müller. I propose to read these reinventions against the foil of Hannah Arendt’s passionate plea to rethink politics by breaking with the catastrophic imaginary born in the ruined landscapes of post-fas-cist Europe.2 Second, I will argue that we need to keep in mind the specific

1. Quoted in Oskar Negt, “Bleierne Zeit, bleierne Solidarität—Der ‘Baader-Meinhof-Komplex’,” in Achtundsechzig: Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001), p. 261. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2. Hannah Arendt still remains a marginal figure in the study of the former East German state and its culture (with the exception of Sigrid Meuschel; see, for instance, her “Totalitarianism and Post-Stalinist Constellation,” Telos 132 (Fall 2005): 99–108). The reasons for this reluctance to explore Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian rule in the East German context are purely ideological. First, since Arendt emerged as the figurehead of conservative cold war theorists and politicians after 1945, most German leftists felt com-pelled to distance themselves from her writings. Unfortunately, by doing so, these critics readily accepted the conservative simplifications of Arendt’s thinking instead of critically engaging with her provocations. Second, Arendt’s equation of Stalinist Communism with National Socialism was seen as potentially apologetic. Third, and most significantly, few leftists were willing to face the fact that Stalinism did at one point turn into totalitarianism,

Julia Hell

Remnants of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, Heiner Müller, Slavoj Žižek,

and the Re-Invention of Politics

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 77

conditions of (post)totalitarian rule in the former Soviet Bloc. Third, and most importantly, these reinventions are haunted by the ghost of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), or the “abstract radicalism” of the 1970s in Ger-many and Italy.3 Both Müller and Žižek’s political thought is burdened with this catastrophic imaginary, a legacy not only of National Socialism but of Stalinism as well.4 In contrast to the European left, which seems to be drawn back into this paralyzing mode of thinking again and again, Arendt insisted on theorizing this imaginary and its pernicious effects as the very precondition for the reinvention of politics.

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, Žižek polemically attacks Arendt’s popularity among what he calls the “centre-left liberal spectrum.”5 However, Žižek’s “radical left” polemic against the “‘democratic’ bloc” ultimately aims not only at Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism but also at the very core of the transformative project of radical democracy. Žižek’s anti-Arendtian trea-tise concludes with the Hegelian lesson that “even the darkest Stalinism harbours a redemptive dimension.”6 Žižek argues this redemptive potential with Hegel and with Benjamin—with the latter’s notion of a new form of

i.e., that it reached a stage where the logic of destruction overrode even any utilitarian use of terror, producing mass death.

3. Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt a. M.: Stro-emfeld, 1998), p. 35.

4. I deliberately use the psychoanalytically-inflected concept of the imaginary, for two reasons: First, it calls attention to the ways in which the past is conceptualized as a philosophical or political story. Sometimes this conceptualization of history is highly ana-lytical, at other times purely ideological. Second, the concept of the historical imaginary thematizes affect; it mixes text and image; it creates seemingly illogical temporalities and topographies; it blurs boundaries between present and past, between the living and the dead. Historical imaginaries obey a logic that is both conscious and unconscious. “His-tory” and its politics are thus not the only theme of the historical imaginary; it centrally involves thoughts and fantasies about the subject itself, about its position in the symbolic order, about its desires and anxieties, about life and death, and about love. The historical imaginary is the way in which we live the symbolic order as historical; its nature deter-mines whether we are enabled and enable ourselves to act as historical-political subjects —or whether we fail to do so. History as catastrophe positions us as subjected to an order over which we have no control. Literature and the visual arts are as central to this imagi-nary as are books like Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946) or Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999) with its catastrophic view of modernity.

5. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 241

6. Ibid., p. 88.

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violence that will break the cycle of violence as well as his concept of the revolutionary act as the redemptive repetition of failed attempts at libera-tion.7 Benjamin’s concept of history and the miracle of revolution is also central to the work of Müller, the author obsessed with Stalinism as the GDR’s pre-history and as the very condition for its founding. Benjamin’s moment of redemptive violence plays a central structuring role in “Explo-sion of a Memory/Description of a Picture,” a brief text published in 1984, and in his “Mommsen’s Block,” Müller’s 1993 requiem to the Soviet Union, to the GDR, and to himself.8 Like Žižek, Müller searched for the redemptive kernel of Stalinism, and like Žižek, he proposed a revolution-ary politics that remains caught in the totalitarian imaginary.

In these texts, Müller reflects on history and the Benjaminian notion of a redemptive revolutionary act. But more importantly, these texts repre-sent the other, catastrophic side of a romantic radicalism caught between melancholic paralysis and revolutionary voluntarism, a politics born in the shadow of National Socialism and solidified under the suffocating condi-tions of Stalinism. Moreover, Müller’s romantic politics, his (desperate) hope for a revolutionary break, bears the deep imprint of 1970s West Ger-man radicalism. In Müller’s texts, the women of the RAF are omnipresent as part of a constellation that includes both Benjamin’s Angel of History and the Benjaminian moment of disruption. Reading Žižek with Müller sheds a critical light on Žižek’s response to Arendt, his dismissal of liberal democracy and increasing distance from the core tenets of radical democ-racy. Reading Müller also critically contextualizes Žižek’s notion of an authentic revolutionary act as an act that both redeems failed acts of lib-eration and redefines the very conditions for political action. Like Arendt, Müller and Žižek attempt to re-invent politics—after National Socialism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in both cases, this reinvention leads to a—highly ambivalent—fascination with the desperate politics of 1970s radicalism.

7. Žižek also discusses Benjamin in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin (London: Verso, 2002), and Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002).

8. Heiner Müller, “Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture,” in Explosion of a Memory: Writings by Heiner Müller, ed. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1989), pp. 97–102; Müller, “Mommsen’s Block,” in DramaContemporary: Germany, ed. Carl Weber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), pp. 271–76.


I. “The Gap in the Process”: Heiner Müller’s Catastrophic History, or The Fantasy of DisruptionIn April 1989, Gerhard Richter, an artist who had left East Germany for the West in 1961, framed the first exhibit of his so-called RAF cycle, Octo-ber 18, 1977, with a sweeping statement on history as catastrophe: “At present and as far back as we can see into the past, [reality] takes the form of an unbroken string of cruelties.”9 History, Richter continued, “pains, maltreats, and kills us.” Richter portrayed the Red Army Fraction as part of the history of the European left, a failed history of revolutions followed by revolutionary terror, a politics of death; he then described his cycle’s rudi-mentary narrative as a failed rebellion: “Deadly reality, inhuman reality. Our rebellion. Impotence. Failure. Death.”10 Evoking “Hope” and “Faith,” Richter then ended his 1989 statement with a voluntarist gesture all too familiar from the many different versions of this apocalyptic imaginary.11 There is deadly, catastrophic history, Richter claimed, but also faith and the desire to live. Critics have pointed to the cross that is barely discern-ible in the background of the painting that concludes the cycle, the funeral of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. While reading Richter through a Catholic lens does not strike me as far fetched, whatever reading we choose, I would argue that we need to take into account the cycle’s focus on the RAF women and the ways in which Richter directs our gaze at their dead bodies.12

Müller shares this catastrophic imaginary with Richter—like the latter’s paintings, Müller’s texts evolve “in the direction of death.”13 They operate with a deeply pessimistic notion of history, on the one hand, and an obsessive romanticization of rebellious women figures and their vio-lent acts of liberation and equally violent deaths, on the other. Throughout Müller’s work, these women figures appear in connection with Benjamin’s Angel of History and its disruptive, messianic potential. In the following

9. Gerhard Richter, “Notes for a press conference, November–December 1988,” in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 175.

10. Ibid., pp. 174, 175. 11. Ibid., p. 175.12. See my analysis of Richter’s Orphic gaze in Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke,

“Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” Germanic Review 80, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 75–77.

13. Gerhard Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the cycle 18 October, 1877,” in The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 186.

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section, I will trace these revolutionary constellations through some of Müller’s key texts on history.

One of Müller’s most famous anti-Stalinist texts is his “Luckless Angel,” written in 1958, in the wake of the bloody repression of the Hun-garian uprising. The scene that Müller creates is a transparent palimpsest of Benjamin’s passage on the Angel of History. But Müller’s scene is more pessimistic. Its time is the moment after the catastrophe, and its topography a ruined, claustrophobic space, with rubble raining down on the angel’s wings and shoulders. Müller inscribes us as witnesses to this moment: “For a time one still sees the beating of his wings, hears the crash of stones, falling before, above, behind him.”14 While the past is nothing but a surge of destruction, the future is a void that “crushes his eyes, explodes his eyeballs.”15 The moment that this text captures is not one of possible redemption; instead, revolutionary history has come to a violent halt. The luckless angel falls silent waiting for history “in the rapidly flooded space.”16 The angel, Benjamin’s allegorical figure of redemption (and the embodiment of the historical materialist), no longer walks backwards into the future with his eyes torn open wide, but waits “in the petrification of flight, glance, breath.”17 Blinded, the angel no longer recognizes the redemptive dimension of the past—not in the past, and certainly not in the present. But then, inexplicably, the angel moves again, breaks out of the “petrification of flight gaze breath.”18 And suddenly things change and a “renewed rush of powerful wings . . . signals his flight.”19 In the midst of Stalinist repression, in 1958, there still is hope: the space left by destruc-tion, flooded with rubble, might again turn into a space of liberation.20

In the 1970s, Müller transformed Benjamin’s angel into an avenging angel, a female figure standing for the oppressed. It appears in the guise of Medea, for instance, or Ophelia. Here is the famous concluding scene

14. Heiner Müller, “The Luckless Angel,” in Germania, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 99.

15. Ibid.16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. On Benjamin’s angel as Orphic historiographer, see my “The Angel’s Enig-

matic Eyes, or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History in W. G. Sebald’s ‘Air War and Literature’,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 361–92.

18. Müller, “The Luckless Angel,” p. 99.19. Ibid.20. On “The Luckless Angel,” see also Frank Hörnigk, “Afterword,” New German

Critique 73 (Winter 1998): 38–39.


from Müller’s “Hamletmachine,” Ophelia’s raging monologue spoken from “the heart of darkness”:

This is Elektra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of tor-ture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims. I eject all the sperm I have received. I take back the world I gave birth to. I bury it in my womb. Down with the happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death.21

In The Task: Memory of a Revolution (1979), Müller’s play about the Hai-tian Revolution, another terrifying angel appears, the “Angel of Despair.”22 This angel announces rebellion and terror: “Terror dwells in the shadow of my wings.”23 These revolutionary figures—incarnations of what Žižek will later call “the freedom fighter with an inhuman face”—have much to do with Müller’s Third-Worldism.24 But more importantly, they also represent a transparent romanticization of the RAF’s women, of their uncompromising, suicidal politics.

In “Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture” (1984), Ben-jamin’s Angel of History is present both as the woman of a story that an ekphrastic speaker tries to decipher and as the disembodied gaze of that speaker.25 We follow his reading of the “Augenblick,” of the (historical) moment and (momentary) glimpse, caught in the pictorial constellation of a man, a woman, a bird, and a setting that hints at a violent event.26 The woman seems wounded—“perhaps a fist hit her,” caught in a defensive gesture “against a familiar terror”; the attack has already happened and is being repeated again and again.27 The man seems to smile “the smile of the murderer on his way to work.”28 To his own question—“What is

21. Heiner Müller, “Hamletmachine,” in Hamletmachine and other texts for the stage, ed. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Publications Journal, 1984), p. 58.

22. Heiner Müller, “The Task,” in Hamletmachine and other texts, p. 87.23. Ibid. 24. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 82.25. On the ekphrastic speaker as mediator between picture and beholder, see W. J. T.

Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–82.

26. Weber translates the original “Augenblick des Bildes” as “instant of the picture”; See Müller, “Explosion of a Memory,” p. 97. For the original, see Müller, “Bildbeschrei-bung,” in Heiner Müller Material, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1990), pp. 8–14.

27. Müller, “Explosion of a Memory,” p. 97.28. Ibid., p. 98.

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going to happen?”—the speaker imagines several solutions transforming the “Augenblick” of the painting into stories.29 Is this the scene of a violent fuck, of two people brutally making love, or is it the scene of a murder? And if it is, who kills whom? Is this woman even alive? Or is she dead, an angel thirsting for blood?

Müller’s text tells a private story, the story of Inge Müller’s suicide.30 “Explosion of a Memory” transforms this story into political history on two levels: first, we get the rather tedious male fantasy of history as a battle of the sexes; and then, the notion of history as catastrophe, a story of labor as daily killings that provide the earth with its “fuel, blood,” turning it into a mass grave.31 The text thematizes Benjamin’s Angel of History twice: through the figure of the woman who changes from victim to avenging angel; but also, and perhaps more importantly, through the speaker’s gaze, which mimics the angel’s horrified gaze and his desire to “make whole what has been smashed.”32 That is, the scrutinizing but erratic gaze of the ekphrastic narrator produces a powerful desire for scopic mastery on the reader’s part, a scopophilic drive to create unity from a visual trajectory that Müller relentlessly deflects, reroutes, and ultimately foils.33

The text culminates in a fantasy of disruption, of a moment that explodes the catastrophic continuum: “wanted: the gap in the process, the Other in the recurrence of the Same, the stammer in the speechless text, the hole in eternity, the possibly redeeming ERROR.” Which kind of error does the text’s narrator imagine? “[T]he distracted gaze of the killer,” Müller writes, a moment’s “hesitation before the incision,” or “the

29. Ibid.30. Inge Müller, a poet and Müller’s first wife, spent several days in 1945 buried

under Dresden’s rubble. Müller’s “Obituary” (in Explosion of a Memory, pp. 36–38) nar-rates her suicide. “Explosion of a Memory” tells her story in the guise of the Alcestis myth, the woman who willingly dies to resurrect her husband.

31. Müller, “Explosion of a Memory” p. 101.32. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 25733. Literary scenarios of scopic mastery are legion. See, for instance, Theodor Drei-

ser, The Titan: “Not long after he had returned from the European trip he stopped . . . in the . . . drygoods store. . . . As he was entering, a woman crossed the aisle before him . . . a type of woman which he was coming to admire, but only from a rather distant point of view. . . . She was a dashing type, essentially smart and trig. . . . She had, furthermore, a curious look of current wisdom in her eyes, an air of saucy insolence which aroused Cowperwood’s sense of mastery.” Theodor Dreiser, The Titan (New York: John Lane, 1914), p. 109.


woman’s laughter”—events that might cause the hand that holds the knife to tremble.34 But this moment might not occur, or the speaker might miss the “gap in the process.” He is paralyzed by the fear “that the blunder will be made while he is squinting, that the peephole into Time [Sehschlitz in die Zeit] will open between one glimpse and the next.”35

“Explosion of a Memory” ends with the end of history, the metaphor of a “frozen storm.”36 Müller added a paragraph to the text in which he points the reader to four intertexts, among them Homer’s ekphrastic pas-sage about Agamemnon’s shield: “And circled in the midst of all was the blank-eyed face of the Gorgon / with her stare of horror.”37 In “Explosion of a Memory,” the victimized woman once again turns avenging angel. But if we pay attention to the text’s scopic structure, to the gaze of its “reader,” instead of to the protagonist, then this text represents the angel’s paralyzed gaze at the murderous history of Stalinism, a gaze terrified that it might miss the moment of redemption. In “Explosion of a Memory,” the angel confronts the possibility that there will be no miracles, no repetitions of failed revolutionary acts—that there is no exit from catastrophic history.

The figure of the 1970s terrorist returns one last time in Müller’s “Mommsen’s Block,” in a biblical guise as “John in Patmos . . . The her-etic The guide of the dead The terrorist.”38 In this prose poem, Müller defines his oeuvre once more as writing for the dead: “For whom else do we write / But for the dead.”39 To write for the dead, to keep their memory alive in the hope that their death will once be redeemed, is the very basis of Müller’s literary historiography of Stalinism. The inspiration is Ben-jaminian: poets are people for whom history is a burden “[i]nsufferable without the dance of vowels / On top of the graves.”40 The goal of writ-ing is redemption, addressing their “dread of the eternal return.”41 But in “Mommsen’s Block,” Müller writes about the end of writing. The poem is a dense palimpsest of historical allusions. The topic of empires and

34. Müller, “Explosion of a Memory,” pp. 101–102.35. Ibid., p. 102.36. Ibid.37. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

1974), p. 235.38. Müller, “Mommsen’s Block,” p. 272. 39. Ibid., p. 274.40. Ibid., p. 271.41. Ibid.

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their decline—“Why does an empire collapse”—constitutes one dominant topic that alludes to the end of the Roman Empire, the Kaiserreich, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and the former GDR and post-unification Ger-many. Heavy-handedly, Müller compares post-unification Germany with Imperial Rome and the GDR with the Roman Republic. At the same time, he uses this opposition to allegorize “THE GREAT OCTOBER OF THE WORKING CLASS” versus the age of Stalin. More importantly, the poem speaks of the connection between power and writing: Müller starts out by comparing himself to Mommsen, who never finished his last volume on the “age of the emperors.”42 Like the historian of Rome, the East German author will not be able to write about the new imperial age—of Rome, of Bismarck’s Reich, of post-unification Germany—because its material-ism and corruption disgusts him. Mommsen, Müller writes, intended to burn Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem about the destruction of Troy and the city’s re-founding as Rome.43 And like Mommsen, he cannot explain why this new empire will collapse: “The ruins don’t answer / The silence of the statues is gilding the decline.”44 But collapse it will—that is the message of Müller’s use of the discourse on the rise and fall of empires. Or rather, it will not simply collapse, for John is the prophet of the apocalypse, “the terrorist” inside the imperial Roman order who “Has seen the New Beast that is rising.”45 The author as guide of the dead, as heretic and terrorist, is left with nothing but his prophecy of doom—or should we say his desire for the apocalypse?

“Mommsen’s Block” revolves around a male figure—or rather, a series of figures: Mommsen/John/Virgil. In this text, the constellation that characterizes Müller’s work—the (female) angel of history as agent of and witness to revolutionary rupture and the violent hopes invested in these figures—is absent. Müller completed “Mommsen’s Block” after the Soviet Union collapsed. Immediately after November 1989, his tone was still markedly more optimistic. Müller then saw the future East as a pos-sible alternative to capitalism and its “total acceleration”: the reformers’ task was to make a virtue of the East’s “deceleration” and to build on this

42. Ibid., p. 273.43. Müller compares himself to Virgil, the poet who had immortality forced upon him

by Augustus. “Mommsen’s Block” is thus also a reflection on “state poets” in the wake of the debate about Christa Wolf.

44. Müller, “Mommsen’s Block,” p. 272.45. Ibid.


“difference, the other of capitalism.”46 In this context, he already takes recourse to the analogy of the Roman and Soviet empires. Gorbachev needs to act as a “Katechon,” or bulwark against capitalism, Müller states, just as Rome’s emperors functioned as a retarding force against “industry.”47 After the final collapse of the Soviet Empire, the hope for revolutionary disruption is buried under a discourse about the eternal rise and fall of the empires of the past. The space cleared by destruction, the space of a possible new beginning, has become one of silent ruins. Disgusted, the author turns away from the capitalist present. Müller is clearly unable to deal with this new present in properly political terms and renounces his project of re-inventing politics after totalitarianism. While the French Jacobin de Volney was inspired by the remnants of ancient empires to invent a whole new Republican age as he gazed at the ruins of Palmyra, and Edward Gibbon professed his belief that enlightened politics would one day break with the cycle of rise and decline as he contemplated the ruins of the Roman Forum, Müller simply gives up on this tradition of (Jacobin/Republican) politics.

Thus, like Gerhard Richter, Müller finally submits to his apocalyptic visions.48 Both artists started working in the GDR under (post)totalitarian conditions. Müller desperately tried to reinvent politics under these condi-tions. His critique of Stalinism at first involved a defiant return to Leninist voluntarism; after the 1950s, his despair over Soviet-style politics finally turned into a desperate fascination with the West German RAF’s radicalism, which after 1989 then slid into utter resignation tinged by an apocalyptic rage.49 On the one hand, this sympathy for the RAF’s desperate and desper-

46. Heiner Müller, “Dem Terrorismus die Utopie entreissen,” in Zur Lage der Nation (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990), p. 11.

47. Heiner Müller, “Das Jahrhundert der Konterrevolution,” in Zur Lage der Nation, p. 84. Müller also applies Carl Schmitt’s analysis of the Roman emperor as Katechon to the Bolshevik revolution.

48. As will other GDR authors, such as Christa Wolf (in her post-1989 novel Leib-haftig) and Wolfgang Hilbig (in his Alte Abdeckerei and Das Provisorium). On Wolf, see my “Stasi-Poets and Loyal Dissidents: Sascha Anderson, Christa Wolf, and the Incomplete Agenda of GDR Research,” German Politics and Society 20, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 82–118; on Hilbig, see “Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig,” The Germanic Review 77, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 279–303.

49. Compare Müller’s earlier use of the Aeneid as a text not about the decline of empire, but the rise of a new century. Heiner Müller, Germania: Tod in Berlin (Berlin: Rotbuchverlag, 1977), p. 57.

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ately violent acts has its roots in the (post)Stalinist conditions under which Müller wrote, conditions that cemented the legacy of National Socialism, i.e., the catastrophic imaginary, and produced a peculiar utopian volun-tarism among East German dissidents.50 But there might be something else at stake in Müller’s affinity with Meinhof’s “abstract radicalism.”51

The RAF was undeniably a post-fascist phenomenon: West German leftists acting out the failed struggles of the anti-fascist resistance—acting out in the sense of a fantasy of not repeating the fate of those groups and the compulsive desire to do just that, to repeat their deaths in the slaughter-houses of the Nazis.52 The RAF’s “death trip” seemed to fascinate Müller, as it did many other intellectuals of this generation.53 But Müller and Meinhof seem to share another experience, the experience of liberation through destruction. In a 1980 interview, Müller “admits” that his writ-ing was driven by a “pleasure in destruction and things that fall apart.”54 He then explains this entanglement of catastrophe and creativity with his experience of 1945: “Everything had been destroyed, nothing worked.”55 For Müller, this immediate postwar moment meant living in a “free space”: “In front of us was a void and the past no longer existed, so that an incredible free space was created in which it was easy to move.”56 This is the post-catastrophic space that Müller depicts in his “Luckless Angel” as immobilizing, flooded with debris. When critics condemn his plays as “depressing,” Müller explained, they obviously miss the point: “The true pleasure of writing consists, after all, in the enjoyment of catastrophe.”57

50. The GDR was not only characterized by the growing gap between the reality of a dictatorial state and communist ideals, but by the tension between the SED’s Stalinism and the (Marxist) dissidents’ utopianism. While stubbornly committed to the defense of the Soviet Union, Müller’s texts nevertheless recoil from this history by keeping the bloody memory of Stalinism alive.

51. Theweleit, Ghosts, p. 77.52. The RAF’s phantasmatic repetition of the (failed) resistance against the Nazis

becomes, in a further permutation, a fight against Israeli “fascism” and the German left’s supposed “Judenkomplex”; see Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), p. 177.

53. Theweleit writes about the RAF’s “rasender Weg Richtung Tod” or “rush toward death” in Ghosts, p. 78.

54. Heiner Müller, “Writing out of the enjoyment of catastrophe,” in Germania, p. 190.

55. Ibid.56. Ibid. 57. Ibid.


Living in the ruins of the Third Reich, living right after the catastrophe, generates in Müller’s account an experience of liberation—the apocalypse as the possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps this is the historical experi-ence that Müller has in common with Meinhof, and another factor drawing him toward her deadly politics. For the RAF’s strategy of “unveiling” the West German (social democratic state) as fascist contains another fantasy: to repeat 1945, the end of the Nazi regime—and to start over again from the very beginning.

Faced with this catastrophic view of German history and the peculiar ideological, if not phantasmatic, excess of the RAF’s politics, Oskar Negt accused the RAF and their “sympathizers” in 1972 of practicing a form of “erfahrungslose Politik,” a politics lacking in experience and utterly divorced from the everyday life of Germans. (I will return to Negt’s term in the discussion of Žižek’s idea of the radical political act). Like Müller (and Richter and Meinhof), Arendt writes in the shadow of this imaginary, but she conceptualizes her Origins of Totalitarianism explicitly against what she calls “the irresistible temptation” to yield to the catastrophic view of human history, a view that, she argues along with Benjamin, reduces human history to the history of nature, an eternal cycle of birth, decay, and death. Thus as Müller falls back on the discourse about the rise and fall of empires after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arendt targets this discourse about “the course of ruin” in the late 1940s, making her critique of its determinism the foundation of her attempts to reinvent politics after totalitarianism.58

II. The Shock of Experience: Arendt on Totalitarianism, Terror, and IdeologyPolemically engaging with a wide array of contemporary thinkers, Žižek’s book is essentially his version of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, espe-cially her final chapter, added in 1951 and entitled “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.”59 Arendt added this chapter after her visit to Germany in 1950. Traveling from Frankfurt to Berlin, Arendt focused on what was “visible”: the ruins of Germany’s bombed-out cities and the photos of liberated concentration camps displayed on allied posters on

58. Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), p. 74.

59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976), pp. 460–79.

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the walls of ruined buildings—sites and sights that most Germans, Arendt observed, wanted neither to see nor to describe. 60

In her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt raises two central issues: she emphasizes the need to confront totalitarianism as an unprecedented historical phenomenon; and she thematizes the perils of Europe’s postwar, post-Holocaust catastrophic imaginary. In this preface, Arendt states that her book is directed against both reckless optimism and reckless despair. Although she sees both “Progress” and “Doom” as two sides of the same medal, Arendt is really more concerned with the latter.61 Faced with the dissolution of “all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world” into some “conglomeration” that seems incomprehen-sible, Arendt wants to discover “the hidden mechanics” that led to this dissolution. She wants to analyze, not to “yield to the mere process of disintegration.”62 Yielding to this disintegration “has become an irresist-ible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity,’ but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal.”63 Only faith combined with analytical thinking will resist this temptation to give in to “growing decay” and the “belief in an unavoidable doom.”64

The political theorist’s very first task is to confront the “reality in which we live,” the fact that the “subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.”65 Arendt is rather adamant about the importance of this confrontation, about seeking out and standing up to “the impact of reality” and “the shock of experience.”66 Confrontation with reality prevents us from “interpreting history by commonplaces,” that is, by “denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents.” For Arendt, “[c]omprehension does not mean . . . explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt.”

60. Hannah Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report on Germany,” in Essays in Understanding, pp. 248–69.

61. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. vii.62. Ibid., p. viii.63. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.64. Ibid., p. vii. In a sense, Arendt writes against the ghost of Spengler and his declin-

ist philosophy of history formulated in The Decline of the West (1917–1922) and The Hour of Decision (1933).

65. Ibid., p. ix.66. Ibid., p. viii.


Instead, it means “the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”67 Facing up to reality and the shock of experience is the intellectual imperative that drives Arendt’s work. The political imperative is the resistance to catastrophic history.

Arendt’s politics and analysis aim at one thing: freedom as the human capacity to act politically—against all odds: thus her anti-catastrophic polemics and her anti-determinism.68 In a 1944 essay on Kafka, Arendt formulates a poignant critique of causal determinism, which, in her view, ultimately comes down to a metaphysical concept of history as nature—and transforms the historian into a “prophet turned backward.”69 The passage in question resonates very strongly with Benjamin’s analysis of modernity and refers to Benjamin explicitly as the one who revealed that bourgeois notion of “progress” as an “inevitable superhuman law,” as a form of Naturgeschichte.70

The concept of “the natural course of ruin” is a central component of Arendt’s argument against deterministic views of history: Life can be “foretold,” Arendt writes, “[i]n so far as life is decline which ultimately leads to death.”71 Equally, “catastrophe can be foreseen,” she continues, “[i]n a dissolving society which blindly follows the natural course of ruin.”72 But while ruin can be foreseen, salvation “comes unexpectedly,” she writes, “for salvation, not ruin, depends upon the liberty and will of men.” Kafka’s texts are not prophesies but “a sober analysis of underly-ing structures which today have come into the open.”73 If we believe “in a necessary and automatic process to which man must submit,” Arendt claims, we support these “ruinous structures” and accelerate “the process of ruin itself.”74 If man acts merely as the “functionary of necessity,” Arendt concludes, he “becomes an agent of the natural law of ruin, thereby

67. Ibid. (emphasis added).68. On the conventional historian’s determinism in the guise of establishing causal-

ity between past and present events, a methodology that, in her eyes, means reducing the newness of a phenomenon to known factors, see Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding, pp. 318–19.

69. Ibid., p. 318.70. She refers to Benjamin’s Angel of History propelled by the winds of Progress.

Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” in Essays in Understanding, p. 74.71. Ibid.72. Ibid.73. Ibid.74. Ibid.

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degrading himself into the natural tool of destruction.”75 Arendt solidifies this imagery of nature, ruins, and ruination with an analogy between build-ings and society, emphasizing again the distinction between “natural” and “human” law: if we abandon a house, it “will slowly follow the course of ruin which somehow is inherent in all human work.”76 Likewise, “when man decides to become himself part of nature,” that is, when he abandons the world “fabricated by men and constituted according to human and not natural laws,” then it “will become again part of nature and will follow the law of ruin.”77 This discussion of bourgeois notions of progress as based on the “law of ruin” foreshadows Arendt’s remarks on totalitarianism as a relentless process of destruction. Arendt’s thoughts also have a peculiar resonance with the ghostly politics of the RAF’s armed struggle.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt links these Benjaminian thoughts on (bourgeois) Naturgeschichte to Hobbes’ bleak picture of life without a commonwealth. Arendt essentially argues that twentieth-cen-tury totalitarianism resulted in a return to “Warre,” to the state of nature.78 In this argument, her analysis of Hobbes as the imperial philosopher of the bourgeoisie plays a central part: Hobbes’s theory legitimates a devel-opment that will displace the logic of expansion from the realm of the economy to that of politics, thus destroying the very commonwealth that the Leviathan advocated. This new imperial logic will destroy the nation-state, its institutions, and ultimately its subjects. With the emergence of the camps as laboratories of total domination, we witness the return of the state of nature—a state of nature of a new kind, to be sure, but still one in which not even utilitarian considerations play a role in the war of all against all.

It is Arendt’s wager that her analysis of the potentially catastrophic course of history, her tenacious attempt to “understand” and “imagine” this process, sets her theory apart from what she calls “prophecies of doom” and their ideological submission to the experience of catastrophic history.79 The concluding chapter of Origins sets out to refine this analysis

75. Ibid.76. Ibid.77. Ibid. (emphasis added).78. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Flathman and David Johnston (London:

W. W. Norton & Co, 1997), p. 70.79. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in

Essays in Understanding, p. 320.


by returning to the concept of ideology. In this chapter, Arendt first shifts her focus from totalitarian terror to totalitarian ideology; second, she dis-cusses the totalitarian temptation in the present. Reiterating her analysis of the destructive nature of totalitarian movements—their destruction of political institutions and political subjects—she now focuses on the role of ideology in “the preparation of victims or executioners,” the subject positions that totalitarianism requires.80 Central here is her assertion that terror and ideology—ideology understood as a form of compulsive logical deduction from a single premise—create loneliness. She understands lone-liness as an existential condition that characterizes modern societies in the wake of industrialization and the rise of imperialism, which produced superfluous, uprooted, and isolated masses.81 In its extreme, totalitarian form, loneliness ruins both social relations and the relation to the self, it ruins experience and thought. The ideal totalitarian subject is not the con-vinced Nazi or Communist “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”82

Second, Arendt addresses the totalitarian threat in the present, a discus-sion that concludes with a Hegelian move. “Totalitarian domination,” she argues, “bears the germs of its own destruction.”83 The goal of totalitarian movements is to prevent a new beginning—Arendt’s existentialist, if not religious, definition of freedom developed in opposition to Heidegger’s death metaphysics: human existence is defined by the possibility of a new beginning, by birth and not by death. Thus freedom is “an inner capacity of man” that “is identical with the capacity to begin.”84 This is Arendt at her most engaged and most emotional:

As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the com-pulsory process of deduction.85

80. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 472. See also p. 468. 81. Ibid., p. 475.82. Ibid., p. 474.83. Ibid., p. 478.84. Ibid., p. 473.85. Ibid.

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What totalitarian governments aim for is to “mobilize man’s own will power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or Nature”—extreme conceptions of deterministic history that she had earlier analyzed as versions of natural history.86

Modernity’s crisis produced an “entirely new form of government,” which will remain with us as a potentiality.87 This “organized loneliness,” she writes, which “harbors a principle destructive for all human living-together,” might destroy “the world . . . before a new beginning . . . has had time to assert itself.”88 But Arendt then famously concludes by reasserting the possibility of new beginnings: for her, it is simply a “truth” that “every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.”89 The end produces nothing but “the promise” of this new beginning: “Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with man’s freedom.”90 Arendt then cites Augustine: “that a beginning be made man was created.” And she concludes with her most utopian statement: “This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”91

Arendt thus takes recourse to a theologian at the end of her Origins of Totalitarianism. She begins this afterword with one problematic, her re-evaluation of the role of ideology in totalitarian regimes, and ends it with another, the possibility of new beginnings in politics.92 As the sub-ject changes so does Arendt’s tone, from the neutral voice of the political theorist to the passionate voice of the one who invests all her hopes in the “miracle of being,” the human capacity for new beginnings, even under

86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., p. 478. 88. Ibid.89. Ibid.90. Ibid., pp. 478–79.91. Ibid., p. 479.92. In this chapter, Arendt responds to criticism that she overestimates terror and

underestimates role of ideology. She defines ideology 1) as logicality, or strict deductive reasoning preparing for two roles, victim and executioner; and 2) this deductive “method” explains the world either as an irrevocable process of History (Stalinism), or as Nature (Nazism)—a foreseeable, explainable process to which society and the individual needs to be subsumed (ibid., p. 469). This definition is thus at once formalist (and thus not foreign to Althusserian definitions of ideology as interpellation, or subject constitution) and specific in terms of historical-political content. For a critical discussion of Arendt’s concept of ideology, see Claude Lefort, “Thinking with and against Arendt,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 447.


the conditions of totalitarian domination.93 Warning that this “entirely new form of government,” far from having disappeared, will stay with us, Arendt strikes a tone full of urgency, if not pathos.94 We can read this tension between the iron logic of totalitarianism and the freedom of human action in a religious light; or we can read it in the spirit of Heidegger’s existentialism or Carl Schmitt’s decisionism.95 Whatever we decide, we also need to read this insistence on the—unprecedented, unexpected, unforeseeable—break with totalitarian rule in connection to the problem-atic that permeates Arendt’s 1950 preface, i.e., the catastrophic imaginary, the alternative between understanding it or submitting to it, between analysis and ideology. As we have seen, this same problematic drives Müller’s literary production. In contrast to Müller’s growing pessimism about change, his inability to think outside the parameters set by Soviet politics, Arendt will spend the next thirty years trying to reinvent the pos-sibility of (democratic) politics.

The desire to reinvent politics after Stalinism also drives the work of the other Marxist intellectual, Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek first aligned him-self with the theorists of radical democracy, his more recent writings point toward a decisive break with their project and a return to a much darker, much more catastrophic analysis of the contemporary world.

III. Žižek’s Redemption of StalinismIn Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Žižek engages Arendt’s core topics: the identity of, or difference between, National Socialism and Stalinism; the functioning of totalitarian ideology and its subject positions; and finally, the liberatory potential contained within Stalinism, its rational kernel. Asked in 1990 whether the revival of totalitarianism theories that accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet empire reaffirmed his view that one needs to insist on the difference between brown and red, Müller answered, “Yes, but it’s becoming more difficult, ever more difficult.”96 Žižek begins his

93. Ibid., p. 46994. Ibid., p. 478.95. On Arendt’s decisionism, see, for instance, Andreas Kalyvas, “From the Act to

the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 320–46. Origins is of course only the beginning of Arendt’s own theory of political action, which she developed fully in The Human Condition (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).

96. Heiner Müller, “Das Jahrhundert der Konterrevolution,” in Zur Lage der Nation, p. 93.

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totalitarianism book with a much more uncompromising attack on Arendt and the concept of totalitarianism, which, he argues, always functions as a way of preventing truly radical thought and therefore truly radical acts. Žižek implicitly establishes an analogy between Arendt’s assertion that totalitarianism destroys the freedom to think and the “Denkverbote,” or taboos on thinking, that constrict radical thought in the West, especially in the United States.97 Theorists who take Arendt’s critique of Stalinism seriously (Richard Bernstein and Julia Kristeva are two names Žižek men-tions) essentially articulate the left’s theoretical defeat and its acceptance of “the basic co-ordinates of liberal democracy.”98 The revival of Arendt’s analysis, with its dichotomy of totalitarianism versus democracy, signals in Žižek’s view the fact that the left is redefining the meaning of “opposition within this space” of liberal democracy.99 What is needed for a genuine leftist project is to break this taboo, because, Žižek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the left needs to abandon “democracy as the Mas-ter-Signifier”: today, democracy has become the “main political fetish, the disavowal of basic social antagonisms.”100 Instead, the left has to develop an alternative politics that includes voluntarism as “an active attitude of taking risks.”101 Or, as he writes in his Leninism book, “an authentic revo-lutionary intervention” requires a passage à l’acte by which we “simply have to accept the risk that a blind violent outburst will be followed by its proper politization.”102

The alternative is, of course, that the blind violent outburst might not be followed by its “proper” politization—it might be followed by right-wing, or even fascist, politics, or good old Stalinism.103 But let us first take a closer look at Žižek’s argument about the redemptive potential of Stalinism, its rational kernel. On the issue of Stalinist ideology and its functioning, Žižek remains consistent with his previous work. Under the conditions of late Socialism, Žižek argues, the psychological mechanism at work is the guilt people share because of their repeated ethical compro-mises. But mainly, late Socialism functioned through cynical acceptance:

97. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 3.98. Ibid.99. Ibid.100. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp. 78–79.101. Ibid., p. 81.102. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 225.103. In the current racist climate of European politics, an uncomfortable prospect.


nothing would have been more threatening, he writes, than to take Eastern European governments at their word.104

When it comes to High Stalinism, Žižek starts to contrast National Socialism and Stalinism, a move that he had previously declared useless. More concretely, he addresses the issue of subject positions—that of the Stalinist leader who acts in the name of History as well as that of the vic-tim—by contrasting the latter with the “Muselmann,” drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s book Remnants of Auschwitz. Žižek complements Agamben’s thesis—that the Muselmann, the being who hovered between life and death, embodies the essence of National Socialism’s biopolitics, as the very product of this specific form of domination—with the thesis that the victim of the Stalinist show trials is the result of Stalinist power. Just as the Muselmann is the product of the Fascist “treatment,” the “traitor” is the product of “Stalinist treatment.”105

Taking Bukharin as his example, Žižek argues that while National Socialism destroys all human subjectivity, Stalinism leaves a remnant of subjective autonomy because of the very structure that informs Stalinist power, the gap between historical necessity and empirical reality, between “objective” and “subjective” guilt.106 Bukharin confesses to treason and sacrifices his “second life”—that is, his dignity as it will be judged from the vantage point of History, this Last Judgment that will “determine the ‘objective’ meaning” of his acts.107 Yet until the end, that is, until his execution, Bukharin insists on his subjective innocence and personal loy-alty to Stalin. This “formal and empty” remnant of subjective autonomy, Žižek maintains, is of no interest to Stalin, or to Stalinism.108 Muselmänner exist in the Gulag, but the Gulag and physical annihilation is not what is specific about Stalinist domination; it is the terror of the show trials—once the traitor has confessed, he may even continue his wretched life.109 The production of the living dead has a different logic in Stalinism than in Nazism.

This specific logic of Stalinist domination is one level on which Žižek argues the redemptive nature of Stalinism. The other level concerns the

104. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 92. 105. Ibid., p. 87.106. Ibid., p. 101.107. Ibid., p. 89.108. Ibid., p. 105.109. Ibid., p. 97.

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function of the purges themselves. Žižek starts with the central thesis that the purges were a sign of weakness and self-destruction, not a sign total control.110 Second, Žižek argues that the ever more destructive purges of the late 1930s were symptomatic of a repetition compulsion, an attempt to ward off the return of the repressed, namely, the nomenclatura’s own knowledge of having betrayed the revolution. The “authentic revolution-ary project” is thus the rational kernel of the purges: “[P]urges are the very form in which the revolutionary heritage survives and haunts the regime.”111

Žižek’s reflections on 1917 are crucial to his notion of an “authentic revolutionary intervention” or act.112 In one of his paradoxical moves, he claims that Stalinism is closer to the position of the Mensheviks in 1917 than to Lenin. By insisting, like Stalinists, on the proper series of events—first a bourgeois, then a proletarian revolution—the Mensheviks expressed a belief in the objectivist logic of History, or in Žižek’s Lacanian language, in the existence of the big Other. The Bolsheviks did not share this belief: the Big Other—God, or the “Logic of History”—does not exist, politi-cal interventions do not occur within the coordinates of some underlying matrix. What these interventions achieve is the very re-organization of existing conditions.113

This brings us to the present and the form of political actions that are thinkable, or unthinkable, in a condition allegedly dominated by the opposition between totalitarianism and democracy. What is needed is a “freedom fighter with an inhuman face.” In Žižek’s Revolution at the Gates, Antigone is such a model, her defiance an example of an act that “intervenes in the very rational order of the Real, changing-restructuring its co-ordinates—an act is not irrational; rather, it creates its own (new) rationality.”114 This event “cannot be planned in advance—we have to take a risk, a step into the open, with no Big Other to return our true message to us”—and its consequences might well be Stalinist terror, that is one of the risks.115

110. Žižek bases this thesis on J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks.

111. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 129.112. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 243.113. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 116.114. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 243.115. Ibid.


A freedom fighter with an inhuman face—the phrase resonates with Benjamin’s early thoughts on the Angel of History as a figure that embod-ies the creativity of destruction. Žižek discusses Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in the context of “revolutionary violence” as “the transformation of the oppressed victim into an active agent.”116 To make the argument for the ethical nature of the revolutionary act, Žižek turns to Eric Santner’s reading of Benjamin. “[A] present revolutionary interven-tion repeats/redeems past failed attempts,” Žižek writes.117 He uses Eric Santner’s notion of “symptoms” as “past traces which are retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary intervention”: they are, Santner writes, “not so much forgotten deeds, but rather forgotten failures to act, failures to suspend the force of the social bond inhibiting acts of solidarity with society’s ‘others.’”118 Santner’s political claims are more modest: these symptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts, but past “failures to respond to calls for action, or even for empa-thy” on behalf of the suffering.119 Santner uses Christa Wolf’s reflections on the Nazi pogroms of 1938, not on the events of 1917. But Žižek is not concerned with modest ethical acts; for him, the excessive violence of the 1938 pogroms is a symptom that testifies to the “possibility of the authen-tic proletarian revolution.”120 This was an outburst of violence that covered “the void of the failure to intervene effectively in the social crisis.”121 As the Stalinist purges contained a redemptive kernel, so does, apparently, right-wing violence. At stake is a contemporary politics of authentic acts that redeems these voids and creates a revolutionary future from a revolu-tionary past.

IV. “A Crazy Wager on the Impossible”: Žižek’s New (Post)Democratic Post-PoliticsIf we read Žižek and Müller with reference to Arendt’s Origins of Totali-tarianism, we discover two different, but complementary stories that express a familiar dilemma of the left. In Žižek’s writings, the entire mur-derous history of Stalinism is erased in favor of a still unrealized future:

116. Ibid., p. 255.117. Ibid.118. Ibid.119. Ibid.120. Ibid., p. 256.121. Ibid.

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the realization of the redemptive dimension—one that we find even at the heart of Stalinism. In Müller’s texts, the GULAG is reified into a concept of history as catastrophe, the history of an eternal cycle of violence. The future only exists as the repetition of that violence. Both Žižek and Müller draw on Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which were written at the moment of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

The opposition between Müller’s melancholic paralysis and Žižek’s revolutionary decisionism raises again a problematic that Yves de Maes-seneer discusses apropos of Benjamin’s angel. Maesseneer argues that the figure of the angel represents a “terrifying amalgam of redemption and destruction,” because it implies the “end of politics,” either leading to res-ignation, or (state) terror.122 If we appeal to Benjamin’s angel, Maesseneer submits, we either risk “an endorsement of the posture of a powerless witnessing of catastrophe,” because the angel is “too immaterial to make a difference,” or else we are endorsing radical destruction.123 Whether this assessment is valid for Benjamin’s angel might be debatable; as a warning, it certainly applies to Žižek’s and Müller’s readings of it.124

I am not arguing that Žižek revived Benjamin’s angel with a bomb in one hand and a copy of the Koran in the other. I do however agree with Geoff Boucher’s analysis that Žižek’s recent theorizing of the act as an “exit from the symbolic network, a dissolution of social bonds” indicates a tension between democratic politics (as the formation of a hegemonic project) and “quasi-religious militarism.”125 Boucher criticizes Žižek’s notion of a foundational act as a leftover from “Cultural-Revolution-period Maoism” and ultimately a retreat from politics, because it seems to privi-lege individual over collective action and reduces politics and economics to ideological struggles.126 I have traced this new politics of “repeating Lenin” and the Bolsheviks’ refusal of evolutionary history to two different

122. Yves de Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum: Terrorist Structures in the Eyes of Walter Benjamin, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Rilke, and Slavoj Žižek,” Modern Theology 19, no. 4 (October 2003): 515.

123. Ibid.124. On Benjamin’s potentially Stalinist politics, see Beatrice Hanssen, “Benjamin’s

Unmensch: The Politics of Real Humanism,” in Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: Univ. Of California Press, 1998), pp. 114–26.

125. Geoff Boucher, “The Antinomies of Žižek,” Telos 129 (Fall–Winter 2004): 161. Boucher discusses the religious and philosophical underpinnings of this new concept of a “leap ‘into the real’” (ibid.).

126. Ibid., pp. 171, 172.


contexts. The first is the Eastern European context, i.e., the de-politicizing connection between petrified (post)totalitarian conditions and the volun-tarist fantasies of Eastern Europe’s dissident Marxists. The second is the context discussed by Boucher, i.e., the politics of the 1970s. However, I propose to comprehend Žižek’s re-invention of radical politics as a return not to Maoism, but to the abstract radicalism of the RAF.

In 1972, Ulrike Meinhof wrote a manifesto about Black September’s role in the anti-imperialist struggle. Meinhof argued that Germany was imperialism’s fascist center, that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians had turned that country into “Nazi-Faschismus,” and that the bloody kidnappings in Munich constituted an “anti-imperialist, anti-fascist” intervention.127 Again, I am not arguing that Žižek is re-inventing the Angel of History as Islamic fundamentalist, Palestinian freedom fighter, or the reincarnation of Ulrike Meinhof. But Meinhof’s ghost does haunt his “freedom fighter with an inhuman face.” Anti-imperialist struggle, she wrote, aims at the “[m]aterial destruction of imperialist domination” and the “myth” of its omnipotence.”128 This sounds familiar: we could be reading a Maoist pamphlet. Meinhof’s reflections on the symbolic core of militant actions are more intriguing: “Propagandistic action as part of the material attack: the act of liberation in the act of annihilation.”129 Libera-tion through destruction: in this statement we find remnants of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and its echoes in Fanon and Sartre—and we find a crude foreshadowing of Žižek’s conception of the authentic revolutionary act as one that changes the symbolic itself.

This raises again the question of which kinds of acts Žižek has in mind. Reading Žižek unfortunately does not help to clarify this issue. What we do learn is that Žižek attempts to theorize politics beyond “democracy.” Discussing the challenge that Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political poses to the left, Chantal Mouffe insists that radical democracy be understood as a critique of parliamentary democracy, not as its dismissal. Radical democracy politicizes liberal democracy by introducing Schmitt’s

127. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, pp. 410, 409. See also pp. 410ff. for his ensu-ing reflections on the question of the RAF’s left-wing anti-Semitism.

128. Quoted in Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Munich: Goldmann, 1998), p. 273.

129. “[O]f course,” Meinhof adds, “this is a disgusting thought” and she concludes with a quote from Brecht’s Leninist masterpiece, The Measure: “aber ‘welche Niedrigkeit begingest du nicht, um die Niedrigkeit abzuschaffen” (quoted in Koenen, Das rote Jahr-zehnt, p. 273).

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agonistic definition of politics, which deliberative models of democracy exclude; and it introduces agonistic pluralism into Schmitt’s ineradicable conflictuality by transforming antagonistic confrontations into agonistic ones, “enemies” into legitimate “adversaries” with whom “there exists a common ground.”130 That parliamentary democracy provides the space for the elaboration of this common symbolic ground has been the cornerstone of the post-Stalinist left and its reinvention of democratic politics.

In his essay on Schmitt’s “decisionist formalism,” Žižek argues that Schmitt asserts “the independence of the abyssal act of free decision from its positive content.”131 Like Mouffe, Žižek welcomes Schmitt’s definition of the political as antagonistic, but criticizes him for not properly articu-lating “the logic of political antagonism.”132 Schmitt’s move to limit the friend/enemy distinction to external politics disavows the internal struggle that traverses society, while “a leftist position,” Žižek writes, insists on “the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the political.”133 Žižek then provides “positive content” to Schmitt’s formalism by defining the political as a struggle for democracy: “The political struggle proper is . . . never simply a rational debate between mul-tiple interests, but simultaneously the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner.”134 The “protests of the ‘excluded’” always involve their right to be recognized.135

Yet is Žižek’s new radical act really more than just another kind of empty, formalist decisionism? Granted, he gives it a more material con-tent by insisting on the continuing relevance of class antagonism, i.e., the “notion of a radical antagonistic gap that affects the entire social body.”136 In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, this gap is exposed by the attacks on the World Trade Center, because, Žižek argues, these attacks represented the eruption of the real into our symbolic order: they signaled the gap

130. Chantal Mouffe, “Introduction,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 5, 4. To build hegemony means engaging in a process of transforming antagonism into agonism, creating the possibility of communality and not “complete opposition” without any “common symbolic ground” (ibid., p. 5).

131. Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, pp. 19–20.

132. Ibid., p. 27. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., p. 28.135. Ibid.136. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 238.


between the First and the Third Worlds. Žižek unequivocally distances himself from these attacks. Nevertheless, this militant gesture does pose a problem. I see Žižek’s recent involvement with theology as an attempt to differentiate his messianic-militant politics from this kind of terrorism. And the hermeneutic pirouettes performed in the service of the “redemptive kernel” of Stalinism serve the same function: to delineate the boundaries of what this act is and is not. The “freedom fighter with the inhuman face” is no terrorist, Islamic or Stalinist—but is she anything more than a rev-enant from another desperate age?

To answer this question, we need to return to Ulrike Meinhof. In Wel-come to the Desert of the Real, Žižek compares the attacks on the World Trade Center to those of the RAF. Meinhof’s concept of the revolution-ary act, Žižek writes, is driven by the twentieth-century “passion for the Real,” a belief that violent transgression bombs people out of their numbed state.137 However, this kind of act, Žižek argues, paradoxically produces only the “pure semblance of the effect of the Real.”138 But does this analysis (which I read as a kind of anticipatory rebuttal) really exhaust Meinhof’s theory of the authentic act? What the RAF aimed for were three things: the existential effect, the shock effect, and, finally, a kind of “rev-elation”: the act’s power to lay bare the (fascist) essence of the (German) state. As I mentioned above, we find traces of Fanon’s existentialism, but point two and three also hint at the legacy of surrealism, of Debord and the Situationist International. And it is here that we can locate Žižek’s debt to the RAF. For we can read the RAF’s desire to “unveil” the true nature of the state in two ways: as the production of mere spectacle, a “thrill of the Real,” or as a desire to radically intervene on the level of the symbolic.139 Like Žižek’s authentic revolutionary act, Meinhof’s theory of revolutionary acts contained a symbolic dimension; they were aimed at a rearrangement of the very pre-conditions of politics.

Žižek is thus in the process of re-thinking radical democracy through Meinhof, substituting the work of hegemonic articulation with a new strat-egy, the authentic revolutionary act. And Žižek takes Mouffe’s Gramscian rearticulation of the symbolic outside the space of liberal parliamentary democracy. For, as Žižek points out in his response to Boucher, the time of optimism is over: “we effectively live in dark times for democratic

137. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 9.138. Ibid., p. 10.139. Ibid., p. 12.

102 JULIA HELL

politics.”140 Far from advocating a “crazy messianic politics of a radical violent Act,” Žižek writes, in this age of global capitalism he is concerned with finding ways to re-think radical change (which, he argues, Mouffe and Laclau abandoned by limiting their anti-globalization strategy to “multiple local practices of resistance”).141 Ultimately, Žižek writes, “we cannot formulate a clear project of global change.”142 Žižek’s angel is thus really not much more than an intriguing, but ultimately empty, cipher—a remnant from a bygone era.

Where does this leave us? Curiously, in a position similar to that of Arendt in 1945: the conditions of both political analysis and politics itself have fundamentally changed, Žižek argues, and therefore need to be radi-cally re-thought. While Arendt takes recourse to the miracle of birth, Žižek conjures the miracle of the authentic act. What distinguishes Žižek from Arendt is his willingness to take the ultimate risk: to sever the connection to liberal parliamentary democracy. In his recent writings, Žižek comes “perilously close to an ultra-left refusal of the difference between capital-ist democracy and military dictatorship.”143 Like Arendt, Žižek situates his recent work in the shadow of catastrophe (“dark times” is a transparent allusion to Brecht and National Socialism). Unlike Arendt, Žižek does not escape this catastrophic imaginary but repeats its antinomies.144

Žižek’s new politics thus constitutes a curious double repetition: first, of Arendt’s attempt to liberate politics from the catastrophic imagi-nary; and second, of the RAF. Žižek himself analyzes 1970s terrorism as a response to the New Left’s realization that the revolution will not happen—neither in Berlin, nor Prague, nor Belgrade.145 As the New Left disintegrated, groups like the RAF and Red Brigades slowly slid into their

140. Slavoj Žižek, “Reply to Boucher,” Telos 129 (Fall–Winter 2004): 189.141. Ibid.142. Ibid.143. Boucher, “The Antinomies of Žižek,” p. 162.144. And while Arendt insisted on exposing herself to the “shock of experience,”

Žižek does not—another attitude he shares with Meinhof. When the latter composed her anti-imperialist manifesto in 1972, Oskar Negt held a speech in Frankfurt appealing to the left to distance itself unambiguously from the RAF. Negt criticized the RAF’s politics as “divorced from experience” and the everyday world of those whom they claimed to represent. Žižek’s new post-democratic theorizing strikes me as exactly that: as lacking in concrete experience—whereas the project of radical democracy still seems very much alive. Oskar Negt, “Bleierne Zeit, bleierne Solidarität,” p. 256.

145. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 9; see also Theweleit, Ghosts, p. 62. Wolfgang Kraushaar argues that the RAF was essentially apolitical, if not autistic; see


suicidal politics. Müller fell for this messianic politics at a moment when the petrified conditions of the GDR appeared to be its eternal future. Žižek seems to fall for it now, his empty repetition of the RAF nothing but a symptom—albeit apparently not a very enjoyable one.

Žižek is certainly not the only one conceiving of a new politics in rather empty terms. Giorgio Agamben argues that modernity’s murder-ous biopolitics has been accompanied by the state of exception as a norm leading to the United States as its ultimate totalitarian instantiation. While Agamben’s view of (contemporary) modernity is best described by Arendt’s “law of ruin,” his new politics comes down to nothing but a metaphysical desire to experience genuine Being, a kind of Heideg-gerian great leap forward—or rather, a leap into the beyond.146 Radical democracy worked through the “shock of experience” that its theorists shared—however belatedly—with Arendt, and they heeded her advice to think the unprecedented. Its strategies might need re-inventing (and Žižek’s materialist re-centering of the social around its basic antagonism is a productive first step). But its basic tenets—that politics takes place within the framework of parliamentary democracy and that it transforms the friend/enemy antagonism into a friend/adversary agonism—still seems the adequate answer to U.S. Republican politics and their own brand of catastrophic scenarios.

Kraushaar, “Phantomschmerz RAF,” in 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), p. 166.

146. See Giorgio Agamben on “liberation” in State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 64; and on “new politics” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), p. 11. Judith Butler proposes an equally abstract politics of mourning and the non-essentialist, non-universalist re-construction of universalism in her Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

Documents

Julia Hell Remnants of Totalitarianism