Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Julia Hell
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 iek and the East German
playwright Heiner Mller. I propose to read these reinventions against the
foil of Hannah Arendts 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 SolidarittDer Baader-Meinhof-
Komplex, in Achtundsechzig: Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht (Gttingen: 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): 99108).
The reasons for this reluctance to explore Arendts 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 Arendts thinking instead of critically
engaging with her provocations. Second, Arendts 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,
76
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 77
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 Vortrge (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 Meineckes Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946) or Giorgio
Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books,
1999) with its catastrophic view of modernity.
5. Slavoj iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the
(Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 241
6. Ibid., p. 88.
78 JULIA HELL
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 Benjamins concept of history and the miracle of revolution is also
central to the work of Mller, the author obsessed with Stalinism as the
GDRs pre-history and as the very condition for its founding. Benjamins
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 Mommsens Block, Mllers 1993 requiem to the Soviet
Union, to the GDR, and to himself.8 Like iek, Mller searched for the
redemptive kernel of Stalinism, and like iek, he proposed a revolution-
ary politics that remains caught in the totalitarian imaginary.
In these texts, Mller 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, Mllers romantic politics, his (desperate)
hope for a revolutionary break, bears the deep imprint of 1970s West Ger-
man radicalism. In Mllers texts, the women of the RAF are omnipresent
as part of a constellation that includes both Benjamins Angel of History
and the Benjaminian moment of disruption. Reading iek with Mller
sheds a critical light on ieks response to Arendt, his dismissal of liberal
democracy and increasing distance from the core tenets of radical democ-
racy. Reading Mller also critically contextualizes ieks 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,
Mller and iek attempt to re-invent politicsafter National Socialism,
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in both cases, this reinvention
leads to ahighly ambivalentfascination with the desperate politics of
1970s radicalism.
7. iek also discusses Benjamin in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso,
1989), Revolution at the Gates: iek 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 Mller, Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture, in Explosion
of a Memory: Writings by Heiner Mller, ed. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications,
1989), pp. 97102; Mller, Mommsens Block, in DramaContemporary: Germany, ed.
Carl Weber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), pp. 27176.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 79
14. Heiner Mller, The Luckless Angel, in Germania, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 99.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid. On Benjamins angel as Orphic historiographer, see my The Angels Enig-
matic Eyes, or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History in W. G. Sebalds Air War and
Literature, Criticism 46, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 36192.
18. Mller, The Luckless Angel, p. 99.
19. Ibid.
20. On The Luckless Angel, see also Frank Hrnigk, Afterword, New German
Critique 73 (Winter 1998): 3839.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 81
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), Mllers 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 figuresincarnations of what iek
will later call the freedom fighter with an inhuman facehave much
to do with Mllers Third-Worldism.24 But more importantly, they also
represent a transparent romanticization of the RAFs women, of their
uncompromising, suicidal politics.
In Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture (1984), Ben-
jamins 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 woundedperhaps 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 questionWhat is
21. Heiner Mller, Hamletmachine, in Hamletmachine and other texts for the
stage, ed. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Publications Journal, 1984), p. 58.
22. Heiner Mller, The Task, in Hamletmachine and other texts, p. 87.
23. Ibid.
24. iek, 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. 15182.
26. Weber translates the original Augenblick des Bildes as instant of the picture;
See Mller, Explosion of a Memory, p. 97. For the original, see Mller, Bildbeschrei-
bung, in Heiner Mller Material, ed. Frank Hrnigk (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1990),
pp. 814.
27. Mller, Explosion of a Memory, p. 97.
28. Ibid., p. 98.
82 JULIA HELL
29. Ibid.
30. Inge Mller, a poet and Mllers first wife, spent several days in 1945 buried
under Dresdens rubble. Mllers Obituary (in Explosion of a Memory, pp. 3638) 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. Mller, 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. 257
33. 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
Cowperwoods sense of mastery. Theodor Dreiser, The Titan (New York: John Lane,
1914), p. 109.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 83
womans laughterevents 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 Mller added a paragraph to the text in which he
points the reader to four intertexts, among them Homers ekphrastic pas-
sage about Agamemnons 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 texts scopic structure, to the gaze of its reader,
instead of to the protagonist, then this text represents the angels 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 actsthat there is no exit from catastrophic history.
The figure of the 1970s terrorist returns one last time in Mllers
Mommsens Block, in a biblical guise as John in Patmos . . . The her-
etic The guide of the dead The terrorist.38 In this prose poem, Mller
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 Mllers 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
Mommsens Block, Mller writes about the end of writing. The poem
is a dense palimpsest of historical allusions. The topic of empires and
46. Heiner Mller, Dem Terrorismus die Utopie entreissen, in Zur Lage der Nation
(Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990), p. 11.
47. Heiner Mller, Das Jahrhundert der Konterrevolution, in Zur Lage der Nation,
p. 84. Mller also applies Carl Schmitts 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): 82118;
on Hilbig, see Wendebilder: Neo Rauch and Wolfgang Hilbig, The Germanic Review 77,
no. 4 (Fall 2002): 279303.
49. Compare Mllers earlier use of the Aeneid as a text not about the decline of
empire, but the rise of a new century. Heiner Mller, Germania: Tod in Berlin (Berlin:
Rotbuchverlag, 1977), p. 57.
86 JULIA HELL
ately violent acts has its roots in the (post)Stalinist conditions under which
Mller 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 Mllers affinity with Meinhofs abstract radicalism.51
The RAF was undeniably a post-fascist phenomenon: West German
leftists acting out the failed struggles of the anti-fascist resistanceacting
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 RAFs death trip seemed to fascinate Mller,
as it did many other intellectuals of this generation.53 But Mller and
Meinhof seem to share another experience, the experience of liberation
through destruction. In a 1980 interview, Mller 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 Mller, 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 Mller depicts in his Luckless Angel
as immobilizing, flooded with debris. When critics condemn his plays as
depressing, Mller 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 SEDs Stalinism
and the (Marxist) dissidents utopianism. While stubbornly committed to the defense of the
Soviet Union, Mllers texts nevertheless recoil from this history by keeping the bloody
memory of Stalinism alive.
51. Theweleit, Ghosts, p. 77.
52. The RAFs phantasmatic repetition of the (failed) resistance against the Nazis
becomes, in a further permutation, a fight against Israeli fascism and the German lefts
supposed Judenkomplex; see Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche
Kulturrevolution 19671977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), p. 177.
53. Theweleit writes about the RAFs rasender Weg Richtung Tod or rush toward
death in Ghosts, p. 78.
54. Heiner Mller, Writing out of the enjoyment of catastrophe, in Germania,
p. 190.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 87
Living in the ruins of the Third Reich, living right after the catastrophe,
generates in Mllers account an experience of liberationthe apocalypse
as the possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps this is the historical experi-
ence that Mller has in common with Meinhof, and another factor drawing
him toward her deadly politics. For the RAFs strategy of unveiling the
West German (social democratic state) as fascist contains another fantasy:
to repeat 1945, the end of the Nazi regimeand 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 RAFs 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 Negts term
in the discussion of ieks idea of the radical political act). Like Mller
(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 Mller 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
the walls of ruined buildingssites 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
Europes 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 theorists 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. 24869.
61. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. vii.
62. Ibid., p. viii.
63. Ibid., pp. viiviii.
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 (19171922) and The Hour
of Decision (1933).
65. Ibid., p. ix.
66. Ibid., p. viii.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 89
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.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 91
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 thinkingwhich as the
freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the com-
pulsory process of deduction.85
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., p. 478.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., pp. 47879.
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 Arendts concept of
ideology, see Claude Lefort, Thinking with and against Arendt, Social Research 69, no. 2
(Summer 2002): 447.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 93
nothing would have been more threatening, he writes, than to take Eastern
European governments at their word.104
When it comes to High Stalinism, iek starts to contrast National
Socialism and Stalinism, a move that he had previously declared useless.
More concretely, he addresses the issue of subject positionsthat of the
Stalinist leader who acts in the name of History as well as that of the vic-
timby contrasting the latter with the Muselmann, drawing on Giorgio
Agambens book Remnants of Auschwitz. iek complements Agambens
thesisthat the Muselmann, the being who hovered between life and
death, embodies the essence of National Socialisms biopolitics, as the
very product of this specific form of dominationwith 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, iek 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 lifethat 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,
iek maintains, is of no interest to Stalin, or to Stalinism.108 Muselmnner
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 trialsonce
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 iek
argues the redemptive nature of Stalinism. The other level concerns the
function of the purges themselves. iek starts with the central thesis that
the purges were a sign of weakness and self-destruction, not a sign total
control.110 Second, iek 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 nomenclaturas 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
ieks 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 revolutionthe Mensheviks expressed
a belief in the objectivist logic of History, or in ieks Lacanian language,
in the existence of the big Other. The Bolsheviks did not share this belief:
the Big OtherGod, or the Logic of Historydoes 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 ieks 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-ordinatesan act is not irrational; rather, it creates its own (new)
rationality.114 This event cannot be planned in advancewe have to take
a risk, a step into the open, with no Big Other to return our true message
to usand its consequences might well be Stalinist terror, that is one of
the risks.115
110. iek bases this thesis on J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror:
Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks.
111. iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 129.
112. iek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 243.
113. iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 116.
114. iek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 243.
115. Ibid.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 97
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 Europes dissident Marxists. The second is the
context discussed by Boucher, i.e., the politics of the 1970s. However, I
propose to comprehend ieks 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 Septembers
role in the anti-imperialist struggle. Meinhof argued that Germany was
imperialisms fascist center, that Israels 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 iek is re-inventing the
Angel of History as Islamic fundamentalist, Palestinian freedom fighter,
or the reincarnation of Ulrike Meinhof. But Meinhofs 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. Meinhofs 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 Hegels
master-slave dialectic and its echoes in Fanon and Sartreand we find a
crude foreshadowing of ieks conception of the authentic revolutionary
act as one that changes the symbolic itself.
This raises again the question of which kinds of acts iek has in
mind. Reading iek unfortunately does not help to clarify this issue.
What we do learn is that iek attempts to theorize politics beyond
democracy. Discussing the challenge that Carl Schmitts 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 Schmitts
127. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, pp. 410, 409. See also pp. 410ff. for his ensu-
ing reflections on the question of the RAFs 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 Brechts Leninist masterpiece, The Measure: aber welche Niedrigkeit
begingest du nicht, um die Niedrigkeit abzuschaffen (quoted in Koenen, Das rote Jahr-
zehnt, p. 273).
100 JULIA HELL
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 iek, Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics, in The Challenge of
Carl Schmitt, pp. 1920.
132. Ibid., p. 27.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid., p. 28.
135. Ibid.
136. iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 238.
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 101
between the First and the Third Worlds. iek unequivocally distances
himself from these attacks. Nevertheless, this militant gesture does pose
a problem. I see ieks 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 Stalinistbut 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, iek compares the attacks on the World
Trade Center to those of the RAF. Meinhofs concept of the revolution-
ary act, iek 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, iek 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
Meinhofs 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 acts power to lay bare the (fascist) essence of the (German)
state. As I mentioned above, we find traces of Fanons 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 ieks
debt to the RAF. For we can read the RAFs 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 ieks authentic revolutionary act, Meinhofs theory of
revolutionary acts contained a symbolic dimension; they were aimed at a
rearrangement of the very pre-conditions of politics.
iek 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 iek takes Mouffes Gramscian
rearticulation of the symbolic outside the space of liberal parliamentary
democracy. For, as iek points out in his response to Boucher, the time
of optimism is over: we effectively live in dark times for democratic
140. Slavoj iek, Reply to Boucher, Telos 129 (FallWinter 2004): 189.
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid.
143. Boucher, The Antinomies of iek, p. 162.
144. And while Arendt insisted on exposing herself to the shock of experience,
iek does notanother 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 RAFs politics
as divorced from experience and the everyday world of those whom they claimed to
represent. ieks new post-democratic theorizing strikes me as exactly that: as lacking
in concrete experiencewhereas the project of radical democracy still seems very much
alive. Oskar Negt, Bleierne Zeit, bleierne Solidaritt, p. 256.
145. iek, 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
REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 103
suicidal politics. Mller fell for this messianic politics at a moment when
the petrified conditions of the GDR appeared to be its eternal future. iek
seems to fall for it now, his empty repetition of the RAF nothing but a
symptomalbeit apparently not a very enjoyable one.
iek is certainly not the only one conceiving of a new politics in
rather empty terms. Giorgio Agamben argues that modernitys 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 Agambens view of (contemporary) modernity is best described
by Arendts 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 forwardor rather, a leap into the beyond.146 Radical
democracy worked through the shock of experience that its theorists
sharedhowever belatedlywith Arendt, and they heeded her advice
to think the unprecedented. Its strategies might need re-inventing (and
ieks materialist re-centering of the social around its basic antagonism
is a productive first step). But its basic tenetsthat politics takes place
within the framework of parliamentary democracy and that it transforms
the friend/enemy antagonism into a friend/adversary agonismstill 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 Zsur (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).