76

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.

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

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 79

I. “The Gap in the Process”:
Heiner Müller’s Catastrophic History, or The Fantasy of Disruption
In 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.

80 JULIA

HELL

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 81

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.

82 JULIA

HELL

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. 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
Cowperwood’s sense of mastery.” Theodor Dreiser, The Titan (New York: John Lane,
1914), p. 109.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 83

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.

84 JULIA

HELL

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 85

“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.

86 JULIA

HELL

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 87

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 Ideology
Polemically 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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 89

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 91

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 93

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 Stalinism
In 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. 469
94. 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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 95

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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 97

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-Politics
If 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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 99

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).

100 JULIA

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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.

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 101

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.

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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

REMNANTS OF TOTALITARIANISM 103

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).