Remnants of Totalitarianism:

Hannah Arendt, Heiner Mller, Slavoj iek,

and the Re-Invention of Politics

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

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 Mller and ieks 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, iek polemically attacks Arendts popularity
among what he calls the centre-left liberal spectrum.5 However, ieks
radical left polemic against the democratic bloc ultimately aims not
only at Arendts theory of totalitarianism but also at the very core of the
transformative project of radical democracy. ieks anti-Arendtian trea-
tise concludes with the Hegelian lesson that even the darkest Stalinism
harbours a redemptive dimension.6 iek argues this redemptive potential
with Hegel and with Benjaminwith the latters 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 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

I. The Gap in the Process:

Heiner Mllers 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 cycles 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 cycles focus
on the RAF women and the ways in which Richter directs our gaze at their
dead bodies.12
Mller shares this catastrophic imaginary with Richterlike the
latters paintings, Mllers 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
Mllers work, these women figures appear in connection with Benjamins
Angel of History and its disruptive, messianic potential. In the following

9. Gerhard Richter, Notes for a press conference, NovemberDecember 1988, in

The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 19621993, 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 Richters Orphic gaze in Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke,
Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic, Germanic Review 80,
no. 1 (Winter 2005): 7577.
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

Mllers key texts on history.
One of Mllers 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 Mller creates is a transparent palimpsest
of Benjamins passage on the Angel of History. But Mllers 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 angels
wings and shoulders. Mller 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, Benjamins 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 pastnot 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, Mller transformed Benjamins 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 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

from Mllers Hamletmachine, Ophelias 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), 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

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?
Mllers text tells a private story, the story of Inge Mllers 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 Benjamins 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 speakers gaze,
which mimics the angels 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
readers part, a scopophilic drive to create unity from a visual trajectory
that Mller 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 texts narrator imagine? [T]he distracted gaze of the
killer, Mller writes, a moments hesitation before the incision, or the

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

34. Mller, Explosion of a Memory, pp. 101102.

35. Ibid., p. 102.
36. Ibid.
37. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1974), p. 235.
38. Mller, Mommsens Block, p. 272.
39. Ibid., p. 274.
40. Ibid., p. 271.
41. Ibid.
84 JULIA HELL

their declineWhy does an empire collapseconstitutes one dominant

topic that alludes to the end of the Roman Empire, the Kaiserreich, Nazi
Germany, Stalins Russia, and the former GDR and post-unification Ger-
many. Heavy-handedly, Mller 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: Mller 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 ageof Rome,
of Bismarcks Reich, of post-unification Germanybecause its material-
ism and corruption disgusts him. Mommsen, Mller writes, intended to
burn Virgils Aeneid, the epic poem about the destruction of Troy and the
citys re-founding as Rome.43 And like Mommsen, he cannot explain why
this new empire will collapse: The ruins dont answer / The silence of the
statues is gilding the decline.44 But collapse it willthat is the message
of Mllers 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 doomor should we say his desire
for the apocalypse?
Mommsens Block revolves around a male figureor rather, a
series of figures: Mommsen/John/Virgil. In this text, the constellation
that characterizes Mllers workthe (female) angel of history as agent
of and witness to revolutionary rupture and the violent hopes invested in
these figuresis absent. Mller completed Mommsens Block after the
Soviet Union collapsed. Immediately after November 1989, his tone was
still markedly more optimistic. Mller 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 Easts deceleration and to build on this

42. Ibid., p. 273.

43. Mller compares himself to Virgil, the poet who had immortality forced upon him
by Augustus. Mommsens Block is thus also a reflection on state poets in the wake of
the debate about Christa Wolf.
44. Mller, Mommsens 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, Mller states, just
as Romes 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. Mller 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, Mller simply gives up on this tradition of
(Jacobin/Republican) politics.
Thus, like Gerhard Richter, Mller finally submits to his apocalyptic
visions.48 Both artists started working in the GDR under (post)totalitarian
conditions. Mller 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 RAFs radicalism,
which after 1989 then slid into utter resignation tinged by an apocalyptic
rage.49 On the one hand, this sympathy for the RAFs desperate and desper-

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

II. The Shock of Experience:

Arendt on Totalitarianism, Terror, and Ideology
Polemically engaging with a wide array of contemporary thinkers, ieks
book is essentially his version of Arendts 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 Germanys 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

19301954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), p. 74.
59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1976), pp. 46079.
88 JULIA HELL

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

Instead, it means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting

of, realitywhatever it may be.67 Facing up to reality and the shock of
experience is the intellectual imperative that drives Arendts work. The
political imperative is the resistance to catastrophic history.
Arendts politics and analysis aim at one thing: freedom as the human
capacity to act politicallyagainst 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 Benjamins 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 Arendts 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. Kafkas 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 historians 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. 31819.
69. Ibid., p. 318.
70. She refers to Benjamins 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.
90 JULIA HELL

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 Arendts remarks on totalitarianism as
a relentless process of destruction. Arendts thoughts also have a peculiar
resonance with the ghostly politics of the RAFs 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: Hobbess 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 naturea 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 Arendts 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 movementstheir destruction of
political institutions and political subjectsshe 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 ideologyideology understood as a form of compulsive logical
deduction from a single premisecreate 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 beginningArendts existentialist, if not
religious, definition of freedom developed in opposition to Heideggers
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 thinkingwhich 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.
92 JULIA HELL

What totalitarian governments aim for is to mobilize mans own will

power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or
Natureextreme conceptions of deterministic history that she had earlier
analyzed as versions of natural history.86
Modernitys 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 mans 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 Arendts 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. 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

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 Heideggers
existentialism or Carl Schmitts decisionism.95 Whatever we decide, we
also need to read this insistence on theunprecedented, unexpected,
unforeseeablebreak with totalitarian rule in connection to the problem-
atic that permeates Arendts 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
Mllers literary production. In contrast to Mllers 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 iek. While iek 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. ieks Redemption of Stalinism

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? iek engages Arendts 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, Mller answered, Yes,
but its becoming more difficult, ever more difficult.96 iek begins his
93. Ibid., p. 469
94. Ibid., p. 478.
95. On Arendts 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): 32046. Origins is of course only the beginning of Arendts own theory of
political action, which she developed fully in The Human Condition (Chicago: The Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1998).
96. Heiner Mller, Das Jahrhundert der Konterrevolution, in Zur Lage der Nation,
p. 93.
94 JULIA HELL

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.
iek implicitly establishes an analogy between Arendts 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 Arendts critique of Stalinism
seriously (Richard Bernstein and Julia Kristeva are two names iek men-
tions) essentially articulate the lefts theoretical defeat and its acceptance
of the basic co-ordinates of liberal democracy.98 The revival of Arendts
analysis, with its dichotomy of totalitarianism versus democracy, signals in
ieks 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, iek 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 lacte 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 politizationit might be followed by right-
wing, or even fascist, politics, or good old Stalinism.103 But let us first
take a closer look at ieks argument about the redemptive potential of
Stalinism, its rational kernel. On the issue of Stalinist ideology and its
functioning, iek remains consistent with his previous work. Under the
conditions of late Socialism, iek 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. iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 3.

98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp. 7879.
101. Ibid., p. 81.
102. iek, 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, 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

104. iek, 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.
96 JULIA HELL

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

A freedom fighter with an inhuman facethe phrase resonates with

Benjamins early thoughts on the Angel of History as a figure that embod-
ies the creativity of destruction. iek discusses Benjamins 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, iek turns to
Eric Santners reading of Benjamin. [A] present revolutionary interven-
tion repeats/redeems past failed attempts, iek writes.117 He uses Eric
Santners 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 societys others.118 Santners 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 Wolfs reflections
on the Nazi pogroms of 1938, not on the events of 1917. But iek 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:

ieks New (Post)Democratic Post-Politics
If we read iek and Mller with reference to Arendts Origins of Totali-
tarianism, we discover two different, but complementary stories that
express a familiar dilemma of the left. In ieks 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.
98 JULIA HELL

the realization of the redemptive dimensionone that we find even at the

heart of Stalinism. In Mllers 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 iek and Mller
draw on Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, which were
written at the moment of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
The opposition between Mllers melancholic paralysis and ieks
revolutionary decisionism raises again a problematic that Yves de Maes-
seneer discusses apropos of Benjamins 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 Benjamins 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 Benjamins angel might be debatable; as a warning,
it certainly applies to ieks and Mllers readings of it.124
I am not arguing that iek revived Benjamins angel with a bomb in
one hand and a copy of the Koran in the other. I do however agree with
Geoff Bouchers analysis that ieks 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 ieks
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 Balthasars Rilke, and Slavoj iek, Modern Theology
19, no. 4 (October 2003): 515.
123. Ibid.
124. On Benjamins potentially Stalinist politics, see Beatrice Hanssen, Benjamins
Unmensch: The Politics of Real Humanism, in Walter Benjamins Other History: Of
Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: Univ. Of California Press, 1998),
pp. 11426.
125. Geoff Boucher, The Antinomies of iek, Telos 129 (FallWinter 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 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

agonistic definition of politics, which deliberative models of democracy

exclude; and it introduces agonistic pluralism into Schmitts 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 Schmitts decisionist formalism, iek argues that
Schmitt asserts the independence of the abyssal act of free decision from
its positive content.131 Like Mouffe, iek welcomes Schmitts definition
of the political as antagonistic, but criticizes him for not properly articu-
lating the logic of political antagonism.132 Schmitts move to limit the
friend/enemy distinction to external politics disavows the internal struggle
that traverses society, while a leftist position, iek writes, insists on
the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive
of the political.133 iek then provides positive content to Schmitts
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 ones 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 ieks 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, iek 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 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

137. iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 9.

138. Ibid., p. 10.
139. Ibid., p. 12.
102 JULIA HELL

politics.140 Far from advocating a crazy messianic politics of a radical

violent Act, iek 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, iek writes, we
cannot formulate a clear project of global change.142 ieks angel is thus
really not much more than an intriguing, but ultimately empty, ciphera
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, iek argues, and therefore need to be radi-
cally re-thought. While Arendt takes recourse to the miracle of birth, iek
conjures the miracle of the authentic act. What distinguishes iek from
Arendt is his willingness to take the ultimate risk: to sever the connection
to liberal parliamentary democracy. In his recent writings, iek comes
perilously close to an ultra-left refusal of the difference between capital-
ist democracy and military dictatorship.143 Like Arendt, iek situates his
recent work in the shadow of catastrophe (dark times is a transparent
allusion to Brecht and National Socialism). Unlike Arendt, iek does not
escape this catastrophic imaginary but repeats its antinomies.144
ieks new politics thus constitutes a curious double repetition:
first, of Arendts attempt to liberate politics from the catastrophic imagi-
nary; and second, of the RAF. iek himself analyzes 1970s terrorism
as a response to the New Lefts realization that the revolution will not
happenneither 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 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).