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

Remnants of Totalitarianism: 

Hannah Arendt, Heiner Müller, Slavoj Žižek, 

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 politics 

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-fascist 

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 compelled 

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, 

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 Germany 

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 treatise 

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.: Stroemfeld, 

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 analytical, 

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. “History” 

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 determines 

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 imaginary 

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 liberation. 

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 “Explosion 

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 revolutionary 

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 represent 

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 conditions 

of Stalinism. Moreover, Müller’s romantic politics, his (desperate) 

hope for a revolutionary break, bears the deep imprint of 1970s West German 

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 democracy. 

Reading Müller also critically contextualizes Žižek’s notion of an 

authentic revolutionary act as an act that both redeems failed acts of liberation 

and redefines the very conditions for political action. Like Arendt, 

Müller and Žižek attempt to re-invent politics—after National Socialism, 

after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in both cases, this reinvention 

leads to a—highly ambivalent—fascination with the desperate politics of 

1970s radicalism. 

7. Žižek also discusses Benjamin in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 

1989), Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin (London: Verso, 2002), and Welcome to 

the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 

2002). 

8. Heiner Müller, “Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture,” in Explosion 

of a Memory: Writings by Heiner Müller, ed. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 

1989), pp. 97–102; Müller, “Mommsen’s Block,” in DramaContemporary: Germany, ed. 

Carl Weber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), pp. 271–76.


I. “The Gap in the Process”: 

Heiner Müller’s Catastrophic History, or The Fantasy of 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, October 

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 rudimentary 

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 discernible 

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 violent 

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 Hungarian 

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 destruction, 

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 Enigmatic 

Eyes, or The Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History in W. G. Sebald’s ‘Air War and 

Literature’,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 361–92. 

18. Müller, “The Luckless Angel,” p. 99. 

19. Ibid. 

20. On “The Luckless Angel,” see also Frank Hörnigk, “Afterword,” New German 

Critique 73 (Winter 1998): 38–39.


from Müller’s “Hamletmachine,” Ophelia’s raging monologue spoken 

from “the heart of darkness”: 

This is Elektra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. 

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 Haitian 

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), Benjamin’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, “Bildbeschreibung,” 

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) narrates 

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 Dreiser, 

The Titan: “Not long after he had returned from the European trip he stopped . . . in 

the . . . drygoods store. . . . As he was entering, a woman crossed the aisle before him . . . a 

type of woman which he was coming to admire, but only from a rather distant point 

of view. . . . She was a dashing type, essentially smart and trig. . . . She had, furthermore, 

a curious look of current wisdom in her eyes, an air of saucy insolence which aroused 

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

1914), p. 109.


woman’s laughter”—events that might cause the hand that holds the knife 

to tremble. 34 But this moment might not occur, or the speaker might miss 

the “gap in the process.” He is paralyzed by the fear “that the blunder will 

be made while he is squinting, that the peephole into Time [Sehschlitz in 

die Zeit] will open between one glimpse and the next.” 35 

“Explosion of a Memory” ends with the end of history, the metaphor 

of a “frozen storm.” 36 Müller added a paragraph to the text in which he 

points the reader to four intertexts, among them Homer’s ekphrastic passage 

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 heretic 

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 Benjaminian: 

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 writing 

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 Germany. 

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 materialism 

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 possible 

alternative to capitalism and its “total acceleration”: the reformers’ 

task was to make a virtue of the East’s “deceleration” and to build on this 

42. Ibid., p. 273. 

43. Müller compares himself to Virgil, the poet who had immortality forced upon him 

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

the debate about Christa Wolf. 

44. Müller, “Mommsen’s Block,” p. 272. 

45. Ibid.


“difference, the other of capitalism.” 46 In this context, he already takes 

recourse to the analogy of the Roman and Soviet empires. Gorbachev needs 

to act as a “Katechon,” or bulwark against capitalism, Müller states, just 

as Rome’s emperors functioned as a retarding force against “industry.” 47 

After the final collapse of the Soviet Empire, the hope for revolutionary 

disruption is buried under a discourse about the eternal rise and fall of 

the empires of the past. The space cleared by destruction, the space of a 

possible new beginning, has become one of silent ruins. Disgusted, the 

author turns away from the capitalist present. Müller is clearly unable 

to deal with this new present in properly political terms and renounces 

his project of re-inventing politics after totalitarianism. While the French 

Jacobin de Volney was inspired by the remnants of ancient empires to 

invent a whole new Republican age as he gazed at the ruins of Palmyra, 

and Edward Gibbon professed his belief that enlightened politics would 

one day break with the cycle of rise and decline as he contemplated the 

ruins of the Roman Forum, Müller simply gives up on this tradition of 

(Jacobin/Republican) politics. 

Thus, like Gerhard Richter, Müller finally submits to his apocalyptic 

visions. 48 Both artists started working in the GDR under (post)totalitarian 

conditions. Müller desperately tried to reinvent politics under these conditions. 

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 Leibhaftig) 

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 voluntarism 

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 slaughterhouses 

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 writing 

was driven by a “pleasure in destruction and things that fall apart.” 54 

He then explains this entanglement of catastrophe and creativity with his 

experience of 1945: “Everything had been destroyed, nothing worked.” 55 

For Müller, this immediate postwar moment meant living in a “free 

space”: “In front of us was a void and the past no longer existed, so that 

an incredible free space was created in which it was easy to move.” 56 This 

is the post-catastrophic space that Müller depicts in his “Luckless Angel” 

as immobilizing, flooded with debris. When critics condemn his plays as 

“depressing,” Müller explained, they obviously miss the point: “The true 

pleasure of writing consists, after all, in the enjoyment of catastrophe.” 57 

50. The GDR was not only characterized by the growing gap between the reality of 

a dictatorial state and communist ideals, but by the tension between the SED’s Stalinism 

and the (Marxist) dissidents’ utopianism. While stubbornly committed to the defense of the 

Soviet Union, Müller’s texts nevertheless recoil from this history by keeping the bloody 

memory of Stalinism alive. 

51. Theweleit, Ghosts, p. 77. 

52. The RAF’s phantasmatic repetition of the (failed) resistance against the Nazis 

becomes, in a further permutation, a fight against Israeli “fascism” and the German left’s 

supposed “Judenkomplex”; see Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche 

Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001), p. 177. 

53. Theweleit writes about the RAF’s “rasender Weg Richtung Tod” or “rush toward 

death” in Ghosts, p. 78. 

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

p. 190. 

55. Ibid. 

56. Ibid. 

57. Ibid.


Living in the ruins of the Third Reich, living right after the catastrophe, 

generates in Müller’s account an experience of liberation—the apocalypse 

as the possibility of a new beginning. Perhaps this is the historical experience 

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, especially 

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.

88 JULIA HELL 

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 incomprehensible, 

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 irresistible 

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 declinist 

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

of Decision (1933). 

65. Ibid., p. ix. 

66. Ibid., p. viii.


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

of, reality—whatever it may be.” 67 Facing up to reality and the shock of 

experience is the intellectual imperative that drives Arendt’s work. The 

political imperative is the resistance to catastrophic history. 

Arendt’s politics and analysis aim at one thing: freedom as the human 

capacity to act politically—against all odds: thus her anti-catastrophic 

polemics and her anti-determinism. 68 In a 1944 essay on Kafka, Arendt 

formulates a poignant critique of causal determinism, which, in her view, 

ultimately comes down to a metaphysical concept of history as nature— 

and transforms the historian into a “prophet turned backward.” 69 The 

passage in question resonates very strongly with Benjamin’s analysis of 

modernity and refers to Benjamin explicitly as the one who revealed that 

bourgeois notion of “progress” as an “inevitable superhuman law,” as a 

form of Naturgeschichte. 70 

The concept of “the natural course of ruin” is a central component 

of Arendt’s argument against deterministic views of history: Life can be 

“foretold,” Arendt writes, “[i]n so far as life is decline which ultimately 

leads to death.” 71 Equally, “catastrophe can be foreseen,” she continues, 

“[i]n a dissolving society which blindly follows the natural course of 

ruin.” 72 But while ruin can be foreseen, salvation “comes unexpectedly,” 

she writes, “for salvation, not ruin, depends upon the liberty and will of 

men.” Kafka’s texts are not prophesies but “a sober analysis of underlying 

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 causality 

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.

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 buildings 

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-century 

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 development 

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 nationstate, 

its institutions, and ultimately its subjects. With the emergence of 

the camps as laboratories of total domination, we witness the return of the 

state of nature—a state of nature of a new kind, to be sure, but still one 

in which not even utilitarian considerations play a role in the war of all 

against all. 

It is Arendt’s wager that her analysis of the potentially catastrophic 

course of history, her tenacious attempt to “understand” and “imagine” 

this process, sets her theory apart from what she calls “prophecies of 

doom” and their ideological submission to the experience of catastrophic 

history. 79 The concluding chapter of Origins sets out to refine this analysis 

75. Ibid. 

76. Ibid. 

77. Ibid. (emphasis added). 

78. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Flathman and David Johnston (London: 

W. W. Norton & Co, 1997), p. 70. 

79. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in 

Essays in Understanding, p. 320.


by returning to the concept of ideology. In this chapter, Arendt first shifts 

her focus from totalitarian terror to totalitarian ideology; second, she discusses 

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 loneliness 

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 convinced 

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 discussion 

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 compulsory 

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 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 livingtogether,” 

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 subject 

changes so does Arendt’s tone, from the neutral voice of the political 

theorist to the passionate voice of the one who invests all her hopes in the 

“miracle of being,” the human capacity for new beginnings, even under 

86. Ibid. 

87. Ibid., p. 478. 

88. Ibid. 

89. Ibid. 

90. Ibid., pp. 478–79. 

91. Ibid., p. 479. 

92. In this chapter, Arendt responds to criticism that she overestimates terror and 

underestimates role of ideology. She defines ideology 1) as logicality, or strict deductive 

reasoning preparing for two roles, victim and executioner; and 2) this deductive “method” 

explains the world either as an irrevocable process of History (Stalinism), or as Nature 

(Nazism)—a foreseeable, explainable process to which society and the individual needs to 

be subsumed (ibid., p. 469). This definition is thus at once formalist (and thus not foreign to 

Althusserian definitions of ideology as interpellation, or subject constitution) and specific 

in terms of historical-political content. For a critical discussion of Arendt’s concept of 

ideology, see Claude Lefort, “Thinking with and against Arendt,” Social Research 69, no. 2 

(Summer 2002): 447.


the conditions of totalitarian domination. 93 Warning that this “entirely 

new form of government,” far from having disappeared, will stay with 

us, Arendt strikes a tone full of urgency, if not pathos. 94 We can read this 

tension between the iron logic of totalitarianism and the freedom of human 

action in a religious light; or we can read it in the spirit of Heidegger’s 

existentialism or Carl Schmitt’s decisionism. 95 Whatever we decide, we 

also need to read this insistence on the—unprecedented, unexpected, 

unforeseeable—break with totalitarian rule in connection to the problematic 

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 possibility 

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 himself 

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.

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. 

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 mentions) 

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 Master-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 revolutionary 

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 rightwing, 

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 compromises. 

But mainly, late Socialism functioned through cynical acceptance: 

97. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 3. 

98. Ibid. 

99. Ibid. 

100. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp. 78–79. 

101. Ibid., p. 81. 

102. Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, p. 225. 

103. In the current racist climate of European politics, an uncomfortable prospect.


nothing would have been more threatening, he writes, than to take Eastern 

European governments at their word. 104 

When it comes to High Stalinism, Žižek starts to contrast National 

Socialism and Stalinism, a move that he had previously declared useless. 

More concretely, he addresses the issue of subject positions—that of the 

Stalinist leader who acts in the name of History as well as that of the victim—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 loyalty 

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 


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. 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 revolutionary 

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, political 

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. 





115. Ibid.


A freedom fighter with an inhuman face—the phrase resonates with 

Benjamin’s early thoughts on the Angel of History as a figure that embodies 

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 intervention 

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 empathy” 

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 authentic 

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 revolutionary 

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 Totalitarianism, 

we discover two different, but complementary stories that 

express a familiar dilemma of the left. In Žižek’s writings, the entire murderous 

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 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 Maesseneer 

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 resignation, 

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 privilege 

individual over collective action and reduces politics and economics 

to ideological struggles. 126 I have traced this new politics of “repeating 

Lenin” and the Bolsheviks’ refusal of evolutionary history to two different 

122. Yves de Maesseneer, “Horror Angelorum: Terrorist Structures in the Eyes of 

Walter Benjamin, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Rilke, and Slavoj Žižek,” Modern Theology 

19, no. 4 (October 2003): 515. 

123. Ibid. 

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

Unmensch: The Politics of Real Humanism,” in Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of 

Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: Univ. Of California Press, 1998), 

pp. 114–26. 

125. Geoff Boucher, “The Antinomies of Žižek,” Telos 129 (Fall–Winter 2004): 161. 

Boucher discusses the religious and philosophical underpinnings of this new concept of a 

“leap ‘into the real’” (ibid.). 

126. Ibid., pp. 171, 172.


contexts. The first is the Eastern European context, i.e., the de-politicizing 

connection between petrified (post)totalitarian conditions and the voluntarist 

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 Liberation 

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 ensuing 

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 Jahrzehnt, 

p. 273).

100 JULIA HELL 

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 articulating 

“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 multiple 

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 content 

by insisting on the continuing relevance of class antagonism, i.e., the 

“notion of a radical antagonistic gap that affects the entire social body.” 136 

In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, this gap is exposed by the attacks on 

the World Trade Center, because, Žižek argues, these attacks represented 

the eruption of the real into our symbolic order: they signaled the gap 

130. Chantal Mouffe, “Introduction,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal 

Mouffe (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 5, 4. To build hegemony means engaging in a process 

of transforming antagonism into agonism, creating the possibility of communality and not 

“complete opposition” without any “common symbolic ground” (ibid., p. 5). 

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

Carl Schmitt, pp. 19–20. 

132. Ibid., p. 27. 

133. Ibid. 

134. Ibid., p. 28. 

135. Ibid. 

136. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 238.


between the First and the Third Worlds. Žižek unequivocally distances 

himself from these attacks. Nevertheless, this militant gesture does pose 

a problem. I see Žižek’s recent involvement with theology as an attempt 

to differentiate his messianic-militant politics from this kind of terrorism. 

And the hermeneutic pirouettes performed in the service of the “redemptive 

kernel” of Stalinism serve the same function: to delineate the boundaries 

of what this act is and is not. The “freedom fighter with the inhuman face” 

is no terrorist, Islamic or Stalinist—but is she anything more than a revenant 

from another desperate age? 

To answer this question, we need to return to Ulrike Meinhof. In Welcome 

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 revolutionary 

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 “revelation”: 

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 strategy, 

the authentic revolutionary act. And Žižek takes Mouffe’s Gramscian 

rearticulation of the symbolic outside the space of liberal parliamentary 

democracy. For, as Žižek points out in his response to Boucher, the time 

of optimism is over: “we effectively live in dark times for democratic 

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

138. Ibid., p. 10. 

139. Ibid., p. 12.

102 JULIA HELL 

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

violent Act,” Žižek writes, in this age of global capitalism he is concerned 

with finding ways to re-think radical change (which, he argues, Mouffe 

and Laclau abandoned by limiting their anti-globalization strategy to 

“multiple local practices of resistance”). 141 Ultimately, Žižek writes, “we 

cannot formulate a clear project of global change.” 142 Žižek’s angel is thus 

really not much more than an intriguing, but ultimately empty, cipher—a 

remnant from a bygone era. 

Where does this leave us? Curiously, in a position similar to that of 

Arendt in 1945: the conditions of both political analysis and politics itself 

have fundamentally changed, Žižek argues, and therefore need to be radically 

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 capitalist 

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 imaginary; 

and second, of the RAF. Žižek himself analyzes 1970s terrorism 

as a response to the New Left’s realization that the revolution will not 

happen—neither in Berlin, nor Prague, nor Belgrade. 145 As the New Left 

disintegrated, groups like the RAF and Red Brigades slowly slid into their 

140. Slavoj Žižek, “Reply to Boucher,” Telos 129 (Fall–Winter 2004): 189. 

141. Ibid. 

142. Ibid. 

143. Boucher, “The Antinomies of Žižek,” p. 162. 

144. And while Arendt insisted on exposing herself to the “shock of experience,” 

Žižek does not—another attitude he shares with Meinhof. When the latter composed her 

anti-imperialist manifesto in 1972, Oskar Negt held a speech in Frankfurt appealing to 

the left to distance itself unambiguously from the RAF. Negt criticized the RAF’s politics 

as “divorced from experience” and the everyday world of those whom they claimed to 

represent. Žižek’s new post-democratic theorizing strikes me as exactly that: as lacking 

in concrete experience—whereas the project of radical democracy still seems very much 

alive. Oskar Negt, “Bleierne Zeit, bleierne Solidarität,” p. 256. 

145. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 9; see also Theweleit, Ghosts, p. 62. 

Wolfgang Kraushaar argues that the RAF was essentially apolitical, if not autistic; see


suicidal politics. Müller fell for this messianic politics at a moment when 

the petrified conditions of the GDR appeared to be its eternal future. Žižek 

seems to fall for it now, his empty repetition of the RAF nothing but a 

symptom—albeit apparently not a very enjoyable one. 

Žižek is certainly not the only one conceiving of a new politics in 

rather empty terms. Giorgio Agamben argues that modernity’s murderous 

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 Heideggerian 

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 nonessentialist, 

non-universalist re-construction of universalism in her Precarious Life: The 

Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

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

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