cc >> Sara Guyer: It's a real
pleasure to welcome Jacqueline Rose, who is Professor of
English at Queen Mary at the University of London.
She's, this week, a scholar in residence at the Center for the
Humanities. I'm grateful to the Anonymous
Fund and also the Division of International Studies for their
support of her visit. I should say, I first read
Rose's work many, many years ago as an undergraduate abroad in
England. And what excited me then, and
what continues to impress me now is the way that her work is at
once conceptual, political, psychoanalytic and literary.
This was true in the essay on George Elliott, that was my
first encounter with her work, as it is in more recent essays,
like the one on Proust, Beckett and Genet, that many of us had
the opportunity to discuss in a smaller seminar yesterday with
her. Many of you will know Rose
through her extraordinarily important earlier work on
feminism and psychoanalysis, namely sexuality in the field
of vision, where I first encountered her.
Others will know her work on Sylvia Plath.
And still others will have come to know Rose more recently,
through her courageous book, "A Question of Zion," and her
essays in the London Review of Books, several of which are
gathered in the last resistance. What distinguishes all this work
is an unwillingness to turn away from the topics or scenes that
might be most uncomfortable to us, whether Lacan and Freud on
the woman question, whether Peter Pan and what's kind of
creepy and strange and fascinating about the case
of Peter Pan, and more recently, the past and future of Zionism.
Early in the question of Zion, Rose refers to this as an
anguished curiosity. That's her phrase.
And while it's not quite a conventional method, I want to
suggest that it is what leads to her rare combination of
generosity and dissatisfaction, openness and critical
engagement. Tonight, Jacqueline Rose will
speak about "Total Belief: Delirium in the West."
Please join me in welcoming her.
(applause)
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you, Sara, for that very generous
introduction. I didn't know you'd been one of
my readers for so long. And that gives me immense
pleasure. I also want to take this
opportunity to thank you for inviting me to Madison, and for
the immense thoughtfulness you've shown toward me, and
hospitality also of the Center as a whole, and making it such a
stimulating visit for me to be here.
I really appreciate it. So, I would like to thank you
for that. This is very much a work in
progress, my attempt to understand something about the
problem of belief in the modern world.
It comes out of a lurking, sort of dissatisfaction, or perhaps
anguished curiosity about the way in which belief is so often
seen as a problem of non-western cultures.
So that led me to go into the heart of the darkest moment of
European history to see how belief has functioned as a form
of political at once ideal and perversion.
So that is the sort of framework within which I'm trying to
think. And I mean trying to think.
That's not just a formality to say that.
Okay, the lecture has a quotation from Simone Weil, from
her essay "Thoughts on the Origins of Hitlerism," where she
says the principle difference between Hitler and the Romans is
that Hitler exerted totalitarian dictatorship before becoming
master of the world, which in all probability is what
prevented him from doing so. Since it seems that it is the
proper domain of the totalitarian state to crush its
own subjects over and above conquering any others.
Towards the end of "Alone in Berlin," or "Every Man Dies
Alone," as it is known in the States, the recently translated
1947 novel about German resistance by Hans Fallada--
Has anybody read this book? It's been this sort of huge--
Oh, good! Okay, excellent.
I'm very pleased to see a few of you have.
Toward the end of this novel, Otto Quangel, who has been
sentenced to death for depositing anti-Nazi postcards
across the city, is visited by a chaplain.
Quangel insists he is an unbeliever.
Undeterred, the chaplain suggests he might therefore be a
pantheist. It's quite simple, he remarks,
while Quangel claims not to know what on earth he's talking
about. It's the world's soul, you know.
Your only mortal soul will return to the great world soul.
Quangel remains unconsoled. Everything is God, he asks.
Is Hitler God? Is all the killing out there
God? Are you God?
Am I? Now, "Every Man Dies Alone," has
become an international best seller.
I'm sure it's not because of these theological,
quasi-theological niceties of the issues raised by them.
Nonetheless, I will be arguing this evening after Hannah Arendt
the question of belief is at the core of any understanding of
totalitarianism. And that recent discussions of
belief, both the march of the skeptics and the argument that
belief in --, I'm trying to avoid using the word extreme
form, is unique to non-western faith, could do well to start,
as I said with this darkest moment of 20th century European
history so strikingly explored in this novel.
I really strongly recommend it. Most simply, Quangel's reply to
the chaplain is just one version, the pantheist version
of a fundamental paradox of faith that an omniscient
all-powerful God must be responsible for the horrors
of the world. If the whole world is God, then
so is Hitler and his murderous regime.
Quangel's reply, Is Hitler God? then raises theological stakes
by ascribing divinity to Hitler himself.
Lighting on one of the properties of Nazism, Hitler was
indeed a god for many of his followers.
He brushes against the mystical or religious component of
political or group allegiance. For Arendt, totalitarianism
means the total destruction of mental freedom.
Today, I'll be pushing her argument a bit further, by
looking at how totalitarianism orchestrates the mental
components, the unconscious drift and dynamic of political
belief. A little later in their
discussion, Quangel asks for a favor.
The chaplain will tell his wife, likewise condemned, that
although he is in fact to be executed first, they will be
dying at the same time. The chaplain refuses.
As a man of God, he cannot violate the eighth Commandment
not to lie. So you never lie, Reverend?
Quangel retorts. Have you never lied in your
life? Once again, their exchange is
eloquent of a radical dimension of belief.
That fact that Jacques Lacan put it, the covert meaning of belief
with this implied claim to truth is that man is an animal who is
capable of lying. The chaplain is lying about
lying, by suggesting that he never lies.
It is a fundamental premise of psychoanalysis that man deceives
himself. Writing of what she calls St.
Augustine's astonishing power as an introspective psychologist,
Rebecca West describes his suspicion of reason, his
recognition that the working of the conscious mind does not
inevitably turn out truth as its finished project, but might
instead involve a rationalization of error.
He was able to realize, as she continues, that because as his
attempts to defy memory show, he was well aware of the existence
of an unconscious mind. Now, I'll be holding onto this
idea that Augustine's awareness of the unconscious was a core
component of his belief. Since it is an idea not always
tolerated by belief's contemporary defenders, and
certainly it plays no part in Arendt's graduate dissertation
on St. Augustine. In absence of mind, her recent
disposition on belief in the modern world, Marilyn Robinson,
who I'm sure you know above all as a famous fiction writer,
takes issue and turns resonant of Sartre, but with a
theological twist, with a psychoanalytic posture that the
Freudian subject enthralled to the unconscious is in some
fundamental sense untrue to her or himself.
Now, Robinson defends Freud for his universality, which,
correctly as I see it, she sees as a challenge to a racist and
nationalist conception of identity.
But the self "should be engrossed by an interior drama,
of which it cannot be consciously aware, that the
center of emotion and experience, the source of motive
and inhibition is inaccessible to the self as experience," that
is unacceptable to Robinson. For her, religious experience is
a form of self-awareness and belief is a form of knowledge.
Even in its most mysterious pathways, the mind has a true
hunch of itself. Now, Robinson is one of my
favorite contemporary writers, not least of all because of the
way she puts questions of religion and faith and belief at
the core of her fiction. Yet, I'm intrigued that unlike
St. Augustine, we could say, she should feel the need to defend
the complexity of the mind in these terms.
If there is an unconscious, then man loses his grip on his
profoundest insight into his own nature.
Mounting her defeat of the skeptics, or the crusaders
against belief, as she calls them, Robinson cannot relinquish
an all-knowing, self-possessed vision of the mind.
For me, this means side-stepping what is perhaps the most
radical, certainly at times the most disturbing dimension of
belief. I see it as a missed
opportunity, which I will also be exploring in what follows.
Now, psychoanalysis, of course, which is the discourse within
which I sort of breathe and move, and have done for a very
long time, has its own complex relationship to these issues.
So much so that Julia Kristeva has recently argued that it is
Freud's incursion into this domain of belief, far more than
his theory of sexuality of the unconscious that provokes
resistance or hostility to psychoanalysis.
Writing to the Swiss pastor, Oskar Pfister, in 1918, Freud
famously declared himself a "godless Jew."
Pfister is having none of it. You are no Jew, he states, no
Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for whom he professes unbounded
admiration. And you are not godless, for he
who "lives in truth, lives in god."
You could say that Pfister takes back with one hand what he
gives with the other. Nonetheless, Pfister believes in
Freud. He puts him, if not with the
prophets, on the side of God. He cannot bear, and this is the
core of their correspondence, that psychoanalysis should usher
us into a faithless world. By 1933, in the twilight years
of their correspondence, such confidence is, however, becoming
much harder to maintain. In one of his last letters to
Freud, written on his return from a visit to Germany, Pfister
describes his disgust at what he has seen, a proletarian
militarism which he said, "stinks even more evilly than
the blueblooded yonkers spirit of the Wilhelmine era, and which
cowardly towards the outside world, wreaks it's infantile
rage on defenseless Jews." Good luck, he concludes, to
him who in the face of such crass idiocy, still has the
strength to be a doctor of souls.
Although as Freud responds, if things are so bad everywhere in
the world, why should a psychoanalyst have it any
easier? If Nazism comes close to
destroying belief, it also, as I will now be arguing, brings us
to a dark corner of the psyche, for which it is unclear if any
form of belief, if any of us can fully claim exemption.
The point not being that we're all capable of radical evil, a
banal point, as Hannah Arendt might say, but that we are all,
one way or another, implicated at a deep psychic level in what
Kristeva calls "pre-political forms of belief," that none of
us are immune from what she describes as the unbelievable
need to believe, as "Incroyable Besoin de Croire" is the title
of one of her recent books. At its most simple, we go on
believing because we refuse to relinquish our infantile ideas.
Belief would then be the true lost object, which we cling to
for the rest of our lives. Belief plunges its roots into
the unconscious, from where it also emerges, finds its first
shadowy shapes. We are all potential recruits
into the divine edges of thought.
Quangel's question, Is Hitler God; is all the killing out
there God? is of course, intended to be
rhetorical. There can be no god, no belief
in a divine origin of mankind in such a hideous world.
But to follow Quangel down this path, as so many would after the
second World War, allows us perhaps to dispense too readily
with the issue of belief. It allows us to ignore, for
example, the extent to which belief in God or his purpose
were at the very heart of Nazism.
It cannot be doubted, writes Hannah Arendt, in the section
totalitarianism, that concludes the origins of totalitarianism,
either the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and did
not merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the follow.
And this is a quote. "The more accurately..."
From the Nazi pamphlet, sorry, I should've said.
"The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws
of nature and of life, so much more do we conform to the will
of the almighty. The more insight we have into
the will of the almighty, the greater will be our success."
As Arendt comments in a footnote, such formulations,
which can be found repeatedly in the pamphlet literature issued
by the SS for the ideological indoctrination of its cadets,
are no more than variations on phrases from Mein Kampf.
Hitler knew that his movement would only succeed, "by
awakening a sacrosanct conviction, a sacrosanct
conviction in the heart of its followers."
He described the basic postulates of his movement as a
covenant and as a profession of faith.
He knew that is, that Nazism had to be a total weltanschauung
that marshaled unconditional passionate and visceral
allegiance. Experience teaches, he writes,
that the human being fights only for something in which he
believes and which he loves. To this end, Hitler did not
hesitate, as is known, to draw on the paths of the Catholic
church. "The mysterious artificial
dimness of the Catholic churches also serves this purpose, the
burning candles, the incense, the --, and so on."
The propositions of Nazism, writes Arendt, have the status
of "sacred untouchable truths." If such divine blather was
aimed at the youngest cadets of the party, Hitler was also clear
that only a few would be equal to the psychological task.
The highest echelons of the party will be composed of a type
of spiritual elite. Only a minority will be willing
and able to fight for their convictions.
"Weakened wavering characters would be frightened away."
You do not need to be a psychoanalyst to know that the
most effective mechanism of psychic subordination is fear.
It is essential to Arendt's argument that the Nazi's were
arch manipulators of the precarious border between lying
and truth. One way of thinking about belief
in relation to Nazism, therefore would be as a set of deranged
conjugations of the proposition, "I speak the truth, which always
for Lacan contains the lie as the inverse or perverse support
of any utterings." Please stop lying, I already
believe you, is the statement by a patient which analyst Theodore
Reik invokes in order best to capture the radically
exasperated self-defeating claim to truthhood of any human
subject. What Wallace Stevens describes
"as the nicer knowledge of belief, that what it believes
is not true." Did he believe or disbelieve,
asks Reik. So much lives in us.
Wishes and their denials, faith and mistrust, appetites and
distastes. To this extent, Nazi
totalitarianism was playing an old tune.
According to Arendt, it organized itself around a strict
graduation of cynicism, expressed in a hierarchy of
contempt, with sympathizers despising their fellow citizens,
party members despising fellow travelers, the elite formations
despising the party membership. What above all is despised is
the gullibility shown by the group that is the object of
contempt. Each group considers itself to
be the possessor of a different superior level of truth.
To that extent, the higher you move up the hierarchy, the more
fervent, fearless Hitler would say your belief, but also the
closer you get to knowing that the whole system is based on a
web of deceit. This is Slavoj-Zizek cynicism,
way before its time. And I like to think he got the
idea from Hannah Arendt. Of course, the leaders do not
admit this to themselves for a minute.
If they did, the whole system would crumble.
Right at the top are a group of men who live, who will always
live, and who will die in a state of disassociation.
After the war, there was not one who admitted to full knowledge
of the atrocities that had taken place.
As well as self-defense legally and effective, of course, this
was clearly a way of preserving an inner ideal.
I have the highest ethics and the highest aims Goering states
to American psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn, who was given access
to the Nuremberg defendants at the time of their trial.
He had been entrusted with monitoring their mental health.
I was not to blame for these horrors.
He was a genius. A great leader, and I subscribed
to his program completely. That's catalogic, by the way,
the two propositions cancel each other out.
These were interviews conducted in May, 1946.
He was sentenced to death in October, and two weeks later, he
hanged himself in his cell. What of course cannot be
admitted is that he knew the whole system was fraudulent, but
went along with it regardless. For Arendt, the consequence of
the system was a type of national and international
mental pandemonium, which also has, and this is crucial, a
strict inner logic. The results, she writes, is that
the gullibility of the sympathizers makes lies credible
to the outside world. While at the same time, the
graduated cynicism of membership and elite members eliminates any
danger that the leader will ever be forced by the weight of his
own propaganda to make good his own statements.
The main delusion of the outside world, therefore, was to misread
the system. To trust on the one hand that
the enormity of its lies will be the undoing of totalitarianism,
and on the other that the Furor could be held to his word.
And of course, this was Neville Chamberlain's great mistake.
Viewed from the outside, it was impossible that a people could
be so duped, or if they were, that their leader could not be
trusted. As well as a wish fulfillment,
this is of course a type of catalogic.
Again, the people know, and will ultimately be guided by the
truth. Leaders, even or perhaps
especially the leader who so misguides him, must be honorable
men. That these two propositions
cancel each other out does not in any sense limit their
combined and deadly power. Underneath the problem of
knowledge that has been so much at the forefront of discussion
of Nazi Germany, who knew, who did not know, lies a strange
twisted fabric of belief, I would suggest.
The question perhaps therefore should be not who knew, but who
believed and how. Even Arendt's account, the
elites are the ultimate cynics, "not even supposed to believe in
the literal truths of ideological cliches," they
nonetheless occupy in even more sinister fashion, the domain of
fiction. It is their rule to transpose
belief into evidence, to make the world conform, to mirror, to
fulfill the Nazi mind. The elite do not consist of
ideologists. Instead, their whole education
is "aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing
between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction."
Theirs is a peculiar form of superiority, which consists,
Arendt writes, in their ability "immediately to dissolve every
statement of fact into a declaration of purpose."
I think it's worth pausing at this for a minute.
So, the membership need to be persuaded of the inferiority of
the Jews before it can be safely asked to kill them.
It is the characteristic of their elite formations to
understand without question, "that the statement all Jews are
inferior, means that all Jews must and will be killed."
No mere mass phenomenon, this mentality requires a very
particular form of cultivation. The whole effectiveness of the
program depends on it. Without this mentality, this was
the object of the most carefully indoctrination by totalitarian
schools of thought and leadership, the program would
not have been able to bring itself to life.
It would remain pure fiction. Without the elite, writes
Arendt, and is artificially induced inability to understand
facts as facts to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the
movement could never move in the direction of realizing
its fiction. So the elite of the guardians of
a hallucinatory, delirious world.
Arendt does not use the word psychotic, but she does use the
word borderline. Delirium, however, always
carries a risk. It is therefore central to this
machinery that no one must be capable of seeing the world
through different eyes. For the Nazis to be carried, a
protective wall has to be built to separate them from the
outside world. Without such a wall, they would
feel too acutely the discrepancy, "between the lying
ficticousness of their own and the reality of the normal
world." Now I have to say here that
I'm less confident than Arendt in the concept of a normal
world, or indeed in its reality. But note how the masses are the
bearers of the form of knowledge that both knows and doesn't know
itself. If the system never stops
working, it is because the masses must be endlessly
protected from the specter of disbelief.
Disbelief haunts the system, the other side of the delirium to
which it is inextricably wed. This goes beyond the dimension
of complicity as I see it, but I don't think it's covered either
by the idea of false consciousness, or indeed by that
of bad faith. As if Nazism constructed itself
with the most painstaking attention to an order of belief
that it knew only too well was beyond belief.
Incroyable, as Kristeva would say.
Provided we add that the element of unbelievability is not a
threat to belief, but how belief operates, how clearly at
historic moments such as this one, it most effectively secures
and protects itself. So it's not therefore simply the
divine grandiosity of Nazism that is at issue, but the way
that propositions of Nazism moved into the realm of
incontrovertible sacred fact, and there upon are immediately
bound to fulfill themselves. Of course, the difference
between a statement and a program is that only the former
can be contested. It is because the gap between
the two has been abolished that the Nazis could believe
themselves to the be the agents of a divine world.
To say that the belief is delusional, which of course it
is, is not therefore, I think, enough.
What matters is how the form of the delirium, its mental
enactment, turns the Nazi into the agent of God.
Remember this quotation. It cannot be doubted that the
Nazi leadership actually believed in and did not merely
use as propaganda such doctrines as the following, the more
accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and
of life, so much more do we conform to the world of the
almighty. This is why Hitler announced his
political intentions in the form of prophecy, of which the most
famous example is his announcement in January, 1939,
"I want today once again to make a prophecy..."
It's very strange to read this out by the way.
It's relatively easy to copy it down, but actually to read it is
kind of weird. "In case the Jewish financiers
succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the
result will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
This sounds like speculation, in case the Jewish financiers,
but it is in fact prediction, or rather two predictions bound by
a hidden relation of causality. The Jews will succeed in
precipitating world war. The Jews will be killed.
It's the type of double apocalypse.
The Jews are already guilty of the end of the world, from which
the world must and will be saved.
Belief in a system therefore hangs on a strict order of time.
The movement produced a mentality which "thought in
conscience and felt in centuries, him that described it
as working for a great task which occurs but once in every
2,000 years. There is hardly a better way to
avoid discussion, "Arendt rightly notes, "than by
releasing an argument from the control of the present by saying
that only the future will fulfill its merits.
You cannot argue with a form of belief that has already secured
its own future. I would say this is not belief
in the future. This is belief as the future.
All debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian
dictator's predictions, she comments, is as weird as arguing
with a potential murderer whether his future victim
is dead or alive, since by killing the person in question,
the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness
of his statement." As well as being a declaration
of intent, Hitler's prophecy abolishes the distance between
today and all the potential tomorrows of the world.
It seizes the future according to a law or chain of fatality,
whose latent sometimes explicit nature is precisely divine.
Man only does or suffers, writes Arendt, what according to
immutable laws is bound to happen anyway.
And then she reminds that it was Tocqueville who wrote of the
appeal, and this is Tocqueville speaking, "absolutist systems
which represent all the events of history as depending upon the
great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as
it were, suppress men from the history of the human race."
Okay, it so happened that as I started to think about this
lecture, I was re-reading the "Sense of an Ending" by Frank
Kermode, the famous English literary critic who died this
summer, and who supported my earliest ventures into the realm
of theory and to whom I'm happy this evening to acknowledge an
enormous personal and intellectual debt.
I was struck by how central the question of belief and indeed
apocalypse, hence the title of the book, is his deservedly
famous study of fiction and time.
Has anybody read Kermode's "The Sense of an Ending?"
I'm getting a few. Okay, great.
I hope I'll explain it away for people who haven't.
But those of you who know, this will be familiar.
The lines I cited earlier from Wallace Stevens, "the nicer
knowledge of belief, that what it believes is not true," in
fact form of the epigraphs to his second chapter on fiction.
For Stevens, "the last and greatest fiction is the fiction
of the absolute, or of an absolute."
Kermode tracks this fiction throughout his book.
But he is also concerned, and indeed at moments he struggles
to wrest the domain of literary fiction, whose only validity is
its inventiveness or effective force from what he calls its
other dangerous relations. In this discussion,
totalitarianism is central precisely because of its power
to bend the world to the mind. If Nietzsche is right, Kermode
argues that the only relevant question is how far an opinion
is "life furthering, life preserving, species preserving."
Then as he points out, anyone who thinks this is at risk of
sounding like the cretin liar, "for his opinion that opinions
have no guarantee can be no less fictive than the opinion to
which it alludes." Once again, belief reveals the
lie as its counterpoint. Worse, anyone subscribing to
such a view may be in danger of colluding with or encouraging
people who believe that death on a large scale can also be a way,
in fact is the only way, of preserving a species,
of preserving life. Now, this is not as I read it, a
bland critique of relativism, nor the even blander suggestion
that Nietzsche has some affinity with, or in his strong version,
responsibility for Nazi atrocity.
An argument for which I have no time whatsoever.
It is far more precisely an attempt to come to grips with
what fiction can do, its internal grip or authority, and
with a brutality and unseemly haste with which fiction in Nazi
Germany tipped into the register of fact.
The problem with delirium being not that the belief is false,
but instead that it becomes real so fast.
"If the value of an opinion is to be tested only by its success
in the world," writes Kermode, echoing Arendt, the validity of
one's opinions of the Jews can be proved by killing six million
Jews." Now, if the sense of an ending
is so germane to my topic this evening, it is because it brings
totalitarianism into the realm of fiction and its powers.
"There might even be a relation," Kermode writes,
"between certain kinds of effectiveness in literature and
totalitarianism in politics." Re-reading it, I found myself
wondering what would be the likely political reaction today,
or outrage to be more blunt, to Kermode's bold linkage of the
highest of western literary culture and the depths of the
Third Reich. Thus, as consciously apocalyptic
fantasies, both King Lear and the Third Reich, he suggests,
force us to recognize "that is ourselves we are encountering
whenever we invent fictions." There is, however, you'll be
glad to hear, a crucial difference.
Unlike Lear, Nazism tells us nothing about death, but instead
projects it onto, and acts it, by means of others.
We could say that perversely Nazism never really -- the
deaths it performs, belonging rather, committing the of to the
realm of nonexistence in Arendt's words, it knows
"neither birth nor death." And Nazism, as we have seen
Arendt describe it, abolishes the distinction between fiction
and reality, or statement and program.
Kermode calls it a degenerate fiction, by presupposing as he
puts it, "a total and adequate explanation of things as they
are." This is not therefore a
positivist kind of reality, as I was a bit worried it was earlier
when citing Arendt. But reality as the endless
capacity and openness of words. It is precisely because it loses
its sense of belonging in time that Nazism starts to climb back
up to the world of the gods. In literature, uncertainty
hovers over time. Unlike "the equivocally offered
futures," that's Kermode of Shakespearian tragedy, the Third
Reich was the disastrous consequence of "trying to impose
limited designs on the time of the world."
"In tragedy, on the other hand," he says, "the great
crises and ends of human life do not stop time."
Similarly, religious historian Karen Armstrong, perhaps today's
most effective spokeswoman for belief defends the realm of myth
against the supremacy of the -- as, "something that had in some
sense happened once, but that also happens all the time."
For Armstrong, too, we subsist most profoundly in recurring
unmasterable time. Compare Hitler's prophetic
utterance, the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish
race in Europe. I had in fact forgotten how
important Hannah Arendt was to Kermode's argument, as well as
how central Jewish thought was to his vision of the critic.
He describes what he's doing several times as
quasi-rabbinical. And he concedes just that Hamlet
in one quote is not the Torah. What prevents apocalyptic
grandiosity, the means of the world careering to its end is
the ceaseless interpretability of things, which it is the task
of the critic, to cultivate. Seen in this light, what Kermode
calls the endless chains and crossings of significance of
semiotics, or, again a quote, those condensations and
displacements of psychoanalysis, -- of modern theory, which he
himself in fact became increasingly impatient, which
led to several heated arguments between us.
But that's another story. Without necessarily knowing it,
the dutiful heirs of Jewish thought, whose sole myth is that
there are as many interpretations of the text, "as
may be found in the created world, with which the book is
co-extensive." Insisting that the world is a
book that can be exfoliated, his word, into the universe, and
that this process is endless, becomes then if not the
counter-myth to the belief that time can be halted, world and
word perfectly aligned, that the validity of one's opinions of
the Jews can be proved by killing six million Jews.
In this light, Nazism is anti-hermeneutic.
The aggressiveness of totalitarianism, Arendt insists,
does not spring from lust for power, but simply from the
ideological drive, "to make the world consistent."
On this, too, Hitler, I discovered was explicit.
The essentials of a teaching, he wrote in Mien Kampf, must never
be looked for in its external formulas, but in its inner
meaning, and this meaning is unchangeable.
Now I want to now push this a little further in psychoanalytic
terms. Although it is rarely explicit,
whenever I read Arendt, I'm struck by this aspect of her
writing. To her surprise, she was awarded
the Sigmund Freud Prize of the Deutsche Akadamie fur Sprache
und Dichtung in 1967. Her biographer, Elisabeth
Young-Bruhl points out-- Elisabeth Young-Bruhl herself
went on to become a psychoanalyst, by the way.
She comments that Arendt would've won no prizes for
sympathy with Freud. It is, however, central to her
understanding of totalitarianism that it involves the inner
domination of the human spirit, "an inner coercion whose only
content is the avoidance of contradictions."
Inner coercion whose only content is the avoidance
of contradictions. The inner meaning in Hitler's
terms. What distinguishes
totalitarianism in her argument from all other political
movements, is its demand "for the total unconditional and
unalterable loyalty of its individual members.
In Hitler's words, the problem of "influencing the freedom of
the human will." It achieves this deathly
allegiance because he has discovered, "a means of
dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
So what I'm asking you to see here is the way Arendt's
argument, which is a political and historic argument, moves
progressively, in my reading of her, inside the human mind,
inside the psyche. So everything outside the
movement is dying, thus when the Nazi functionary, who has
pursued and interrogated Otto Quangel in "Every Man Dies
Alone," finds himself persuaded of his prisoner's superior
humanity, but describes himself as Quangel's sole convert, his
only option is immediately to shoot himself.
This is also why of course, Frau Goebbels murders her five
children in the last days of the regime, a moment shockingly
rendered in Hirschbiegel's 2004 film "Downfall," based on
Hitler's final ten days in his Berlin bunker.
In all of this, there is of course something inexplicable
involved. Looking back on his life, Albert
Spear describes the inner compulsion that drew him to
Hitler before he knew, but when he acknowledges in his
interviews with journalists he already should have known.
"The truth is that for a reason I still cannot explain to
myself, perhaps like a thief who fills compelled to return to the
scene of his crime, something very deep inside me drew me
towards the chancellery. Totalitarianism, therefore, is
external coercion, but it works above all through the inner
life, relying in Arendt's words, listen to this, "on the
compulsion with which we can compel ourselves."
Compulsion with which we can compel ourselves.
It relies, that is, on our inner attraction to force, to what
Freud will describe in his analysis of the super ego, as
the cruelty which regulates the traffic between the different
agencies of the mind. As she also remarks, cruelty can
also feel like a liberation from a society's liberal and
humanitarian hypocrisy, a warning the new Coalition
government in the UK with it's mixture of liberalism and
cruelty might do very well to heed.
Incidentally today's a good day, because the students were on the
streets and -- conservative party headquarters protesting
against the educational cuts, so I'm in a very good mood today.
(laughter) Okay, cruelty, as Freud
describes it is the last resort of the humiliated.
The super ego wreaks on the defense's ego or the subjugated
child's wrath against its parents.
The law of ruthless expansion was, Arendt writes, a
psychological necessity before it was a political device.
A psychological necessity before it was a political device.
The front generation which emerged from the humiliation and
violence of World War I, she writes, read not Darwin, but the
Marquis de Sade. As we know, there were then
strictly no limits to what could take place.
Faced with the mentality of the SS, it would become the almost
impossible task of the next generation to take the measure
of the psychicly destructive powers of a form of conviction
so intense that it seems to have the power to destroy the mind
itself. To grasp that, "the psyche can
be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical
man." When I read this quote, by the
way, I thought she was talking about the inmates at the camp.
She's not. She's talking about the
destruction of the Nazi man, in the process of electing itself.
I had to read it several times. Can be destroyed even without
the destruction of the physical man, that indeed psyche
character and individuality seem under certain circumstances to
express themselves only through the rapidity with which they can
disintegrate. If totalitarianism wipes out the
mind, it does so however only by plunging its roots so
effectively into the worst of what the mind is capable of.
The reality of the camps was unbelievable, precisely because
the image of that reality could be found in the hidden echo
chambers of the human heart. Everything that was done in the
camps, Arendt writes, is known to us, from the world of
perverse malignant fantasies. At moments like this, as I see
it, Arendt raises the psychological stakes of her
discussion of the lies, deceit and false actualization of the
Nazi world. Nazism made its dreams come
true. One definition of the psychotic
is that their dreams come true. If it colonizes, destroys the
mind, it does so by breathing life, actual concrete life, into
their unconscious. We then should be very skeptical
about the Nazi claim that the only private individual in
Germany was someone who was asleep.
Under such forms of coercion, nobody was ever free, not even,
I would add especially, when they were asleep.
And here, I would just like to allude to Sara Guyer's book,
"Romanticism After Auschwitz," which I was reading this
afternoon, the chapter on wakefulness, and I thought this
point about the mind controlled even during its sleep is the
counter image to your discussion of wakefulness as a form of
ethical vigilance. I was very struck by what you
were saying. I would love to hear more from
you on that. As I read this account, what it
evokes from me most powerfully, is the world of Daniel Paul
Schreber, the Leipzig high court presiding judge whose
deranged 1903 memoirs were the object of one of Freud's few
forays into the realm of psychosis.
In her 2004 study of the meta-psychology of belief, Le
Besoin de Croire: Metapsycholgie du fait Religiex, French
psychoanalyst Sophie Mijolla-Mellor gives
central place to Schreber in a chapter called "Sacred
Intoxications." Now, for those of you who don't
know Schreber, a very famous case of Freud's, although he
didn't analyze him, he analyzed his memoirs, believed that he
was to be inseminated by God in order to repopulate the earth
with a new race. This makes him the carnal
embodiment of God's will and futurity, whose more abstract
virtue, though abstract is not quite the right word, we've
already seen at the heart of Nazism.
His solution to the problem of suffering, and we must never
underestimate the extent to which Nazism presented itself as
a solution to the suffering of the German people, is to try and
think, as the way Mijolla-Mellor puts it, from the point of view
or place of God. For her, belief always contains
this potentially delirious element as it tries to counter
the collapse of the child's faith in their own narcissistic
omnipotence, and in the parental capacity to restore its
infantile ideal. Belief arises out of that
melancholy recognition as its most fervent denial, which is
why for Kristeva, it is the adolescent who is the privileged
bearer of the domain of belief. As anybody with an adolescent
daughter will attest to that, I think.
If psychoanalysis then inspires its adherence to a type of faith
in turn, it is at least in part because it allows the analyst
not just a new creed, but to make his or her way back to the
mainspring of belief in the infantile mind to play in the
psychic four courts of conviction.
Now, Freud himself was contemptuous of religious
passion, from which, as I'm sure you know, he did all he could to
distance himself, although as I've written, and others have
written even much more fully elsewhere, his relationship to
his own Jewishness was in fact profoundly ambiguous.
In doing so, in distancing himself from religious passion,
I think he also underestimated the wider social force of
delusional systems like Schreber's, which elevate the
subject to an ecstatic albeit tortured relationship to God.
And by brushing aside longing for paternal protection as the
regressive component of faith, he also sidestepped the
potentially delirious tie that binds man to the divine.
This is to make of Schreber as Mijolla-Mellor does, a
demonstration or test case of the unconscious element of
belief. What Schreber then allows us to
see so graphically is how this whole system relies on a
systematic and interminable invasion of the realm of
thought. Now, Mijolla-Mellor does not
make the link. But for me, the similarities to
Arendt's account of totalitarianism are quite
overwhelming. The link is also historical.
Schreber's fervor, as we now know, was at the heart of the
new late-19th century gymnasium project, unsurpassed in its
cruel physical exactions that laid down some of the
educational foundations for Hitler.
The cruelty of these exactions, the belts, chin, head and back
straps, to which Schreber was subjected as a child, are well
known. I'm going to read you quite a
long quote from Schreber's memoirs, because I really think
it's worth it, so bear with me. And he's describing his
penetration by the divine rays. This influence-- I realize in
this lecture, I spend half my time reading, speaking the voice
of Hitler, and the other half speaking the voice of some
deranged high court presiding judge in pre-Nazi Germany.
So, what can I say. I'm sure you'll have many
thoughts and things to say about that.
Okay, this is the quote. "This influence showed itself
relatively early in the form of compulsive thinking.
An expression which I received from the inner voices
themselves, and which hardly be known to other human beings,
because the whole phenomenon lies outside all human
experience. The nature of compulsive
thinking lies in a human being having to think incessantly; in
other words, man's natural right to give the nerves of his mind
their necessary rest from time to time by thinking nothing, as
occurs most markedly during sleep, was from the beginning
denied me by the rays in contact with me; they continually wanted
to know what I was thinking about.
For instance I was asked these very words, 'What are you
thinking of now?' because this question is in
itself complete nonsense, as a human being can at certain times
as well think of nothing as of thousands of things at the same
time, and because my nerves did not react to this absurd
question, one was soon driven to take refuge in falsifying my
thoughts. For instance the above question
was answered spontaneously: 'He should' scilicet think 'about
the Order of the World'; that is to say the influence of the rays
forced my nerves to perform the movements corresponding to the
use of these words." Okay, now I just want to
comment on this, because I think it is so remarkable.
Compulsive thinking obliges you to falsify your thoughts.
Real mental freedom consists in the freedom to think nothing, to
drift off, or to think a thousand things at the same
time, another kind of drifting, as I'm sure several people are
doing in this lecture. In any lecture, I'm not being
self-flagellating here. Okay, likewise, St. Augustine
described his memory as "full beyond counting, with
countless kinds of things." Now, this is the opposite of
thinking about the Order of the World, which requires above all,
that the mind be self-present and consistent, and unchangeable
in a meaning in Hitler's words. Under totalitarianism, Arendt
writes, "the self cohesive force of logicality is mobilized lest
anybody ever start thinking," by which she means not
compulsively, but precisely freely and on their own terms.
Unlike authoritarianism, total domination does not aim to
restrict freedom, but to abolish it completely, including that of
spontaneity in general, including you might say the
capacity of the mind to drift and roam.
There must be no secrets. Schreber's instructions are
precise, as if his tormentors had understood only too well
that the human mind makes it's best bid for freedom simply by
losing itself, by changing tack, by being open to the confused
bits and pieces of mental life. This could be a definition of
the unconscious, which consists in the ability of the mind to
double and escape itself. Arendt then comes very close to
suggesting, after Lacan, or rather, before Lacan, we might
say, that deception is the very kernel of human thought.
Simply because of their capacity to think, she writes, human
beings are suspects by definition.
And this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior
for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change
one's mind. It is impossible, she writes, to
know it beyond doubt, another man's heart.
Psychoanalysts will say it's impossible for you to know one's
own. Torture then becomes quite a
desperate and eternally futile attempt to enter completely the
mind of another "to achieve what cannot be achieved."
So the idea of knowing another's mind is already a form
of invasion, which torture elevates to a craft.
It is then Schreber's dubious privilege as a former childhood
memory that anticipated the brutality of totalitarianism to
come, to lay bear the mechanism of torture at its core.
He belongs with the tortuous rather than the ecstatic
extremity of belief. Torture is the inverse image of
mental freedom. It is the state's rejoinder to,
as well as recognition of the fact that we are all suspects.
The common official argument that it is an exceptional
measure reluctantly embraced is therefore as psychologically as
it is politically evasive. After Schreber, I am tempted to
say, Arendt is describing the deep, violent psychic coercion
of totalitarian rule. Schreber's vulnerability to such
coercion is acute. It is precisely his paranoia to
live it so literally, body and soul.
But in fact, the structure has its origins in the germs of
mental life. All children, writes
Mijolla-Mellor, believe in the capacity of their parents to
read their thoughts. The delirium of the paranoid
repeats this belief ad infinitum.
In his famous 1919 essay on the Origin of the Infancy Machine
and Schizophrenia, Victor Tausk, one of Freud's most important
and troubled interlocutors, wrote "we are familiar with this
infantile stage of thinking, in which a strong belief exists
that others know of the child's thoughts.
Until the child has been successful in its first lie, the
parents are supposed to know everything, even its most secret
thoughts. The striving for the right to
have secrets from which the parents are excluded is
therefore one of the most powerful factors in the
formation of the ego, especially in establishing carrying out
one's one will." If there is no secrecy, there
is no mind. Underneath the totalitarian aim
to control, as Hitler put it, the freedom of the human mind,
lies the delusion that everything, everyone can be
fully known. When Arendt writes of total
domination, what she is describing therefore is the
destruction of the unconscious. In the final pages of the
Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes the ultimate
freedom as being identical with the capacity to begin.
This is one of her more lyrical moments of writing.
Just as freedom is the political realities identical with the
space of movement between men, her definition of democracy,
over such beginnings, she writes, no logic, no cogent
deduction can have any part, because the chain presupposes in
the form of a premise a new beginning.
It is therefore each new birth that totalitarianism hates, a
hatred that is wholly compatible of course with eugenics, because
each new birth "might raise its voice in the world," threatening
a multiplicity of possible futures that are uncontrollable
and unknown. So we are back with Frank
Kermode's equivocally offered futures of Shakespearian tragedy
as the antidote. Political freedom and psychic
freedom are therefore, as I see it in this argument,
inseparable. Only if the child is allowed its
secrets and lies, only if language can circulate in the
head and in the city space, will there ever be freedom for
humankind. And of course, I'm pushing
Arendt further than she would probably wish to go.
Arendt may be against the tyranny of logic, she may at
moments come close to psychoanalytic vision of the
mind, but she is also always cautious.
In these final pages, duality, equivocally and doubt, what we
might call the core of the Freudian subject, reappear as
something which the citizen must be protected against.
But this is because they are the attributes of the bereft lonely
man in the crowd, whose uncertainty makes him vulnerable
to totalitarian coercion. The lonely man is surrounded by
a hostile world. I thought this would make
Schreber the loneliest man on earth, whereas the solitary man,
she suggests, is alone, but together with himself, since men
have the capacity of talking with themselves, she's citing
Cicero, in solitude I am by myself together with myself, and
therefore two in one; whereas in loneliness, I am actually one,
deserted by all the others. Once again, Arendt is talking
about the inner most life. And here, it resonates with
Winnicott's capacity to be alone, that is in the presence
of the other that is so striking.
It is by means of thought, as I see it, myself alone with
myself, alone with a thousand thoughts, or none, that Arendt
strives to deliver the modern subject from the crowd, the
subject mass of totalitarian coercion in order to restore his
civic and psychic dignity. Work and the free play of the
imagination, Freud writes to Pfister in 1910, offer me the
same thing. I take no pleasure in anything
else. For Freud, such freedom requires
a full reckoning with the horrors of the world, which even
by the 1930s, Pfister can only, with the greatest reluctance, be
brought to contemplate. Freedom consists of freedom from
idealization and with it any form, any form, of sacred
belief. Pfister himself suggests that
the point in ethical matters is to be free thinkers without
being heroes. No false gods.
Freud, however, was less immune to their powers than it might
seem from his later writings on religion.
In 1899, I couldn't believe this when I found it, he wrote a poem
to Fliess, extolling him, "as the valiant's son who at the
behest of his father appeared at the right time to be his
assistant and fellow worker in furthering the divine order.
I don't think he was being ironic.
However, by the time he starts his correspondence with Pfister
ten years later, something has happened to place any such
appeal to the divine order, thank the lord, under Eurasia.
Psychoanalysis will henceforth join the ranks of the
disbelievers, of the future of an illusion, he writes to
Pfister somewhat mercilessly, I wanted to strike a blow at
superstition, stupidity and goggle-eyed self-abasement.
Even in the poem, in fact, Freud had called on the higher powers
to claim as his right to conclusion, belief and doubt,
which is kind of a strange mix, as if you can appeal to the
higher powers for the right to doubt them.
So there's something going on even there.
But by 1909, probably because he had started to father his own
movement, Freud has become acutely aware of the danger to
psychoanalysis of its demanding any such allegiance of its
becoming its own form of faith. The value of what we must write,
he penned, must depend on its containing nothing accepted on
authority. I do not call for any act of
faith on your part. I have deliberately set myself
up only as an example, but never as a model, let alone as an
object of veneration. However, and I think this is
just an important aspect of Freud's thinking.
It turns out that belief is absolutely at the core of the
psychoanalytic process for Freud.
And I'm just going to go through this very quickly with you and
then end the lecture by talking about St. Augustine.
It is crucial to Freud that psychoanalysis dissolves belief
in the crucible of transference, where at least
this is the risk and the challenge it most strongly
germinates and spreads. To this extent, as even
anticipation of Arendt, and indeed of his own later work on
mass psychology, Freud is offering psychoanalysis as its
own antidote to idealization, to the sacred perversity of the
group, starting with a group of two that is the analytic pair.
To call Freud a skeptic, as indeed he might call himself, is
therefore not quite right, since he immerses himself and indeed
the whole practice of psychoanalysis so firmly inside
the register of belief. What I then discovered in
reading Freud's correspondence with Pfister, it is that it is
out of the transference, a concept slow to emerge in
Freud's thinking, that psychoanalysis draws its
understanding of belief. Thus, he writes to Pfister,
failure to acknowledge the power of transference in the early
days of psychoanalysis meant that it remained untouchable and
divine. In the early cathartic method,
he writes, the transis was taken for granted rather like the
omnipresence of the divine being, who's assumed to be the
onlooker, but is unmentioned. This meant that the negative
transference, hostility to the analyst, "as in the case of most
decent neurotics," was overlooked.
There can be no negative transference to a god whose
existence or whose name remains unspoken.
If psychoanalysis fails to tolerate the unconscious
hostility of the patient, it will find itself, he writes, in
the position of Christ, who pronounces thy sins are forgiven
thee, arise and walk. It is a startling analogy.
And Freud does not let it go. Besides, he writes, the above
statement calls for analysis. If the sick man had asked, how
knowest thou that my sins will be forgiven?
The answer could only have been, I the son of God, forgive thee.
In other words, a call for unlimited transference.
I don't think there is another place in Freud's writing where
he so unequivocally links the issue of belief to that of
transference and both to the question of freedom.
Freud has brought the issue of belief into the consulting room.
This seems to me to be a far more important intervention into
the question of the future of an illusion, in which a belief is
no more than an illusion to be dissipated by the reason of the
mind. Freud's least Freudian work, I
might add, and more interesting again than the papers on
technique, where love is the demon of the cure.
Instead, what counts here is how the analytic process responds to
the potentially sacred powers of conviction.
To preserve his mental freedom and move on, the analysand must
retain his right to be suspicious, even of a forgiving
god. Freud does not, therefore, want
the world to be either forgiven or saved.
By the way, I said I was in a good mood today, because of what
had happened in London yesterday.
But of course, I must just point out to you the strange irony of
being here this November. I was in Chicago on November 4,
2008, and shared in the extraordinary euphoria of that
moment, so to come back two years later, after your midterm
elections is-- as you said, gallows humor, by the way.
It's extremely dispiriting, because one would be forgiven at
that moment in 2008 is thinking something's about to be saved,
right, it was very hard to avoid that language.
And Freud does not want the world to be either forgiven or
saved, which is kind of a relief, given where we are
today. Like the patient, he wants it to
know itself. And as the correspondence
progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that the free play
of the mind, of the imagination, the only thing apart from work
that gives Freud true pleasure is the freedom to -- the
worst of what human nature has to offer.
Freud's own negative transference we could say
reaches to the gods. In this, he is true to his
historical moment. What he wants is for the world
to take the measure of what it is, or what it will be, since he
does not live to see the worst capable of.
For Pfister, Freud is not godless, because he who lives in
the truth, lives in god. And he cites Nietzsche's
observation that even belief in science draws its fire from the
blaze lit by 1,000-year-old belief, the Christian belief,
which was also that of Plato, that God is truth, and truth is
divine. But supposing, as Nietzsche
continued, this grew less and less believable, and nothing
divine was left, save errors, blindness and lies.
Errors, blindness and lies are, however, as we've already seen,
where psychoanalysis begins. And in the end, this is where
the way of the pastor and the way of the psychoanalyst divide.
I do not properly understand, Pfister concludes, your outlook
on life. Okay, I'm now going to conclude,
the last few pages, by talking about St. Augustine.
I hope you'll see the relevance to what I've been trying to
track today. In her study of St. Augustine,
which I referred to at the beginning of this evening's
lecture, Rebecca West describes the ecstasy of his conversion,
"Could this exultation of spirit have continued without an end,
and all the other lesser visions have been quite taken away, and
that this exultation should ravish us and swallow us up, and
so wrap the beholder in these more inward joys, so that his
life might be forever like this moment of understanding which we
now side after; we're not this as much as enter into thy
master's joy. But when shall that be?
Shall it be when we shall all rise again, then nothing of us
will not be changed?" Now this experiences ecstasy,
which was a long time coming, "does not fall," Rebecca West
writes, it rests in the air, circling in its strength.
It was, she said, the peak of Augustine's experience, and
perhaps the most intense experience ever commemorated by
a human being. So she does not mince her words.
Nothing, she insists, not the -- of any obvious Christian
dimension, a cause of concern to many in the church at the time,
nor the transparent psycho drama, Augustine has this
experience along with his mother, who wanted him to go out
for a decade before he did. Should, she says, detract from
its significance from the fact that it was this experience, and
here's the link, that allowed Augustine to rise above the
political degradations that had been his lot, and the lot of his
fellow Africans under the yoke, the systematic degradations of
the Roman state. Here again, therefore the stake,
and not only in Africa, was freedom.
For West, in the declining days of empire, the common man
castrated of his world was left solely with the strictly limited
and not satisfying freedom of stray cats to ravage dustbins
and fight in alleys. Man, West comments, could not
use time in the only way it can serve him.
He had no chance to devise a drama in which he could play his
part and reveal the character of his self.
For Simone Weil, who's epigraph opened this lecture, it was the
total submission, required by the leaders of their subjects,
and the accompanying brutality that made the Roman empire the
template, the prime political exemplar of totalitarianism
under Hitler. By the end of his life in West's
reading, Augustine has lost the radical edge, the free floating
psychic expansion, the generous cosmic reach of that early
moment of intensity, that liberated him from the bounds of
a world which allowed man to aspire no further than to
servitude of empire and state. "What is it we serve the state
for? Can our hopes at court rise
higher than to be the emperor's friends?
And in this court, what is there that's not brittle and full of
perils." This was the words of a friend
African politician, who finds enlightenment on the way home
from a chariot race. Augustine becomes, as she puts
it bluntly, a conservative, in the clutches of a bureaucracy,
which brings its own inexorable violence.
Forgetting his own earlier admonition that it is better to
slay war with a word than to slay men with a sword, he simply
ignores a plea from one of his priests to allow him to foresake
his church and flee before the invaders, rather than watch men
slaying women outraged, churches burned, and himself tortured.
Augustine rejoins, you might say, the spirit of empire in
which Weil locates the origins of Hitlerism, and from which
mysticism had given him such exhilarating, if temporary,
exemption. I came across Rebecca West's
biography of Augustine quite by chance.
If it allows me to bring this lecture to a close, it is first
because it offers the experience of the mystic as an antidote to
tyranny and mental subordination, belief on the
side of the angels, as one might say.
Like but also unlike Schreber, it allows the mind its fullest
ecstatic possibilities, allows it less simply to take flight.
Also because it does so in the context of the Roman empire, in
which that other famous mystic Simone Weil writing in 1940,
locates the founding spirit of Hiterlism.
Now, in case you're starting to get worried, let me make clear
that I'm not proposing mysticism as a solution to the ills of the
world, though of course for the mystic, that is exactly what it
is. But rather, it is something like
another mode of thought. But if I end in this somewhat
unlikely place today, it is because the links I have traced
here this evening, from Hitler to Rome, from Augustine to
Freud, suggest to me that we tread with the utmost caution in
our assessment of the domain of belief.
We in the west have been its supreme and most deadly
choreographers. Belief can be at once an
antidote to tyranny, and the means by which it most brutally
and definitively secures itself. We should therefore begin by
drawing on our own rich store of experience to illustrate belief
in its inspiring and terrifying shapes.
Most simply, history demonstrates that we are not
immune from it, the modern world from Geothe to Joyce,
West concludes, has followed in Augustine's steps.
It is, therefore, our problem before, or at least as much as
that of anybody else. Thank you.
(applause)