cc
pleasure to welcome Jacqueline >> Sara Guyer: It's a real
English at Queen Mary at the Rose, who is Professor of
She's, this week, a scholar in University of London.
Humanities. rI'm grateful to the Anonymouse
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
England. as an undergraduate abroad in
what continues to impress me now And what excited me then, and
once conceptual, political, ipsychoanalytic and literary.t
This was true in the essay on George Elliott, that was my
first encounter with her work,
like the one on Proust, Beckett aand Genet, that many of us had
the opportunity to discuss in a smaller seminar yesterday with
her.
through her extraordinarily important earlier work one
feminism and psychoanalysis,
of vision, where I first namely sexuality in the field
Others will know her work on encountered her.
And still others will have come to know Rose more recently,
through her courageous book,
essays in the London Review of "A Question of Zion," and her
gathered in the last resistance. Books, several of which are
is an unwillingness to turn away What distinguishes all this work
might be most uncomfortable to from the topics or scenes that
the woman question, whether uPeter Pan and what's kind ofn
creepy and strange
of Peter Pan, and more recently, and fascinating about the case
Early in the question of Zion, the past and future of Zionism.
anguished curiosity. Rose refers to this as an
And while it's not quite a That's her phrase.
suggest that it is what leads to conventional method, I want to
generosity and dissatisfaction, hopenness and criticalf
engagement. Tonight, Jacqueline Rose will
speak about "Total Belief:
Please join me in welcoming Delirium her.he West."
(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
the immense thoughtfulness inviting me to Madison, and for
hospitality also of the Center you've shown toward me, and
stimulating visit for me to be as a whole, and making it such a
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
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
So that is the sort of framework perversion.
think. within which I'm trying to
That's not just a formality to And I mean trying to think.
Okay, the lecture has a quotation from Simone Weil, from
her essay "Thoughts on the
says the principle difference between Hitler and the Romans is
that Hitler exerted totalitarian
master of the world, which in diall probability is whating
prevented him from doing so.
proper domain of the Since it seems that it is the
own subjects over and above totalconquering any others. its
Towards the end of "Alone in
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
Toward the end of this novel, Otto Quangel, who has been
sentenced to death for
across the city, is visited by a depositing anti-Nazi postcards
Quangel insists he is an chaplain.
Undeterred, the chaplain unbeliever.
pantheist. suggests he might therefore be a
while Quangel claims not to know It's quite simple, he remarks,
about. what on earth he's talking
Your only mortal soul will It's the world's soul, you know.
Quangel remains unconsoled. reEverything is God, he asks.l.
Is Hitler God?
God? Is all the killing out there
Am I? Now, "Every Man Dies Alone," has
become an international best
I'm sure it's not because of seller.
quasi-theological niceties of the issues raised by them.
Nonetheless, I will be arguing
the question of belief is at the this evening after Hannah Arendt
totalitarianism. core of any understanding 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
as I said with this darkest moment of 20th century European
history so strikingly explored
I really strongly recommend it. Most simply, Quangel's reply to
the chaplain is just one
of a fundamental paradox of verfaith that an omnisciention
all-powerful God must be
of the world. If the whole world is God, then
so is Hitler and his murderous
Quangel's reply, Is Hitler God? then raises theological stakes
by ascribing divinity to Hitler himself.
Lighting on one of the
indeed a god for many of his properties of Nazism, Hitler was
He brushes against the mystical or religious component of
political or group allegiance.
means the total destruction of For Arendt, totalitarianism
Today, I'll be pushing her mental freedom.
looking at how totalitarianism argument a bit further, by
components, the unconscious drift and dynamic of political
belief. A little later in their
discussion, Quangel asks for a
The chaplain will tell his wife, favor.
although he is in fact to be likewise condemned, that
dying at the same time. exeThe chaplain refuses.l be
As a man of God, he cannot
not to lie. vSo you never lie, Reverend?nt
Quangel retorts.
life? Once again, their exchange is
eloquent of a radical dimension of belief.
That fact that Jacques Lacan put
with this implied claim to truth it, the covert meaning of belief
capable of lying. isThe chaplain is lying aboutis
lying, by suggesting that he
It is a fundamental premise of never lies.
himself. psychoanalysis that man deceives
Augustine's astonishing power as Writing of what she calls St.
Rebecca West describes his an introspective psychologist,
recognition that the working of the conscious mind does not
inevitably turn out truth as its
instead involve a frationalization of error.t
He was able to realize, as she
attempts to defy memory show, he continues, that because as his
of an unconscious mind. wNow, I'll be holding onto this
idea that Augustine's awareness of the unconscious was a core
component of his belief.
tolerated by belief's Scontemporary defenders, andys
certainly it plays no part in Arendt's graduate dissertation
on St. Augustine. In absence of mind, her recent
disposition on belief in the
who I'm sure you know above all moas a famous fiction writer,n,
takes issue and turns resonant
theological twist, with a psychoanalytic posture that the
Freudian subject enthralled to
fundamental sense untrue to her the uncor himself. in some
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
is unacceptable to Robinson. to the self as experience," that
a form of self-awareness and For her, religious experience is
Even in its most mysterious pathways, the mind has a true.
hunch of itself.
favorite contemporary writers, Now, Robinson is one of my
way she puts questions of religion and faith and belief at
the core of her fiction.
St. Augustine, we could say, she Yet, I'm intrigued that unlike
the complexity of the mind in should fethese terms.to defend
If there is an unconscious, then
profoundest insight into his own man loses his grip on his
Mounting her defeat of the nature.
against belief, as she calls skeptics, or the crusaders
an all-knowing, self-possessed them, Robinson cannot relinquish
For me, this means side-stepping vision of the mind.
radical, certainly at times the most disturbing dimension of
belief. I see it as a missed
opportunity, which I will also
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
So much so that Julia Kristeva relationship to these issues.
Freud's incursion into this domain of belief, far more than
his theory of sexuality of the
resistance or hostility to unconscious that provokes
Writing to the Swiss pastor, psychoanalysis.
famously declared himself a Oskar Pf"godless Jew.", Freud
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
gives with the other. Nonetheless, Pfister believes in
Freud.
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.
of their correspondence, such confidence is, however, becoming
much harder to maintain.
Freud, written on his return In one of his last letters to
describes his disgust at what he from a visit to Germany, Pfister
militarism which he said, "stinks even more evilly than
the blueblooded yonkers spirit
cowardly towards the outside of the Wilhelmine era, and which
rage on defenseless Jews." world, wreaks it's infantile
him who in the face of such crass idiocy, still has the
strength to be a doctor of
Although as Freud responds, if souls.
the world, why should a thipsychoanalyst have it any in
easier? If Nazism comes close to
destroying belief, it also, as I
to a dark corner of the psyche, for which it is unclear if any
form of belief, if any of us can
The point not being that we're fully claim exemption.
banal point, as Hannah Arendt might say, but that we are all,
one way or another, implicated
Kristeva calls "pre-political aforms 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
Belief would then be the true rlost object, which we cling to
for the rest of our lives.
the unconscious, from where it Belief plunges its roots into
shadowy shapes. We are all potential recruits
into the divine edges of
Quangel's question, Is Hitler God; is all the killing out
there God?
rhetorical. There can be no god, no belief
in a divine origin of mankind in
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
were at the very heart of belief in Nazism.his purpose
It cannot be doubted, writes
totalitarianism, that concludes the origins of totalitarianism,
either the Nazi leadership
not merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the follow.
And this is a quote.
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
of the almighty. more do we conform to the will
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
by the SS for the ideological indoctrination of its cadets,d
are no more than variations on
Hitler knew that his movement would only succeed, "by.
awakening a sacrosanct
conviction in the heart of its conviction, a sacrosanct
He described the basic followers."
covenant and as a profession of postulates offaith.ovement as a
He knew that is, that Nazism
that marshaled unconditional had to be a total weltanschauung
allegiance. Experience teaches, he writes,
that the human being fights only
believes and which he loves. for something in which he
hesitate, as is known, to draw To this end, Hitler did not
church. o"The mysterious artificialc
dimness of the Catholic churches
burning candles, the incense, also the --, and so on.", the
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
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
and truth. precarious border between lying
in relation to Nazism, therefore One way of thinking about belief
conjugations of the proposition, would be as a set of deranged
for Lacan contains the lie as the inverse or perverse supports
of any utterings."
believe you, is the statement by Please stop lying, I already
Reik invokes in order best to a patcapture the radicallyeodore
exasperated self-defeating claim
subject. to truthhood of any human
"as the nicer knowledge of What Wallace Stevens describes
is not true." Did he believe or disbelieve,
asks Reik.
Wishes and their denials, faith and mistrust, appetites and
distastes.
totalitarianism was playing an To this extent, Nazi
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
despising the party membership. tWhat above all is despised iss
the gullibility shown by the
contempt. Each group considers itself to
be the possessor of a different superior level of truth.
To that extent, the higher you
fervent, fearless Hitler would move up the hierarchy, the more
closer you get to knowing that say your belief, but also the
web of deceit. the whole system is based on a
way before its time. This is Slavoj-Zizek cynicism,
idea from Hannah Arendt. And I like to think he got the
admit this to themselves for a Of course, the leaders do not
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
of the atrocities that had taken who admitted to full knowledge
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
He had been entrusted with the time of their trial.
I was not to blame for these monitoring their mental health.
He was a genius. horrors.
to his program completely. A great leader, and I subscribed
the two propositions cancel each That's catalogic, by the way,
These were interviews conducted in May, 1946.
He was sentenced to death in
hanged himself in his cell. OctoWhat of course cannot be, he
admitted is that he knew the
went along with it regardless. whole system was fraudulent, but
the system was a type of For Arendt, the consequence of
mental pandemonium, which also national and international
strict inner logic. The results, she writes, is that
the gullibility of the
to the outside world. syWhile at the same time, theble
graduated cynicism of membership
danger that the leader will ever and elite members eliminates any
own propaganda to make good his be forcown statements.t of his
The main delusion of the outside
the system. wTo trust on the one hand thatad
the enormity of its lies will be
and on the other that the Furor thecould be held to his word.m,
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.
this is of course a type of As well ascatalogic.lfillment,
Again, the people know, and will
truth. ultimately be guided by the
especially the leader who so Leaders, even or perhaps
men. misguides him, must be honorable
cancel each other out does not That these two propositions
combined and deadly power. in any sense limit their
knowledge that has been so much at the forefront of discussion
of Nazi Germany, who knew, who
twisted fabric of belief, I did notwould suggest.strange
The question perhaps therefore
believed and how. shoEven Arendt's account, theho
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.
belief into evidence, to make the world conform, to mirror, to
fulfill the Nazi mind.
ideologists. The elite do not consist of
is "aimed at abolishing their Icapacity for distinguishingon
between truth and falsehood,
Theirs is a peculiar form of between reality and fiction."
Arendt writes, in their ability "immediately to dissolve every
statement of fact into a
I think it's worth pausing at decthis for a minute.e."
So, the membership need to be persuaded of the inferiority of
the Jews before it can be safely
It is the characteristic of their elite formations to
understand without question,
inferior, means that all Jews "thmust and will be killed." are
No mere mass phenomenon, this mentality requires a very
particular form of cultivation. The whole effectiveness of the
program depends on it.
the object of the most carefully Without this mentality, this was
schools of thought and indoctrination by totalitarian
not have been able to bring leadersitself to life.m would
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
its fiction. direction of realizing
a hallucinatory, delirious So the elite of the guardians of
Arendt does not use the word world.
word borderline. psychotic, but she does use the
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.
feel too acutely the Without such a wall, they would
ficticousness of their own discrepancy, "between the lying
world." aNow I have to say here thatl
I'm less confident than Arendt
world, or indeed in its reality. in the concept of a normal
bearers of the form of knowledge But note how the masses are the
itself. thaIf the system never stopsknow
working, it is because the
protected from the specter of masses disbelief.dlessly
Disbelief haunts the system, the
which it is inextricably wed. This goes beyond the dimension
of complicity as I see it, but I
by the idea of false don't think it's covered either
of bad faith. As if Nazism constructed itselft
with the most painstaking attention to an order of belief
that it knew only too well was
Incroyable, as Kristeva would beyonsay.lief.
Provided we add that the element
threat to belief, but how belief of unbelievability is not a
historic moments such as this one, it most effectively secures
and protects itself.
divine grandiosity of Nazism So it's not therefore simply the
that propositions of Nazism thamoved into the realm ofway
incontrovertible sacred fact, and there upon are immediately
bound to fulfill themselves.
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,
What matters is how the form of the delirium, its mental
enactment, turns the Nazi into
Remember this quotation. the agent of God.
Nazi leadership actually It cannot be doubted that the
use as propaganda such doctrines believed in and did not merely
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
famous example is his announcement in January, 1939,
"I want today once again to make
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.
succeed once more in hurling the "In case the Jewish financiers
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
a hidden relation of causality. rathThe Jews will succeed in by
precipitating world war.
It's the type of double The Jeapocalypse.killed.
The Jews are already guilty of
the world must and will be the end of the world, from which
Belief in a system therefore saved.
The movement produced a hamentality which "thought inme.
conscience and felt in
as working for a great task cwhich occurs but once in everyt
2,000 years.
avoid discussion, "Arendt Therrightly notes, "than byy to
releasing an argument from the
that only the future will controfulfill its merits. saying
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.
All debate about the truth or Thfalsity of a totalitariane.
dictator's predictions, she comments, is as weird as arguing
with a potential murderer whether his future victim
is dead or alive, since by
the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness
of his statement."
of intent, Hitler's prophecy As well as being a declaration
today and all the potential abotomorrows of the world.ween
It seizes the future according
whose latent sometimes explicit tnature is precisely divine.y,
Man only does or suffers, writes
immutable laws is bound to Arendt, what according to
And then she reminds that it was happen anyway.
appeal, and this is Tocqueville speaking, "absolutist systems
which represent all the events
great first causes linked by the of history as depending upon the
it were, suppress men from the chain of fatality, and which, as
Okay, it so happened that as I history of the human race."
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
of theory and to whom I'm happy ethis evening to acknowledge anm
enormous personal and intellectual debt.
I was struck by how central the question of belief and indeed
apocalypse, hence the title of
famous study of fiction and the book, itime. deservedly
Has anybody read Kermode's
I'm getting a few. "The Sense of an Ending?"
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
knowledge of belief, that what Wallace Stevens, "the nicer
fact form of the epigraphs to his second chapter on fiction.
For Stevens, "the last and
of the absolute, or of an greatest fiabsolute."he fiction
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
other dangerous relations. force from what he calls its
totalitarianism is central In this discussion,
to bend the world to the mind. precisely because of its power
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,
have no guarantee can be no less "for his opinion that opinions
which it alludes." fictive than the opinion to
lie as its counterpoint. Once again, belief reveals the
such a view may be in danger of colluding with or encouraging
people who believe that death on
in fact is the only way, a large scale can also be a way,
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
responsibility for Nazi with, or inatrocity.ng version,
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
with a brutality and unseemly haste with which fiction in Nazi
Germany tipped into the register
The problem with delirium being not that the belief is false,
but instead that it becomes real
"If the value of an opinion is so fast.
in the world," writes Kermode, to be tested only by its success
one's opinions of the Jews can echoing Arendt, the validity of
Jews." be proved by killing six million
is so germane to my topic this Now, if the sense of an ending
totalitarianism into the realm evening, it is because it brings
"There might even be a of fiction and its powers.
"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.
fantasies, both King Lear and Tthe Third Reich, he suggests,ic
force us to recognize "that is
whenever we invent fictions." oThere is, however, you'll be
glad to hear, a crucial difference.
Unlike Lear, Nazism tells us
projects it onto, and acts it, nothing about death, but instead
We could say that perversely by means of others.
deaths it performs, belonging rather, committing the of to the
realm of nonexistence in
"neither birth nor death." Arendt's words, it knows
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
are." expThis is not therefore ahey
positivist kind of reality, as I
when citing Arendt. wasBut reality as the endlessier
capacity and openness of words. It is precisely because it loses
its sense of belonging in time
up to the world of the gods. that Nazism starts to climb back
hovers over time. Unlike "the equivocally offered
futures," that's Kermode of Shakespearian tragedy, the Third
Reich was the disastrous
limited designs on the time of consequence of "trying to impose
"In tragedy, on the other hand," he says, "the great
crises and ends of human life do
Similarly, religious historian not stop time."
most effective spokeswoman for Karen Armstrong, perhaps today's
against the supremacy of the -- as, "something that had in someh
sense happened once, but that also happens all the time."
For Armstrong, too, we subsist
unmasterable time. most profoundly in recurring
utterance, the result will be the annihilation of the Jewish
race in Europe. I had in fact forgotten how
important Hannah Arendt was to
how central Jewish thought was Kermode's argument, as well as
He describes what he's doing to his vision of the critic.
quasi-rabbinical. And he concedes just that Hamlet
in one quote is not the Torah.
grandiosity, the means of the world careering to its end is
the ceaseless interpretability
of the critic, to cultivate. of things, which it is the task
calls the endless chains and Seen in this light, what Kermode
semiotics, or, again a quote, crthose condensations and of
displacements of psychoanalysis,
himself in fact became -- of modern theory, which he
led to several heated arguments increasinbetween us.nt, which
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."
book that can be exfoliated, his Insisting that the world is a
that this process is endless, wobecomes then if not theand
counter-myth to the belief that time can be halted, world and
word perfectly aligned, that the
the Jews can be proved by vakilling six million Jews.of
In this light, Nazism is
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
be looked for in its external wroformulas, but in its innerer
meaning, and this meaning is
Now I want to now push this a little further in psychoanalytic
terms.
whenever I read Arendt, I'm Alstruck by this aspect of her,
writing.
the Sigmund Freud Prize of the To her surprise, she was awarded
und Dichtung in 1967. DeHer biographer, Elisabethhe
Young-Bruhl points out--
went on to become a Elpsychoanalyst, by the way.f
She comments that Arendt
sympathy with Freud. would've won no prizes for
understanding of totalitarianism It is, however, central to her
domination of the human spirit, "an inner coercion whose only
content is the avoidance
Inner coercion whose only content is the avoidance
of contradictions.
terms. The inner meaning in Hitler's
totalitarianism in her argument from all other political
movements, is its demand "for the total unconditional and
unalterable loyalty of its
In Hitler's words, the problem individual members.
the human will." of "influencing the freedom of
allegiance because he has discovered, "a means ofy
dominating and terrorizing human
So what I'm asking you to see here is the way Arendt's
argument, which is a political
progressively, in my reading of her, inside the human mind,s
inside the psyche.
movement is dying, thus when the So everything outside the
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
rendered in Hirschbiegel's 2004 rfilm "Downfall," based ony
Hitler's final ten days in his
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
"The truth is that for a reason I still cannot explain to.
myself, perhaps like a thief who
scene of his crime, something fivery deep inside me drew methe
towards the chancellery.
external coercion, but it works Tabove all through the inneris
life, relying in Arendt's words,
compulsion with which we can listen to this, "on the
Compulsion with which we can compel ourselves."
It relies, that is, on our inner compel ourselves.
Freud will describe in his attraction to force, to what
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
humanitarian hypocrisy, a warning the new Coalition
government in the UK with it's
cruelty might do very well to mixture ofheed.ralism and
Incidentally today's a good day,
streets and -- conservative bparty headquarters protestinghe
against the educational cuts, so
(laughter) I'm in a very good mood today.
describes it is the last resort Okaof the humiliated.ud
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
A psychological necessity before it was a political device.
The front generation which it was a political device.
violence of World War I, she emerged from the humiliation and
Marquis de Sade. writes, read not Darwin, but the
strictly no limits to what could As we know, there were then
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
so intense that it seems to have powers of a form of conviction
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
She's not. about the inmates at the camp.
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
express themselves only through the rapidity with which they can
disintegrate. If totalitarianism wipes out the
mind, it does so however only by
effectively into the worst of what the mind is capable of.
The reality of the camps was
the image of that reality could unbe found in the hidden echose
chambers of the human heart.
camps, Arendt writes, is known Everything that was done in the
perverse malignant fantasies. At moments like this, as I see
it, Arendt raises the psychological stakes of her
discussion of the lies, deceit
Nazi world. aNazism made its dreams comehe
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.
about the Nazi claim that Wthe only private individual inl
Germany was someone who was asleep.
Under such forms of coercion, nobody was ever free, not even,
I would add especially, when
And here, I would just like to they were asleep.
"Romanticism After Auschwitz," allude to Sara Guyer's book,
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
ethical vigilance. of wakefulness as a form of
were saying. I was very struck by what you
you on that. I would love to hear more from
evokes from me most powerfully, Asis the world of Daniel Paulit
Schreber, the Leipzig high
deranged 1903 memoirs were the court presiding judge whose
forays into the realm of object of one of Freud's few
In her 2004 study of the psychosis.
Besoin de Croire: Metapsycholgie meta-psychology of belief, Le
psychoanalyst Sophie Mijolla-Mellor gives
central place to Schreber in
Intoxications." Now, for those of you who don't
know Schreber, a very famous
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.
embodiment of God's will and This makes him the carnal
virtue, though abstract is not futurity, whose more abstract
already seen at the heart of quite the right word, we've
His solution to the problem of Nazism.
underestimate the extent to which Nazism presented itself as
a solution to the suffering of
think, as the way Mijolla-Mellor the German people, is to try and
or place of God. puts it, from the point of view
this potentially delirious For her, belief always contains
the collapse of the child's faith in their own narcissistic
omnipotence, and in the parental
infantile ideal. capacity to restore its
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
mainspring of belief in the minfantile mind to play in thee
psychic four courts of
Now, Freud himself was conviction.
passion, from which, as I'm sure contemptuous of religious
distance himself, although as yI've written, and others haveto
written even much more fully
his own Jewishness was in fact elsewhere, his relationship to
In doing so, in distancing profoundly ambiguous.
I think he also underestimated himself from religious passion,
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,
potentially delirious tie that he also sidestepped the
This is to make of Schreber as binds man to the divine.
demonstration or test case of the unconscious element of
belief. What Schreber then allows us to
see so graphically is how this
systematic and interminable invasion of the realm of
thought.
make the link. Now, Mijolla-Mellor does not
Arendt's account of Buttotalitarianism are quite to
overwhelming. The link is also historical.
Schreber's fervor, as we now
new late-19th century gymnasium kproject, unsurpassed in itse
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.
long quote from Schreber's I'm going to read you quite a
it's worth it, so bear with me. memoAnd he's describing hishink
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
Okay, this is the quote. that.
relatively early in the form of "Thiscompulsive thinking.self
An expression which I received
themselves, and which hardly be known to other human beings,
because the whole phenomenon
experience. The nature of compulsive
thinking lies in a human being
other words, man's natural right having to think incessantly; in
their necessary rest from time to give the nerves of his mind
occurs most markedly during tsleep, was from the beginnings
denied me by the rays in contact
to know what I was thinking with me; theyabout.nually wanted
For instance I was asked these
thinking of now?' because this question is in
itself complete nonsense, as a
as well think of nothing as of human being can at certain times
time, and because my nerves did thounot react to this absurdame
question, one was soon driven to
thoughts. For instance the above question
was answered spontaneously: 'He should' scilicet think 'about
the Order of the World'; that is
forced my nerves to perform the tmovements corresponding to thes
use of these words."
comment on this, because I think Okay, now I just want to
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
time, another kind of drifting, as I'm sure several people are
doing in this lecture.
self-flagellating here. Okay, likewise, St. Augustine
described his memory
countless kinds of things." aNow, this is the opposite ofh
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
anybody ever start thinking," by of logicality is mobilized lest
compulsively, but precisely freely and on their own terms.
Unlike authoritarianism, total
restrict freedom, but to abolish domination does not aim to
spontaneity in general, itincluding you might say the of
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
losing itself, by changing tack, best bid for freedom simply by
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
beings are suspects by to think, she writes, human
And this suspicion cannot be definition.
for the human capacity to think dis also a capacity to changer
one's mind. It is impossible, she writes, to
know it beyond doubt, another man's heart.
Psychoanalysts will say it's
own. impossible for you to know one's
desperate and eternally futile Torture then becomes quite a
mind of another "to achieve attwhat cannot be achieved."the
So the idea of knowing
of invasion, which torture another's mind is already a form
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
extremity of belief. rather than the ecstatic
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
measure reluctantly embraced is therefore as psychologically as
it is politically evasive.
say, Arendt is describing the Adeep, violent psychic coercion
of totalitarian rule. Schreber's vulnerability to such
coercion is acute.
live it so literally, body and It is precisely his paranoia to
But in fact, the structure has soul.
mental life. its origins in the germs of
Mijolla-Mellor, believe in the All children, writes
read their thoughts. capacity of their parents to
repeats this belief The delad infinitum.paranoid
In his famous 1919 essay on the Origin of the Infancy Machine
and Schizophrenia, Victor Tausk,
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
parents are supposed to know successful in its first lie, the
thoughts. eThe striving for the right toet
have secrets from which the parents are excluded is
therefore one of the most powerful factors in the
formation of the ego, especially
one's one will." in establishing carrying out
is no mind. Underneath the totalitarian aim
to control, as Hitler put it, the freedom of the human mind,
lies the delusion that
fully known. everything, everyone can be
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
space of movement between men, realities identical with the
over such beginnings, she writes, no logic, no cogent,
deduction can have any part,
the form of a premise a new because thebeginning.supposes in
It is therefore each new birth
hatred that is wholly compatible that totalitarianism hates, a
each new birth "might raise its voice in the world," threatening
a multiplicity of possible
and unknown. futures that are uncontrollable
Kermode's equivocally offered futures of Shakespearian tragedy
as the antidote.
freedom are therefore, as I see Politit in this argument,chic
inseparable.
secrets and lies, only if Olanguage can circulate in thets
head and in the city space, will
humankind. there ever be freedom for
Arendt further than she would Andprobably wish to go.ing
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
In these final pages, duality, cautious.
might call the core of the equivocally and doubt, what we
something which the citizen must Freudian subject, reappear as
But this is because they are the be protected against.
man in the crowd, whose uncertainty makes him vulnerable
to totalitarian coercion. The lonely man is surrounded by
a hostile world.
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
Cicero, in solitude I am by myself together with myself, and
therefore two in one; whereas in
deserted by all the others. Once again, Arendt is talking,
about the inner most life.
Winnicott's capacity to be And here, it resonates with
of the other that is so alone, thastriking.he presence
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
civic and psychic dignity. coercion in order to restore his
imagination, Freud writes to Work and the free play of 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
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
to Fliess, extolling him, "as whthe valiant's son who at theem
behest of his father appeared at
assistant and fellow worker in the right time to be his
I don't think he was being furthering the divine order.
However, by the time he starts ironic.
ten years later, something has his correspondence with Pfister
appeal to the divine order, thank the lord, under Eurasia.
Psychoanalysis will henceforth
disbelievers, of the future of join the ranks of the
Pfister somewhat mercilessly, I wanted to strike a blow at
superstition, stupidity and goggle-eyed self-abasement.
Even in the poem, in fact, Freud
to claim as his right to had called on the higher powers
which is kind of a strange mix, cas if you can appeal to the,
higher powers for the right to
So there's something going on even there.
But by 1909, probably because he
movement, Freud has become had started to father his own
psychoanalysis of its demanding acany such allegiance of itsto
becoming its own form of faith. The value of what we must write,
he penned, must depend on its containing nothing accepted on
authority.
faith on your part. I have deliberately set myself
up only as an example, but never
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
And I'm just going to go through Freud.
then end the lecture by talking this about St. Augustine.u and
It is crucial to Freud that psychoanalysis dissolves belief
in the crucible of
this is the risk and the transference, where at least
germinates and spreads. cTo this extent, as evenly
anticipation of Arendt, and indeed of his own later work on
mass psychology, Freud is offering psychoanalysis as its
own antidote to idealization, to
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
the whole practice of psychoanalysis so firmly inside
the register of belief. What I then discovered in
reading Freud's correspondence
out of the transference, a with Pfister, it is that it is
Freud's thinking, that concept slow to emerge in
understanding of belief. psychoanalysis draws its
failure to acknowledge the power Thus, he writes to Pfister,
days of psychoanalysis meant of transference in the early
divine. tIn the early cathartic method,d
he writes, the transis was taken
omnipresence of the divine for granted rather like the
onlooker, but is unmentioned. bThis meant that the negativee
transference, hostility to the
decent neurotics," was analyst, "as in the case of most
There can be no negative overlooked.
existence or whose name remains transfereunspoken.god whose
If psychoanalysis fails to
hostility of the patient, it tolerate the unconscious
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
The answer could only have been, be forgiven?
In other words, a call for I the son of God, forgive thee.
I don't think there is another unlimited transference.
he so unequivocally links the plissue of belief to that ofre
transference and both to the
Freud has brought the issue of question of freedom.
This seems to me to be a far belief into the consulting room.
the question of the future of an more important intervention into
no more than an illusion to be illusion, in which a belief is
mind. dFreud's least Freudian work, I
might add, and more interesting again than the papers on
technique, where love is the
Instead, what counts here is how demon of the cure.
the potentially sacred powers of the analytic process responds to
To preserve his mental freedom conviction.
retain his right to be and move on, the analysand must
god. suspicious, even of a forgiving
the world to be either forgiven Freud does or saved.efore, want
By the way, I said I was in a good mood today, because of what
had happened in London
But of course, I must just point yesterday.
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
And Freud does not want the world to be either forgiven or
saved, which is kind of a relief, given where we are
today.
know itself. Like the patient, he wants it to
progresses, it becomes clearer And as the correspondence
of the mind, of the imagination, and clearer that the free play
that gives Freud true pleasure the only thing apart from work
worst of what human nature has is the freedom to -- the
Freud's own negative to offer.
reaches to the gods. transference we could say
historical moment. In this, he is true to his
to take the measure of what it What he wants is for the world
does not live to see the worst is, or what it will be, since he
For Pfister, Freud is not godless, because he who lives in
the truth, lives in god.
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.
the way of the pastor and the way of the psychoanalyst divide.
I do not properly understand, Pfister concludes, your outlook
on life.
the last few pages, by talking Okay, I'm now going to conclude,
I hope you'll see the relevance to what I've been trying to
track today.
which I referred to at the In her study of St. Augustine,
lecture, Rebecca West describes the ecstasy of his conversion,
"Could this exultation of spirit
and all the other lesser visions have continued without an end,
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
master's joy. aBut when shall that be?y
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,
It was, she said, the peak of Augustine's experience, and
perhaps the most intense
a human being. experience ever commemorated by
Nothing, she insists, not the So-- of any obvious Christiands.
dimension, a cause of concern to
nor the transparent psycho many in the church at the time,
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
here's the link, that allowed thAugustine to rise above theand
political degradations that had been his lot, and the lot of his
fellow Africans under the yoke, the systematic degradations of
the Roman state.
and not only in Africa, was Here again, freedom.e the stake,
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.
use time in the only way it can Man, West serve him.could not
He had no chance to devise a
part and reveal the character of drama in which he could play his
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
template, the prime political texemplar of totalitarianismhe
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
servitude of empire and state. aspire no further than to
for? "What is it we serve the state
higher than to be the emperor's Can our hofriends?ourt rise
And in this court, what is there
perils." that's not brittle and full of
African politician, who finds enlightenment on the way homed
from a chariot race.
it bluntly, a conservative, in Augustine becomes, as she puts
which brings its own inexorable the clutchviolence.ureaucracy,
Forgetting his own earlier
slay war with a word than to admonition that it is better to
ignores a plea from one of his slay men with a sword, he simply
his church and flee before the priests to allow him to foresake
slaying women outraged, churches invaders, rather than watch men
Augustine rejoins, you might burned, and himself tortured.
which Weil locates the origins say, the spirit of empire in
mysticism had given him such of Hitlerism, and from which
exemption. exhilarating, if temporary,
biography of Augustine quite by I came acrchance.ecca West's
If it allows me to bring this lecture to a close, it is first
because it offers the experience
tyranny and mental of the mystic as an antidote to
side of the angels, as one might subordination, belief on the
Like but also unlike Schreber, say.
ecstatic possibilities, allows it allows the mind its fullest
Also because it does so in the it less simply to take flight.
which that other famous mystic context of the Roman empire, in
locates the founding spirit of Simone Weil writing in 1940,
Now, in case you're starting to get worried, let me make clear
that I'm not proposing mysticism
world, though of course for the mystic, that is exactly what ite
is. But rather, it is something like
another mode of thought.
unlikely place today, it is because the links I have traced
here this evening, from Hitler
Freud, suggest to me that we to Rome, from Augustine to
our assessment of the domain of tread with tbelief.st caution in
We in the west have been its
choreographers. Belief can be at once an
antidote to tyranny, and the
and definitively secures itself. means by which it most brutally
drawing on our own rich store of We should therefore begin by
in its inspiring and terrifying experience tshapes.trate belief
Most simply, history
immune from it, the modern world demonstrates that we are not
West concludes, has followed in frAugustine's steps.,
It is, therefore, our problem before, or at least as much as
that of anybody else. Thank you.
(applause)