WPT University Place Humanities Without Borders  Jacqueline Rose, "Total Belief: Delirium in the West"  November 11, 2010 UP520   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)