Abstract
Despite Žižek's polemical attacks on Hannah Arendt, their writings on totalitarianism share significant similarities. Žižek's Lacanian analysis of the distortion of the elementary symbolic coordinates of human sociability in Stalinism refines Arendt's controversial account of the role of ideologies in totalitarian regimes; it brings to the political field an account of subjectivity and its relation to language derived from (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Reading Žižek's analyses of Stalinist and fascist ideologies preserves – by psychoanalytically reframing – the radical philosophical register of Arendt's understanding of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes as attempting the systematic destruction of ‘world’ – the in-between public space of shared political human experience and action. Žižek's psychoanalytic framework allows us to address the tendency in Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to conflate fascism and Stalinism and also to question the motives for these regimes’ political and ontological violences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In some theoretical debates, theorists who lament how structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Lyotard, and others) ‘do not have a theory of subjectivity’ have turned to Arendt’s Human Condition. Cornelius Castoriadis, to name one such thinker, explicitly draws on Arendt to ‘rescue the revolution with an ontology’.
The very term ‘subject’, Arendt might remind us, has its political heritage in the absolute monarchies of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. These were regimes that followed the dissolution of the multiplicity of feudal pacts and religious obligations. In these regimes, as a result, the monarchs were ‘sovereign’ in the sense of possessing what Bodin terms a potestas legibus soluta: a power absolved ultimately of all legality itself (Arendt, 1990, pp. 155–165). In the face of such power, the political agency of all other individuals in these regimes was suppressed, turning them into mere ‘subjects’ to the unchecked voluntas of the sovereign.
Both The Human Condition and On Revolution make Arendt’s hostility to liberalism's promotion of merely private liberties abundantly clear. In fact, the predominant theoretical model of totalitarianism, as it was deployed by the Western powers led by the USA in the Cold War, was shaped by the work of Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956).
As readers of Being and Time will know, Heidegger’s use of the word ‘public’ to qualify a phenomenon by contrast tends to be exclusively critical, implying the ‘inauthenticity’ of that phenomenon (Heidegger, 1962[1927]). This is not so in Arendt.
In speech act theory, the perlocutionary consequence of a speech act is the actual effect it has on those of its auditors who understand its meaning.
If a conflict breaks out between ordinary workers and the Party on some issue, the Stalinist response is for this reason not to say: ‘the Party must do more to more adequately represent the people’. The proper Stalinist response is this: ‘the people themselves [the resisting workers] have become alien to themselves or their Real interests [embodied directly in the Party]’.
References
Arendt, H. (1976) Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
Arendt, H. (1989) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1990) On Revolution. London: Penguin.
Aron, R. (2006) The essence of totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt. In: G. Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. Volume I: Arendt and Political Events. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 145–156.
Baehr, P. (2006) Identifying the unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism and the critique of sociology. In: G. Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. Volume I: Arendt and Political Events. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 224–264.
Crick, B. (2006) On rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism. In: G. Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. Volume I: Arendt and Political Events. Oxford: Routledge, pp. 159–173.
Friedrich, C. and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Z. (1956) Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. USA: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962[1927]) Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Lacan, J. (1992) Seminar VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. In: J.-A. Miller (ed.) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII. Translated by D. Porter, London/New York: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (2006) Ecrits, Translated by B. Fink, London: W.W. Norton.
Voegelin, E. (2006) Review of origins of totalitarianism. In: G. Williams (ed.) Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. Volume I: Arendt and Political Events. Oxford: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (1996) The fetish of the party. In: W. Apollon and R. Feldstein (eds.) Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics. USA: SUNY Press, pp. 3–30.
Žižek, S. (1997) Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (1999) When the party commits suicide. New Left Review 1 (238): 26–47.
Žižek, S. (2002) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sharpe, M. When the logics of the world collapse – Žižek with and against Arendt on ‘totalitarianism’. Subjectivity 3, 53–75 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.33
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.33