Monatshefte | 2019
Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory. By Christina Gerhardt. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. 307 pages + 25 b/w illustrations. $91.00 hardcover, $81.89 e-book.
Abstract
of the community of sons reoccupies the place of the father’s unlimited sovereignty. Freud’s reading of the “Moses of Michelangelo,” in turn, provides an emblem of a “zivilisatorische[s] Verharren vor der Kraft des nicht ausbrechenden archaischen Zorns,” whose “bewusste[r] Aufschub der Tat” provides a counterpoint to Hamlet’s brooding persistence in reflection (165). This moment of hesitation, Fohrmann claims, is analogous to elongation of time in drama prior to the moment of anagnorisis, and it condenses in a moment of non-time an unresolvable ambivalence. For Freud, the ambivalent father-son relationships of Oedipus and Hamlet are given ontogenetic expression in the development of human cultures. The rhetorical forms of transference (metaphor), condensation (metonymy), and displacement (synecdoche) allow us to see how these moments of ambivalence result not in omnipotent sovereignty but in a shared sociability. Scene 5 (“Politik als Effekt von Kultur und das ‘Politische’”), together with the book’s epilogue, argue that culture produces a concept of politics (Politik) radically different from Schmitt’s concept of the political (das Politische). As an effect of culture, politics forgoes the marking of the other and the permanent production of absolute enmity characteristic of the political. The conceptual basis of this sense of politics is provided by Kant’s notion of a sensus communis, which implies reciprocity, and by Arendt’s definition of political power as the “Pluralität einer (Mit-)Welt” in which “kein Mensch souverän [ist]” (209). A politics of public space shared by all, for Fohrmann, is the key achievement of culture that provides an alternative to political theology and its foregrounding of enmity. Feindschaft / Kultur makes a theoretically sophisticated contribution to the understanding of the relationship between Schmitt and Freud, a connection that has received little attention in the scholarship, with the exception of a handful of Englishlanguage essays by Emily Zakin, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Joseph Bendersky. The book’s striking contrast between Schmitt’s concept of enmity and Freud’s concept of culture at times overshadows important similarities between Freud’s and Schmitt’s work, for example, between Schmitt’s concept of war and Freud’s understanding of the aggressive drives of the id. Similarly, Fohrmann’s reading of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur focuses on the formation of social bonds through the renunciation of drives, yet does not address Freud’s critical account of how the repression of drives results in feelings of guilt, a diminishment of happiness, discontent (Unbehagen), and other pathologies of culture. Nevertheless, Feindschaft / Kultur stands out for its novel juxtaposition of Schmitt and Freud and for its compelling literary readings, which bring their theoretical differences to life. It makes a significant and innovative contribution to both German intellectual history and literary studies, one that will be of great interest to scholars of political theology and to a general readership.