The ‚Totalitarian Subject‘ in Politics and Psychology. An Approach to Totalitarianism Through Discourse Analysis

My paper links to Panel II of the section and builds on the findings of a book in progress. Its basic premise lies in the idea that political theory, as it is formulated at a specific time in history, can be addressed as a knowledge formation that is connected to other fields of discourse without necessarily addressing these explicitly. In particular, my paper will be concerned with psychological and psychiatric knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s and its analogies in political thought. The common ground on which such analogies can evolve, in my view, is the notion of the subject. I take it that this notion, in each historical period, is composed by a certain set of concepts. These are certainly not identical in psychology and political thought, but do present similarities at least in what can be called ‘figures of thought’. Building on the analysis of a vast array of texts from different psychological and psychoanalytical schools, I show that ‘the subject’ of the 1930s and 1940s (as object of knowledge) is characterized by a certain dissolution of boundaries which appears throughout different topics: theory of emotions, theories of (subjective) space and time, the relation to reality and sociopsychology. The most generalizable notion seems to be the idea that subjectivity can be described by analogy with a force field in which it simultaneously represents the whole field, a point in the field and one of its forces. Thus, an emotion modifies the whole subjective world in a specific sense, as attractive or repulsive, defines its characteristics as friend or foe. Transposed to sociopsychology, these notions explain the heightened interest psychologists of this period take in paranoid psychosis, which even more literally populates its world with friends and foes without ever fully individuating hostile and friendly forces. The paper will argue that it is possible to identify, within the political thought of the same period, a comparable set of concepts that concur to form a similar notion of political subjectivity. “Totality” then appears as a notion which is motivated through this particular context. One example would be Ernst Jünger’s notion of the Worker as a functional element within the totality of his society as “Gestalt”, a totality that he also incarnates. Another example are the pro-totalitarian writings of Carl Schmitt, whose thought has been analysed, by Friedrich Balke, as following typically paranoid patterns – which may then be identified as an effect of knowledge rather than psychopathology. In particular, I will rely on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and her notions of “selflessness”, describing the totalitarian subject, and of the “objective adversary”. The figure of the political subject as knowledge formation thus lies beyond individual engagement and can be referred to in an affirmative as well as in a critical sense. Methodologically, I draw on three sources without closely following any one of them: (the early) Foucault’s discourse analysis; Marcel Gauchet’s notion of the history of the subject; and Claude Lefort’s notion of ‘the political’ (in contradistinction to ‘politics’).