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When the logics of the world collapse – Žižek with and against Arendt on 'totalitarianism'
journal contribution
posted on 2010-04-01, 00:00 authored by Matthew SharpeDespite 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.
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Subjectivity : International journal of critical psychologyVolume
3Issue
1Pagination
53 - 75Publisher
Macmillan Publishers LtdLocation
London, EnglandISSN
1755-6341eISSN
1755-635XPublication classification
C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalUsage metrics
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