BOOK, EDITED BOOK, BOOK CHAPTERS by Julia Hell
Post-Fascist Fantasies : Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany. , 1997
This book critically analyses the role of Communist exile and GDR-era literature in the creation ... more This book critically analyses the role of Communist exile and GDR-era literature in the creation of East Germany's anti-fascist narrative. The analysis is faced on Claude Lefort's theory of totalitarianism to which the author adds a psychoanalytic lens.
The Conquest of Ruins, 2019
This chapter continues analysis of neo-Roman scenarios of ruin contemplation.
The Conquest of Ruins, 2019
Theoretical chapter on neo-Roman mimesis, departing from Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry.
The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome, 2019
In chapter 24 I explore how Schmitt evolved into the neo- Roman
theorist of empire, imperial mime... more In chapter 24 I explore how Schmitt evolved into the neo- Roman
theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary by observing
the rise, and then the fall, of the Third Reich. With his katechontic theory
of empire, Schmitt sums up the entire neo- Roman imperial tradition. Polybios developed his ideas about imperial endtimes at the moment when Rome conquered Carthage. Schmitt’s idea of the restrainer who postpones the empire’s end emerged in the early 1940s, when Werner Best, the leading SS- Großraum- theorist, argued that the Nazi empire might be in the process of repeating Rome’s fall while the Reich’s leadership was still celebrating its victories.
I conclude The Conquest of Ruins with a conservative revolutionary thinker as controversial as Carl Schmitt, briefly exploring in chapter 25
Heidegger’s thinking about empire and imperialism. Coming to Heidegger’s defense, Arendt stated that the philosopher lacked the capability to think politically. Arendt should have said that when Heidegger thought politically, he thought in Spenglerian terms. Hitler, Himmler, and Speer proposed a thousand- year Reich and thousands of years of glorious ruins. Schmitt devoted himself to the neo- Roman problem of how to prolong the time before the fall by returning to the first century. Privileging ancient Greek readiness to face the end, Heidegger analyzed and criticized this Roman desire to endure. In contrast to Schmitt, when Heidegger thought about Reich, he did not return to Rome but turned to archaic Greece. We will hear echoes of Schmitt’s (and Best’s) reflections on empire in Heidegger’s thoughts about (Jewish) Western imperialism. But the strongest voice in Heidegger’s diaries, the so- called Black Notebooks, is that of Oswald Spengler.
American Imago, 2021
An act of reconstruction and recontextualization, this article reframes Freud’s reflections on ar... more An act of reconstruction and recontextualization, this article reframes Freud’s reflections on archaeology and Imperial Rome from the perspective of the deep history of European empires’ neo-Roman imitations. I propose to read Freud’s thinking and writing as modes of analysis attuned to the reality of Europe’s imperial histories. That is, a form of analysis that consciously—and, at times, unconsciously—draws on and works against the discursive orders and imperial imaginaries of Europe’s neo-Roman empires. Relying on my recent analysis of Europe’s formal empires as neo-Roman formations, I will trace this mediating background to Freud’s thought. I first explore Freud’s reflections on world history and empires in Why War? and Moses and Monotheism before narrowing the focus to a rereading of Freud’s archaeological metaphors/analogies and preoccupation with Virgil, Hannibal, and Dido in his earlier texts. In this latter section, I unfold the context of the Habsburgs’ neo-Roman practices in more detail, foregrounding the excavations in Duna Pentele, Carnuntum, and Vienna’s Ruin of Carthage/Roman Ruin (1778). With Freud’s neo-Roman archaeo-analysis in mind, I then move to a brief reading of a contemporary archaeological site, the London Mithraeum in Bloomberg SPACE.
Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes... more Connecting post-imperial studies to ruin studies, The Conquest of Ruins reconstructs and analyzes the Roman Empire’s afterlife as Western Europe’s history of neo-Roman mimesis. Each moment in the long European history of imitating Rome, from Charles V to the Nazi empire, generated its own mimetic practices as well as a vast body of texts reflecting on the history and theory of Roman and neo-Roman empires. The Romans’ monumentalizing empire-making and theatricality of politics pre-structured later imitations. These moments of neo-Roman mimesis created the ancient empire as the ultimate expression of imperial power. At the same time, they also produced a never-ending series of scenes about Roman ruins. The first of these ruin scenarios originated with the Romans’ conquest of Carthage. Constructing the ancient Roman metropole as a ruined stage, these scenes thematize the enigma of Rome’s fall. They also define empire’s time as eschaton or endtime and raise the question about how to ward off the end. Operating in this endtime, political leaders, imperial theorists, and artists went in search of strategies to fortify their empires. The book traces this obsession with the Roman empire’s ruinous end from Augustus to Hitler, Polybios to Carl Schmitt, Virgil to Riefenstahl, and Roman to Nazi architecture. The author combines intellectual history with literary/visual and psychoanalytic methods of analysis concerning identification as Besetzung/occupation and the nexus of visuality, power and desire. She proposes a model of imperial mimesis and the neo-Roman imaginary and analyzes the theatrical form of ruin scenarios across different textual and visual media. She also develops a notion of realism proper to the political aesthetics of neo-Roman empires. This notion is based on the ruin’s absent presence and mimesis as a mode of representation that demands both recognition and imitation.
This chapter explores in depth the concept of neo-Roman mimesis, using the Tunis campaign of Char... more This chapter explores in depth the concept of neo-Roman mimesis, using the Tunis campaign of Charles V. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Homi Bhabha and the Roman practice of wearing death masks, the author analyzes neo-Roman mimesis as a political practice and mode of representation. Ad 1: Arguing that these political acts of imitating Rome always involve an encounter with death, the author rethinks Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry in the neo-Roman context. Ad 2: Reading Augustus's Res Gestae and panels of the Augustan Aa Pacis, the author argues with Freud's concept of cathexis or Besetzung that this resurrectional mode responds to the desire of the past to be imitated.
This chapter focuses on Oswald Spengler's stance as the West's last imperial ruin gazer and analy... more This chapter focuses on Oswald Spengler's stance as the West's last imperial ruin gazer and analyzes The Decline of the West in the context of the Kaiserreich's neo-Roman mimesis. Connecting back to the reading of Louis Bertrand's texts about African Latinity in chapter 11, the author explores the conservative revolutionaries's thought as a key strand in the long history of neo-Roman mimesis and its obsession with Rome's ruinous end (see also the chapters on Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger). Excavating Spengler's Roman matrix, the author analyzes Spengler's ideas about imperial endtime and the role of the Caesarist leader. Reading Spengler's Jahr der Entscheidung (1933), the author points at the importance of Spengler's thought in the Nazi era, culminating with Heidegger's Spenglerian reflections in the Black Notebooks (chapter 25).
Chapter 17 and 22 focus on Hitler's state visit to Rome in 1938 in the context of the Italian fas... more Chapter 17 and 22 focus on Hitler's state visit to Rome in 1938 in the context of the Italian fascists's celebration of Augustus's birth.
Chapter 17 describes Hitler's visit to the Mostra Augustea and the triumphal parade organized by Mussolini's experts in mimesis, the author argues that this visit played a crucial role in the NS leadership's conception of their future empire.
Chapter 22 focuses on Hitler's night-time ride across the Roman stage, analyzing it as one of the preformances of imperial ruin gazing.
Review of Hell, The Conquest of Ruins by Sarah Jacobson
Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory c... more Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past.
Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities.
Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler
Ruins of Modernity, Jan 1, 2010
This chapter situates the Nazis' discourse and aesthetics of ruins in the context of western imp... more This chapter situates the Nazis' discourse and aesthetics of ruins in the context of western imperialism's post-Roman mimesis. The fall of Rome represents a problem for all post-Roman empires, a problem visualized in the scenario of the imperial ruin gazer which originates with Polybios' account of the Romans' victory over Carthage. I read Hitler's visit to Rome in 1938 as the staging of this scenario. This staging reasserts the scopic mastery of the sovereign imperial subject over Rome's ruins, eliminating the barbarian ruin gazer from the scene.
Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East ... more Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions sharing the theme of antifascism, the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek’s work on the Communist’s sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism’s concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement. She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR’s most prominent author, in the GDR’s effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author’s subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell’s psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR’s dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR’s social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure’s dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
ARTICLES by Julia Hell
New German Critique, 2022
This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the con... more This introduction situates the 1966 essays by Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the context of decolonization, taking into account Gary Wilder’s and Michael Rothberg’s reframing of the immediate postwar decades. More precisely, the introduction discusses Weiss’s and Enzensberger’s texts as engaging Frantz Fanon’s “On Violence,” published in Kursbuch, together with Enzensberger’s “Europäische Peripherie” (1965), the article to which Weiss responds with “Enzensberger’s Illusions.” Analyzing their present moment in global terms, the authors debate the role of European intellectuals. Although Weiss and Enzensberger do not address the relationship between politics and aesthetics directly, the introduction asks us to rethink postwar modernisms. Keeping in mind the connection between anticolonial politics and surrealism in the writings of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the introduction briefly traces the political and aesthetic significance of surrealism in Weiss’s thought and writing.
Frantz Fanon, decolonization, surrealism, Ernst Jünger
American Journal of Cultural Sociology , 2017
This paper discusses the affinity between Alexandr Dugin's neo-Eurasian geopolitics and Steve Ban... more This paper discusses the affinity between Alexandr Dugin's neo-Eurasian geopolitics and Steve Bannon's nationalist populism. We argue that one key characteristic of the new American populism is its orientation toward global military confrontation with ''Islam.'' The paper focuses on texts by Michael Anton, Stephen K. Bannon, including Bannon's film Torchbearer (2016). Comparing their ideological work to Alexander Dugin's writings on the global order, the authors organize the comparison around the contextual similarity between American and Russian right-wing thinkers. There are substantive affinities, but more important is the similar relation between textual production and imperial context. We conclude by arguing that these new authoritarian movements and regimes combine coherent ideological projects with deliberately chaotic, even incoherent statements and interventions.
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BOOK, EDITED BOOK, BOOK CHAPTERS by Julia Hell
theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary by observing
the rise, and then the fall, of the Third Reich. With his katechontic theory
of empire, Schmitt sums up the entire neo- Roman imperial tradition. Polybios developed his ideas about imperial endtimes at the moment when Rome conquered Carthage. Schmitt’s idea of the restrainer who postpones the empire’s end emerged in the early 1940s, when Werner Best, the leading SS- Großraum- theorist, argued that the Nazi empire might be in the process of repeating Rome’s fall while the Reich’s leadership was still celebrating its victories.
I conclude The Conquest of Ruins with a conservative revolutionary thinker as controversial as Carl Schmitt, briefly exploring in chapter 25
Heidegger’s thinking about empire and imperialism. Coming to Heidegger’s defense, Arendt stated that the philosopher lacked the capability to think politically. Arendt should have said that when Heidegger thought politically, he thought in Spenglerian terms. Hitler, Himmler, and Speer proposed a thousand- year Reich and thousands of years of glorious ruins. Schmitt devoted himself to the neo- Roman problem of how to prolong the time before the fall by returning to the first century. Privileging ancient Greek readiness to face the end, Heidegger analyzed and criticized this Roman desire to endure. In contrast to Schmitt, when Heidegger thought about Reich, he did not return to Rome but turned to archaic Greece. We will hear echoes of Schmitt’s (and Best’s) reflections on empire in Heidegger’s thoughts about (Jewish) Western imperialism. But the strongest voice in Heidegger’s diaries, the so- called Black Notebooks, is that of Oswald Spengler.
Chapter 17 describes Hitler's visit to the Mostra Augustea and the triumphal parade organized by Mussolini's experts in mimesis, the author argues that this visit played a crucial role in the NS leadership's conception of their future empire.
Chapter 22 focuses on Hitler's night-time ride across the Roman stage, analyzing it as one of the preformances of imperial ruin gazing.
Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities.
Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author’s subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell’s psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR’s dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR’s social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure’s dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
ARTICLES by Julia Hell
Frantz Fanon, decolonization, surrealism, Ernst Jünger
theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary by observing
the rise, and then the fall, of the Third Reich. With his katechontic theory
of empire, Schmitt sums up the entire neo- Roman imperial tradition. Polybios developed his ideas about imperial endtimes at the moment when Rome conquered Carthage. Schmitt’s idea of the restrainer who postpones the empire’s end emerged in the early 1940s, when Werner Best, the leading SS- Großraum- theorist, argued that the Nazi empire might be in the process of repeating Rome’s fall while the Reich’s leadership was still celebrating its victories.
I conclude The Conquest of Ruins with a conservative revolutionary thinker as controversial as Carl Schmitt, briefly exploring in chapter 25
Heidegger’s thinking about empire and imperialism. Coming to Heidegger’s defense, Arendt stated that the philosopher lacked the capability to think politically. Arendt should have said that when Heidegger thought politically, he thought in Spenglerian terms. Hitler, Himmler, and Speer proposed a thousand- year Reich and thousands of years of glorious ruins. Schmitt devoted himself to the neo- Roman problem of how to prolong the time before the fall by returning to the first century. Privileging ancient Greek readiness to face the end, Heidegger analyzed and criticized this Roman desire to endure. In contrast to Schmitt, when Heidegger thought about Reich, he did not return to Rome but turned to archaic Greece. We will hear echoes of Schmitt’s (and Best’s) reflections on empire in Heidegger’s thoughts about (Jewish) Western imperialism. But the strongest voice in Heidegger’s diaries, the so- called Black Notebooks, is that of Oswald Spengler.
Chapter 17 describes Hitler's visit to the Mostra Augustea and the triumphal parade organized by Mussolini's experts in mimesis, the author argues that this visit played a crucial role in the NS leadership's conception of their future empire.
Chapter 22 focuses on Hitler's night-time ride across the Roman stage, analyzing it as one of the preformances of imperial ruin gazing.
Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities.
Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author’s subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell’s psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR’s dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR’s social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure’s dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
Frantz Fanon, decolonization, surrealism, Ernst Jünger
Abstract
In this article, I offer a literary-critical reading of Modernity and the Holocaust, arguing that Bauman’s non-Hobbesian ethics is linked to a form of Orphic authorship. I contextualize this reading with a study of three literary authors: W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss and Janina Bauman, and their respective
versions of this post-Holocaust authorship. At stake is the drama of the forbidden gaze, the moment when Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, killing her a second time. Using Levinas’ ethics and his scenario of recognition, Bauman re-writes this fateful gaze as a loving gaze, implicitly proposing a
counter-model to the Schmittian gaze – always ready to recognize the enemy, always ready to kill.