Kahn, Laurence

Zero hour. Myth, derealization, foundation - 2023.


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Even if sublimation is a value judgement, one of the mainstays of Freud’s definition, the equation between work and artistic activity – which is at the heart of the National Socialist myth – as well as the role played by “the art of politics”, requires us to question the cultural performativity of the Aryan myth and its utopian power, and further to question the collective process that led the German community to “derealize” devastation and loss in favour of a quasi-manic reconstruction. How did hatred cement the people collectively by embedding the claims of the individual self-preservation drive in the promise of a Lebensraum that was supposed to guarantee the self-preservation of the group? Conversely, what meaning can be attributed to Moses and Monotheism at a time when the “dejudaization” of law was attempting to eradicate the abstract rationality of Jewish law and its sublimatory function? Finally, by means of what conflictualization did German society manage to overcome the silence that had fallen on history at “zero hour”?