Julia Hell

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.

This article deals with two different but related attempts to reinvent politics as a radical revolutionary act, made by two intellectuals from the former Soviet Bloc, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the East German playwright Heiner Müller. I propose to read these reinventions against the foil of Hannah Arendt's passionate plea to rethink politics by breaking with the catastrophic imaginary born in the ruined landscapes of post-fascist Europe.2 Second, I will argue that we need to keep in mind the specific conditions of (post)totalitarian rule in the former Soviet Bloc. Third, and most importantly, these reinventions are haunted by the…