HOW TO BREAK OUT OF OUR IDEOLOGICAL PRISON-HOUSE

Shame for one’s country—not love for it—may be the true mark of belonging to it

Dear Comrades,

In a world overflowing with noise, your support as a paid subscriber is an act of valuing depth over superficiality. By subscribing, you gain access to exclusive content that challenges conventional narratives and invites critical reflection. This is more than just supporting a platform; it’s about fostering a space where meaningful ideas thrive.

Your subscriptions keep this page going. So if you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We all know Marx’s remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Marx had in mind the tragedy of the fall of Napoleon I and the later farce of the reign of his nephew, Napoleon III. Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse remarked that the lesson of Nazism seems to be the opposite: first as farce (throughout the 1920s, Hitler and his gang were mostly taken as a bunch of marginal political clowns), then as tragedy (when Hitler effectively took power). Obviously, the intrusion of the mob into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, also wasn’t a serious coup attempt but a farce. Jake Angeli, the QAnon supporter known to all of us as the guy who entered the Capitol wearing a horned hat similar to a Viking helmet, personifies the fakeness of the entire mob of protesters. Viking warriors are associated with horned helmets in popular culture, but there is no evidence that Viking helmets really had horns. They were invented in this shape by early 19th-century Romantic imagination: so much for the authenticity of the protesters. To quote Russell Sbriglia (from private correspondence):

“Could there possibly be a better exemplification of the logic of ‘theft of enjoyment’ than the mantra that Trump supporters were chanting while storming the Capitol: ‘Stop the steal!’? The hedonistic, carnivalesque nature of storming the Capitol to ‘stop the steal’ wasn’t merely incidental to the attempted insurrection; insofar as it was all about taking back the enjoyment (supposedly) stolen from them by the nation’s others (i.e., Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, LGBTQ+, etc.), the element of carnival was absolutely essential to it.”

What happened on January 6 at the Capitol was not a coup attempt but a carnival. The idea that carnival can serve as a model for progressive protest movements—such protests are carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, humorous chants…) but also in their non-centralized organization—is deeply problematic. Is late-capitalist social reality itself not already carnivalesque? Was Kristallnacht in 1938—this half-organized, half-spontaneous outburst of violent attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and people—not a carnival if there ever was one? Furthermore, is “carnival” not also a name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynching? Let us not forget that Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais, written in the 1930s as a direct reply to the carnival of Stalinist purges. Traditionally, in resisting those in power, one strategy of the “lower classes” has regularly been to use terrifying displays of brutality to disturb the middle-class sense of decency. But with events on Capitol Hill, carnival again lost its innocence. Will then, after November 5, 2024’s US presidential elections, also see farce repeat itself as tragedy?