Marx im Chor (Hannah Arendt)

Abstract

This contribution explores the complex structure of Hannah Arendt’s study on Marx, which remained a fragment. Begun in 1951 under the working title Totalitarian Elements in Marxism, Arendt’s book project aims to reconstruct the philosophical foundations of totalitarianism (Stalinism) and provides a specific articulation of her thesis—central to her thinking since The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—of the break with tradition manifest in the unprecedented form of rule that is totalitarianism. The connection between Marx, Marxism, and totalitarianism leads Arendt to an analysis in which she shifts the locus of the break with tradition, situates the break in Marx’s thinking itself, and seeks to examine it there. From the perspective of form, and keeping in mind a particular writing scene that emerges in Arendt’s project, the difficulties of the endeavor become apparent: her presentation captures the break by repeatedly rewriting and reinterpreting it. In the course of this consistently differentiating writing movement, references arise that contextualize the break in various and far-reaching ways. Specifically, the break thus mobilized does not focus on a point-like caesura, a definable boundary, but rather brings forth discursive environments and—against the backdrop of the figure of the chorus and Foucault’s reflections on the archive—aspects of a choral-archival theory of tradition.