Totalitarianism: Transgressions and Transcendence

Totalitarian movements including Soviet communism, Italian Fascism, and German National-Socialism have often been seen as an assault against the pillars of political modernity such as reason, liberal democracy, and capitalism. This paper suggests that totalitarian movements were the ultimate product of a modernity driven by transgressions, fanaticism, and limitlessness.The argument holds that each of these movements not only was a result of massive transgressions in the immanent world—a world war, domestic condition of civil war but also a permanent re-evaluation of values in a series of limit experiences. This brokenness of political reality created visions, meanings, narratives, and rituals destined to transcend such crises. Transcendent frames are vanishing points that imagine a non-contingent realm of identity.  Transcendence here is not understood as a super-historical or metaphysical category but in an experiential and performative dimension. The key idea is that secular political authorities must maintain awe-inspiring capacity in order to bind people to the political community as a source of identity and existential security. The proposition defended here holds that the political imagination of totalitarian movements requires a problematisation of the social conditions underlying such limit situations. Whilst the rise of totalitarianism, therefore, was historically contingent on specific crises of political modernity in the early twentieth century, this paper argues that different historical configurations can nevertheless be understood by means of specific anthropological practices that have remained ‘permanent’.