Revolutionary Subjects: German Literatures and the Limits of Aesthetic Solidarity with Latin America by Trnka Jamie H

Author:Trnka, Jamie H. [Trnka, Jamie H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Both Wallerstein and Zea conclude that liberty-equality must ultimately be treated as a single concept, but fraternity presents a more difficult challenge.541 In overlaying the French and Russian Revolutions, Müller already attempts to unite the terms liberty-equality, but it is no coincidence that while Galloudec’s mask is equality, his death is fraternity: “Your death is liberty, Sasportas, your death is fraternity, Galloudec, my death is equality,” says Debuisson.542 It is fraternity as the corollary to the particular, the barbarous, the concrete human—and the difficulty the Second World subject faces in recognizing the particular not as an obstacle to, but a guarantor of equality—that Müller renders aesthetically in The Task.

Müller generates contradictions that enable the Second World, a place most readily associated in the social scientific division of labor with equality, to recognize that it needs the Third World, a place similarly associated through anthropological or cultural study with fraternity, for any authentic expression of solidarity. But the Second World author stops short of staging solidarity’s achievement. Instead, he retains the tensions among the three worlded positions and their respective revolutionary attributes. It is in and through commentary that the conditions for the recognition of inequality are set in motion. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are embodied and betrayed first and foremost at the French Revolution’s limits; accordingly, the unified periphery, the Tri-cont, most directly challenged revolutionary internationalism’s hierarchies. While Wallerstein demarcates a key period of the capitalist world system with the dates and symbolic events 1789 (which includes 1791, 1803, and even 1815) and 1968 (itself a cipher for a broader constellation of events extending back into the late 1950s), Müller demonstrates their radical co-temporality. At the same time, the marginalized Caribbean expresses the key theoretical impulse of a new particularity marked by 1968 and the possibility of a far-reaching critique of orthodox Soviet socialism.

The Task’s staging of revolutionary subjects is an instance of aesthetic solidarity that gestures toward its own limits and suggests a specific mode of relation within the three worlds of the Cold War and in the wake of two of the most significant anti-systemic movements since the French Revolution: anticolonial liberation movements and 1968. Wallerstein explains that anti-systemic thought surrounding 1968 turns not just against the First World—here in the figure of Debuisson—but with particular vituperation against the Second World—here in the figure of Galloudec—, which was associated with the betrayal of revolutionary possibility.543 Antoine’s disavowal of the Second World Galloudec is swift and adamant; he accedes to knowing him only upon hearing of Sasportas’s execution. The play’s originary subject of revolution, Antoine must acknowledge particularity before any reconstruction of the task can commence.

In sum, Müller’s treatment of the three worlds forms a geocultural complement to a historical, political constellation: the aftermath of anti-systemic movements surrounding 1968 and their collective reassessment of fraternity and culture in capitalist and socialist discourse. The anti-systemic thinking most closely allied with the social transformations connoted by 1968 is evoked in references to its Third World theoretical forebears (e. g., Fanon and Césaire) and political outcomes (e.

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