ANNE GRÄFE
Making Petrified Relations Dance: Aesthetics, Terror, and the Emergence of a Critical Collective Subject
In the introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx writes, "One must force these petrified relations to dance by singing to them their own melody!" The next sentence reads: "One must teach the people to become frightened of themselves in order to give them courage." History has shown that the real terror, the horror, and the violence human beings are capable of inflicting on others have often made those relations dance – and passed off self-defense as courage – yet never truly generated the courage needed to break through the petrified relations of history’s repetition as comedy and farce. But what if this terror must be experienced not in reality but at a distance, as an aesthetically mediated terror – to trigger a dialectical form of catharsis? That is precisely the question this article asks: In what ways could the experience of rupture, as an aesthetic experience of disruption, bring the petrified relations – through a form of self-subjectivation – to dance? The French sociologist Pierre Charbonnier describes, in his ecological history of political ideas Abundance and Freedom, a "nearly total collapse of the bridges that typically connect us both with the past […] but also with the future as we have imagined it until now." He argues that the only response to this loss and demoralization is the emergence of a "novel, critical collective subject." In turn the East German dramaturg Heiner Müller sketches, in his apocalyptic theater texts, a landscape from which this new critical collective subject emerges through a form of self-subjectivation.