Based on “a childhood fantasy about a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal,” Georges Perec’s 1975 novel W or The Memory of Childhood paints the picture of an island society locked in a relentless competition for survival and honor. In the novel, the inhabitants of this “nation of athletes” have organized all aspects of their community according to a strict hierarchy and schedule of contests between villages. All decisions are made in secret by the Central Government of W, which decides on the outcome of the annual “Games” with impunity. The purpose of these competitions is the “glorification of success” (89) and their losers are deprived not merely of recognition but of the island’s resources. Through constant competition, grueling training, starvation, and discriminatory practices that may randomly hit any contestant, that is, through a deliberate imposition of “organized injustice” (111), the society of W instills a sense of absolute unpredictability in its inhabitants. “The athlete must know that nothing is certain; he must expect anything, the best outcome or the worst. Decisions concerning him, whether they be trivial or vital, are taken without reference to him; he has no control over them” (117, Perec’s italics). What the initiation of athletes into the races effects is thus not the creation of a perfected species of man but the submission of all inhabitants under the dictate of a total lack of alternative. As in an inversion of Plato’s cave metaphor, the young novices of W realize that their notions of honorable battle and glorious rewards are a mere effect of sense deception, “magical notion[s]” that, upon actual confrontation, “appear[] before them in an intolerable light” (139).
At the very end of the novel, Georges Perec’s narrator intimates that his boyhood ideal, which he depicted in countless drawings of “sportsmen with stiff bodies and inhuman facial features” (163), resonates with a real document of totalitarianism, a document which he discovered many years after the fact. David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (The Other Kingdom; 1946) describes the National Socialist concentration camps in the terms of a pseudo-athletic “game”: “The structure of the punishment camps is determined by two fundamental policies: no work but ‘sport’, and derisory feeding” (Rousset, cited in Perec 163). Rousset’s surreal provocation connects the language of exercise that most of his readers would recognize from more or less torturous gym class experiences to the utterly inassimilable idea of being fully exposed and subjected to the fantasy of an other: “In the small rectangular concrete yard, anything can be turned to sport: making men turn round very fast, under the whip, for hours on end; organizing a bunny-hop race, with the slowest to be thrown in the pond beneath the Homeric guffaws of the SS: having them repeat endlessly the exercise that consists of squatting on your heels, and then standing again, very fast, with both arms held out horizontally; forcing them to do press-ups fast [….]” (Rousset, cited in Perec 163, 4).
Along with his slightly earlier L’Univers concentrationnaire, Rousset’s personal account of the camps Les Jours de Norte Mort (1947) is among the most cited sources in “Totalitarianism in Power,” the next to last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and it is lauded as one of the “best reports on Nazi concentration camps” (439). Rousset’s “insights,” placed in quotation marks by Arendt to indicate that the very sense of penetrating the situation of the prisoner and of gaining knowledge about it is undermined (“‘knowledge of the disaster’ means knowledge as disaster”[1]), obviously made a lasting impression on Arendt, whose analysis follows that of Rousset in decisive ways.[2] Specifically, Arendt credits Rousset with being the first to realize that in the camps “everything is permitted” and it is this “everything,” this complete susceptibility to contingency on the one hand and vulnerability to total possibility as a principle which Perec captures with his island society.
But of course another text reverberates just under the surface of Perec’s fiction. As already indicated, it is Plato’s own vision of a perfectly regulated society in The Republic and, even more explicitly, in The Laws (Nomoi) that echoes throughout the novel. In the first text, Plato devises an ideal organization of life in the “cave” of worldly existence, which allows the philosopher-king to pursue truth undisturbed by the concerns of the city attended to by the well-educated guardians. In The Laws a written coda of rules governs every aspect of social life and is specifically intended to define the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Following Arendt’s reading of this late Platonic dialogue, the text introduces, perhaps for the first time in Western philosophy, “rule as the all-important constituens of political affairs” (Modern Challenge, 327). As Arendt shows in the recently published manuscripts, lecture, and fragments that constitute The Modern Challenge to Tradition (2018),[3] an unfinished book project written in the prolific period between The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, rule is not the only and certainly not the originary political category of government. Part of an ambitious attempt to rewrite the entire history of Western philosophy from Plato to Marx, her project situates the beginning of political thought in Plato’s cave allegory as the defining fantasy for the way we have come to represent the relationship between the common world and philosophical ideas. As is well known, the cave allegory describes the realm of human affairs as a mirage, a world of “darkness, confusion and deception” (Modern Challenge, 463) to be avoided by the truth-seeker. Arendt’s pointed thesis is that “[t]he beginning of political philosophy was made when the philosophers tried to rid themselves of and rule over the world of common human affairs” (ibid.). She thereby exposes that the concept of rule, which has since come to dominate our idea of politics (“who rules whom?” is the first question asked about any form of government), is not based on an experience of the polis but, on the contrary, reflects the desire of the philosopher. Starkly put, rule is introduced into thought about politics in order to “get rid” of the political — namely of the originally political characteristic of the common: action.
As a consequence, the philosopher’s utopia begins to resemble and foreshadow Perec’s and Rousset’s living hell. Thus the Nomoi, often regarded as the more democratic of Plato’s two visions of an ideal society, strikes Arendt as a particularly insidious amalgam of reality and fiction: “The state of the Nomoi does not only bear all characteristics of tyranny which the classical theory including Plato ever enumerated, it is even the most tyrannical utopy ever conceived. It is perhaps not exaggerated to speak of the hellish character of this state, with its merciless punishments, its nightly council and constant mutual spysystems. It is as though Plato, when he tried to re-write the Republic in a way which would blend the central story of the cave with the concluding myth of a hellish hereafter, succeeded only in devising a polity in which the myth of hell would be a horrible nightmarish reality” (327). By realizing his ideas as laws, which are intended only for those blind cave dwellers who will never see the truth, the philosopher secures his standing while maintaining his grip on the polis; “he becomes a ruler who is permanently in absentia” (326).
Crucially, in all three of these “utopias” — Perec’s, Rousset’s and even Plato’s — total possibility is joined with the “horrible omnipresence of laws” (517). That is, the very ubiquity of the standards imposed by the philosopher, imported as they are from the philosophical realm to the realm of human relations, appears to “fictionalize” the real. Everything becomes possible in such a community. The polis, in which contingency and relation are the irreducible facts of reality, is subjected to the transcendental ideas; speech and action must give way to “solitude” and “speechlessness.” Through the lens of Perec’s image of the Olympic ideal we can glimpse, darkly, the transcendence of the world as and in boundless possibility. Transcendence transcends, as it were, and what it transcends — or “skips over” — is relation: “a realm where everything seems to dissolve into relationships and to be relative by definition” (501). Rather than establishing its otherworldly claims, all that transcendence manages to supersede and leave behind is “the common world of living-together.” As such, Arendt marks transcendence itself as a political concept because its afterglow illuminates precisely the space it seeks to leave behind. “And it is here that the transcendence of the ideas has its origin; they are transcendent in terms of the world of the polis and no more so than the yardstick is transcendent in terms of the matter which it is supposed to measure; the standard necessarily transcends everything to which it is applied. Not the ideas themselves, but the non-religious concept of transcendence in philosophy, [sic] is political in origin” (501).
At the very end of the novel, Georges Perec’s narrator intimates that his boyhood ideal, which he depicted in countless drawings of “sportsmen with stiff bodies and inhuman facial features” (163), resonates with a real document of totalitarianism, a document which he discovered many years after the fact. David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (The Other Kingdom; 1946) describes the National Socialist concentration camps in the terms of a pseudo-athletic “game”: “The structure of the punishment camps is determined by two fundamental policies: no work but ‘sport’, and derisory feeding” (Rousset, cited in Perec 163). Rousset’s surreal provocation connects the language of exercise that most of his readers would recognize from more or less torturous gym class experiences to the utterly inassimilable idea of being fully exposed and subjected to the fantasy of an other: “In the small rectangular concrete yard, anything can be turned to sport: making men turn round very fast, under the whip, for hours on end; organizing a bunny-hop race, with the slowest to be thrown in the pond beneath the Homeric guffaws of the SS: having them repeat endlessly the exercise that consists of squatting on your heels, and then standing again, very fast, with both arms held out horizontally; forcing them to do press-ups fast [….]” (Rousset, cited in Perec 163, 4).
Along with his slightly earlier L’Univers concentrationnaire, Rousset’s personal account of the camps Les Jours de Norte Mort (1947) is among the most cited sources in “Totalitarianism in Power,” the next to last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and it is lauded as one of the “best reports on Nazi concentration camps” (439). Rousset’s “insights,” placed in quotation marks by Arendt to indicate that the very sense of penetrating the situation of the prisoner and of gaining knowledge about it is undermined (“‘knowledge of the disaster’ means knowledge as disaster”[1]), obviously made a lasting impression on Arendt, whose analysis follows that of Rousset in decisive ways.[2] Specifically, Arendt credits Rousset with being the first to realize that in the camps “everything is permitted” and it is this “everything,” this complete susceptibility to contingency on the one hand and vulnerability to total possibility as a principle which Perec captures with his island society.
But of course another text reverberates just under the surface of Perec’s fiction. As already indicated, it is Plato’s own vision of a perfectly regulated society in The Republic and, even more explicitly, in The Laws (Nomoi) that echoes throughout the novel. In the first text, Plato devises an ideal organization of life in the “cave” of worldly existence, which allows the philosopher-king to pursue truth undisturbed by the concerns of the city attended to by the well-educated guardians. In The Laws a written coda of rules governs every aspect of social life and is specifically intended to define the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. Following Arendt’s reading of this late Platonic dialogue, the text introduces, perhaps for the first time in Western philosophy, “rule as the all-important constituens of political affairs” (Modern Challenge, 327). As Arendt shows in the recently published manuscripts, lecture, and fragments that constitute The Modern Challenge to Tradition (2018),[3] an unfinished book project written in the prolific period between The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, rule is not the only and certainly not the originary political category of government. Part of an ambitious attempt to rewrite the entire history of Western philosophy from Plato to Marx, her project situates the beginning of political thought in Plato’s cave allegory as the defining fantasy for the way we have come to represent the relationship between the common world and philosophical ideas. As is well known, the cave allegory describes the realm of human affairs as a mirage, a world of “darkness, confusion and deception” (Modern Challenge, 463) to be avoided by the truth-seeker. Arendt’s pointed thesis is that “[t]he beginning of political philosophy was made when the philosophers tried to rid themselves of and rule over the world of common human affairs” (ibid.). She thereby exposes that the concept of rule, which has since come to dominate our idea of politics (“who rules whom?” is the first question asked about any form of government), is not based on an experience of the polis but, on the contrary, reflects the desire of the philosopher. Starkly put, rule is introduced into thought about politics in order to “get rid” of the political — namely of the originally political characteristic of the common: action.
As a consequence, the philosopher’s utopia begins to resemble and foreshadow Perec’s and Rousset’s living hell. Thus the Nomoi, often regarded as the more democratic of Plato’s two visions of an ideal society, strikes Arendt as a particularly insidious amalgam of reality and fiction: “The state of the Nomoi does not only bear all characteristics of tyranny which the classical theory including Plato ever enumerated, it is even the most tyrannical utopy ever conceived. It is perhaps not exaggerated to speak of the hellish character of this state, with its merciless punishments, its nightly council and constant mutual spysystems. It is as though Plato, when he tried to re-write the Republic in a way which would blend the central story of the cave with the concluding myth of a hellish hereafter, succeeded only in devising a polity in which the myth of hell would be a horrible nightmarish reality” (327). By realizing his ideas as laws, which are intended only for those blind cave dwellers who will never see the truth, the philosopher secures his standing while maintaining his grip on the polis; “he becomes a ruler who is permanently in absentia” (326).
Crucially, in all three of these “utopias” — Perec’s, Rousset’s and even Plato’s — total possibility is joined with the “horrible omnipresence of laws” (517). That is, the very ubiquity of the standards imposed by the philosopher, imported as they are from the philosophical realm to the realm of human relations, appears to “fictionalize” the real. Everything becomes possible in such a community. The polis, in which contingency and relation are the irreducible facts of reality, is subjected to the transcendental ideas; speech and action must give way to “solitude” and “speechlessness.” Through the lens of Perec’s image of the Olympic ideal we can glimpse, darkly, the transcendence of the world as and in boundless possibility. Transcendence transcends, as it were, and what it transcends — or “skips over” — is relation: “a realm where everything seems to dissolve into relationships and to be relative by definition” (501). Rather than establishing its otherworldly claims, all that transcendence manages to supersede and leave behind is “the common world of living-together.” As such, Arendt marks transcendence itself as a political concept because its afterglow illuminates precisely the space it seeks to leave behind. “And it is here that the transcendence of the ideas has its origin; they are transcendent in terms of the world of the polis and no more so than the yardstick is transcendent in terms of the matter which it is supposed to measure; the standard necessarily transcends everything to which it is applied. Not the ideas themselves, but the non-religious concept of transcendence in philosophy, [sic] is political in origin” (501).