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Starting out from the interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, this essay discusses how, why, and for what purposes Weiss inserted extensive discussions of classical and contemporary artworks in his novel. More specifically, and by introducing the two notions of the foldout and political emergence, the essay investigates how the visual artworks in Weiss’s narrative reconfigure understandings of temporality, collectivity, and realism. A central question concerns the novel’s way of transforming representations of objective oppression, and even death itself, into figures of emancipatory subjective agency. Analyses of the novel’s interpretive engagement with visual artworks such as Guernica demonstrate how these sections of the novelistic text interrupt historical temporality, establish a transhistorical collectivity, and superimpose the experience of the victim with the perspective of the witness. In this way, it is argued, Weiss’s narrative enables an identification with the mute experience of destruction while converting that experience into a future-oriented political force: the emergence and continuation of collective struggle.

In response to a widespread idea of the European Union as a “peace project,” an idea disseminated especially after the EU received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, this essay retrieves some of the historical causes of the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. The essay emphasizes specific geopolitical and colonial incentives that had lain behind the European integration project ever since the pan-European blueprints the interwar period and which became critical with the Suez crisis and decolonization movements of the 1950s. As the essay demonstrates, practically all of the visions, movements, and concrete institutional arrangements working toward European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As much of the scholarly, political, and journalistic accounts at the time testify, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political, and institutional discourse on Eurafrica, a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. Strong evidence suggests that these ideas were instrumental in the actual diplomatic and political constitution of the EEC, or of Europe as a political subject, in 1957. The essay discusses why the EU’s colonial origins have been consigned to oblivion in mainstream research and why this history is of continued concern to the world.

This essay discusses Sigmund Freud’s Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ’I’ (1921), within its historical, intellectual and political context. Freud’s argument, that masses are produced through processes of identification with authoritarian leadership, opens a new chapter in the history of crowd psychology. The essay asks how it is that Freud’s mass theory has been interpreted both as a theory of the psyche and as theory of society, and, as for the latter alternative, both as a theory of fascism and as a theory of social cohesion in general. Or: how come Freud’s definition of the mass serves both as a definition of totalitarian rule, the proto-fascist order of the primal father, and as a definition of society, held together by libidinal ties that Freud associated with Eros? Dissolving this apparent paradox, the essay shows that, for Freud, the mass occupies the same position as the unconscious. Being beyond any means of representation and language, the mass, like the unconscious, is for Freud society in its ”zero-degree” or ”raw” state, before being socially divided and politically organized. No wonder that such a theory would emerge in a historical situation like the Weimar period, when social divisions were contested and political institutions weak or defunct.