On Tuesdays at the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lev Marder looks at Kai Evers’s “The Holes of Oblivion: Arendt and Benjamin on Storytelling in the Age of Totalitarian Destruction,” from Telos 132 (Fall 2005).
Totalitarianism drives people to silence, to defend their positions, to speak out, to cry out, and even to turn on themselves. Out of totalitarianism come some of the most incredible witness accounts, histories, and stories about these stories. Eventually theories about the theories of those stories, such as Kai Evers’s essay “The Holes of Oblivion: Arendt and Benjamin on Storytelling in the Age of Totalitarian Destruction,” emerge and peek through their holes. Juxtaposing Benjamin’s firm position that only silence could follow a catastrophe and Arendt’s rejection of this stance after accepting it, Evers questions whether or not storytelling is dead. Is it possible that the holes of oblivion designated by Arendt as the core of totalitarianism, where people and their traces seem to disappear, exist and totally efface?
The founder and long-time editor of Telos, Paul Piccone, was born in Italy on January 17, 1940, in the city of L’Aquila, the capital of the Abruzzo. He combined philosophical passion with an irrepressible instinct for hospitality, and this was nowhere clearer than in the way he would generously gather friends and strangers together for meals that celebrated both food and thought. His culinary skills, of which he was legitimately proud, were only enhanced when he married Marie Filice, an accomplished chef in her own right. Since Paul—ever the traditionalist—and Marie made many trips to L’Aquila, the menu in their New York home was constantly renewed through those returns to the ancestral source. That profound connection to the past provided the foundation for the welcoming hospitality, where a set table was always a celebration. 
John Milbank’s article “Liberality and Liberalism,” as evidenced by its suggestive title, pulls some of the conventional punches. There is a dichotomy between the values of the Enlightenment-affected liberal mindset and the real turnout of liberal institutions. Crass egotism in the market, chilled international relations, and a profaned life for the individual are the fruits of a social model that bases itself on supposedly “natural” conditions of humanity and utility. The unconventional part of Milbank’s critique rests precisely in his religious foundations. He wants a revival, or perhaps the birth, of radical social criticism based on Catholic theology. There is probably some ire to Milbank’s voice, because he is challenging a liberalism that thought it had put such religious dissidence to rest—therein the “liberality” of the marketplace, in which all are accommodated and all space is taken over. But Milbank believes post-Enlightenment efforts for reform based on secular grounds have mostly come to naught. Looking around in the present day, the reader is likely sympathetic. The entrance of divine grace into human life, the Christian guiding light of charity, and the notion of an exchange of gifts as the only fair exchange (non-exploitative), are all solutions to our unhappy liberal aporia. At least that is Milbank’s story. 
But as for myself, I do not at all address Scandinavia specifically in my paper—I was even unaware the paper was to end up under the headline of Scandinavia. So: sorry for not addressing Sweden in a paper that is not about Sweden, nor indeed about Scandinavia. My paper is about an international issue occurring in many countries: the tension between secularism and defenders of radical religion. For the same reason, I shall not go into Hugoson’s different musings about Scandinavia and the possible causes of minor cultural differences between Scandinavian countries. 
The paradigm of a “new class” originated in socialist Eastern Europe among dissidents and other regime critics as a way to describe the ensconced stratum of managers, technocrats, and ideologues who controlled the levers of power. The rhetorical irony of the phrase depended on the implied contrast with an “old class” as well as the good old class theory of the orthodox Marxism that once served as the established dogma of half the world. The history of class struggle, which had been history altogether, had culminated in the victory of a proletarian class that in turn had ushered in—or was well on its way to ushering in—a classless society. Or so the grand narrative went. To talk of a “new class,” then, conjured up the unquestionable epistemology of class analysis, while simultaneously challenging the notional outcome: instead of the end of the state and classlessness, one was stuck with police states and a new class that, while eminently cooler than the Bolsheviks of yore, still exercised a dictatorship (of the not-proletariat) while skimming off the benefits of unequal power. The phrase turned Marxism against Marxism during those decades when the fall of the Berlin Wall was not even imaginable. 
