Metonymic Slides

p. 217. The “power of endless repetition” is what Ahmed would describe as the power of circulation: the more these affectively associated figures circulate together, the more the affective intensity builds and the more stuck together they become: Jews = bad, German war victims = good.

p. 195: If the “villainous Jew” succeeds in “seducing” Aryans, “he poisons their blood by intermingling with them. Whereupon, by purely associative connections of ideas, we are moved into attacks upon syphilis, prostitution, incest, and other similar misfortunes, which are introduced as a kind of “musical” argument when he is on the subject of “blood-poisoning” by intermarriage or, in its “spiritual” equivalent, by the infection of “Jewish” ideas, such as democracy” (195).

p. 200: “So, you had this Babel of voices; and, by the method of associative mergers, using ideas as imagery it became tied up, in the Hitler rhetoric, with “Babylon,” Vienna as the city of poverty, prostitution, immorality, coalitions, half-measures, incest, democracy (i. e., majority rule leading to “lack of personal responsibility”), death, internationalism, seduction, and anything else of thumbs-down sort the associative enterprise cared to add on this side of the balance” (200).

P. 205: “the Jew, who thereupon gets saddled with a vast amalgamation of evils, among them being capitalism, democracy, pacifism , journalism, poor housing, modernism, big cities, loss of religion, half measures, ill health, and weakness of the monarch.”

p. 207, on the flipside/upside: Leader and people are completely identified: “Hitler’s inner voice, equals leader-people identification, equals unity, equals Reich, equals the mecca of Munich, equals plow, equals sword, equals work, equals war, equals army as midrib, equals responsibility (the personal responsibility of the absolute ruler), equals sacrifice, equals the theory of “German democracy” (the free popular choice of the leader, who then accepts the responsibility, and demands absolute obedience in exchange for his sacrifice), equals love (with the masses as feminine), equals idealism, equals obedience to nature, equals race, nation.”

Burke exercise