The German term Ohnmacht (medically: syncope, fainting; literally: without-power) linguistically combines the perceived inability to act with a residual agency – which leads us to ask: How much Macht is left in Ohnmacht? Is there a critical potential inherent in this feeling, so often associated with weakness, helplessness, or a debilitating incapacity? In exploring this question, this issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST seeks to make the term productive with regard to art-historical and cultural-historical contexts and concepts. But the texts gathered here also bring Ohnmacht into focus as a contemporary state of emotional being in Western societies, a consequence of intertwining crises – political, economic, ecological – that appear as a subjectively overwhelming force. How does this collective state of mind relate to the activist imperative of progressive cultural politics – or, more generally, to the agency and space for creative maneuver that art promises to enable? To what degree can Ohnmacht be harnessed as a propulsive force in artistic work?

In the medical sense of fainting, Ohnmacht has taken a peculiar role in the cultural histories of past centuries: upper-class Victorian houses were often equipped with a so-called fainting room, fitted out with specially designed furniture to encourage rapid recovery. In literature and painting, too, depictions abound of affluent women succumbing to fainting spells triggered by revelations, such as the titular bad news of Marguerite Gérard’s painting La mauvaise nouvelle (1804). One might also think of the reaction of the “demure and virtuous” Luise Miller to her defamation as a whore in Friedrich Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (1784). At that time, Ohnmacht was considered a sign of a delicate temper, and accordingly, it advanced to become a hallmark of sophisticated femininity. Temporary loss of consciousness did not result, however, from some kind of individual psychological or physiological condition; the prevalence of fainting spells was rather a consequence of the era’s ideals of beauty, since tightly laced corsets impaired the flow of oxygen to the brain. Not dissimilar to the psychological feeling of Ohnmacht as powerlessness in the face of today’s crises, a temporary loss of consciousness was then, ultimately, the result of external conventions: in structures bound up with the capitalist social order, with its mechanisms and fashions.

As an emotional experience, Ohnmacht-as-powerlessness reflects a social condition in which people feel unable to do anything about the causes of their experienced suffering. It is the response to collectively experienced structural conditions, which render any action difficult, if not impossible. Examples include the climate crisis, the worst effects of which currently seem inevitable, as well as Kafkaesque alienation in the face of oblique bureaucracies, the ever-growing strength of the political Right, or the systematic oppression enforced by authoritarian state apparatuses.

As the psychoanalyst Marcus Coelen recalls in his contribution to this issue, the Macht of Ohnmacht was withdrawn only at a late stage. The word is derived from āmaht, which is formed from the Middle High German word for power and a prefix partially cognate with the English forth but also signifying “away, without.” While regional influences and shifts led that ā to become an ō, understood today in German as a linguistic syncope equated with the word ohne (without), Ohnmacht initially was by no means synonymous with powerlessness. It rather implied a preceding power that is now “gone forth,” thus lending Ohnmacht a temporality that eludes powerlessness: to become ohnmächtig, a certain power must have previously existed and can thus still be recovered. According to Theodor W. Adorno, a particular criticality lies within this temporality: being ohnmächtig means being aware of oppression and at the same time refusing to accept it.

Kathrin Busch elucidates this thought by way of various examples, including the withdrawal practice of Lee Lozano, whose artistic tactics of undermining and weakening the self – through drug use or the decision to no longer speak to women – aim to make superordinate powers visible, be they addiction, the laws of the art world, or Lozano’s social marginalization as a woman. While the artists and authors Busch invokes – Lozano and Chris Kraus, for instance – stand for the paradoxical desire to experience powerlessness through the provoked loss of self, Sascha Crasnow’s contribution concerns the aesthetic strategies of cultural creators that counter a political situation perceived as disempowering. She examines the works of the Palestinian artist Ashraf Fawakhry, whose art addresses the overwhelming sense of disillusionment of a life in waiting. The fundamental question of artistic agency stands at the center of both Jules Pelta Feldman’s and Georg Imdahl’s contributions: Can political art have any long-term, real-life impact without inevitably becoming politics itself?

Verena Straub’s and Nina Vabab’s contributions focus on the politics of representation, with both authors engaging with the role images play within protest movements. Straub observes a certain Ohnmacht in the images from Lützerath, the former hamlet in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia that was occupied by climate protests to rescue it from being demolished in favor of brown coal mining. Although photographs of the protest circulated rapidly, they did not have any substantial political impact. This was anything but the case with a photo of Mahsa Jina Amini, a woman murdered by Iran’s morality police, which sparked the Iranian revolt in the fall of 2022. Vabab takes the viral photograph as an opportunity to retrace a relational concept of subjectivity by referring to Judith Butler’s reflections on nonviolent resistance, in which the universality of vulnerability is invoked in order to affirm the resister’s existence.

Overcoming feelings of Ohnmacht in efforts to achieve an emancipatory future is always accompanied by setbacks – which often cannot be explained in rational terms. To understand these better, Amy Allen proposes bringing together the critical theory of the Frankfurt School with the metapsychology of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. In conversation with Isabelle Graw, Allen develops ideas for a constructive approach to the polarized political climate of today. Neither an abandonment of the self nor the illusion that our psychic life can be rationally understood can be considered a viable option. The appeal of self-abdication in other contexts is illustrated vividly by Christian Liclair’s analysis of Jimmy DeSana’s photography, which he contextualizes against the backdrop of contemporaneous writing on sadomasochism. Self-determined Ohnmacht via temporary submission emerges here as a libidinous moment that challenges the dichotomy between the might of mächtig and the perceived powerlessness of ohnmächtig.

Translation: Matthew James Scown