An Affect-Theory Approach to Ulrike Meinhof's "letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing"

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An affect-theory approach to Ulrike Meinhof’s letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing Dimitrios Chatzicharalampous MA Semiotics - University of Tartu e-mail: [email protected] Introduction Ulrike Meinhof (1934-1976) was the enfant terrible of the discontented Left in post-Nazi West Germany from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s. Her life and activity as a public figure were split and shared between two discontinuous social topologies: first, as a reputable journalist and intellectual of the left wing, she earned the respect of the German intelligentsia by elaborating a notable political polemics, which acquired systematic character particularly during the period between 1959 and 1969 (when she worked as a central columnist for the left-wing magazine konkret); subsequently, her breakthrough into the underground world of terrorism, as a co- founding member, intellectual core and central figure of the radical-left, anti-imperialist, urban-guerilla organization RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), rendered her one of the most wanted persons by the state apparatus of West Germany during the period between 1970 and 1972 1 . 1 For a comprehensive biography of Ulrike Meinhof, see: Ditfurth 2007 (in German, not translated in English). 1

Transcript of An Affect-Theory Approach to Ulrike Meinhof's "letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing"

An affect-theory approach to Ulrike Meinhof’s

letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing

Dimitrios ChatzicharalampousMA Semiotics - University of Tartu

e-mail: [email protected]

IntroductionUlrike Meinhof (1934-1976) was the enfant terrible of the

discontented Left in post-Nazi West Germany from the mid-1950s

until the mid-1970s. Her life and activity as a public figure

were split and shared between two discontinuous social

topologies: first, as a reputable journalist and intellectual

of the left wing, she earned the respect of the German

intelligentsia by elaborating a notable political polemics,

which acquired systematic character particularly during the

period between 1959 and 1969 (when she worked as a central

columnist for the left-wing magazine konkret); subsequently, her

breakthrough into the underground world of terrorism, as a co-

founding member, intellectual core and central figure of the

radical-left, anti-imperialist, urban-guerilla organization

RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), rendered her one of the

most wanted persons by the state apparatus of West Germany

during the period between 1970 and 19721.

1 For a comprehensive biography of Ulrike Meinhof, see: Ditfurth 2007 (inGerman, not translated in English).

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On 15th June 1972 she was arrested and directly

transferred into Cologne-Ossendorf prison, where she was held

in confinement in a cell within an empty medical wing2 under

conditions of isolation and sensory deprivation for eight

consecutive months, from 16.06.1972 to 09.02.1973, before she

was moved into another section of the prison. During that

period she wrote a text that came to receive the title ‘brief

einer gefangenen aus dem toten trakt’ (translated as ‘letter from a prisoner

in the isolation wing’ [literally: dead wing]), whereby she “tried to

describe her physical and linguistic symptoms” (Colvin 2009:

152), or better “the physical and psychic experience of

isolation” (Bauer 2008: 75).

This letter constitutes the primary object of analysis

for the present essay, in juxtaposition with a second one,

complementary to it, which was elaborated during the second,

significantly shorter period of Meinhof’s confinement in the

dead wing, under similar –but lighter- conditions, namely

during December 1973 for half month3. The analysis of these

texts will be attempted through the prism of affect theory,

more specifically by making use of Brian Massumi’s relevant

elaborations. Before proceeding to the axes of this analysis,

2 According to Sarah Colvin: “The wing in which Meinhof was held –officially called Abteilung für die psychiatrische Untersuchung weiblicher Gefangener(Section for the Psychiatric Examination of Female Prisoners)- was known tothe resident psychiatrist Dr. Bernd Götte as the stille Abteilung (silentsection). The RAF called it the toter Trakt (dead wing): a designation thatalludes to the feelings of hopelessness and misery experienced there, butalso an intention ascribed to the state to drive the prisoners to suicide,or at the very least to cause severe mental deterioration. Götte’s ownterm, ‘silent section’, describes (even if unintentionally) the loss oflanguage experienced by isolated prisoners.” (Colvin 2009: 152)3 Both letters are attached as an Appendix to the present essay. Forreasons of economy, only their English translation has been included.

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a prerequisite contextualization will be provided, regarding

the conditions of Meinhof’s confinement that illuminate these

letters, but as well the theoretical work that has been done

with regard to the latter.

Contextualization of the lettersThe issue of the actual conditions of Meinhof’s confinement in

the isolation wing / silent section / dead wing of Cologne-Ossendorf

prison and their significance has been a strongly disputed

one, since it has been mediated by and has itself constituted

a valuable vector for mutually opposing and counteractively

operating sets of wider discourses, the credibility of each of

which is contingent upon discrediting the other. As Sarah

Colvin notes:

It quickly became the standard RAF position that the conditions in which

they were held amounted to ‘state terrorism’. That kind of polemic led

to a situation where many regarded and still regard claims that group

members experienced serious suffering in solitary confinement as pure

propaganda. /…/ Nervousness about being deemed a ‘sympathizer’ may be in

play here (the discourse of terrorism /…/ is black-and-white, and there

is little tolerance for those who seek a space in between). (Colvin

2009: 150-151)

Whereas, though, solitary confinement characterized the

treatment of almost all the imprisoned members of RAF, in the

particular case of Meinhof (and some other members of the

group4), another more aggravating factor was also at work: the

4 Examples are the cases of Gudrun Ensslin and Astrid Proll, though withdifferentiated duration.

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sensory deprivation, which led to highly-contested claims

about Vernichtungshaft (annihilation custody) (see ibid: 153).

Through a cross-reading of sources regarding the actual

conditions of Meinhof’s confinement in the dead wing –whose

general attitude fluctuates on the spectrum of sympathy-

neutrality-demythification towards RAF claims5- we can

extrapolate some common factual denominators at least about

the period of Meinhof’s first eight months, which suggest the

crucial context of the first letter examined here6: her cell

was isolated in an “otherwise empty wing” (C: 149), it was

“specially soundproofed” (S, M: 238), so that “no sounds from

the outside or inside of the prison could be heard” (B: 75),

it was “painted bright white” (S, M: 238) and had “entirely

white furnishings” (B: 75), it had “a single grated window

covered with fine mesh” (S, M: 238) and “a single bald neon

light” (ibid), which “should be left on day and night” (P:

38). Furthermore, “contact with other prisoners was not

allowed, and Meinhof was excluded from all prison activities”

(B: 75), and, as was the case with all RAF prisoners, she was

entitled only to “half-hour visits once a fortnight” (C: 151)

by family members and lawyers. The issue of being “allowed [to

have] radios, newspapers, typewriters, and books in their

cells” (ibid) is intractable when it comes to the conditions

of the first eight months of Meinhof’s confinement, and

although it is explicitly registered by Meinhof herself in her5 Respectively, these sources are: Smith, Moncourt 2009; Bauer 2008; Colvin2009; Passmore 2009.6 For reasons of economy of space, the in-text references mentioned in thisparagraph will be codified as follows: ‘S, M’ stands for Smith, Moncourt2009; ‘B’ stands for Bauer 2008; ‘C’ stands for Colvin 2009; ‘P’ stands forPassmore 2009.

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second letter, it becomes rather questionable regarding her

first time in the dead wing. Passmore observes that “the

initial prison conditions experienced by the RAF leadership

group were severe” in contrast with the “general but slow

trend of relaxing conditions” (P: 38) through the time; this

relaxing tendency is already reflected in the slight

betterment of conditions during Meinhof’s second time in the

dead wing, when, for example, the “permanent lights-on” factor

was eliminated, as she herself registered this in a correction

of “factual inaccuracies” (see C: 151).

What is rather interesting, and the reason why all these

facts are mentioned here in such detail (apart from serving as

necessary contextualization for the analysis that will

follow), is that the theoretical approaches which have been

attempted with regard to these two texts by Meinhof –

considering particularly the recent, English-speaking relevant

literature- tend to examine them only as subordinate fragments

of the overall RAF discourse, solely acknowledging in them an

either strategic or otherwise serving function with a view to

the collective “project or ‘struggle’ [of RAF prisoners] /…/

to maintain their identity as fighters” (Colvin 2009: 155),

and to construct discursively and publicize the image of a

‘terrorist state’. This approach is to a great extent

plausible and supported by evidence, such as the fact that,

according to Colvin, the first letter of Meinhof was written

“at the request of her attorney Klaus Croissant” (ibid: 152).

Passmore, furthermore, reveals a January 1974 “discussion

between Meinhof and the lawyers in which it was decided to use

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the poem [i.e. the letters] externally” (Passmore 2009:49-50),

from which he concludes that “this discussion seems to answer

the question /…/ as to whether this text was really a poetic

transcript of a prison experience or a literary complaint

composed for the purposes of the campaign” (ibid: 50, footnote

125). Passmore himself, on the other hand, has previously

acknowledged that:

It is also clear, however, that they [i.e. the RAF prisoners] suffered

terribly under earlier prison conditions: in February 1973 [i.e. at the

point of Meinhof’s release from her first dead wing confinement] one of

Cologne-Ossendorf prison’s own medical experts, Dr. Goette, found that

‘in the case of Ms [Meinhof], whom I have twice examined, the limit of

her resilience, in psychiatric terms, has now been reached’. (emphasis

in the original) (ibid: 38)

The purpose of exposing all this seemingly superfluous

information is not of course to investigate or restore some

sort of historical truth and justice around the matter, but

quite the opposite: to show that approaches which examine

these two texts as one and the same, and as a mere component

of overarching, collective, discursive strategies, in other

words approaches which deploy solely the methodological

triptych historicism-materiality-discourse in the Foucauldian

framework of power relations, run the risk of reducing and

subordinating the actual complexity of such textual and

contextual instances that involve “linking of the /…/ prison

experience to the human body” (ibid: 49), into the cognitive

pretext or afterword of political strategies. Meinhof’s texts

appear to provide unique insight into the living, embodied

experience of isolation and sensory deprivation, which,

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embedded as it is undoubtedly in a certain, authoritative and

discursively prescribed context of imprisonment conditions,

and serving -as it has been shown by the abovementioned

authors- a distinct, strategic, counterdiscursive line, cannot

be accounted for exclusively or totally by corresponding

approaches. The missing part of these approaches will be

heuristically accessed in the subsequent sections of this

essay, using the prism of affect theory, which advocates the

inadequacy of views that hold “the body /…/ as a surface upon

which discourse is inscribed rather than as something which is

known ‘from within’” (Brown, Tucker 2010: 6).

The letters as documents of affective forcesThe privileging of corporeality by affect theory does not

divorce body from mind in yet another dualist fashion. It

rather apprehends “the real powers of affect /…/: a body’s

capacity to affect and to be affected” (Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 2)

as the fundamental condition for perception and cognition to

take shape; the latter are regarded as progressively ‘higher’

functions, as capturing forces of the material flux in which

the body participates, thus feeding it back (by circumscribing

its potential through actualization) and being fed back by it

(by its virtual residue, whose residual character is

susceptible of being sensed as such). The analysis of an event

from the perspective of affect theory, then, has to begin from

the premise that “affect is this two-sidedness [i.e. the

simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and

the actual in the virtual] as seen from the side of the actual thing, as

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couched in its perceptions and cognitions” (Massumi 1995: 96,

emphasis in the original). The letters of Meinhof, then,

should be regarded from the perspective of affect theory as

expressions of the “situated standpoint of the actual thing as it

extracts a foothold in the material flux” (Brown, Tucker 2010:

9), whereas this material potential or intensity has to be

traced, vaguely sensed or re-configured through the

expressive-textual slippages, lapses, and deferments.

We have first to acknowledge that in both letters, what

is registered by Meinhof is a state of affectedness, namely a

state of attendance of the body to the impingements (a term of

Spinoza preferred by Massumi, see 1995: 92) of a persistent

material context (the cell). The first movement of abstraction

noted by Massumi is the feeling itself: “The body infolds the

effect of the impingement –it conserves the impingement minus the

impinging thing” (ibid). The documentation of the feeling

attempted by Meinhof, then, is the product of the second

movement of abstraction, namely the “conscious reflection

[which] is the doubling over of this dynamic abstraction on

itself” (ibid: 93). This documentation has by definition

entered the signifying order of language, whose resources it

consciously employs in order to capture, immobilize, filter,

and refine the simultaneously unfolding flux of intensity as

it impinges upon the body. In other words, the intensity of

affect that emerges in the in-between space of the biological

body and its material context (cell) becomes perceived as

feeling, and then feeling becomes cognized and linguistically

circumscribed. This character of the letters is rendered

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explicit by the deployment of a specific expressive structure,

which is dominant in the first letter, whereas it seems to

have receded in the second: the repetitive phrase “the feeling

[that]…” (“das Gefühl /…/”) inaugurates most of the

fragmentary sentences of the first letter, wherein it appears

15 times, while in the second it only appears three times.

The function of this repetitive phrase can be understood

not only as a running thread that brings cohesion to an

otherwise fragmented discourse, but further and foremost as a

significatory anchorage, and therefore as the stable starting

and returning point of a precarious endeavor of exploration

and fumbling within the signifying demands of representation.

The attempts of Meinhof to capture linguistically her affected

state are doomed to a gestural character; they are performed

upon satellite trajectories around the dominant, all-

encompassing, yet never-complete signifier: ‘the feeling’.

What is meant here by ‘never-completeness’ does not refer to

the ‘natural’ incompleteness of this signifier, which rests on

supplementation and explication in order to be specified in

shifting contexts and circumstances, but quite the opposite:

the never-complete character of ‘the feeling’ here reveals the

constant attendance of the body, from perception to cognition,

even to (or, as will be shown later, due to) its ever-

identical impingements by the invariable context of the

isolated and soundproofed cell. This never-completeness

becomes apparent in the text through the surplus of

signification deployed in order to represent the same

intensity induced by isolation and sensory deprivation. This

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surplus betrays the constant slippage of the signified

intensity, its deferral throughout the text: the repetition of

this stable phrase, differentially completed at each sentence,

reveals that each sentence in isolation is only complete until

the next sentence appears and re-informs it, and further, that

one can extrapolate a whole set of sentences that do not, but

could appear in between the existing ones and after the last

one is articulated, with the same gestural and self-deferring

status.

The never-complete character of ‘the feeling’ becomes the

leakage point through which we can get a glimpse of the

ineffable status of affect, of the virtual character of

intensity. According to Massumi, “the level of intensity, is

characterized by a crossing of semantic wires /…/ This is to

say that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered /…/

When asked to signify itself, it can only do so in a paradox”

(Massumi 1995: 85). This is what we witness in Meinhof’s

letters, especially the first one. The significations

attempted are not only incomplete and self-deferring, but they

find a provisional completion through the paradox, the

contradiction. Meinhof elaborates the expression of feeling,

and therefore the momentary capture of intensity, through

contradictory propositions, which can be organized

semantically under five predominant categories, all of which

are pertinent to the sensory realm, yet deployed in a manner

that traverses their distinct sensory modality towards the

synaesthetic; according to Massumi, “affect is synaesthetic,

implying a participation of the senses in each other” (ibid:

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96). These five categories are: heat and cold, loudness and

silence, solid and liquid state, motion and rest/acceleration

and deceleration, expansion and contraction.

More specifically: the thermal element fluctuates between

“freezing”, “cold”, “fever”, “burning”, and “boiling”; the

acoustic element (“terrifying euphoria that you’re hearing

something”) is juxtaposed to the interoceptive sense of

phonation and simultaneously exteroceptive sense of self-

audition, itself oscillating between “mute”, “speaking at a

normal volume”, “shouting”, and “yelling”, becoming

“absolutely unbearable” when it comes to “the sounds sibilants

make”; solid state and dryness (“brain /…/ like baked fruit”)

is followed by liquid state (“pissing the soul out of your

body, as though you can’t hold water”); the sense of motion is

transposed to the cell, being either constant (“you can’t get

rid of the feeling of moving”) or paused (“the cell is

moving /…/ it suddenly stops”), or to the time, which is set

in motion (“flowing away”) or immobilized (“time and space are

encapsulated within each other”); in the second letter,

Meinhof inserts the sense of velocity, which is either minimal

(“one moves in slow motion”) or maximal (“acceleration causes

your skin to flatten”, “rollercoaster ride”, “speed from 240

to 190”); expansion and contraction refers to the

interoceptive sense induced in the head –brain and skull-

which is either “exploding”, “tear[ing] apart, burst[ing] wide

open”, or “shriveling up”, later “expanding again”.

All these polarities which belong to the signifying order

attempt to capture paradoxically the same feeling, and it is

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only in few instances of them that an actual shift of

impinging stimuli gives rise to an actual shift of feeling

(as, for example, in the description of the feeling of having

a bath, which “means thawing for a moment, and can last a few

hours”). When Meinhof writes “the feeling your head is

exploding” and shortly afterwards “the feeling your brain is

gradually shriveling up, like baked fruit”, she employs

contradictory language with regard to the same experiential

referent. Equally, when she writes “you’re freezing” and then

“the feeling of burning out inside”, there is no shift of

feeling experienced, but rather a shift of focus of the bodily

attendance to the same intensity, stratified in levels and

permeating all of them, from the skin to the depth of the

body, leaving differential traces, so that their experienced

interconnectedness leads to paradoxical articulations.

Massumi observes that “intensity is embodied in purely

autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin –at

the surface of the body, at its interface with things”

(Massumi 1995: 85). This holds true for several instances in

the letters where skin becomes the locus of intensity (for

example, “you’re trembling”, “you’ve been flayed”,

“acceleration causes your skin to flatten”), but what

dominates particularly the first letter is the sensation of

the depth of the body, of its content: the body turns its

perception inwards, and this is reflected in the signifying

order through the predominance of introspective expression.

The sensation of the body-within ascertains that, from the

perspective of affect theory, “bodies [are] defined not by an

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outer skin envelope or other surface boundary but by their

potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of

affect” (Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 2). Meinhof reveals,

especially in her first letter, an interoceptive dismantling,

a perceptual awareness of the distinctiveness of body parts

that are vital to her: “head”, “skull”, “spinal column”,

“brain”, more poetically “soul”, suffering “headaches”,

“growing mute”. The affectual emphasis placed on the upper

part of the body, namely the head and its compartments, is

directly associated with Meinhof’s social occupation as a

writer and a thinker, endangered in this context of

imprisonment conditions. At this point, another ascertainment

comes forth:

The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds

contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not

situated. Intensity is asocial, but not presocial –it includes social

elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of

functioning, and combines them according to different logic. (Massumi

1995: 90-91, emphases in the original)

Meinhof’s persistent concerns about the destabilization of

higher cognitive functions, such as thought (“the associations

you make are being hacked away”), expression (“you’re growing

mute”), management of language (“you can no longer identify

what words mean, you can only guess”, “sentence structure,

grammar, syntax –are out of control”), and memory (“half an

hour later you can only mechanically reconstruct whether the

visit took place today or last week”) need to be addressed in

this context. All these crucial elements, belonging to the

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order of the social, have been abruptly7 forced to a novel

affective regime of isolation and sensory deprivation, namely

to a regime that excludes the social or marginalizes it to the

sphere of exception –half-hour visits by familiars and lawyers

once a fortnight- or side-effect -“the only minimal contact

with another human being was when food was delivered” (Smith,

Moncourt 2009: 239).

What seems to have been taking place, then, is the

accumulation of two factors, each one belonging to a different

level: on the one hand, the social proper level faces the

danger of disruption, and demands the reinforcement of

cognitive mechanisms that testify its persistence; on the

other hand, the affective proper level impinges a continuous

intensity upon the body at the same time that the discrete

external stimuli it provides are infinitesimal, and therefore

the counterbalancing process of internal sensation is elevated

to the highest level of awareness. The combination of the

processes that unfold on these two levels amounts to the

experience of a radical internalization and thus radical

destabilization of the external-internal homeostasis,

traversing the body all the way from perception to cognition,

and manifesting itself on the level of linguistic expression.

When Meinhof says that “you can no longer identify what words

mean, you can only guess”, she refers to the slippage of

meaning as suspension of the underlying intensity, which,

transferred to the linguistic plane in order to be captured,

7 It is important to acknowledge that her confinement in the dead wingfollowed immediately after her arrest.

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suffers the deferral of signification and the paradox (as

argued previously).

After all the previous analytical elaborations, the

pathway to the final task of understanding the discrepancy

between the first and the second letter is now more open. The

structure of the second letter seems split in two parts: the

first part reaches until the phrase “reduces one’s speed from

240 to 190”, after which the second part begins. The reason

why this heuristic segmentation is attempted here, is that one

witnesses a shift from the fragmented, gestural and

contradictory discourse of the first letter, continued also in

the first part of the second letter, to a more semantically

coherent and determinate expression in the second part of the

second letter. This divergence accompanies also the writer’s

attitude towards the object of attention: in the first case,

Meinhof explores the intensity of the novel affective regime

and its impingements upon her, as if she’s groping her way

across the dark, the brand new, that which requires a surplus

of signification to compensate for a deficit of apprehending

capacity, since it’s slipping away; in the second case, she

expresses an assertive attitude towards this intensity, which

is no longer a new, non-experienced regime, she articulates

with certainty and condensing competence her final cognitive

abstraction of what actually “is going on in these places”: “a

process of inner disintegration occurs”, “the complete

destruction of personality is insidious”, “one expects the

prisoner to lose self-control”. The political and ideological

positioning has come to the foreground (“prisoner”, “judge”,

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“execution”, “Tupamaros”), whereas in the first case this had

receded in the background, as implicit element, susceptible of

extrapolation from contextual knowledge; the affected body,

stripped to a high degree off its political accretion, was at

the centre.

This discrepancy is justified by the fact that the second

letter is the product of the second (and thus not-

unprecedented) time of Meinhof in the dead wing, for a much

shorter period of time, under seemingly more relaxed

conditions, and having had the time before that to re-

socialize within prison, but foremost to restore contact and

communication with the other imprisoned members of RAF8.

Afterword - ConclusionThe afterword of this overall analysis has to do with what in

affect theory is termed as “the patho-logy of a body

intersecting with the pedagogy of an affective world”

(Seigworth, Gregg 2010: 12). Pedagogy here has to be understood

as the social subjection of the body to changing and novel

affective regimes, effectuated by diverse mechanisms and

apparatuses pertinent to the sphere of biopolitics; patho-logy

becomes in this context the openness of the body, its

vulnerability as a medium for the passage of affects. In the

first case, Meinhof attempts to articulate this patho-logy of

8 This restoration was effected in a complete form after the period ofMeinhof’s first confinement, which sheds some further light to the issue ofdiscrepancy between the two letters: “In March 1973 Baader [i.e. the otherleading figure of RAF] demanded that the lawyers ‘build an info-system’,which from May became highly organized. /…/ This became known as ‘das info’,and it was received by a regular group of around thirty prisoners”(Passmore 2009: 39).

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the body in a cruelly pedagogical, affective context; in the

second case, she transforms this patho-logy into sheer

pathology, subject to a final verdict, which can support

substantially the counter-discourse of RAF against ‘state

terrorism’. Of course, both letters expose a significant state

of affectedness, which, having been textually registered,

carries on with its own, autonomous affective force.

We can have a glimpse of this affective force in two

instances, historically connected with the situation examined

in the present essay. First, as Passmore registers:

“Groenewald [i.e. an RAF lawyer] reported back to her [i.e. to

Meinhof] on a speech he gave on 30 January 1974 in Stuttgart

to around 900 people and the success of the poem [i.e. the

letters] in relaying the reality of prison torture” (Passmore

2009: 50). A second instance -which was not a direct corollary

of the affective force of Meinhof’s letters, yet nonetheless

remains an event, for which to take place these letters played

a major role as exposing such tormenting prison experience- is

an open letter, which was handed over from the French

organization Mouvement d’Action Judiciaire to the German Embassy in

Paris on 8th April 1974, was addressed to the Minister of

Justice in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (to whose

administrative region the Cologne-Ossendorf prison belongs),

and which demanded: direct application of normal imprisonment

conditions for Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and all other

political prisoners, direct abolishment of the dead wing in

Cologne-Ossendorf prison, and abolishment of the torture of

isolation and sensory deprivation. This letter was signed,

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among others, by prominent members of the French

intelligentsia, such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre,

Simone de Beauvoir, and Gilles Deleuze (see Komitees gegen

Folter an politischen Gefangenen in der BRD 1974: 190-193 -in

German, not translated in English).

What was attempted in overall in the present essay is not

by any means an objective to disregard the strong ideological,

political, and discursive aspects surrounding historically the

texts examined here; it was rather an attempt to illuminate

the equally strong, yet analytically overshadowed, affective,

and thus generative aspect of these texts, in reconciliation

with their multilayered context, and to emphasize the

necessity for a discrete reading of these two texts as not

entirely one and the same, and as not solely subordinate

excerpts of the wider discourse of RAF. The analysis performed

bears a suggestive and not exhaustive character, and is

susceptible of being re-informed under the light of new

evidence regarding the letters or their context.

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http://www.socialhistoryportal.org/sites/default/files/raf/

0019741100_03_2.pdf (accessed 20.06.2014).

Massumi, Brian. 1995. The Autonomy of Affect. In Cultural Critique

31: The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II. pp.

83-109.

Passmore, Leith. 2009. The Art of Hunger: Self-Starvation in

the Red Army Faction. In German History 27 (1). pp. 32-59.

Seigworth, Gregory J. and Melissa Gregg. 2010. An Inventory of

Shimmers. Introduction to: Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.

Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. pp. 1-25. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Smith, J. and André Moncourt. 2009. The Red Army Faction: A

Documentary History. Volume I: Projectiles for the People. Oakland and

Montreal: PM Press and Kersplebedeb Publishing.

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APPENDIX

Meinhof, Ulrike. brief einer gefangenen aus dem toten trakt. (two

letters, one from the period 16.06.1972 – 09.02.1973, one

from the period 12.12.1973 – 03.01.1974)

Original source:

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS), RAF Archive.

Classification: HIS, RAF, F Me, U / 009, 002.

Published in German (among other editions) in:

Brückner, Peter. 1976. Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse.

Berlin: Wagenbach.

Selected Translations in English:

First letter’s translation by Louise von Flotow in: Bauer 2008

(see above), pp. 75-76.

Second letter’s translation by André Moncourt and J. Smith in:

Smith, Moncourt 2009 (see above), pp. 272-273.

1. From the period between June 16, 1972 and February 9,

1973

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2. The second time (December 12, 1973 until January 3, 1974)

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