The book argues that the political ideologies of modernity were determined in a fundamental manner by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the “world” names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. Although the four figures have formed a number of different historical constellations, the book highlights their enduring presence in the modern imagination through the detailed analysis of one con ... More

The book argues that the political ideologies of modernity were determined in a fundamental manner by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the “world” names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. Although the four figures have formed a number of different historical constellations, the book highlights their enduring presence in the modern imagination through the detailed analysis of one concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Within this historical context, the primary objective of the book is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist “aesthetic ideology.” The book traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that in spite of the radical separation of the two cultural fields they both participated in a common ideological program.