In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Notes on the Interregnum
• Monica Black (bio)

Uncertainty reigns. It's noon on November 4, the day after the election. The votes are still being counted. It is very possible that Joe Biden won the election, but today, right now, that feels like a loss. There was supposed to be a reckoning, a great sweeping transformation where the country repudiated the occupant, reclaimed some measure of democratic virtue, and chose justice over swaggering hate and self-absorption.

I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, a generally red place with vibrant pockets of blue. Last week, I noticed, a local fan had stuck trump stickers on almost every stop sign in the neighborhood. When I went to pull one off, I noticed that someone else had already tried. Like that good neighbor, I, too, was soon defeated. Only the tiniest pieces came away, as if the stickers were principally designed not to be removed but rather to cling to whatever they were stuck to with infuriating, immortal glue. They are more like a stain than a sticker. No matter what happens next, parts of them will be there forever. [End Page 357]

November 5

Trump continues to sow mistrust about the electoral system. I am thinking about two essays I just read with my students.

The first was Victor Klemperer's "On a Single Working Day" from his 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii, or The Language of the Third Reich. Born into a Jewish family, Klemperer had converted to Christianity, was a WWI veteran, and was married to a woman who was not Jewish—all of which helped him survive the Nazis, barely, and in very reduced circumstances. He was stripped of his professorship and consigned to work instead at a Dresden envelope and paper-bag factory. The scene he describes in the essay unfolds there. By the time he wrote it, Allied bombing raids had become common over the city. The workers would crowd into air-raid shelters, and into strictly segregated sections: Jewish and "Aryan."

Klemperer explained that many of his coworkers were not Nazis but that their minds had become "infected," as he put it, with fascist thinking. It happened through language, through the use of words that people unthinkingly assimilated: words like artfremd (alien) and Rassenschande (racial defilement). Through words, Klemperer argued, the whole conceptual apparatus of the Third Reich was fashioned and replicated itself. In that sense, Nazi ideas were not "beliefs" at all—at least, not in the sense of things we imagine being adopted through some conscious process of contemplation and affirmation or decision-making. Embedded in pieces of language, the ideas that made the Third Reich were naturalized and normalized through daily use, and that restructured how people thought. And then those new structures became reality itself.

This was especially true, Klemperer suggests, of those coworkers who were not that good at what is often referred to as critical [End Page 358] thinking (he says that one coworker, Albert, "was rather better at thinking" than another coworker, Frieda). For people like Frieda—though not just for Frieda—the steady repetition of concepts was a "mind-numbing drug," a "poison," that gradually seeped into the space of thought, replacing whatever had been there earlier. One day, in a gesture of kindness and humanity, Frieda brings Victor Klemperer an apple for his wife, who is ill. Then she asks him, "with a measure of inquisitiveness and surprise: 'Albert says your wife is German. Is she really German?'" Frieda, though a non-Nazi, finds this information almost impossible to assimilate. She had so thoroughly "identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan" that Klemperer's marriage was literally unthinkable.

That, according to Klemperer, was how fascism was made and how it remade the world. It operated at a preconscious level, transforming the basic architecture that made thinking possible.

The second essay my class read together was Hannah Arendt's extraordinary "The Aftermath of Nazi Rule," published in 1950, following her first trip back to Germany since fleeing her homeland in 1933. Like Klemperer, the political philosopher was also intrigued by what Nazism had done to thinking, and her analysis also focused on words, but she was interested...

中文翻译：

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间号注释

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 关于间隔的注释
• 莫妮卡·布莱克（生物）

不确定性占主导地位。大选后的11月4日中午。票数仍在计算中。这是非常可能的，拜登在大选中获胜，但今天，现在，那种感觉就像一个损失。当时应该算是一个算计的，彻底的转变，该国拒绝了占领者，收回了一定程度的民主美德，并选择了正义而不是宽泛的仇恨和自我吸收。

I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, a generally red place with vibrant pockets of blue. Last week, I noticed, a local fan had stuck trump stickers on almost every stop sign in the neighborhood. When I went to pull one off, I noticed that someone else had already tried. Like that good neighbor, I, too, was soon defeated. Only the tiniest pieces came away, as if the stickers were principally designed not to be removed but rather to cling to whatever they were stuck to with infuriating, immortal glue. They are more like a stain than a sticker. No matter what happens next, parts of them will be there forever. [End Page 357]

November 5

Trump continues to sow mistrust about the electoral system. I am thinking about two essays I just read with my students.

The first was Victor Klemperer's "On a Single Working Day" from his 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii, or The Language of the Third Reich. Born into a Jewish family, Klemperer had converted to Christianity, was a WWI veteran, and was married to a woman who was not Jewish—all of which helped him survive the Nazis, barely, and in very reduced circumstances. He was stripped of his professorship and consigned to work instead at a Dresden envelope and paper-bag factory. The scene he describes in the essay unfolds there. By the time he wrote it, Allied bombing raids had become common over the city. The workers would crowd into air-raid shelters, and into strictly segregated sections: Jewish and "Aryan."

克莱姆佩勒解释说，他的许多同事都不是纳粹分子，但正如他所说，他们的思想已经被法西斯主义思想“感染”了。它发生通过语言，通过使用的话，人们不假思索同化：话像artfremd（外星人）和Rassenschande（种族污秽）。克莱姆佩勒认为，通过言语，第三帝国的整个概念性工具得以塑造和复制。从这个意义上说，纳粹的想法根本不是“信仰”，至少在我们想象通过某种沉思，肯定或决策的意识过程中采用的事物中，纳粹根本不是。嵌入第三语言的思想通过日常使用被自然化和规范化，并重新构造了人们的思维方式。然后这些新结构本身就变成了现实。

克莱姆佩勒（Klemperer）建议，在那些通常不擅长批评的同事中尤其如此[End Page 358]思考（他说，一个同事阿尔伯特比另一个同事弗里达“在思考方面要好得多”）。对于像弗里达这样的人（虽然不仅仅对弗里达如此），不断重复的概念是一种“麻木的药”，“毒药”，它逐渐渗入思想空间，取代了以前的思想。有一天，弗里达以一种善良和人道的姿态，为生病的妻子送来了一个苹果。然后她问他：“有点好奇和惊讶：'阿尔伯特说你的妻子是德国人。她真的是德国人吗？'”弗里达虽然不是纳粹分子，却发现几乎无法吸收这些信息。她如此彻底地将“德国人与雅利安人的魔幻概念相结合”，以至于克莱姆佩勒的婚姻简直是不可想象的。

按照克莱姆佩勒的说法，这就是法西斯主义是如何产生的，以及它是如何重塑世界的。它以一种有意识的方式运作，改变了使思考成为可能的基本体系结构。

我班同学一起阅读的第二篇文章是汉娜·阿伦特（Hannah Arendt）于1950年发表的非凡的《纳粹统治的后果》，这是她自1933年逃离家园以来第一次返回德国。在思考方面做得很好，她的分析也集中在单词上，但是她很感兴趣...