The terror of ambivalence

Abstract

Osip Mandel’štam’s poem, Stalin Epigram, describes the two levels of Stalinistterror: an everyday terror characterized by silence and whisper, and a politicalterror marked by annihilation and the carnivalesque derision of the «objective enemy»(Hannah Arendt). According to Félix Duque, the meaning of totalitarian terror, as wellas of postmodern apocalypse, resides in an innite deferral of the end.