Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch enters the discussion through To Be or Not to Be, whose memorable pun gives the book a compact image for the difference between people confined by power and those left outside its control.

Reference in the Book

In discussing slum-dwellers as people pushed into a space of diminished state control, the book recalls the film’s reversal: those in power do the concentrating, while refugees do the camping. The joke makes a political distinction vivid. Slum-dwellers are not simply subjects subjected to intensive discipline; they are also abandoned to an out-of-control zone where power declines to exercise its full capacity to regulate them. The allusion to Lubitsch thus helps frame exclusion not as freedom, but as a precarious condition in which people must improvise ways of living together without the protections of ordinary political membership.

Social Abandonment and Improvised Collectivity

The allusion also sharpens a distinction between exclusion from citizenship and economic exploitation. The book contrasts slum-dwellers with the classic Marxist working class, whose position is defined by selling labor-power and the appropriation of surplus-value. The slum-dweller’s defining condition, by contrast, is sociopolitical: incomplete integration into the legal space of citizenship and its rights. Lubitsch’s joke therefore helps frame a form of abandonment that cannot be reduced to a familiar account of workplace exploitation.

That abandonment does not mean social life disappears. The book describes slums as sites where people forcibly thrown together, without inherited religious or ethnic forms to rely on, improvise ways of being together. These may include charismatic religious groups and criminal gangs, but also the beginnings of new solidarities. Set beside the book’s question of whether slum-dwellers might form an alliance with the progressive portion of the uprooted symbolic class, the allusion opens onto a political problem: whether life in the space power leaves unregulated can generate new forms of collective awareness.

Scope of the Reference

Lubitsch appears here through a single, sharply delimited intertextual reference: the book borrows a pun associated with To Be or Not to Be to compress its discussion of political power. It does not develop a portrait of Lubitsch or analyze the film beyond that use; his significance in this entry is the verbal hinge the argument takes from his work.

A Parallel Image of Political Justice

Elsewhere, the book reads Disney’s 1935 cartoon Pluto’s Judgment Day as a comic, musical staging of the show trial. After falling asleep near a fire, Pluto dreams that a cats’ court names him a Public Enemy, hears accusations of anti-feline behavior, and sentences him to public burning; the flames in the dream echo the real fire approaching his tail, and he wakes as he begins to burn. The cartoon’s musical treatment of accusation and judgment, including its allusions to popular songs such as “Three Little Maids from School,” gives the book a separate example of how political spectacle can be rendered as entertainment. This passage does not extend its account of Lubitsch, but places the film’s pun about power and refugees alongside a broader discussion of the comic forms through which show trials become visible.