Red Army Faction

The Red Army Faction (RAF; Rote Armee Fraktion) is presented as an example of Leftist political terrorism whose wager was to use direct violence to awaken a population presumed to be immersed in capitalist ideological sleep. The book places this strategy in the mid-1970s, after the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential, and treats it as one expression of a broader turn toward immediate experience rather than sustained sociopolitical engagement.

Identification and Historical Placement

The Red Army Faction appears alongside the Red Brigades in Italy as an instance of Leftist political terrorism. The account does not trace the organization’s formation, membership, or campaign history; instead, it identifies the RAF by its place in a political and cultural conjuncture. The impulse to seek pure, self-enclosed experience arose, the book argues, when the possibilities opened by 1968 had run out. The RAF is therefore situated within a mid-1970s crisis of political possibility, not described through a detailed institutional chronology.

Strategy and Political Rationale

The passage characterizes the terrorist wager as a response to the belief that the masses were sunk in capitalist ideological sleep and that standard ideological critique could no longer reach them. On that premise, raw, direct violence was supposed to break through where critique could not and rouse the masses. This is the account’s stated rationale for the strategy, not a report of particular RAF operations or evidence that the wager succeeded.

The RAF is one of three forms through which the book describes a turn toward the Real at this moment. The other forms are the pursuit of extreme sexual jouissance and the turn to inner experience through Oriental mysticism. These are distinct practices, but the book groups them by their movement away from concrete sociopolitical engagement and toward direct contact with the Real. The RAF’s political violence thus belongs to a wider diagnosis of withdrawal, even though it takes an explicitly political and collective form.

Place in the Book’s Argument

This placement gives the RAF a specific analytical role: it exemplifies the attempt to overcome political impasse through an immediate, forceful act. The account connects that attempt to a historical exhaustion of emancipatory possibilities, rather than presenting it as a self-contained organizational program. Its focus is the logic of the wager—violence as a supposed means of breaking ideological passivity—and the shared retreat from practical political engagement that the book sees across otherwise different forms of the period’s turn toward the Real.