Guilt History

Sparked or perhaps - since I haven't been following it, I can't be sure - egged on by Newt Gingrich's recent campaign to institute a patriotic teaching of US history from a Christian perspective, parts of the blogsphere have erupted in a stoush over religion.  But, while I haven't really been following the discussion, given some of it has turned around the question of the relation between Christianity, capitalism and the stain, though little as far as I can tell about history (or temporality in this), I thought that I might reprise this piece from Werner Hamacher, "Guilt History - Benjamin's Sketch 'Capitalism as Religion'".

 

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Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

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Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

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Open Memorial?

A friend of mine has an interview with Peter Eisenman, architect of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin, published in The Nation.  I've excerpted one bit, but the whole thing is rather worth reading.  One aspect of the memorial that strikes me is the apparent concern for irregularity, in particular for irregular distances, or steps.  (Agamben counterposes the "memorable" to the "unforgettable," where the "unforgettable," as represented by the tombstones, is that which resists closure or archival.)  While neither a uniform, sterilized graveyard nor purely ostentatious and inaccessible (nor excessively immune), the site suggests the opposite of what might be described as any essential distance.  Perhaps.

You once said in an interview that when you travel to Germany you go as a New Yorker and you return as a Jew. What did you mean by that?

I think that's really part of the problem. The Germans treat me with so much deference, and that makes me feel Jewish, right? They step all over themselves to be nice. Nobody treats you this way in New York. In New York a Jew is a Jew, an Italian is an Italian, a Muslim is a Muslim: Nobody's going out of his way to treat you in a special way. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany. And that's what we're trying to get over. The Germans should stop pretending that they love all Jews.