"stands still and has come to a stop"

It is helpful, if also a bit unnerving, when media culture generates near proofs, direct materializations, of theses that you've already been walking around feeling smugly smart about. The thesis that I'm thinking about right now isn't exactly mine, but it is one that has held my attention for a little while now. And I think I can localize the origin of this line of thought down to a single passage from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, a passage that clues us in to the significance of the novel's title.

"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." (Clipped from here)

It is an argument about science fiction that is also an argument about the experience of time at present, or vice versa. And it is in an excellent description of the state of speculative films today. In one of the DVD extras for Children of Men (unfortunately not available on line) the set-designers and stylists discuss the fact that Cuaron wanted everything in the film to look like stuff from today, only older and more weathered, which is exactly what we get. The future as present-less-infrastructural investment. Disaster movies set themselves in a next year that looks a lot like last year, while Al Gore's apocalyptic infomercial confusedly quivers between easy futural solutions (buy carbon indulgences!) and a deeper, more convincing sense that we are always already fucked.

Newsmagazine features on future stuff has morphed into special issues on What Is About to Happen, and What Are They Doing to Stop It. From this...

to this...

(Survival Guide???? See what I mean...)

What set me to writing this post (the "near proof" mentioned above) was the trailer for a new PKD film-adaptation, reportedly quite terrible: Next.

A PKD symptomatic in with the protagonist can only see into the proximate future - a future that apparently climaxes with the detonation (or do they stop it???) of a nuclear device in an American shipyard. Right. It is tough to think of a premise that comes closer to exactly mimesis of the dominant temporal strategy of the first four years of the Bush administration, which I was only half-gulible enough to half-take serious, as I anxiously sort-of awaited the truck bombing of the synagogue and the two cop cars constantly parked in front of it at the end of my street in Brooklyn.

The progression of PKD films over the past quarter-century is vividly emblematic of the recision of the future; with each iteration, we draw closer to the present, and even drop at times back into the past. First, there's Blade Runner, with its replicants and super-huge video screens and so forth, even if things are dusty and noirish. Then there's Total Recall with the robot drivers and Mars Today and tennis sim that Sharon Stone practices with. But A Scanner Darkly is a retro future, set in a Californicated past of stoners and beautiful losers, no matter where (when) it thinks it is. (I know I'm leaving a few out, but bear with me....) And then there's Here.

When I teach utopian / dystopian fiction from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to my undergraduates, I usually start by taking them on a little mental journey back to a time when the question future was actually up for argument, and then bring them back to the here and now to ask them what, if anything, they can imagine significantly changing during the course of their lives. More and better video games, older and older people, fewer and fewer good jobs. But, of course, no fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization of things - their kids, if they have them, will live in the same sort of world as they do. Maybe someone will cure cancer, perhaps there will be free tv on the internets, but mostly things will rest as they are.

The first time I used this ploy, I actually waited to hear what they thought the future might look like. I have since learned to lecture straight through the socratic counter-point. They don't answer; they've never, it turns out, even considered the question - at least the vocal ones haven't. It is all entirely new to them...

It is tough, though, to know exactly what to make of this development - the foreshortening of the future from way, way out there to quite soon to almost now down toward in selben Augenblick. On the one hand, of course, it marks a foreclosure of the concept that the world might be radically otherwise, as there will never be any time for it to radically change. On the other hand, the whole scenario calls to mind Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and its resistance to the Social Democratic concept of progress as a "progression through a homogenous, empty time" in favor of a "notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop."

At any rate, perhaps this sort of issue is exactly the sort of thing that the present day literature department should take up as a task. We English professors love the conjunction of the aesthetic and the political. But something has happened that makes it nearly impossible (save through pseudo-blog) to make this argument publically.

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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so as not to ruin

But Benjamin wrote for quotation, his style is geared to it, and it rose to method for him as aphorism had for Nietzsche...'What mattered to him above all was to avoid anything that might be reminiscent of empathy, as though a given subject of investigation had a message in readiness which easily communicated itself, or could be communicated, to the reader or spectator:   "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener"'      (The Task of the Translator)

-Stochastic Bookmark, on Walter Benjamin (by way of Lindsay Waters and CI).

wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

Continue reading “wrenching them out of their assigned function”

How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Continue reading “How No Can You Go?”

The Chronicler

This is the second installment of my (non)series on Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, for which see here. I have made it all the way through the Theses, basically keeping up with my one-a-day regimen, as well as reading through (with next to no comprehension) the "Theologico-Political Fragment." I'm finding that it's better the second time through. My subject for today will be the third section, which follows in German and in the translation linked above:

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Dropped out of the calendar

From Walter Benjamin, section ten of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations):

It is–if one follows Bergson–the actualization of the durée which rids man's soul of obsession with time.  Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscenses that had worked their way into his pores during his sojourn in the unconscious.  Proust was an incomparable reader of Fleurs du mal, for he sensed that it contained kindred elements.  Familiarity with Baudelaire must include Proust's experience with him.  Proust writes:  "Time is peculiarly chopped up in Baudelaire; only a very few days open up, they are significant ones.  Thus it is understandable why turns of phrases like 'one evening' occur frequently in his works."  These significant days are days of recollection, not marked by any experience.  They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from time.  As for their substance, Baudelaire has defined it in the notion of the correspondances, a concept that in Baudelaire stands side by side and unconnected with the notion of "modern beauty."

Disregarding the scholarly literature on the correspondances (the common property of the mystics; Baudelaire encountered them in Fourier's writings), Proust no longer fusses about the artistic variations on the situation which are supplied by synaesthesia.  The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements.  Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing.  Only in this way was he able to recognize in it the challenge meant for him alone, a challenge which he incorporated in the Fleurs du mal.

[...]

The correspondances are the data of remembrance–not historical data, but data of prehistory.  What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life.  Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled "La Vie antérieure." The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapor of tears, tears of homesickness.  "The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears well up in his eyes," writes Baudelaire in his review of the poems of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.  There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated by the symbolists later.  The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life:

Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique
Aux couleurs du couchant refléte par mes yeux.

C'est là que j'ai vécu...

The breakers, rolling the images of the sky,
Mixed, in a mystical and solemn way,
The powerful chords of their rich music
With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

There did I live...

[...] "Recueillement" traces the allegories of the old years against the deep sky:

...Vois se pencher les défuntes Années
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées

...See the dead departed Years in antiquated
Dress leaning over heaven's balconies.

In these verses Baudelaire resigns himself to paying homage to times out of mind that escaped him in the guise of the outdated.

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Dead in his own lifetime

“when someone is dead, you can see it from two hundred yards away,” says Goya in a play we wrote, “his silhouette goes cold.”’

What Berger makes Goya say in his play is connected also to another of Berger’s favourite notions, this time from Walter Benjamin, that storytellers are “death’s secretaries”. What he means by this, I think, is that with stories their end is in their beginning. Each event bears the silhouette the End. This is also what Goya sees around the dead. Their life is ‘closed’. It has become the story leading up to their death. To use Benjamin’s example, the man who dies at 35 becomes, through death’s fiat, the man who was always going to die at 35. Death seems to give a kind of ‘verdict’ on the life. It takes a life but releases its meaning. I remember, when Debord commited suicide, a friend rang me distraught. It was as if this one act had thrown new shadows over the man's work.

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"Critique of Violence" Roundup

By populist demand: the Long Sunday Symposion on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence".

The Call For Contributors and the Schedule and the best plug.

• Jon Beasley–Murray "'Critique of Violence' and the Party Form"
• Matt Christie "Chora"
• Jodi Dean "Divine Violence"
• Adam Kotsko "'Critique of Violence’ and Deconstruction"
• Marc Lombardo "Language, Jurisprudence and the Divine"
• Craig McFarlane "The Three Names of Power"
• Angela Mitropoulos "Benjamin, geWalt"
• Paul Passavant "Foucault as a Critique of Benjamin"
• Kenneth Rufo "The Auratic Economy of a Critique of Violence"
• Alain Wittman "Pure Means"

Off-site discussion: Archive (Another); I Cite; Fort Kant; The Weblog; What in the hell...; Epideixis

(Should anyone have links to any other discussion of the symposium elsewhere, please leave a comment.)

The Three Names of Power

I want to continue the trend over the past few contributions in bringing Benjamin into relation with Foucault, without reducing discussion to Agamben.  Jon and Paul, in their respective contributions, wonder how, on the one hand, power and violence can be brought into relation with one another and how, on the other hand, this relation appears to be missing from Benjamin’s essay.  Indeed, “the task of a critique of violence” is the act of “expounding its [violence] relation to law and justice” (277).  Power, it appears, does not enter into the critique at all.  A critique of violence is apparently complete without reference to power.

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Chora

"Discourse here meets its limit--in itself, in its very performative power.  It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.  [...] Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.  This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal" or "illegitimate."  They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment.  They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded...The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news.  One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 242)

"Here one notices that there are cases in which, posed in terms of means/end, the problem of law remains undecidable.  This ultimate undecidability, which is that of all problems of law...is the insight of a singular discouraging experience.  Where is one to go after recognizing this ineluctable undecidability? Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, upon a beyond of mediation and so beyond language as a sign.  Sign is here understood, as always in Benjamin, in the sense of mediation, as a means toward an end.  It seems at first that there is no way out, and so there is no hope."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 285)

Let me attempt to make my general disposition, such as it is, explicit.  I am tempted to subscribe fully to Derrida's reading of, and resistance to Benjamin, and thus in certain respects against Agamben.  To subscribe fully to the disquiet Derrida outlines, and to the questions he poses, in this already much-cited, seminal essay, "Force of Law:  The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"   Above all, perhaps, to not be in too much of a hurry, as Derrida was fond of saying (in that yesteryear still blissfully ignorant of "teh! serious" weblogs, we can only assume). 

There are some real differences here, as Adam alluded to earlier (Agamben calls the likewise leaping conclusion of Derrida's essay on Benjamin a peculiar misunderstanding, and understandably so, since surely it's fair to say that Derrida is addressing his remarks in no small part to Agamben's Benjamin, so to speak).  For Agamben's fullest response, as far as I am aware, the reader is encouraged to consult Homo Sacer I (above linked).  The differences here could certainly be sketched out in many ways, using everyone from Kant to Heidegger to Schmitt as one's primary filter (not to mention Blanchot, Wittgenstein, Montaigne or Pascal, Rawls or Sam Weber and so on, all of whom appear in Derrida's historico-philosophical sketch).  But perhaps some summary schematics can at this point be posed, or repeated, both for the sake of clarity and complexity (if not for the added benefit of driving the larger panopticon crazy with shades of ambivalence).  Derrida is useful in this way.   But first it should be plainly noted:  even where he claims to be leaving "Benjamin the last word," Derrida is picking up where Benjamin left off, specifically there where Benjamin states:

The realm of ends, and therefore also the question of a criterion of justness, is excluded for the time being from this study.  (279)

The question of justice, as I believe Paul Passavant touched on earlier, runs strongly through Derrida's larger project, in which the ideas of a just decision, a justice to-come, and a certain 'messianicity without messianism' are at least suggestively, elliptically or implicitly, opposed to Benjamin's (and Agamben's) perceived messianism.  Not that any of these ideas are so easily understood, of course.  But perhaps it is not merely coincidental that in another nearby essay,"Faith and Reason," Derrida's discussion of these topics repeatedly returns to a single, rather enigmatic word:  "chora" (which he borrows from Plato, and borrows it not for the first time, as we shall see).  Would it be accurate to suggest that this Platonic "chora" is invoked at least partly in response to Benjamin's meditations on "divine violence," as described, in some literary fashion, by the story of Korah?  I don't know.  It is possible, I suppose, that Derrida has been responding to this essay, in one form or another, for some time.

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"Critique of Violence" and the party form

What's odd about Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," at least from our present context, is how little the essay has to say about power. There is much about violence (of course) and much about the law. But the question of power hardly arises, and when it does its relation to violence and law is unclear.

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Paul Passavant: Foucault as a Critique of Benjamin

From Paul A. Passavant: "Foucault as a Critique of Benjamin"

As readers of Jacques Derrida already know, Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence has an entirely problematic narrative. This narrative is organized around an earlier moment in time prior to law and alienation, with the process of modernization being posited as degeneration and fall. During primitive communism, we were not disempowered by law; Benjamin’s specific example is the penalties for fraud under modern legal systems. Prior to the modern period, according to Benjamin, there were no laws against fraud. Instead, the fear of “mutual disadvantages” kept the peace and prevented deception. That is, people calculated that if one deceived another, a violent response might occur, and in this resort to violence, both parties might be worse off than if everybody were simply truthful. Not moral considerations but these pragmatic and anticipatory considerations prevented deception.

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Benjamin, geWalt

Walter Benjamin was - for reasons which are not so clear, but likely shaped by the circumstances of his death - buried under the name of Benjamin Walter. This thereby ensured that he was not registered as a Jew, and so was not buried on the outside of the proper cemetary, with all that this implied in 1940.

At one level, this introduction might open out onto a discussion of recognition and misrecognition, of the play between the one and the other, of the border and law, of death and monumentalisation, and more besides, which is no doubt possible, salient and would take more than a few remarks to unpack. But I wanted instead to offer a simpler set of comments that run, likely all too hastily and headlong, from the permutations of inside/outside to that of the contract. In some ways, I wanted to respond to Ken's questions about alchemy or, perhaps more directly, what might be put at stake in reading this particular essay, in the here and now that might open onto an elsewhere and otherwise.

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The Auratic Economy of a Critique of Violence

[For those who don't know me, my name is Kenneth Rufo, and I post primarily at Ghost in the Wire.  My training is actually in rhetoric (from a speech-communication perspective) and media ecology, thus the content and style of the following post.]

Why are we here?  Why is the ever growing list of Long Sunday contributors spending this week discussing Walter Benjamin and his Critique of Violence?  The answer is at once both banal and incisive: we wanted a reading group that began with a relatively brief and accessible text, and this particular work of Benjamin was the primary suggestion.  But why?  Why is it that 85 years after its initial publication this particular essay still holds such fascination?  What is it about the appeal of messianic violence, the institutional critique of the police and of the death penalty, or the timeliness/timelessness of this critique?  What is it about Benjamin that draws us to him on this, of all issues?

Debates over author-function aside, let's face it, for all the fame that Benjamin earned, much of it posthumously, his real reputation was made on essays penned in the 30s, not at the start of the 20s or before.  This "Critique" is not an essay he returns to with any seriousness in his later work, so when we think the name Benjamin, whatever the appeal of this particular essay, this isn't really the work that defines the proper name of the author.  This is a Benjamin in his infancy, a Benjamin who still ardently believed in a Jewish work for Europe, who believed that Judaism held within it a spiritual essence necessary for cultural redemption.  Three years before the Critique would be published, Benjamin had sketched a "Program of the Coming Philosophy," a program that (following Kant) hoped to search for objective/empirical means for a "higher concept of experience... the sole embodiment of which, for philosophy, can and must be God."  The Critique also coincides with his failed struggle to start a new journal, Angelus Novus, inspired by the same angel picture that would be referenced 20 years later in his "Theses" on history.  The journal catered to a fairly esoteric crowd of religious thinkers, who gathered from a shared desire to reclaim a spiritual imaginary from the violence with which the 20th century had begun.  Between a limited audience (the journal's mission statement went so far as to dismiss the general public as readers) and the financial burdens of 1921, the journal never saw the light of day.  This is also a Benjamin concerned first and foremost with formulating a concept of the work of art (his works on this subject, both explicit and implict, dominate the late 10s and early 20s), and does so with a metaphor that hints a bit at the flaming Geist of Heidegger, comparing the critic to an alchemist who, confronted with the "work as a flaming pile," believes "the flame itself remains a mystery, that of the living being.  Thus the critical thinker asks about the truth, whose living flame burns above the massive logs of what once existed and the light ashes of what has been experienced."

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“Critique of Violence” and Deconstruction

[The following is exerpted from a longer paper I wrote on Force of Law. The part on "Declarations of Independence" in particular has been quite brutally cut, hopefully not beyond comprehensibility. For those who don't know, my name is Adam Kotsko, and I normally blog at The Weblog.]

Introducing his reading of “Critique of Violence” in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Derrida goes to great lengths to distance himself from any sense that Benjamin’s text is some kind of unique key: “One will not dare say that this text is exemplary. We are in a realm where, in the end, there are only singular examples. Nothing is absolutely exemplary. I will not attempt to justify absolutely the choice of this text. But it is not, for all that, the worst example of what could be exemplary in a relatively determined context such as ours” (263). What is the context here? First of all, of course, the context is an academic conference on Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, where “Critique of Violence” presents itself as a particularly well-suited “exercise in deconstructive reading” (264), for reasons of both structure and content. Already, though, the “complete” text in Acts of Religion contains materials adapted for a second conference on the Final Solution, materials in which, according to Agamben, Derrida “guards against [Benjamin’s concept of divine violence], approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’” (64). Finally, Derrida explicitly widens the context to include the whole political situation of his time: “In the Western Democracies of 1989, with work and a certain number of precautions, lessons can still be drawn from it” (“Force,” 264). And although we can’t know for sure that he knew it at the time—any more than we can know for sure that Benjamin knew the Shoah was coming—Derrida is writing just as “the European model of bourgeois, liberal, parliamentary democracy” (263) is about to experience what will seem to have been its greatest triumph, that is, the fall of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. Once again, the internal contradictions of Actually Existing Democracy, its self-deconstructive properties, so apparent to Benjamin and others in the wake of the Great War, become all too visible.

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Divine Violence

What is divine violence? How can we understand it? I begin with these questions because I do not know the answers. But, I will suggest in what follows that divine violence is an extra-temporal violence that purifies the community of the mere life that provides the law with a body for its inscription. In so doing, it produces a piety in excess of life, a piety necessary for community.

Benjamin sets out divine violence in opposition to mythical violence. Divine violence destroys laws and boundaries. Moreover,

if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.

Benjamin draws on the example of God’s judgment on the company of Korah:

It strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, and a deep connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatory character of this violence is unmistakable. For blood is the symbol of mere life. The dissolution of legal violence stems, as cannot be shown here, from the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law. For with mere life the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living.

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Pure Means

Benjamin's essay Critique of Violence was written in the aftermath of the First World War. It attempts to formulate a poetics of violence in order to come to terms with the devastation and economic crisis that faced Europe. It expresses Benjamin's conviction that the political institutions of parliamentary democracy had failed to live up to expectations. Ironically, it's apocalyptic conclusion foreshadows the rise to power of extreme right-wing reactionary forces and the "pure violence" unleashed as the final solution of the Holocaust. (Derrida, among others, has commented on Benjamin’s imagery of bloodless expiatory violence as eerily close to the sinister gas chambers of Auschwitz.) The basic problem he addresses is the relation between law and justice as it hinges on violence. More specifically, his essay addresses the question of whether violence in the social and political realms can be justified as pure means in itself, independent of whether it is applied to just or unjust ends. That includes a consideration of the violence represented by the general and the partial strike—whether treated as political or proletarian in origin—against the power of the state.  This is what I would like to briefly discuss.

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Marc Lombardo on Benjamin: Language, Jurisprudence, and the Divine

Marc Lombardo provided me with the following contribution to our discussion of Bejamin and "Critique of Violence."

In the over 80 years which have passed since the writing of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” despite the numerous important interpretations which it has received from redoubtable commentators, the text never seems to have been done justice. To say this is neither to call previous interpretations into question nor to propose that the text can be seen in a new, wholly illuminating light. Rather, I would submit that Benjamin’s text can never be done justice, precisely because of what his very notion of justice requires. This is not entirely accurate: justice is that which can never be done by men. Even in harnessing a power which is beyond his capacities as mere man, Benjamin as auteur becomes still only mythical, that is one who can demand sacrifices but not one who can accept them. The sacrifice is always, first and foremost, the sacrifice of the reader. Benjamin’s text, if it is ever to come into its own, can only be read by a higher mind; one capable of hearing prayer, that is devouring those bodies and minds which offer themselves. This is why we see that “even Derrida” (that is to say, one of those proper names which could only be said to denote another mythic auteur like Benjamin) could not “equal” the text: “for lack of time but not only time, I cannot claim to do it justice.”

[1]

[1] Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"," Cardozo Law Review 11, no. 5-6 (1990): 1025.

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A Propaedeutic

"Power no longer has today any form of legitimation other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as well as labouring secretly to produce it".  Giorgio Agamben from Means Without End

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.  Walter Benjamin, VIII Thesis on the Philosophy of History

Schedule for Critique of Violence Symposium

Here is a preliminary schedule for the symposium on "Critique of Violence."  Craig has provided a link to the essay at theoria.

            Sunday:  Alain
            Monday: Marc, Jodi
            Tuesday: Adam
            Wednesday: Angela
            Thursday: Matt
            Friday: Jon
            Saturday: Craig, Paul

If folks aren't happy with the schedule, please let me know and we can switch it around.

Symposium on Critique of Violence

We are in the process of putting together a symposium on Benjamin's "Critique of Violence." Ideally, we start the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Any volunteers?

That cat's something I can't explain

The following comprises recent two posts from Fort Kant.

Sunday morning I rode my bike out to Cousins Island (there is a bridge) to look for a power plant whose blinking smokestacks Hilary and I used to see across Casco Bay, looking out the kitchen window of our old apartment. The ride was long (for me), about 16 miles each way, and on it I saw many things: country clubs, yacht clubs, other cyclists, antique BMWs and Benzes representing all shades of brown and silver, tree-lined avenues light-tunneling like mini-Hellbrunner Allees to estates unseen, Koyaanisqatsi-caliber pylons stringing transmission lines down overgrown lanes of sumac, two Episcopal churches (one Romanesque revival, one of modern design), and, stuck onto a rusting polygonal lamppost, a silvery and rhinestoned plastic tiara whose nubbly whorls embellished the words “Happy Birthday.”

I slowed but didn’t stop as I passed the tiara, looking just long enough for its image to recall, as from some recessed chamber in which sunbleached and crumbling artifacts are laid aside for preservation against further decay, a memory-shape of childhood, an inner composition of color and desire traced from some elementary school or birthday party tableau and lifted away to allow the actual event to pass into oblivion, recording only the particular form of curiosity and expectation it had occasioned. But alas! this inner composition, whose design had bared itself all at once, began to denature in the white light of waking presence, and each desperate attempt to name the specific content of its arcs and piping retrieved an image more generic and dim, the half-grasped truth of my childhood dissolving forever under the phantomic substitution of the tiara’s glittering afterimage.

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Spectacles for the Gods

Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them.

The older sense, of an inhuman presence watching humanity means that there is a dimension of existence which is incalculable, unknown, beyond your ownership or objectification. The subjective stance corresponding to this doctrine is, therefore, a kind of humility and receptivity to an Otherness which has preceded us both temporally and ontologically and which we can, so to speak, never get round the back of. If we are all, equally, objects for an inconceivable Other, we are less likely to become objects to onanother, so it goes. According to some, the place of non-human Other is supposed to be a kind of guarantee of humaneness.

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backlash era, how it lingers

Thomas Friedman speaks in a certain identifiable tradition of American grandeur and conceit, to be sure, often in coy or generally evasive dialogue with all the proppings of male authority and expertise that comes with such a...___ (you fill it in).  He's a sly marketeer, in that he allows himself just enough show of humility, just enough willingness to pander to ambiguity when confronted, at ease amidst a barrage of sexy soundbite talking points gleaned from cocktail parties with those "in" power, that often those who waste money on his books are the first to say, "Oh I know, it's only one opinion."  To which I often reply, as I take their money, "huh."

Such shadow-wrestling as Friedman's and countless others, not so much with big ideas as with great swaths of time poorly understood or dishonestly portrayed, betrays in its "success" a ready-made market for gross generalization and half-baked speculation just barely clever enough to appear contrarian (so long as it conforms in the end)—this much seems obvious.  I've been considering lately a bit of Walter Benjamin.  Or rather, in the words of Wendy Brown (reading also Stuart Hall) on "Resisting Left Melancholy:"

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