The Mourning Cloak

Every Day

February 1, 2017

A Meditation on Every Day.

Every Day

War is no longer declared,

but rather continued. The outrageous

has become the everyday. The hero

is absent from the battle. The weak

are moved into the firing zone.

The uniform of the day is patience,

the order of merit is the wretched star

of hope over the heart.

It is awarded

when nothing more happens,

when the bombardment is silenced,

when the enemy has become invisible

and the shadow of eternal weapons

covers the sky.

It is awarded for deserting the flag,

for bravery before a friend,

for the betrayal of shameful secrets

and the disregard

of every command. – Ingeborg Bachmann.

This poem struck me as a meditation suitable for our times. The sort of harsh prayer that can stand as a true human activity in the face of our inheritance of perpetual crises and terror. A hard hope; unflinching and wretched light that illuminates the human heart not with grandeur or illusion, but with the steadiness of a desperate love.

What other love could brook the sea of despair but a desperate love? In this climate of war, the trickle of sanity that still holds forth the hope of a human act; an act become impossibly criminal and unreasonable in the day of unreason. We need name no names here, for it is well known that we struggle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. It is worth noting, though, that Bachmann composed these verses against the backdrop, not of Nazism or the Second World War, but in the days heading towards the Cold War, when global threat was elevated to the level of political dogma. What become of the everyday when every inclination of the world powers is towards violence, exclusion, threat, and the strategies of death? The classical hero is useless in such a situation, since he is motivated by the outbursts of bravery achieved only in the physical violence of struggle. The flag draped across the shoulders and caskets of these soldiers offers no comfort or redemption for the deeper betrayal which they have effected – that of friend, family, and fellow human. The spectre of rabid nationalism, that persistent ghost which haunts the human psyche always with more or less violence, did not disappear in 1945. As Bachmann herself acerbically observed fascism did not magically disappear in 1945 “just because murder is no longer distinguished, demanded, and supported by the awarding of medals.” It has not disappeared now.

At the level of everyday ethics and politics, then, we need to have a distance from the powers of state and the violence of collective desire. In the face of perpetual war, peace appears as the transgressor. The emblem of the peaceful protester facing off against the armed forces, against the police in their neurotic riot shields is a familiar sight. The everyday warrior – the peaceful soldier – wears in place of all that gear only the threadbare uniform of patience. Struggle is constant, daily, and will continue unabated. There is no victory, no final and decisive battle. This new hero, who goes to the firing lines in utter weakness, will not be glorified in the form of a statue. Her praises will not be sung in the schools of the nation. She will be given no plaque, awarded no medal, offered no recognition.

Yet, the tone of the poem is far from despairing. Despair, after all, is a creature of violence, a creature which doubts peace and disavows the uniform of patience. The wretched star of hope is to be the order of merit. The very wretchedness of this star forbids the exaltation of a false hope, the illusory hope of grand and final victory. It is awarded, rather, when nothing more happens. Our obsession with novelty, newsworthiness – with great and grand gestures – betrays the reality that for nothing to happen opens up a space for truly human activity. For the life that is beyond spectacle, that bears no desire for worldly fame.

This reversal of the roles of importance, in which friendship takes precedence over national pride, and truth is valued above obedience, is a message which needs to be heard again and again. The flags have again begun to rally the great human mass to their message of division and hatred. Indeed, they have never stopped. The flag has always been there, as a symbol of unity by exclusion, as a symbol of inhuman loyalty. It is time, and past time, to reclaim our human birthright. To stand as brave, not in the eyes of the nation, but in the eyes of a friend. To disregard the commands and laws which elevate the basest impulses of the human soul to the level of executive power and juridical authority.

We need accept no order of merit but that wretched star. That hope which springs eternal, not because we are foolish or optimistic, but because we are caught in the grip of a wild and desperate love which never despairs.
PermaWar.

September 1, 2016

PermaWar.

There it is; a succinct description of the current stage of globalisation in which we find ourselves. The obscene rejection of all the principles of a true permaculture. Rather than build and design for peace and for the true flourishing of human and natural activity, we are subject to the perpetual drumbeat of war. The onward march of global capital and its discontents. War enters into our collective unconscious as the necessary backdrop to economic activity. Ceaselessly we are dehumanized, our souls subjected to the perpetual mocking of our consciences. David Swanson writes about the Arms Dealing as the subject of Hollywood comedy, here. Comedy, not in the tradition of the biting satire which unveils the pretentious illusions of empire and makes us more aware of our fragility, our humanity, and how our lives intersect and affect the lives of others. No, precisely not in that sense. Comedy in the sense of treating human life and meaning as trivial. Comedy that masks the fact that mass murder is big business. Swanson, writing about the movie War Dogs and the advertising surrounding it has this to say:

The cultural lesson, especially of the advertising, seems to be that joking about war profiteering is funny, cool, and edgy. Joking about cruelty to non-human animals would not be so acceptable in movie promotions. The industry of mass murder for human beings has become background noise in the era of permawar. All jokes about it will be labeled ironic, but the fact that it is an acceptable topic for joking says something very troubling about our culture.

Something very troubling indeed. Students of history are aware, or should be aware, of the dangers present in this attitude. A culture that trivializes human life, a culture that is comfortable greeting death, especially the death of others, as an amiable friend, is a culture in decline. It is a sign of decadence and moral decay. The apathetic laughter of the entertainment industry, as apathetic as it is banal, is symptomatic of a deeper underlying indifference. An indifference to life itself. The pulsating thrust of death, in the guises of economics or religion, have taken the driver’s seat. Agitated and fragmentary attempts to make sense of it all, or to deal with the aftermath follow, necessarily, for we are still human. There is still something, an instinct or value for life, that is preserved among us.

But it needs to be stronger. The spectre of permanent war, the permanent and perpetual destruction and degradation, not only of our “enemies”, but of the very planet itself, cannot go on. We cannot continue to design for war and expect peace to ensue. That is a fool’s hope, an empty illusion which harbours no truth at all, only the scent of death.

How do we, collectively, exorcise the demons of bloodlust, apathy, indifference, inhumanity? I don’t know. There are small ways, small acts of caring, to be sure. There is welcome and hospitality. There is the refusal to laugh where others laugh. I can attempt to call the government of the country where I live to account. Elsewhere David Swanson, along with Roberto Fantina has challenged Canada not to follow the U.S. into the culture of permawar. Drawing on the wisdom of the late Robin Williams they say that he called us, that is Canada, “a nice apartment over a meth lab for a reason.” Now, for some time, we have been bringing the drug upstairs. We have been imbibing the drug of war, and especially, its economic perks. Swanson and Fantina define war as the root problem which leads to the degradation of morality, the erosion of civil liberties, environmental degradation, and a tendency to oligarchic rule.

And they are right. War is more than act of conflict declared between nations. It is, and is increasingly, a disease of the soul and mind. It is a systematic hatred, a posture which infects us all and blinds us to our fragility as well as our creative potential. When permawar is the incessant background of cultural development, then we stagnate as people as human beings. The horizons of our imagination, of our creativity, and of our involvement with others are hemmed in completely by death. Death as saviour.

This, I reject. I refuse to spend my short days on this earth locked in an embrace with destruction. I refuse to disavow beauty, gentleness, and humility. I refuse to laugh at the misfortune of others. The culture of war cannot endure, must not endure. And we must not let it.
Saudi Arms Deal: Canada has not done the right thing. A Reply to Professor Hansen

May 10, 2016

It has been some time since I last attended to this space and, perhaps, a political rant is not the best re-introduction. Still, I was provoked. Irked, really, by the astounding lack of empathy and general good sense of a so-called “international security expert.” To be clear the personage in question, one Randall Hansen, is not some internet hack but a professor at the illustrious Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. For those not familiar this is one of Canada’s most prestigious institutions in the area of international relations. But enough preamble. The provocation: “Saudi arms deal: Canada has done the right thing, says Munk professor.” The reference is to Canada’s 15 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal was made under the previous Conservative government, and has not been halted by the current Liberal administration. In the article Professor Hansen applauds the government for its refusal to bend to the “warm and fuzzy feelings” of ethical criticism.

Hansen’s rationale for supporting the deal is simple. Saudi Arabia, no matter how repugnant the regime is, is our ally. Besides, if we didn’t sell to them, somebody else would, possibly a “state with laxer reviews and fewer conditions.” Basically it is good business and is in our interest. This is key for Hansen whose view of foreign policy is centred around states acting in their own self-interests. He has little time for “moral preening” and views ethical concerns in foreign policy as harmful. “Morality in foreign policy is a bit like religion; its often well intended but often toxic.” The Professor is entitled to his opinion, of course, but it is unfortunate that the “best and brightest” Canadian minds should be subjected to such a hodgepodge of utter nonsense. Hansen’s article reads like a weak-minded editorial against “bleeding heart liberals.” In its final crescendo he invokes De Gaulle against the Canadian public. No country should have friends. “If the people of Canada want to be morally unassailable then they should exit the foreign policy game.”

But the question isn’t about being morally unassailable. It’s about having an ethical compass. Professor Hansen, who is unable to differentiate between the “warm fuzzy feeling” of a “selfie with the Prime minister” and objections to humans rights abuses and crimes against humanity, does not have such a compass. And yet he still speaks about “doing the right thing” and makes moral judgements between the bad and the worse. (Saddam Hussein was worse than Ayatollah Khomeini, Assad is worse than ISIS.) No clear reason is given, other than, presumably, Hansen’s own moral intuition. Is the point of public discourse around foreign policy that we should leave its moral dimension up to the private intuitions of “experts” like Hansen? This Ivory Tower kid who can’t even distinguish between arms deals and military interventions? Should a man who can say stuff like “Most attempts to create an ‘ethical’ foreign policy have failed for obvious reasons; the international system is made up of states and we have to deal with these states even when we don’t like them…” Does the learned Professor know the meaning of the word ethical? Ethics is very clearly involved in foreign policy, unless we are willing to say that it is a matter of purely arbitrary decisions. Ethics also exist because moral decisions are sometimes difficult. Does this mean we should dispense entirely with moral reason, in favour of… what exactly?

National interest. National security. These are the terms Professor Hansen is banking on, and it seems to me that they are pretty much conceptually bankrupt. It is not obvious that selling weapons to a gross perpetrator of human rights abuses and the seedbed of Wahhabist extremism is in the interests of international and national security. It is also not clear, except in a sort of vague “it’s good for the ‘conomy, stupid” way that this deal is in the interest of Canadians.

What is more clear is that Canada has violated its own laws and codes of ethical conduct in order to have this deal go through. This is probably why the Professor feels the need to downplay ethics and morality and pretend that it’s all namby-pamby feeling good stuff that doesn’t pan out in the cold hard world of pragmatic politics. Sorry, Professor, but you’re wrong. Ethics, in this case, is about the rule of law. It is about international standards of conduct and human rights. It is also about global public image, perhaps something even the Professor could understand. Canada cannot be a relevant and effective presence in the international scene if they are reviled by the international community as cynical cash-grabbers who are willing to violate their own code of integrity in order to make a buck. Ethics is not just about feeling good, it is about establishing reliable connections between nations.

But what irks me most is the title of the essay, “Canada did the right thing.” Professor Hansen has jettisoned the language of ethics and morality, by what right does he speak about right? It would be one thing if he had made an argument establishing how the arms deal was ethically viable given the codes of conduct to which Canada holds itself responsible. This would be a hard argument to make, and would involve a lot of moral gymnastics. It wouldn’t convince me, but at least he could have made an ethical argument. The other option would be to simply say that the Canada-Saudi Arabia arms deal benefits certain weapons manufacturers, who may have industries based in Canada, and that the lives of Middle Eastern people aren’t worth much anyway. This is the argument Professor Hansen has made, but he has made it using weasel-words like “national interest” “the interest of Canada and Canadians” “unpalatable regimes” and “moral preening.” Debate and conversation is foreclosed, since the Professor really gives no indication of how we adjudicate between the bad and the worse. Nor does he offer insight into how ethically dubious deals make Canada or the world a safer place. Professor Hansen is a spokesman for the weapons manufacturing industry, hiding behind the veneer of academia and international affairs. His propaganda, there is no other word for it, is cynical and vile. Not only is it morally incoherent, it is incoherent period. The advice from this “international security expert” will not make the world a safer place. It is not conducive of peaceable affairs between nations. In his support of the Canada-Saudi arms deal Professor Hansen has consigned Canada to a diplomatic and international obsolescence, but he has done so on the side of moral vice.

Who needs a teacher like that?
Red Rosa: On Economic Expansion and Militarism.

November 14, 2015

Red Rosa:On Economic Expansion and Militarism.

Works Reviewed: . Luxemburg, Rosa. The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. Volume 1: Economic Writings 1. Edited by Peter Hudis. Translated by David Fernbach, Jospeh Fraccia, and George Shriver. New York: Verso, 2013., 596 pages.

Rosa Luxemburg appears to us today, in the gauzy film of hindsight, not so much as a figure from the past as the symbol of a world that lay within reach of historical possibility, but was violently arrested. A world that may yet inspire our longing and our work. The horizon of a world that was lost – lost before it was ever allowed to come into being – dawns under Red Rosa’s star. It was her communism, which uniquely brought the voice of dissent, of foreignness and of women to the foreground of social revolution, which brought out the most violent reactions of the fascist Freikorps troops. Barbara Ehrenreich describes the male fantasy of the “Red women” which preys upon the fascist imagination as it mingles a fear of women’s bodies with a fear of the dissolution of order:

“Communism – and this is not the communism of Lenin and Stalin, but the communism off Rosa Luxemburg, the most potent and horrifying of the “Red women”… – represents a promiscuous mingling, a breaking down of old barriers, something wild and disorderly.”[1]

The Freikorpsmen feared communism, but what this fear coded for them was a dread of women. Women as such constituted a threat to the fascist warrior’s sense of ordered reality; the stark tidiness of a freshly pressed military uniform. In this distorted view of reality the scene of domestic life became utterly desexualized, while warfare was glamorized and eroticized in extremely disturbing ways.[2]

In a world where perpetual warfare had become engrained into the political and sexual economy of the nation, a woman of Rosa Luxemburg’s keen emotional intelligence was a threat. Her own comrades in Germany’s Social Democracy party turned against her as the nationalist frenzy of the First World War caught them in the grips of violent death-glorifying fantasy. Rosa remained, in Germany, a sole voice of sanity, a faithful witness against the fervor of war.

Nationalisms, with their intense focus on racial, ethnic, and linguistic purities, name ways of coding violence against women, whose sexuality makes them possible sites of ethnic or racial contamination. Nationalist rhetoric fosters fear of foreigners, resident aliens, and those whose religious affiliations might be suspect. The world that Rosa Luxemburg lived in was not big enough for her internationalism. It was not big enough for the challenge of deep social democracy, because the minds of the rulers were small, rigid, and anxious. The people of Germany, and of all Europe, in failing to disown the war-hungry autocrats, failed Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg was a threat; a threat to a social order based on militarism and imperialism. The perpetual battle against true social democracy continues to manifest itself today. It is apparent in the increased economic disparity, in the overblown rhetoric of religious war, in the absurd escalation of the surveillance state, and in the deeply misogynistic, racist, and oligarchic political configurations of our time. The masters of war are still alive, still forcing their fantasies of a stilled, stolid deathly politics upon the living world. It is clear enough; Rosa is still a threat, and needs to remain one.

Economic Writings

The translation and publication of her complete works into English is, therefore, a timely event. Her voice is a necessary one, because it is original and untamed. In the introductory essay to The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume 1: Economic Writings 1, Peter Hudis provides a vignette of the breadth and depth of Luxemburg as an activist, a theoretician and an original personality. In her own words she expresses it this way:

“I feel that within me there is maturing a completely new and original form which dispenses with the usual formulas and patterns and breaks them down… I feel with utter certainty that something is there, that something will be born.”[3]

Her originality is revealed, not simply in her own sensibility of it, but through the depth of her active political commitment and relentless inquiry into the nature of capitalist expansion. Hudis describes the sum of her four major theoretical works – The Industrial Development of Poland; Introduction to Political Economy; The Accumulation of Capital: and The Accumulation of Capital, or what the Epigones Have Made of Marx’s Theory: An Anti-Critique – as “the most comprehensive study of capital’s inherent tendency towards global expansion ever written.” There is a great deal of truth to this claim, already in her dissertation piece, The Industrial Development of Poland, she observes:

It is an inherent law of the capitalist method of production that it strives to materially bind together the most distant places, little by little, to make them economically dependent on each other, and eventually transform the entire world into one firmly joined productive mechanism. This tendency, of course, works most strongly within one and the same state, within the same political and tariff borders.[4]

This essay, which opens the volume, gives an indication of her attention to particular political and economic configurations and her ability to, presciently, situate those situations with regard to the overall structure and inherent tendencies of global capitalism. In The Industrial Development of Poland, Rosa makes no mention of Marxist theory. Her work is clearly grounded in an internationalist perspective, and her keen awareness of the expansionist tendencies of capitalism alone, as seen in the quote above, make Rosa a figure worth reconsidering in our allegedly “global” age. What, she asks, are the barriers to prevent a continued expansion of global capitalism? If these barriers cannot be identified the objective necessity of socialism would remain wishful thinking. Marx, Rosa thought, lacked an adequate explanation of the limits of capitalist expansion.

The boundless horizon of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought, then, is made manifest within the constraints of particular, determinate action. However she refuses the answer of nationalism as a legitimate way of resolving the double bind between the place of determinate action and the horizon of global responsibility. For example, unlike Marx and Engels, Rosa opposed calls for Polish national self-determination. As we see in the quote from her dissertation work, Rosa is far too aware of the complicity of national statist power in the work of capitalist expansion.

Introduction to Political Economy

Freedom is always the freedom to think differently, said Rosa Luxemburg, and her work powerfully embodies this mantra. It is not, however, that thinking differently is enshrined into a law that refuses any agreement. Rather, Rosa struggles to maintain the difficult space of critical thought. Certainly, there is often a polemical edge to her work, but it is equally clear that this polemic is felt as the necessary reaction to the work and words of people whose theoretical speculations have an obscure and oppressive quality. Thus, in Introduction to Political Economy, she takes the professors of political economy to task. This work, which was never fully completed, offers a biting critique of the illusory notion of a “national economy.” The national economy, she points out, is a myth that conveniently ignores the constant exchange between nations, and obscures the ever-increasing grip of capitalist economy on the world stage:

In this way, the “commodity” capital spreads still more remarkable “commodities” on an ever more massive scale from various old countries to the whole world: modern means of transport and the destruction of whole indigenous populations, money economy and an indebted peasantry, riches and poverty, proletariat and exploitation, insecurity of existence and crises, anarchy and revolutions. The European “national economies” extend their polyp-like tentacles to all countries and people of the earth, strangling them in the great net of capitalist exploitation.”(116)

Rosa is attentive to attentive to the myriad economic entanglements which global trade foists upon the world and, because she refuses to reduce history to national identity and economy to national economy, she is able to resist the facile definitions of economy proffered within the sphere of academic specialization. The definitions which, to our great detriment, remain much in vogue today.

The historical depth of Rosa Luxemburg’s work comes through strongly in Introduction to Political Economy as well as in other work included in this volume. In her work on Slavery the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is analysed through the lens of its slave economy. In this essay she develops the compelling, and still inadequately considered thesis that “the slave revolts were the first immense, world-historical class struggle against the exploiters. Not the free peasant, not the proletarians in Rome.” (327) Rosa’s work on slavery is not fully developed, indeed it has a more tenuous character even than the Introduction to Political Economy, but it is full of intriguing threads. Most notably this work, along with her comments on The Middle Ages, Feudalism, Development of Cities gives evidence of her sense of the importance of reading history in a way that is attentive to the dissolution of social structures.

Her analysis of capitalism, therefore, is read against the backdrop of prior social dissolutions. Through her attentiveness to the dissolute, the hidden, to that which escapes the eyes of those complicit with the reigning authority Rosa perceives and elucidates the connections between militarism and industrial expansion with a keen and prescient gaze. If we are to move beyond the stagnation of our arrested history, hers will be a voice that is heard.

[1]Barbara Ehrenreich “Foreward” in Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies,           History. trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. xiv.

                [2]Theweleit, Male Fantasies.

                [3]Rosa Luxemburg, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume 1: Economic Writings 1, trans. Peter Hudis (New York: Verso, 2013)

                [4]Ibid., 73.
The Politics of the Image.

August 26, 2015

Works Reviewed: Chiara Bottici Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Nevertheless human life was thus image-graced and image-cursed; it could comprehend itself only through images, the images were not to be banished, they had been with us since the herd-beginning, they were anterior to and mightier than our thinking, they were timeless, containing past and future, they were a twofold dream-memory and they were more powerful than we. – Herman Broch, The Death of Virgil.

We live in an age where images permeate our awareness and practice of politics. At the same time the comment is often made that our politicians lack imagination, there is little capacity to imagine a world of new possibilities, a world that is not reduced to the governance of the neoliberal consensus. Those who do operate under the slogan of “another world is possible” are typically dismissed as fanatics well outside the viable political spectrum.

Chiara Bottici’s Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary is therefore a timely book. Bottici begins with the hypothesis that `there is a link between the indiscriminate proliferation of images and the crisis of political imagination understood as the capacity to start something new.`(3) She critiques the notion that the imagination is simply the faculty to represent what does not exist, and goes on to show that this conception of the imagination began in the eighteenth-century, and has had some debilitating consequences in terms of our ability to navigate the use and presence of images as they shape our thought and society. The definition of reality, she argues, changes from one context to another, and along with our changing definition of reality we find ourselves in need of new conceptual apparatuses to allow us to speak and act meaningfully into those contexts.

Bottici proposes the imaginal as a conceptual apparatus to overcome our own impasse with regard to the faculty of the imagination, as the exercise of the singular mind, and the social imaginary. Her books proceeds along three broad strokes. First she develops the etymological and philosophical concept of the imagination beginning with Plato and Aristotle and moving up into the Enlightenment and beyond into psychoanalysis and critical theory. She identifies key moments of opposition, or ruptures, which affect and change the way the concept of imagination is used. She then traces the concept of the social imaginary, as a further rupture in the fate of the image, and the determination of its coordinates as more contextually based. This follows her argument that change in usage of language depicts a deeper change at the conceptual level of understanding. Finally she turns to the concept of the imaginal, as a way to focus on images themselves and not merely their production. Bottici is concerned that the typical focus on the imaginary/imagination as a source of alienation does not give sufficient attention to the way our thought is formed through images.

The second section offers an etymology of politics, from Aristotle’s political animal up to present-day biopolitics. Bottici argues for a more positive reading of biopolitics which takes into account Hannah Arendt’s work on natality. We are, she maintains, not only beings-toward-death, but beings-after-birth, and it is the event of birth, rather than death, that is more fundamentally political because it is in birth that we become, biologically, a part of a common world. This recasting of the political tradition, with a keen eye to its historical male-blindness allows Bottici to bring together the imaginal, as an ambivalent presence and use of images, and the political, as a sphere which entails much more than governance.

In the final chapter Bottici offers a keen analysis of the ways images are used in shaping current political mythology. Following Guy Debord she makes the case that the society of the spectacle has become even more entrenched than Debord foresaw. Their is no escape, and yet the commodification of the spectacle and its integration into global capitalist society as a constant relation between persons calls for the need to envision new conceptual breaks.

She calls for a re-orientation of our image-making in way that positions the modern concern for freedom within an already socially defined space. Freedom is the freedom of equals. Bottici’s book is a worthwhile and excellent read.
B.R. Ambedkar: The Annihilation of Caste and the Future of Democracy.

August 17, 2015

Works Reviewed: B.R. Ambedkar. Annihilation of Caste. New York: Verso, 2014.

“Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally. To have excised Ambedkar from Gandhi’s story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a travesty. Equally, to ignore Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar is to do Ambedkar a disservice, because Gandhi loomed over Ambedkar’s world in myriad and un-wonderful ways.” -Arundhati Roy.

In the popular consciousness of the Western world the story of India’s independence is a classic underdog story focused centrally on a single protagonist; Mohandas K. Gandhi. The pacifist Gandhi, with his indefatigable ascetic activism looms as a larger than life presence. He is more than a simple leader of a nationalist movement, he has become a spiritual hero on the world stage. Politics, social justice, and spirituality seem to cohere in Gandhi to such an extent that the political and social dynamics of post-colonial India are overwhelmed; they must live in his shadow, even as Gandhi proves the ideal icon for marketing India’s spiritual traditions to the West. His moral discipline place him beyond the ken of mortal politics. As a result of this lionization Western perception of India’s independence are severely clouded by the blind-spot of hero-worship.

An article in the July 2015 issue of National Geographic illustrates this blind-spot quite well. Tom O’Neill, following “In the Footsteps of Gandhi’, purports to assess the Mahatma’s legacy in modern India. O’Neill himself has nothing but praise for the saintly man describing him as an indomitable figure who “forced his countrymen to question their deepest prejudices about caste and religion and violence.” Waxing romantic the author describes himself sitting under the trees where Gandhi had spoken and telling the villagers he was meeting Gandhi: “They’d smile and hurry away convinced a madman had come to town.” The bustling and spiritually deficient denizens of modern India are held up to the idyllic, robust spiritual guru of their recent past. O’Neill’s tone is not one of contempt, rather it is lightly patronizing. The enlightened Western journalist is able to consume the spiritual commodity that is Gandhi in a way that he is inaccessible to many Indians.

This kind of idyllic narrative serves a number of political purposes. In this case it shields the political and social dynamics of contemporary India by fixing a romantic and somewhat abstract spiritual icon as the absolute spiritual and moral guide of that country. Gandhi is described as the hero who stood up to British imperialism and Hindu caste-society. He is a figure with followers and enemies, but no comrades, no colleagues. It is a very minimalist drama that fails to capture the real social and religious antagonisms of India, not only in the present, but during the first days of independence. The most glaring omission of this vignette can perhaps be summed up under the name B.R. Ambedkar.

The republication, by Verso, of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, along with extensive annotations, a lengthy introduction by the activist and novelist Arundhati Roy, and Gandhi’s response to Ambedkar offers a perfect opportunity to reassess the legacy of Indian independence and those who helped shape it. This work looks deep into a muted side of Indian history, a part of that world that has been actively silenced and whose political agency has been and continues to be denied. The hard question of whether India’s Dalit population can actually depend on Gandhi’s legacy is confronted head-on. Perhaps the Mahatma never spoke for them, after all. This, in turn, confronts the Western ideals of political and moral greatness. Is it the benevolent and pastoral leader, who graciously extends his hands to the lower classes, while preserving the best of traditional culture and religion? Or should we relinquish this inspirational dream in favour of a more difficult and conflict-ridden one which strives towards the political determination of the oppressed?

Ambedkar was India’s first Minister of Law after Independence in 1947. Born into the Untouchable, or Dalit, caste of Hindu society Ambedkar eventually converted to Buddhism. He found the caste system to be absolutely unbearable and opposed to the principles of justice and reason, and could not disassociate the caste system from the religious traditions out of which it arose. Ambedkar fought vigorously for the right to self-representation of India’s Dalit population. Profoundly aware of the social stigma, often manifesting as outright physical violence, which daily attended the Dalit population, Ambedkar knew that simply granting a right to vote to all Indians could not possibly result in actual social equality. Ambedkar therefore proposed a double electorate in which Dalit’s would choose their own representatives. He also proposed that for a ten-year period the Dalits would be granted a second vote to have a say in which candidates were elected among caste Hindus. The idea behind this second electorate was to ensure that those representatives who were least inimical to Dalit interests would be elected to the legislative assembly. The Communal Award of 1932 awarded this double-vote to the Dalits for a twenty-year period, despite Gandhi’s protestations. It was in response to this defeat that Gandhi deployed his greatest and most effective weapon: the fast unto death. It was in response to this fast that Ambedkar, in a move he would later regret, rescinded the political gains he had made.

Gandhi’s main concern was the unity of the Hindu religious community: “For me the question of these classes is predominantly moral and religious. The political aspect, important though it is, dwindles into insignificance compared to the moral and religious issue.” In her introductory essay, The Doctor and the Saint, Roy describes Gandhi as a great admirer of the caste system. It represented, for him, the genius of Indian society. That being said, Gandhi certainly objected, to varying degrees throughout his life, to hierarchy between the castes. He believed that the Untouchables, the outcasts of Hindu society could be brought into the varna system. Ambedkar’s response was that the “outcaste is a byproduct of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” (26) The contrast between the two could not be more clear, Gandhi’s statement all but completely disavows the social and political dimensions of moral and religious life, where for Ambedkar the social aspect is absolutely central to morality and to religion. His rejection of the caste and varna systems are based on the deeply felt experience that Hindu society is incoherent. Roy relates Ambedkar’s assessment of Hindu society with chilling aplomb: “To the Untouchables,” Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.”(20)

The Doctor and the Saint.

Roy’s essay, really a short book in itself, is not for those short on nerve, or for those who prefer political expediency to the difficulties of truth-telling. It is a hard book to read, it is brutal and heart-wrenching. Roy faces head-on the chamber of horrors that Indian society continues to be for its most marginalized and despised peoples. It is a story of murder, rape, of people being stripped and paraded naked, and literally forced to eat shit. To face these horrors, and not be driven to despair or callousness, requires a greater moral imagination than the one which simply encourages individuals to “be the change they want to see.” Roy confronts not only the conflicts within Indian society, but also the indifference, ignorance, and hypocrisy of the West. She begins her essay:

If you have heard of Malala Yousef but not of Surekha Bhotmange, then do read Ambedkar.

Malala Was only fifteen but had already committed several crimes. She was a girl, she lived in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, she was a BBC blogger, she was in a New York Times video, and she went to school…

Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes too. She was a woman- an ‘Untouchable’ Dalit woman – who lived in India, and she wasn’t dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr. Ambedkar was her hero. (17-18)

Surekha, like Ambedkar, was a convert to Buddhism. She had purchased a plot of land in the village of Khairlanji. She was refused connections to electricity and water. Eventually Surekha was gang-raped and murdered. Indian media reported the murder as a “morality” murder, and India’s legal system took no notice of the crime until they were forced to by mass protests of Dalit organizations. Even then caste prejudice was not taken into account as a motivating factor, and the judge dismissed the evidence that Surekha and her daughter had been raped. Writing of the world response to this crime Roy acerbically observes:

Surekha Bhotmange and her children lived in a market-friendly democracy. So there were no “I am Surekha” petitions from the United Nations to the Indian government, nor any fiats or messages of outrage from heads of state. Which was just as well, because we don’t want daisy-cutters dropped on us just because we practice caste. (20)

Roy’s unflinching presentation of the social ills of caste society do not stop at India’s borders. She describes, among other instances, how caste-Hindus lobbies in the UK have sabotaged the efforts of Dalit-led organizations to have caste discrimination recognized as a form of racial discrimination. “Democracy” writes Roy, “has not eradicated caste. It has entrenched and modernised it. This is why it’s time to read Ambedkar.” (37).

Annihilation of Caste.

Time to read Ambedkar, because Ambedkar was keenly aware of the social dimensions of democracy and the need for social and religious reform to accompany political reform. Without real transformation at the level of social relationships and religious and moral perspectives the political hand-off of power could only entrench the social deformation and injustice of Indian society. Ambedkar’s undelivered speech, Annihilation of Caste, begins by describing the Social Conference which began as the social reform side of the National Congress party, but eventually split into a separate party, and was met at first with indifference and then outright hostility by the politicians of the National Congress. Ambedkar quotes one of the founders of the National Congress, W.C. Bonnerjee: “I for one have no patience with those who say we shall not be fit for political reform until we reform our social system.”(213) Ambedkar takes up the challenge by drawing on the experience of the Untouchables as the weak point in the social organization of Indian society. The fact that a population of the society are routinely and ritually treated as subhuman, who were not allowed even to walk on the same ground, was evidence enough that Hindu society was an incoherent mess, incapable of any unified experience of equality and fraternity upon which to base a national politics.

Ambedkar goes on to defend his thesis, that religious and social reform must accompany political reform with numerous examples from history. His analysis is broad-ranging and his politics are thoughtful and nuanced. He is critical not only of the nationalist politicians who ignore the question of economic reform, he is equally critical of a narrow focus on economy that does not grapple with the question of social reform and the question of caste. If a socialist revolution does not take account of caste before the revolution, he writes, it will have to account for it after.

This is only another way of saying that, turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster. (233)

Annihilation of Caste was a speech prepared for a group of moderate Hindu reformers. It has, therefore, some very practical advice on how to go about the abolition of caste. After subjecting caste to a rigorous examination in terms of its origins, its effect on the economy, and on the social unity and ethics of Hindu society, Ambedkar turns to the question of how to defeat caste prejudice. Chief among the strategies advocated, though not employed were inter-dining between castes and inter-marriage. Ambedkar addresses the strengths and limitations of these strategies and this leads him to question the underlying religious values which serve as obstacles to pursuing these strategies. Inter-dining and intermarriage are viewed as objectionable, he argues, and the cause for social reform is unpopular because “inter-dining and intermarriage are repugnant to the beliefs and dogmas which the Hindus regard as sacred.”(121) The notion of caste comes from a deeply religious perspective, and it would persist, argued Ambedkar, as long as Hindu society continued to observe the authority of the shastras which taught them the religion of caste. Ambedkar therefore urged the would-be social reformers to be religious reformers as well, and not to shy away from confronting the deeply held religious values of their countrymen:

You must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took. You must not only discard the shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion – the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste. Will you show that courage?

Difficult words, particularly in an age of religious pluralism and political timidity. Gandhi took great offense at them, and his response to Ambedkar’s article is published in this edition of Annihilation of Caste. What emerges from this response is a Gandhi who is unwilling to face the gravity of the social ills of caste, and who looks to the Hindu religion to provide “warmth … to compensate for the shameful persecutions to which the vast majority of Harijans are exposed.” (324) Gandhi’s protestations are feeble, they do not do justice to the strength of the argument which Ambedkar poses. Gandhi, threatened by the argument, emerges as a defender of tradition and religious values over and above the dignity and self-determination of human beings. Ambedkar’s religious reform, Gandhi fears, would destroy Hindu society.

For Ambedkar, however, there is no such thing. Hindu society, because it is a caste society, is already divided and devours itself and is therefore a completely vulnerable and defenseless society. He preaches and predicts, therefore, not the end of Hinduism but that through a relentless self-purging it might rid itself of the social and religious deformities which plague it:

In my opinion it is only when Hindu society becomes a casteless society that it can hope to have strength enough to defend itself. Without such internal strength, swaraj (self-rule) for Hindus may turn out to be only a step towards slavery.(317

Annihilation of Caste is an important, profound, and disturbing text. It is, in a sense, understandable that the moderate Hindu reformers cancelled Ambedkar’s speaking engagement and the speech was not delivered as intended. It is also understandable that Gandhi reacted with such vehemence, a challenge to religion, to dearly held tenets of faith and forms of social organization is never looked upon kindly. It is regrettable, however, that such a powerful voice for social transformation has been subject to such censure and silence for so long. Regrettable, too, that dreamy-eyed Western journalists prefer to pine after the legacy of commodified spiritual gurus, rather than facing the harsh realities of social evils and contradictions. Ambedkar’s rebuttal to Gandhi’s indictment of Annihilation of Caste provides fair warning to those who seek refuge in an idyllic and imagined past, just as much as to those who despair or accommodate themselves to the corruption of the present:

The Hindus, in the words of Matthew Arnold, are `wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. What are they to do? The Mahatma to whom they appeal for guidance does not believe in thinking, and can therefore give no guidance which can be said to stand the test of experience. The intellectual classes to whome the masses look for guidance are either too dishonest or too indifferent to educate them in the right direction. We are indeed witnesses to a great tragedy. In the face of this tragedy all one can do is to lament and say – such are they leaders, O Hindus. (356)

The pain in Ambedkar’s voice carries itself, through the written text, and into the eyes and ears of his contemporary readers. Democracy has not abolished caste, has not abolished ethnic and religious violence. The commodification of India’s spiritual traditions for Western consumption has not alleviated the suffering of India’s Dalit population. Streams of books about mindfulness, consciousness, and spirituality have not provided us with the moral fibre to face up to the horrors and brutalities entrenched within our own social systems. This is why it is time to read Ambedkar.
The Flight of Minerva: Hegel and the Haitian Revolution

July 10, 2015

Works Reviewed: Susan Buck-Morss. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. 151 pages.

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” The twilight shade with which Hegel cast his work, at least here, lends an aura of sad nobility to the pursuit of philosophy. The pallor of grey in grey drapes like a banner over Western historical consciousness. The small consolations of philosophy are not really on offer to the living world; its aptitude and appetites lie with the contemplation of the ashes of history, of forms of life grown cold and dead. This philosophical mood, which cannot really be what Hegel intended, has received an exaggerated place in the public and academic conception of the practice and uses of philosophy. It has been further exacerbated, within the academic realm, by disciplinary entrenchment; philosophers are read in the context of other philosophers and history takes place elsewhere. Hegel’s symbolic choice of Minerva’s owl, which encapsulates nature and the Greek birth of philosophy, seems to consolidate this notion of a perennial, and ahistorical, wisdom.

Minerva, however, has another resonance for Hegel, one which places him within the context of daily newspapers and world-historical events, rather than simply within the rarefied atmosphere of Aristotelian philosophy. Minerva was the name of a German newspaper, written with a Girondist cosmopolitan perspective. Throughout its run the paper included extensive coverage of the revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. G.W.F. Hegel was known to be an avid reader of the news, and of this journal in particular. It is to this connection, this resonance, that Susan Buck-Morss points in her book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. The picture of Hegel that emerges ifs one in which the philosopher is both the bold composer of a philosophical defense of history inspired by the Haitian revolution and yet, by virtue of the silence of metaphor which surrounds that philosophical development, also complicit in the silence around the role of racism as a tool of suppression at the foundation of the modern world.

Buck-Morss central thesis is that Hegel draw his inspiration for the master-slave dialectic from the Haitian revolution and the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. This event, which should have shook the foundations of Western political philosophy, given that slavery had become the root metaphor in Western thought for “all that was evil about power relations,” was shunted into relative obscurity. There was, Buck-Morss notes, a glaring discrepancy between the rise of the economic practice of slavery, as the systematic capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labour force in the colonies, to the point where it came to form the basis of the entire economic system of the West, and the use of slavery as the political metaphor that formed the antithesis of the highest political value of Enlightenment thought; freedom. This discrepancy went unnoticed by rational, ‘enlightened’ thinkers and, Buck-Morss contends, continues to be ignored by present-day writers who unproblematically construct Western histories as ‘coherent narratives of human freedom.’ The persistence of these kinds of narratives, in face of all the evidence, stems in part from the rigidity of academic boundaries in which ‘national histories are considered as self-contained, or when separate aspects of history are treated in disciplinary isolation.’ Bringing together the conceptual and empirical aspects of history, as signalled by Hegel and Haiti respectively, form the strands of Buck-Morss project of decentering the legacy of Western modernity, while salvaging modernity’s universal intent.

Buck-Morrs proves an adept guide at navigating the depths of suppressed history, and drawing lost, or nearly lost, strands into sharp relief. The picture of history that emerges is neither a tentative pastiche nor a dogmatic relief; the author is keenly aware that writing history, especially with its universal horizon in view, is an ongoing process that is and should be subject to constant correction and improvement. It is not, for that reason, a project to be despaired over, but one to be faced resolutely through conceptual development as well as gathering of facts. Facts, for Buck-Morrs, become most useful when they shatter the boundaries of previously held conceptions or world-views: “Critical thought is empowered by the facts only by being pushed over the brink of the discursive worlds that contain those facts.”(139). The Haitian Revolution, she argues, is a site full of precisely these kinds of facts, not only with respect to the brutal fact of slavery in the modern world and the radical gesture of defiance offered against it, but also, in connection with that act, a breaking open of defined roles of race, religion, and gender. She examines the connections between sexuality, racialization and economic and political domination in brief, but fruitful sketches. The role of religion, and particularly of Islam, is also brought, somewhat more tentatively, back into the purview of a universal history of emancipation.

Slavery is connected to sexuality, to the “boundary-disrupting potential of women’s sexual agency that was economically powerful and escaped political control.” This disrupting power was what prompted Napoleon to order Leclerc to expel from Saint-Domingue all white women who had slept with black men. The boundary-disrupting potential of women is not simply limited to the field of sexuality, however, but extends to the perceived disruption of the order of a narrative of Western progress. Buck-Morrs attends to these “historical anomalies”, that, for example of the women under Toussaint L’Ouverture’s system of “military agragrianism” making the unprecedented demand for equal pay. “Simply stated, the women saw themselves as individual and equal workers – and the men did not object.” This particular victory is short-lived, as the French representative to Haiti appeals to notions of gender inequality to convince them otherwise. The “historical anomaly” still stands, however, as an example that allows for an emancipation of the political horizon of the past, and subsequently of the present as well. In the field of religion Buck-Morrs makes a similar move, using as a starting point the stories surrounding the slave ceremony at Bois Caiman that initiated the insurrection. The evidence here is fragmentary; a speech by a black man named Boukman and a sacred ceremony by a priestess called Fatiman. “What if” conjectures Buck-Morrs – “you learn that Boukman…was named Boukman – Bookman- because he was literate and could read the Book, but that the Book was not the Bible?” She argues that evidence points to Boukman being a Muslim, and that this allows for a reading in which he is a preacher of jihad, but also, and more convincingly, for a reading that is framed in the context of a larger, messier, and more universal emancipation.

This, after all, is her overarching project, to rescue history from the systems imposed upon it, even while learning to use the conceptual tools of those systems of thoughts with a greater degree of imagination and freedom. The Haitian Revolution is not a simple story of good vs evil, bu a history formed through “all the existential uncertainties and moral ambiguities of a struggle for liberation under conditions of civil war and foreign occupation.” At the heart of this struggle, however, a universal horizon can be definitively found, one which transcends the political imaginary of our own time as much as of the past; “Haiti’s political imaginary as liberated territory, a safe haven for all, was too grand for statist politics. Its absolutely new extension of both freedom and citizenship transracially and transnationally, does not lend itself to political appropriation as a definition of national identity.” It is, in short, a universal history, or, at least, a moment of historical rupture in which we can see with clarity that radical anti-slavery is a “human invention that belongs to everyone.” A political philosophy that results from authentic and sustained engagement with universal history, which extends the boundaries of moral and political imagination, because it helps us see more clearly. The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, but it flies towards the dawn.
Lifework: That Zone of Indetermination

June 2, 2015

Works Reviewed: David Kishik. The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

“I was not entirely surprised to discover that Wittgenstein and Agamben, my “philosophical parents” to whom I have dedicated my first two books, happened to be born on the same day as my actual mother and father. This book is dedicated to my parents who gave me what philosophy cannot.” – David Kishik.

It is a rare thing when a book’s dedication can serve as a guide to its deployment. In The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics, however, David Kishik makes just such a gesture. Through the combination of biographical research and textual analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s work a picture emerges of a life infused and transformed by philosophy. It is not a biographical work in the sense that it presents an image of “the great man in his study,” but instead a working out of Agamben’s philosophy of life through the lens of the events which gave that philosophy its shape and its trajectory. Life is made in speech, says Agamben; “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” (7) Kishik argues that the success or failure of his own book, dedicated as it is to Agamben’s philosophy of life, should be measured through “its ability to lead the reader to imagine a form of life, by its capacity to clarify how his way of thinking points toward a way of living.” (3)

At the heart of Kishik’s work lies the expressed desire to rework the genre of philosophical biography so that the philosophical subject becomes the subject of philosophy, or, put differently so that the thought of the thinker becomes an illumination of their life. Perhaps what Kishik sets out to do could be described as a secularized hagiography, not in the pejorative sense that it is unduly adulating, but in the sense that the lives of saints were meant as windows or icons which pointed towards a form or way of life. It must, of course, be admitted that for Kishik, as for Agamben, indeterminacy seems to play a far greater role than it does for the saints, yet perhaps this is only a reflection of the idioms of our time.

Despite the frequent use of concepts like indeterminacy and emergent, Kishik’s begins his narrative at a very specific time inn Agamben’s life; 1968. In 1968 Agamben had the opportunity to tell Henry Kissinger off – a small victory, no doubt, but one which we may smile at anyway – and to study with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s influence on Agamben hangs like a heavy cloud throughout the book; indeed Kishik’s endeavour to weave life and philosophy together is in large part a riposte to Heidegger’s famous contempt for the historical and personal context of a philosophy, summed up in his comment that “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.” Kishik reads this statement as a somewhat ironic rebuttal of the opposition between reason and spirit, and finds some truth in it. It is clear, however, that Kishik finds the ethical impulse in Heidegger to be unbalanced or missing, or perhaps too wedded to a determinate form of power over life, rather than the more indeterminate power of life.

The focus on indeterminacy leads Kishik to produce a rather vague political outline, in which Benjamin’s concept of divine violence – that is a violence completely outside the law, is somewhat astoundingly connected to the city of New York under the perverse title of The Manhattan Project. Kishik, apparently intends to connect this with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and is intent on making a statement about an iconoclastic anti-state human politics. Is he simply unaware that he is referencing an appalling, and state-sanctioned, violence against life? The superficial dichotomy between state and humanity, which is in Agamben, though treated with considerable more depth, is a blemish on this work.

Another weakness lies in Kishik’s assesment of religion. He writes: “The rise in modernity of forms of life that are not necessarily grounded in religious convictions is still probably one of the most momentous political events in human history.” A careful reader of Agamben, who has analyzed modern secular concepts as precisely displaced theological ones, should offer a more historically and philosophically nuanced presentation of the intersection of religion and politics. In the end, perhaps, Kishik does not fully escape the temptations of biography or hagiography, the temptation to allow the reference to an actual human presence to substitute for rigorous conceptual analysis. Despite its flaws, however, Kishik’s work is an insightful and engaging companion to Agamben’s lifework.
From the Museum of Abandoned Ideals to Utopia.

May 26, 2015

Works Reviewed: Slavoj Zizek & Srecko Horvat. What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

In the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done, published in 1902, Vladimir Lenin presciently draws a link between “Economism” and terrorism. He chastises those who are fixated on the spontaneity of mass-movements and action, even to the point of advocating terror as a means of “exciting the working-class movement and giving it a strong impetus.” “Are there not,” he asks sardonically, “enough outrages committed in Russian life without special ‘excitants’ having to be invented?” The “Economists”, on the other hand, recommend the apparently more gentle, if less exciting, approach of “lending the economic struggle itself a political character.” What both groups studiously avoid is the organisation of comprehensive political agitation and analysis of their own activity in “political agitation and the organisation of political exposure.” One group goes off searching for artificial ‘excitants’ while the other insists upon talking about “demands.”

“Concrete demands,” of course, is a euphemism for the types of demands which the economic elite is willing to accommodate. The two tracks identified by Lenin, that of the adventurer and that of the bureaucrat, are precisely what we have seen develop in the days and years following movements around the world, movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. The use of terrorist tactics are not limited to those who are granted the label; the American use of drone strikes is itself a significant act of terrorism. At this point we would be justified in speaking not of a “war on terror,” but of terrorist warfare, practiced by jihadists and corporatists alike. What is largely missing is the practice of sustained political agitation and truth-telling.

It is to this dearth of political organization that Srecko Horvat and Slavoj Zizek turn to in What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. In the preface Horvat analyses the Hollywood treatment of the Occupy Wall Street movement as told through Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan, who had taken a plane to New York to film the Occupy protestors while his new Batman movie was under production, presents the choice as one between the existing order of power concentrated in the hands of the financial elite, represented by Batman, or in the brutal violence of Bane. It does not represent, notes Horvat, the conflict between the 1% and the 99%, but rather between one terror and another. It is the false choice between economism and terrorism; as though the huge global mobilization of 2011 could only end in the confirmation of the neoliberal order under Obama in America, the return of military rule to Egypt, or the instigation of Salafist terrorism. The problem, says Horvat, is that structures and organizations that can channel mass political energy and seriously challenge different power relations still need to be built.

What Does Europe Want? offers itself as manifesto for the building of such structures and organizations. It is a manifesto of the political legacy of social democracy inn Europe, and a rallying cry to the active participation of the masses in politics. Composed not long before Syriza rose to power in Greece the book also contains two essays by Alexis Tsipras. Tsipras calls for a new vision of the real economy in which the public good, environmental protection, and decent work conditions are held as the main criterion. “The future,” writes Tsipras, “does not belong to neoliberalism, bankers, and a few powerful multinational companies. The future belongs to the nation and society. It’s time to open the way for a democratic, socially cohesive and free Europe. Because this is the viable, realistic, and feasible solution to exit the current crisis.” (xiv)

Tsipras has no illusions about the difficulties that face this political undertaking. Nor do Horvat and Zizek. The generalized European model, says Tsipras, was created not to save Greece but to destroy it. “Europe’s future is already planned and it envisages happy bankers and unhappy societies.” (xi) Save us from the saviours, writes Zizek, noting that it is a mistake to view the Greek crisis as a humanitarian crisis. “The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle because it is our struggle too.” (89)

Depictions in the media of Greece’s current situation studiously avoid any indications of solidarity across national lines. Greece, and the beleaguered Syriza, must face the European Union, but really the banks of Europe, alone. The future had already been decided, before Alexis Tsipras took power; it was and is a Europe where “monetarism, harsh austerity, and the demolition of the society will be the answer, no matter what the question might be.” (150) This set of ideals, however, will in the long-run mean the dissolution of European society and its political and moral degradation. Tsipras is right to say that Europe will either be democractic and social or it will no longer exist. There is a need, not only in Europe, for the revival of mass political movement, and of a utopian vision in politics which can challenge the life-threatening neoliberal idealism which currently holds sway in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. For this reason this is a book which deserves to be read.
Poisonous words.

February 19, 2015

“Scripture is poison, so to the holy one. Only when it is translated back into oral use, the spoken word, can my stomach tolerate it.” – Franz Rosenzweig

The ancient proscription of knowledge, of the knowledge especially of good and evil, falls heavy in our enlightened hears. Knowledge is our unqualified good, education the panacea by which the masses will become civilized. Civilized for what? Even the most unreflective of us knows that knowledge is bought at a terribly alienating price. The absolute moral standard, the unwavering law of good and evil snatches us inexorably from the naivety of our existence. Now, I cannot exist together with you in the simplicity of speech. Now, I must reflect, I have become a self, our unity has been torn asunder. You, and I, and between us this mediation – these Scriptures, this writing.

Writing makes speech more difficult. Now I must translate back, from the deposits of history, from the vast stores of the dreams of others. Translate back into an idiom which can be understood, not by some absent other, but by the one to whom I speak. I must learn to speak again, not as one writes, but as I am. Already, in the silent spaces of my mind, I can hear the crafty serpents hissing, “you’re just practicing a metaphysics of presence; outdated, idolatrous.” It isn’t so. This desire for proximity, for closeness, for the physicality of the word is my deep desire as a man, a human being. Writing is lonely, infinite loneliness. It reveals already the loneliness of speech; in the delicate dialectics of presence and absence, of yearning and seeing. So, we will not condemn writing or disparage of education. But it must be made palpable. To constantly take medicine won’t do. The Scriptures are overwhelming. Holiness is overwhelming, my mere mortality cannot stand up under its sheer weight. Yet what use is all the knowledge in the world if my own soul becomes a paralyzed deadweight and I cannot speak to you.

You will not surely die. The words of the serpent work their crafty magic. Immortality is promised, and indeed delivered, but only in a certain way; a disembodied way.

The codex, unalterable and terrible, devastates me, creature that I am. Its permanence makes possible the diabolical evils of which I previously would be incapable of even imagining. The longevity of my sins, of my errors, must now outlast me. The weight of the risk I take in communicating of myself now increases, but it is increasingly unclear how the words of my heart and my mouth can go out to become productive and to live on in the hearts and minds of others. Without a community, without a friend, I would surely have no stake in language itself. The seriousness of this loss is easily perceived in contemporary discussions on “free speech.” What is typically meant is a speech that is free, not in the sense of freedom and authenticity, but free in that it is not carefully considered responsive and responsible speech. The permanence and anonymity of writing, of a disembodied textuality, whose repercussions in the world of flesh and blood are all too real and usually violent. The immortality that is offered in the textual fabric of civilization, and the end of life.

The dream of redemption is ever-present. Even in the face of the terrors, and the horrors of history. In the face of the evolution of the craft of death there are signs of life. The poison of Scripture can, indeed must, be translated back into orality. We will learn, because we must, how to speak to one another. To do this we must ask difficult questions, ask them, especially, of each other. Thought cannot be the monologic stasis of a single self thinking itself into the world. The world; the community of human language, is already out there, and the thoughts and words that fill it take their place with respect to the complex ecology in which they abide and within the conversation of those living humans who populate this earth. The weight of words is a heavy burden, and if there is no certainty that they will not prove poisonous and vain then it would, perhaps, be better to be silent. But if our words are intimidating and oppressive, how much more terrifying our silences. After all, a complete refusal to engage in the compromised human world would not heal our deep and desperate need for communion.

And healing is what we need.

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