Des Insurrections Ambivalentes : entretien avec Etienne Balibar Button 14 January 2021 Button Etienne Balibar; Image crédit: FRANCE 24, http://cas.uniri.hr et Verso Books Etienne Balibar est le philosophe marxiste le plus important de nos jours, et c’est précisément pour cette raison qu’il continue de présenter des critiques sensibles des modèles marxistes. Balibar a remis en question de nombreux mythes endurcis de notre époque, y compris celui de l’État-nation. Dans cet entretien, il aborde de grands problèmes contemporains : le sens de l’engagement politique des intellectuels dans une période de transformation des puissances mondiales, les limites du projet d’Althusser, la politique insurrectionnelle, la xénophobie et les notions d’identités nationales, la « guerre contre la migration ». Cet entretien avec Balibar pour Philosophy World Democracy a été réalisé par Ivica Mladenović et Zona Zarić. Tout d’abord, (1) nous commencerons par la question que vous allez aborder dans cette conférence, à savoir la question de l’engagement. Plusieurs chercheurs ont mentionné le fait que ce terme a des significations différentes dans différentes langues. Vous parlez vous-même d’engagement au sens pascalien et sartrien. Qu’est-ce qui inspire cette idée d'engagement dans vos propres expériences et vos propres références philosophiques? ÉTIENNE BALIBAR : C’est Sartre qui a réutilisé le vocabulaire de Pascal dans le texte considéré comme « fondateur » de sa théorie de l’engagement (la « Présentation des Temps Modernes » de 1945), en citant la fameuse formule : « vous êtes embarqués ». (2) Ainsi se trouve initiée une dialectique des contraires : il faut choisir (« il faut parier ») (3) mais dans une situation qu’on ne choisit pas. Je pense que la référence pascalienne est fondamentale, parce qu’elle montre que dans l’engagement il ne s’agit pas d’une simple décision d’un mode de vie ou de travail plutôt que d’un autre mais de ce qui détermine toute la vie et toute la pensée. Il s’agit donc de transformer une contingence en nécessité. Mais la référence pascalienne suggère que ce qui est en jeu est une rédemption ou une damnation dans une vie future (un « au-delà »), alors qu’il s’agit du sens de la vie présente, ou de ce que Marx appelait « l’ici-bas » ( Diesseitigkeit ). Dès lors se pose la question des conséquences de l’engagement, qui est à mes yeux la question fondamentale. Qu’est-ce qu’on fait des erreurs qu’implique inévitablement l’engagement. D’un point de vue sartrien, celui d’une liberté toujours « transcendante », on peut se « dégager » et parfois c’est ce qu’il faut faire. Je pense que la forme supérieure de l’engagement consiste à « s’obstiner » (comme disent Negt et Kluge dans History and Obstinacy ), ce qui ne veut pas dire défendre aveuglement les mêmes erreurs, mais chercher les moyens de les comprendre et de les rectifier pour soi et surtout pour le « nous » auquel un engagement vous lie. Car s’engager c’est sortir de soi. C’est ce que j’ai essayé de faire dans mes rapports avec l’engagement communiste – sans être certain d’y avoir réussi, bien sûr. L'idée de la fin, ou du moins du déclin des intellectuels, est défendue dans un nombre important de textes théoriques publiés au cours des trente dernières années. Êtes-vous d'accord avec cette thèse et quel est, à votre avis, le rôle et la place de l’engagement des intellectuels dans les sociétés contemporaines et dans les luttes sociales ? EB : Cette question n’a aucun sens si on ne la subordonne pas à une enquête et un effort de définition de ce que signifie « intellectuels ». Deux idées me semblent importantes à cet égard dans la tradition à laquelle j’appartiens. D’une part, celle de Marx qui inscrit la « division du travail manuel et intellectuel » parmi les grandes structures de domination traversant toute l’histoire, même si ses modalités ne cessent de se transformer. D’autre part, celle de Gramsci qui fait des « intellectuels » (ou du moins de certains d’entre eux, ayant une capacité d’intervention « organique » sur les luttes sociales) les constructeurs de l’hégémonie, des rapports de pouvoir et de subordination (ou de contre-pouvoirs défiant l’ordre établi), mais qui affirme aussi l’existence d’une « fonction intellectuelle » débordant l’intellectualité institutionnelle dominante, et pouvant être assumée par des individus de toutes les classes sociales, en particulier à travers leurs activités militantes. La société capitaliste « mondialisée » d’aujourd’hui (que j’appelle avec d’autres une société de « capitalisme absolu ») est en train de complètement transformer les données de ce problème, en utilisant les ressources des nouvelles technologies et de la communication en déplaçant les lieux de pouvoir réel dans la société. En fait elle n’a plus besoin d’intellectuels au sens « bourgeois » du terme (dont font partie les universitaires, les artistes « indépendants », voire les savants qui se consacrent à la recherche « pure », etc.). C’est une société capitaliste non-bourgeoise ou post-bourgeoise . D’où une situation paradoxale et périlleuse à la fois : les intellectuels qui se veulent « critiques » (les « traîtres » à l’ordre existant, comme disait Marx) doivent aussi et peut-être d’abord défendre leur droit à l’existence et les institutions qui leur permettent de travailler. Mais ils n’ont aucune chance d’y parvenir s’ils campent sur une définition passéiste de l’intellectuel (même « engagé ») et sur une position défensive. L’articulation avec des luttes sociales (ce qui ne veut pas dire seulement la lutte des classes, mais l’écologie, le féminisme, l’antiracisme et le décolonialisme, etc.) est donc à la fois un choix éthico-politique et une façon de faire vivre la « fonction intellectuelle » dans la société. Les insurrections sont le moteur des changements politiques dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, mais l’ambivalence est leur caractéristique fondamentale, donc le problème politique qu’elles doivent affronter. Votre maître et la personne qui a fondamentalement influencé votre pensée, Louis Althusser, a publié en juin 1970 dans la revue La Pensée un de ces textes magistraux, intitulé "Idéologie et appareil idéologique de l'État". Dans ce texte, le philosophe distingue deux appareils d'État : l'appareil répressif et l'appareil idéologique de l'État. Ce dernier est moins visible et est constitué de toutes les institutions qui permettent la transmission de leur idéologie par les classes qui dirigent l'État à l'ensemble de la société. Quelle est la différence entre l'appareil idéologique de l'État dont Althusser parlait dans les années 1970 et l'appareil idéologique de l'État d'aujourd'hui ? EB : Ce serait une très longue discussion… J’ai énormément appris d’Althusser, à la fois au travers de ses textes et sous la forme d’une longue amitié et collaboration personnelle. Je suis très heureux de voir que certains de ses textes, souvent incomplets et aporétiques, car ils ont été élaborés dans des conditions de très grande tension personnelle et collective, continuent de faire penser ou même agir aujourd’hui. L’opposition entre « appareils répressifs » et « appareils idéologiques », qui a été souvent critiquée (notamment par Foucault) ne doit pas être entendue de façon typologique (même si Althusser se laisse aller à des classifications des grandes institutions dans l’une ou l’autre catégorie) mais plutôt de façon dynamique ou stratégique, comme signe du fait que les rapports de pouvoir oscillent entre deux pôles et les combinent dans des proportions inégales. Mais le problème le plus délicat, et potentiellement le plus fécond, concerne la référence qui est faite ici à l’État . Il s’agit évidemment d’une descendance par rapport à la notion de postestas indirecta , qui appartient à la tradition de la théologie politique (Bellarmin, Hobbes) et qui débouche au XIXe siècle sur le concept du « pouvoir spirituel » chez Auguste Comte. En la combinant avec l’idée marxiste de « l’idéologie dominante comme idéologie de la classe dominante », Althusser se donne les moyens de reprendre le programme gramscien d’un « élargissement du concept d’État » qui installe celui-ci de façon occulte dans l’infrastructure inconsciente de la subjectivité individuelle elle-même. Louis Althusser dans son bureau, Paris, April 26 1978, Photo crédit : Alain Mingam/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Mais on peut se poser la question de savoir si cette construction structurale est toujours adéquate (du moins sans variation) à la façon dont sont formatées les subjectivités dans le capitalisme actuel (qui de ce point de vue est bien caractérisé comme un « néo-libéralisme »). Une jeune philosophe grecque, Maria Kakogianni, a proposé le concept d’ « appareils idéologiques de marché » pour enregistrer la nouveauté des mécanismes d’interpellation des individus en « sujets » dans une société où la domination idéologique ne passe pas tant par l’imaginaire de la souveraineté que par celui de la concurrence et de la rentabilité auxquelles il faut « s’adapter » (Barbara Stiegler). Je suis tenté de penser que nous avons là un autre indice de l’émergence d’un capitalisme sans bourgeoisie au sens classique. On voit bien dans la crise actuelle, engendrée par la pandémie du Covid-19, et dont les dimensions morales sont aussi fondamentales que les dimensions économiques, que le désarroi et même le désespoir collectifs résultent autant, voire davantage du sentiment de la faillite du marché que du sentiment de la faillite de l’État… Ou plutôt celui-ci en fait partie, car les États aujourd’hui sont instrumentalisés par le marché à un degré qui est sans précédent. A l'époque où le mouvement des Gilets jaunes était à son zénith, vous avez dit qu'à travers ce mouvement - qui présente de nombreuses contradictions - on remarque le processus où « les exclus s’incluent ». Comment voyez-vous ce mouvement dans le contexte des nouvelles luttes de classes en France ? EB : en tant que « mouvement » non pas organisé mais individualisé, les Gilets Jaunes ont probablement terminé leur trajectoire. Mais la révolte contre les effets d’exclusion (privation de citoyenneté active en même temps que de reconnaissance et de protection sociale) dont il était l’expression ne va pas disparaître. On peut penser au contraire que les conditions extraordinairement inégalitaires et autoritaires dans lesquelles s’organise (ou se désorganise) l’effort de la société pour maîtriser la pandémie (qui elle-même affecte les individus et les groupes sociaux de façon extraordinairement inégale, en creusant ce que j’ai appelé les « différences anthropologiques », c’est-à-dire les différences qui fracturent l’espèce humaine comme telle), sont grosses de nouveaux phénomènes insurrectionnels. Mais la question de savoir quelle orientation politique ils vont prendre va se poser de façon aiguë. Dans le mouvement des Gilets Jaunes, où beaucoup avaient cru pouvoir lire une forme française de « populisme » tel qu’il se développait ailleurs au même moment (pensons à Trump, à Bolsonaro, etc.), il est remarquable que les tendances xénophobes et autoritaires aient été marginalisées et finalement surmontées par les participants eux-mêmes. Rien ne garantit qu’il en aille toujours ainsi. Les insurrections sont le moteur des changements politiques dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, mais l’ambivalence est leur caractéristique fondamentale, donc le problème politique qu’elles doivent affronter. Mais ils n’ont aucune chance d’y parvenir s’ils campent sur une définition passéiste de l’intellectuel (même « engagé ») et sur une position défensive. L’articulation avec des luttes sociales (ce qui ne veut pas dire seulement la lutte des classes, mais l’écologie, le féminisme, l’antiracisme et le décolonialisme, etc.) est donc à la fois un choix éthico-politique et une façon de faire vivre la « fonction intellectuelle » dans la société. Dans votre dernier livre, Histoire interminable : d'un siècle l'autre, (écrit I) , le dernier chapitre est un plaidoyer stratégique pour un projet socialiste pour le 21ème siècle. Nous avons une question suivante : si les socialismes précédents – ceux qui se sont concrétisés dans l'État national-social selon votre expression – pensaient la politique en termes de purs rapports de force, quel est le cadre interprétatif de la politique que vous proposez pour le socialisme du 21ème ? EB : Dans ce chapitre final de mon livre, je prends soin de souligner le caractère hypothètique des descriptions et des propositions que j’avance. Tout cela est matière à discussion et donc objet de réflexion. J’ai pris le risque d’utiliser un concept “large”, et même extrêmement large (on me l’a reproché) de “socialisme”, dans lequel, retournant contre elle-même la thèse de Friedrich von Hayek qui opposait au libéralisme en tant que dérégulation absolue du marché toutes les formes d’intervention étatique dans l’économie, j’ai inclu aussi bien les modèles de planification autoritaires et de parti unique du “socialisme réel” que les formations social-démocrates de l’Ouest européen et américain (donc le New Deal ) et les politiques de “développement” du tiers monde. Il s’agissait en particulier d’inscrire toutes ces politiques et les innovations institutionnelles correpondantes dans l’histoire des luttes de classes, de souligner (après Keynes et Negri) la fonction décisive de la Révolution russe de 1917 qui inspire au capitalisme le sentiment de l’urgence des politiques sociales (qu’il a perdu aujourd’hui...), et de comprendre que le capitalisme dans lequel nous vivons aujourd’hui n’est pas, suivant la formule classique, une “antichambre du socialisme”, mais un régime postsocialiste , qui s’est construit en déconstruisant le socialisme sous ses différentes formes. Lenin à Paris Affiche soviétique ; Image crédit : Wikimédia Commons J’ai aussi souligné, comme vous le rappelez, que ces expériences socialistes (très hétérogènes entre elles) ont ceci de commun d’avoir traité la question sociale dans un cadre national , ce qui est aussi un ressort de leur étatisme et explique la difficulté de repenser la question de la transformation sociale de façon transnationale, en mobilisant les forces correspondantes à cette échelle. C’est pourtant ce qu’imposent aussi bien les effets plus ou moins réversibles de la “mondialisation” que ceux, décidément irréversibles, de la catastrophe écologique. Un “socialisme” du 21ème siècle (j’ai mis le terme entre guillemets, pour marquer que ce n’est pas nécessairement le meilleur terme, ou le terme définitif) devrait combiner, de façon ouverte, des objectifs et des modalités d’action politique très hétérogènes entre eux et d’échelle très différente: j’ai dit hypothétiquement des régulations internationales (du travail, de la finance, des normes environnementales, des armements...), des utopies (c’est-à-dire des expérimentations à petite petite ou grande échelle de nouveaux modes de vie en commun, donc de consommation, de propriété, etc.), et finalement des insurrections (au sens le plus large, de préférence non-violentes étant donné). En juin dernier, vous avez co-signé un appel alertant l'espace public sur le fait qu'Emmanuel Macron ne lutte pas contre le racisme, mais contre l'antiracisme en France. Comment voyez-vous la présidence d'Emmanuel Macron dans son ensemble ? Y a-t-il quelque chose de fondamentalement nouveau qu'il a apporté à la vie politique française par rapport à ses prédécesseurs ? Et comment vous sentez-vous en sachant que le président français a indiqué qu'il était "très inspiré" par votre travail et qu'il voulait même faire sa thèse avec vous ? EB : Je pense que ces déclarations du candidat Emmanuel Macron faisaient partie d’une campagne de communication, de même que ses références encore plus insistantes à la collaboration avec Paul Ricœur. Mais après-tout je n’ai aucune raison et aucun moyen de déterminer son degré de sincérité. Je n’ai donc rien de plus à en dire. Quant à la combinaison dans le discours et l’action d’un dirigeant politique français de la rhétorique modernisatrice et réformatrice, comportant le cas échéant un volet social, avec une instrumentalisation du thème xénophobe et, dans les faits, racisant, de « l’identité française », elle n’a strictement rien de nouveau. Ce qui est très inquiétant, c’est que le Président opère ce virage à droite, et même vers l’extrême droite (il n’est pas le seul dans la classe politique française, mais il exerce le pouvoir) dans un moment où toute une série de facteurs (dont le terrorisme) peuvent pousser l’opinion publique vers une forme « active » de racisme institutionnel. C’est le phénomène que j’avais appelé il y a quelques années « l’impuissance du tout-puissant », une des matrices du fascisme dans l’histoire européenne. L’accueil des errants dans des conditions « humaines » c’est-à-dire conformes au droit international, peut poser des problèmes de police comme n’importe quel mouvement de population dans des situations d’exception, mais il ne constitue pas un danger pour la « sécurité » des pays européens ou de leur communauté. L’amalgame avec la question de la « terreur » est purement et simplement raciste (en particulier à travers la composante islamophobe). Il y a trois ans, dans un article paru dans Le Monde, vous souligniez que l'Union européenne, menacée par l'autoritarisme technocratique et la montée du néofascisme, risquait d'exploser. Dans cet article, vous appeliez à une refondation historique de l'Europe axée sur un nouveau type de fédération. Entre-temps, la situation ne fait que de se dégrader visiblement. À votre avis, quelle est la solution la plus probable pour l'UE dans la conjoncture actuelle : la dissolution ou la refondation ? Et, peut-on dire que la destruction de l'ex-Yougoslavie peut être considérée comme un indicateur de l'incapacité de l'Europe à faire face à son propre destin ? EB : Ma réponse – pardonnez la dérobade – est que je n’en sais rien. La destruction de la Yougoslavie (je n’emploie jamais l’expression « ex-Yougoslavie »…) est bien sûr, entre autres (car il y a quand même aussi des causes internes, mais nous sommes ici par définition dans une topologie où l’interne et l’externe échangent constamment leurs places) une marque de cette incapacité de l’Europe que vous évoquez. Mais il y en a beaucoup d’autres. Le Brexit en est une autre, évidemment, et par-dessus tout la gestion criminelle de la question des migrants et des réfugiés en Méditerranée, avant, pendant et après l’initiative de Merkel en 2015 (dont le sabotage a été assuré conjointement par la Hongrie et par la France). Réfugié syrien montrant une affiche d’Angela Merkel; Image credit: Deutsche Welle Certains commentateurs ont, sur le moment, salué le programme de « relance » de la Commission européenne (comportant un volet très limité de mutualisation des dettes) en face de la crise actuelle comme un « moment hamiltonien » - donc fédéraliste – pour l’Europe. Admettons la comparaison, bien qu’elle recouvre toute sorte de difficultés quant à la nature de la construction étatique en Amérique au 18ème siècle et en Europe au 21ème siècle… En fait rien n’est joué parce que, d’un côté, la question maintenant posée, est de savoir ce qu’est une monnaie dans le monde de l’endettement généralisé (ou dans quel régime monétaire l’Europe devra s’engager compte tenu des rapports de forces internationaux) ; et, de l’autre, la possibilité de gérer un budget commun sans une légitimité démocratique renforcée pour les institutions européennes est plus douteuse que jamais (or cette légitimité est presque inexistante). On en reste donc à la situation que je décrivais : aucune politique pour les peuples européens n’existera si le fédéralisme européen ne s’invente pas (pensons à ce que nous disions plus haut des régulations), mais les adversaires de ce fédéralisme (pour des raisons souvent opposées entre elles, mais dont la négativité se conjugue) ont en main tous les moyens de blocage. Je n’ai pas les moyens de dire autre chose. Comme d’autres, je pense aux « Somnambules » (au sens de Hermann Broch, repris depuis). Dans une conférence que vous avez donnée le 22 octobre 2018 à Montréal, vous affirmiez qu'après la "guerre contre la terreur", on parle maintenant de la "guerre contre les migrations". Nous pouvons voir que cette question des migrations approfondit le clivage non seulement entre la gauche et la droite, mais aussi au sein même de la gauche, entre les courants qui plaident pour une solution dite sécuritaire et ceux qui prônent la position humanitaire. Vous soutenez vous-même la thèse selon laquelle le droit à la circulation et à l'hospitalité sont des droits fondamentaux. Comment devrait-on, selon vous, comprendre la question des migrations dans le contexte du capitalisme contemporain et quelle est la stratégie appropriée pour une gauche progressiste sur cette question ? le capitalisme dans lequel nous vivons aujourd’hui n’est pas, suivant la formule classique, une “antichambre du socialisme”, mais un régime postsocialiste, qui s’est construit en déconstruisant le socialisme sous ses différentes formes. EB : Comme je ne peux pas, en quelques mots, reprendre tout mon argumentaire, qui d’ailleurs ne cesse d’évoluer, sauf sur le point central qui est la reconnaissance de la centralité politique et morale de cette question, je me contenterai de trois notations. Premièrement il faut cesser de s’enfermer dans cette dichotomie du « sécuritaire » et de « l’humanitaire », qui est elle-même un élément de la rhétorique de guerre contre les migrations, ou plutôt contre les migrants et les réfugiés – que pris ensemble j’appelle les « errants ». L’accueil des errants dans des conditions « humaines » c’est-à-dire conformes au droit international, peut poser des problèmes de police comme n’importe quel mouvement de population dans des situations d’exception, mais il ne constitue pas un danger pour la « sécurité » des pays européens ou de leur communauté. L’amalgame avec la question de la « terreur » est purement et simplement raciste (en particulier à travers la composante islamophobe). Deuxièmement l’analyse des migrations internationales dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, avec toute la complexité des déterminations concrètes qui l’accompagne (orientation des migrations du Sud au Sud, du Sud au Nord, combinaison des formes légales et illégales, corrélation ou non avec la transformation de la division internationale du travail, etc.) relève d’une transformation de ce que Marx appelait la « loi de population » du capitalisme et que Rosa Luxemburg (puis ses successeurs, analysant le « système-monde » du capitalisme historique) ont repensé comme une articulation entre les « centres » capitalistes et leurs « périphéries ». Aujourd’hui les centres sont en Europe ou en Amérique, mais aussi en Chine, en Asie du Sud-Est, dans le Golfe persique… et les « périphéries » d’om provient la surpopulation prolétarisée. Enfin troisièmement, la régulation des mouvements de population et surtout la reconnaissance du « droit aux droits » (Arendt) pour toutes les catégories d’êtres humains à la surface de la terre, territorialisés et déterritorialisés, nationalisés et dénationalisés, est le cœur d’un nouveau droit cosmopolitique et d’un nouvel ordre international, auquel s’opposent toutes les forces conservatrices (y compris celles qui se classent « à gauche » ici ou là dans le monde), mais que l’entrée de l’humanité dans l’âge des bouleversements climatiques et démographiques (auxquels on voit maintenant que vont s’ajouter les bouleversements sanitaires) met inéluctablement à l’ordre du jour. Je ne sais pas combien de temps il faudra pour que la majorité de nos peuples en prenne conscience, ni quelles violences en seront la condition (je ne crois pas, malheureusement, qu’il faille exclure des pratiques génocidaires). Ni, a fortiori, [combien de temps il faudra] pour que des gouvernements et des institutions internationales prenne le problème en charge. Mais je ne vois pas comment on pourrait en faire l’économie. NOTES 1. Cet entretien a été réalisé le 11 décembre 2020 à l'occasion d'Etienne Balibar recevant le prix annuel «Miladin Životić» à l'Institut de philosophie et de théorie sociale de l'Université de Belgrade. 2. BlaisePascal, Les Pensées , Paris, E. Mignot, 1913, p. 123. 3. Pascal, ibid. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY Jean-Pierre Dupuy is an engineer and a philosopher. He founded the center of cognitive sciences and epistemology of the École polytechnique (CREA) in 1982 and is a member of the French Academy of Technology. He wrote more than twenty books, notably on cognitive sciences and on the question of disasters, notably Pour un catastrophisme éclairé : quand l'impossible est certain , Seuil, 2002. “A Paradise Inhabited by Murderers Deprived of Wickedness and Victims Deprived of Hatred”: Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima 30 March 2021 Read Article

The Politics of the Expired: Response to “Trash: Evil” by Dwivedi and Mohan Button 4 May 2023 Button Title image; A homeless man sleeps under an American flag blanket on a park bench in New York City; Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Trash evokes a strange feeling of vulnerability against something that was once a part of our life and now we have to throw it away and destroy it. This stinking mass once belonged to us and now we have a burning desire to get it out of our sight as soon as possible. Our vulnerability to trash, to the stench of things we throw away, is a vulnerability to our own self. This is a response to the philosophical and political meditation on epochs of trash published recently by Dwivedi and Mohan. On March 20, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan published an article titled Trash: Evil (1) which offered a new and intriguing interpretation of the concepts of trash and evil. Dwivedi and Mohan are philosophers concerned with evil and are confronting evil (2) , and this concern can be seen in nearly all their writings. They address particular evils including caste, racism, war, fascism, and technocracy, and the conceptual problematics of evil such as kakon, steresis, stasis, pandemics, criticalisation. The text under my consideration is an extension of their concern. Mohan and Dwivedi's article was published at a time when Paris was facing mountains of trash caused by a widespread strike in various sectors in response to the French government's controversial pension bill. The protest movement against raising the pension age from 62 to 64 is the biggest domestic crisis of Emmanuel Macron’s second term. The stench of overflowing trash cans had lingered in the French capital after garbage collectors went on strike and piled up to 10,000 tons of rotting garbage on the streets. But striking sanitation workers in Paris returned to work. Associated Press reported that clean-up crews were tasked on Wednesday, March 29, to pick up piles of trash that had accumulated during the week-long strike starting March 6. “Trash mounds of up to 10,000 tons along the French capital’s streets — matching the weight of the Eiffel Tower — have become a striking visual and olfactory symbol of opposition to Marcon’s bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64”, (3) the report continued. Well, supposedly, the streets of Paris are returning to their former state: the trash is returning to where it belonged, and the streets are once again reclaiming their iconic identity, namely a place where cleanliness reigns and can once again be used as a community. My intention is to raise points that may be generally overlooked in this immediate context in order to provide a kind of ontology of excess and our vulnerability to it. Their article serves as the starting point for the text that follows. I will extend three points which are also indicative of a difference with their text: We are a trash making species and trash is an integral part of human life which will never be removed, Capitalism is a system which generates trash, but in the current era, this mechanism has turned into a kind of ethos, which, although it seems to show the environmentalist approach of the dominant system, is ultimately nothing but the new logic of late capitalism, Trash is related to the sacred and therefore it should be considered as a necessary ruin of our lives, a point I will argue through Georges Bataille's notion of excess. Trash: Division “Trash: Evil” begins with an apparently simple and self-evident premise: Trash is evil . So far, everything seems obvious: everything that is left-over and can no longer be used should be thrown away under the title of trash, which is evil; that is, trash is a kind of evil like many other things. But Dwivedi and Mohan invert this proposition and ask us to “try to understand it in the same way we understand evil is steresis and evil is stasis .” (4) The logic of inversion of statements is addressed by Dwivedi and Mohan in Gandhi and Philosophy while discussing the inversion of “God is Truth” to “Truth is God” in M. K. Gandhi. No inversion is the same as the other one for them, predicative logic and term logic cannot examine the peculiar system of M. K. Gandhi. As Dwivedi and Mohan show “We should not be led […] to the conclusion that God is a category predicated of Truth” and instead “even God has Truth, but he is not it”. (5) Uncollected garbage is piled up on a street in Paris, Monday, March 20, 2023; Image credit: Aurelien Morissard/AP “Trash: Evil” inverts the proposition “trash is evil” to “evil is trash” through two considerations. First, the text shows that evil is always designated in relation to something which is not desirable. The older meaning of evil as “kakon” came from disgust towards excrements. Therefore, there are different historical epochs of thinking the concept of evil, in other words, evil is not an absolute concept. If yesterday evil was deformity, today evil is trash—“These components [such as excrements, peels of vegetable, rotten food], which came to be the designation for evil, and the laws which comprehend them, analogously identified evil in actions and functions which were far removed from their origins.” (6) Secondly, the relation that “trash” has to everything else in the world today is that of an accumulation which is not integrable into the system of production. So trash as evil grows in proportion to growth of wealth; for the same reason they also argue that most of the wealth produced today is trash because it has no real productive relation to the world we live in. Trash never loses its existence and even despite all the recent efforts to reuse it, this stubborn remnant shows us its so-called "evil" nature. “Trash: Evil” also makes a distinction between trash and all other kinds of refuses of living such as rubbish, garbage, and pollution; that is, trash is a relatively new and specific variable which is integral to the present form of capitalism. Vomit and excrements which caused disgust could be removed and returned to the earth. What came to be called pollution was with reference to the excrements of animals which pulled carts and wagons through modern cities, which could also be returned to the farm as manure. Rubbish is the remains of construction and destruction of buildings which could be reused in construction. Garbage on the other hand is related to the laws of cuisine and it refers to the animal parts which human beings do not wish to use, but these parts can be turned into animal feed. For Dwivedi and Mohan, trash is only analogous to these older types of refuse, that is, they define trash is that which cannot be reused or returned to the system of life. Trash never loses its existence and even despite all the recent efforts to reuse it, this stubborn remnant shows us its so-called "evil" nature. The way the system of senses are distributed in regards to trash is such that it cannot be ignored: the smell and the disgusting appearance of the refuse will never be removed and we can overlook it simply by transferring it to a place beyond our sense of smell and sight, just like scandalous idea of shipping trash and toxic waste to poor countries. As Jennifer Clapp has elaborated in her “Toxic Exports” (7) , for more than a decade, environmentalists and the governments of developing countries have lobbied intensively and generated public outcry in an attempt to halt hazardous transfers from Northern industrialized nations to the Third World, but the practice continues. Trash is ultimately the property of those who are on the wrong side of geography and geopolitics, those who have no choice but to carry the remnants of a civilization that has benefited the least from its positive features, but has taken the largest share of its discontents. Trash or waste creates a significant divide, a division between the "haves" and "have-nots". In the beginning, this gap has a very common nature: the "haves" produce trash, and the "have-nots" often have no fate other than living off these leftovers. Here, our task is not so difficult: antagonism, consumerism, etc. are among the usual suspects. But is it not possible to go beyond this usual reading? Here, a more precise focus is needed on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. Today, commodities are bought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value. In our societies, when a consumer buys an object, he/she is buying into a whole new system of needs that is at once rational and hierarchical. As a rule, this version is presented as part of a wider shift towards a new holistic post-materialist spiritual paradigm. Employee cooperation and engagement, respect for the environment, transparent commercial transactions, are today the keys to success. Nowadays, marketers have found a crafty way to rework Max Weber’s "Protestant Ethic". They tell us we can achieve personal redemption not through hard work and amassing savings, but by consuming the right products. When you buy eco-friendly products, fair trade goods, or products that yield some kind of charitable dividend, you don’t have to think twice about the cost of your consumerism. Not when you’ve done some good and earned yourself some good capitalist karma. In other words, today's capitalism is no longer a machine that is constantly producing waste, but aims to create a deeper personal experience, one that is based on a kind of "new spirit of capitalism." In this way, a new spirit of global responsibility can use capitalism as the only and the most efficient means for the common good. As Slavoj Žižek has elaborated perfectly, “the basic ideological dispositif of capitalism... is separated from its concrete socio-economic conditions (capitalist relations of production) and conceived of as an autonomous life or "existential" attitude which should (and can) be overcome by a new more "spiritual" outlook, leaving these very capitalist relations intact .” (8) Here, one is dealing with a new level of consumption: We buy commodities not for their utility or as status symbols; we buy them for the experience they provide, and we consume them to make our lives more pleasurable and meaningful. In such circumstances, blaming capitalism for consumerism is ineffective. The current crisis stems from capitalism's incorporation of a cultural dimension into its mechanism, giving the impression that existing antagonisms and contradictions can be easily overcome within the framework of market relations. For Dwivedi and Mohan, trash is only analogous to these older types of refuse, that is, they define trash is that which cannot be reused or returned to the system of life. This form of “conspicuous consumption”, as Thorstein Veblen argued in his “Theory of the Leisure Class” (9) , creates a situation in which the entire society is organized around consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing. In the realm of sign-value, commodities and their remnants take on meaning according to their place in a differential system of prestige and status. In this regard, the division between the "haves" and "have-nots" and their relation to trash takes a different meaning: The "haves" often produce less trash because they are able to consume high-quality products that leave less waste behind. They also engage in a personal culture of "recycling" to the point where they are essentially stingy in their consumption. But the "have-nots” have access only to low-quality goods that degrade over time and must be thrown away overall. An example of this seemingly contradictory distinction can also be seen in architecture: only the true wealthy class can use minimal architecture in their homes, while the poor and marginalized classes use every chance to use kitsch objects in their habitations, just so to give it a more bearable appearance. Trash: Ballistics In today's world, it is not possible to deal with disposable things, in other words, what remains of the consumption cycle, without a closer examination of the nature of the ruling system, i.e. capitalism. For example, in the field of agricultural waste, the nature of mass and industrial production of the agronomics is very important. When capitalism operates according to its own most rational internal principles or deep structures, it cannot properly manage the agricultural/food system. We learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that capital-led agriculture produces hotspots in which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. As Rob Wallace puts it, “capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence.” (10) “Trash: Evil” differs with Marx on the concept of proletariat. Dwivedi and Mohan have been engaging with Marx in their works, but always at a distance, and often with differences. The concept of proletariat was critiqued by them in "Gandhi and Philosophy", “Gandhi’s theoretical and political confrontations with the machines reflect Marx […] man is objectified by the production system, or he is a substratum of the machine, and his movements are determined according to the laws of the machine […] those men who maintain the machines by cleaning and repairing them are not directly working at the end product — the law of a product — but they work according to the laws of the peripheries of the machines”. (11) In “Trash: Evil”, they argue that even if proletarianisation—the process of creating labourers through the destruction of the independent lives of the people—is still underway, the era of the proletariat is over. The proletariat are those who are essential to the modes of production with regularity. Today labour is less essential to production and the jobs which engage people are temporary in nature as productions systems invent novelties to remove people from production. Following this, they argue for a thinking of mankind itself as a kind of trash under the present production system, pointing to an important concept: the human-trash who has been forsaken by the production systems. The relationship between man as a species and the rest of nature is central to Marx's thinking. I would argue that the uses the concept of metabolism in his analysis of labor is central to Marx’s thinking. Labor was a process in which man "regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature". (12) As shown by Marx, humans are changing the natural world on which they depend, in more ways and to a greater extent than is commonly thought. For Marx, solution lies in the end of the capitalist system and beginning a socialist society in which there is "more rational management of the metabolic interactions of the producers involved". (13) The word metabolism is derived from the Greek word “Metabolismos” or from the French word “métabolisme”. In Greek, metabolē means a “change” and metaballein means "to change". The combination of the words is derived from meta meaning “over” and ballein meaning “to throw” (ballistics). Therefore, "change" and "throw" are the two main axes of metabolism, and the same axes can be seen in Marx's understanding of this word. During this process, matter is changed through labor and eventually becomes something to be thrown away. During the endless process of production-consumption, there is always something left out, something that must be put aside and destroyed so that the apparatus of "progress" (the so-called most important result of the mentioned sign-value process) continues to move forward. This residue and its often unpleasant smell are in conflict with order, hygiene and progress. It is not without reason that the French word "perfume” (perfume) can be parsed to read pare/fumier or counter/manure. (14) What is thrown out, in a recursive process, becomes the enemy of the system, an obstacle that the health-based ruling system insists on removing as quickly as possible. In the end, this issue has little to do with protecting the environment because, within this framework, preserving the ecosystem is reduced to a personal responsibility that can only be accomplished by recycling Coca-Cola bottles and outdated newspapers, while macropolitics and significant changes to capitalism are ignored. Here, the classic idea of Georges Bataille should be considered once again, according to which surplus is inherent in every economy and the three luxuries of nature, i.e. eating, death and sexual reproduction are intimately related examples of our basic proclivity towards excess, an exuberant dispersal of molecules and energies, without which no new life can come into being. (15) My attempt is to look at this issue beyond the difference that Dwivedi and Mohan made between trash and other forms of it, because in my opinion, the refuse and all its ancient and modern forms can ultimately be classified as "surplus", in other words, the thing that remains in the process of production and consumption. It was this unwanted excess that caused Luther to reach his special enlightenment. As Luther recalls: “In that tower (on the toilet) the Holy Spirit has revealed the Scriptures to me”. (16) From this point of view, without a material world made of dirt, there would be no sacred space. Although trash and human remains are disposed of through complex rituals and mechanisms of totem and taboo, its otherness is tied to our reactions of disgust: this means that detritus or the material produced by erosion is never fundamentally destroyed, but always bears this otherness within. Wastes and residues are often washed away and destroyed, or they are converted by humans into fertilizer for the agricultural cycle. However, despite this, their impact remains and is eerily embedded in the very system in which these objects are treated as trash. These debris are things that life rarely and hardly endures since they represent death and decay. Against them, I, as a living subject, am at the limit of my condition as a living being. The body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (17) Aradkooh Waste Processing Plant, Tehran Province.; Image credit: received Dwivedi and Mohan elaborate that trash can be considered an endogenous variable and an exogenous variable or parameter under different formalities, “Under a different formality, trash is the endogenous variable” and under another consideration “trash grows as an exogenous variable which has to be kept apart from the system which produces it, without (so far) affecting the system of production directly.” (18) However, we may be able add another twist to this reading. Trash is both endogenous and exogenous. Residue, excrement and waste are the product of a kind of "con-plosion", a form of implosion and conspiracy. Waste is a part of the system itself, the excess that the system tries to contain and expel, but ultimately the more that effort increases, the more new methods are introduced to expel that waste, those venomous dregs return to our lives with more power. All efforts to recycle all types of waste and return it to the consumption cycle (products made from recycled garbage, etc., which of course sometimes cost more than normal goods) show that the endo-exogenous nature of trash cannot be denied. Trash is not destroyed but disappears and, like any form of disappearance, leaves behind specters and fragments, like the people of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were killed after the nuclear bombing, but their shadow remained on the walls. This is what Jean-Luc Nancy in his "Being Singular Plural" (19) called “being with”, meaning that that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Our existence and being is accompanied with trash and co-existence with it. Things can only be-with, because every-single-thing exists and they all exist together. The “with” is an inherent part of being because the world is the togetherness of all things, therefore there is no neutral place where being happens. Trash and being, or to put more precisely, our being and trash take place together. The finitude of being is experienced by being in community, that is, through exposure to the death of others, whether it be the expiry of objects or the ones we love and adore. Trash evokes a strange feeling in us; a kind of vulnerability against something that was once a part of our life and now we have to throw it away and destroy it. This stinking mass once belonged to us and now we have a burning desire to get it out of our sight as soon as possible. Our vulnerability to trash, to the stench of things we throw away, is a vulnerability to our own self. This is the catastrophic condition that Nancy so aptly characterized in “L’Intru”: "Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and troubling technician, as Sophocles designated him twenty-five centuries ago. He who de-natures and re-fashions nature; he who re-creates creation; he who brings it out of nothing, and, perhaps, returns it to nothing. He who is capable of the origin and the end." (20) We live in a sad apparatus of trash: we buy, we consume, and then we throw away. Each item's countdown to being thrown away begins when it is purchased. Perhaps it is true that a product's transformation into trash starts the moment it is produced. Trash surrounds us: There is no way to avoid it or forget it. Even the wealthy Brazilians who use helicopters to avoid colliding with the lower classes cannot escape this plight by focusing their attention on the horizon because the day will come when the height of the piled-up dross will be so great that it will cover the entire sky. We have to accept that we are a trash-making species, and any form of human genealogy has to deal with the genealogy of his remnants and waste. This is the code of the automatic disappearance of the world: To go beyond the end when the processes becomes erosional. Our world has turned its own disappearance, its declared self-destruction, its bastard outcome, by seeking to take over all the dimensions of visibility, to make itself extremely operational. This is the ballistics of our world: the calculation of how to throw our surplus, our "being with," so that it is out of sight, as quickly and forcefully as possible. The expired is closely related to the fracture. Something happens in the crack of things, in the breach, and hence in their appearance. A phenomenon in the strict sense, "phainomenon" (from phaenomenon which derives from φαινόμενον, namely something that can be seen and understood), trash is visible and exposed: all our efforts in modern times are to eliminate this phenomenon, this object exposed to light, and suffocate it in darkness. Waste is in front of our eyes, our constant companion in the endless process of consumption. And trash, when it is treated as a phenomenon and is exposed to the sunlight and becomes visible, shows its refuse-ness better than any other time: under the sunlight and in the visible world, trash stinks, and its unpleasant smell takes our breath. From this point of view, the streets of Paris, and the suburbs of big cities like Delhi and Tehran, are the manifestation of the most objective form of the phenomenon. Trash: Disposable Obsessive concern for excreta and trash is the distinguishing feature of humans from animals: Humans do not know what to do with their waste and are distressed by it, while animals do not pay much attention to this issue. The root of this difference should be found in the issue of culture (21) . In other words, culture means trash, a big trash-can. Culture is always pre-existing and wants only to be respected. In culture, like a trash-can, everything has a predetermined place. But waste and excreta occupy an uncertain and troublesome space, a middle place between nature and culture that cannot be left behind. The last few decades have seen capitalism place a lot of emphasis on waste recycling, and for good reason. In the end, this issue has little to do with protecting the environment because, within this framework, preserving the ecosystem is reduced to a personal responsibility that can only be accomplished by recycling Coca-Cola bottles and outdated newspapers, while macropolitics and significant changes to capitalism are ignored. Our world today as a whole is something unthrowable; we all know that the ruins we are living in are simply a trash-object, ready to be torn apart and thrown away, but nonetheless, we assume this old shell of the world as something impossible to be tossed away. But there are some trashes that have become waste due to bad luck and miscalculations, trashes on which our very survival may depend. The movie “Lovely Trash” (2013) directed by Mohsen Amiryoussefi portrays a wonderful example in this regard. The movie has an interesting central idea: Following protests after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, an elderly woman has one night to clear her house of any politically troublesome belongings of her family. Left alone, the old woman (Monir) starts talking to the picture frames of her long lost family members on her windowsill. To help her out, her deceased husband, executed Marxist brother (Mansour) and two sons come back to life in their picture frames. Of the four photo frames in the house (the photo of her husband, who was a supporter of the legal government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the photo of her first son, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq war front, and the younger son, who has more or less nationalist tendencies and lives in America, and the photo of her brother), Monir decides to throw away the one that belonged to his brother: Mansour, a Marxist who was killed in prison after being tortured. Mansour objects to this decision and wonders why, of the four photos, only he should be discarded. "Right. I'm the one who always gets in the way!" In response to his sister's justifications, Mansour responds. The film's most intriguing point is when the remaining three characters, each representing a different aspect of Iran's political leanings, join forces to throw Mansour into the dumpster. Mansour (Shahab Hosseini) in a scene of "Lovely Trash" (2013) by Mohsen Amiryoussefi; Image Credit: Received Finally, Mansour is cast aside, into the trash can of history, like all those lovable trash that went unmentioned and unremembered, from Julian Assange, whose only destination is the dark recess of Belmarsh Prison, to all those boys and girls, men and women who, in the words of the great Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, "knew the secret of the trench and of the star!" (22) And when Monir realizes at the end of the film that her life is not in danger and runs to save the trash of her past, she realizes it is too late and everything is forever lost. Perhaps there is no better image to describe our world. In today's pitiless and cruel world, a world where silence has been brought to court and madness has become the order of the day, only such disposables, these lovely trashes, can be a source of hope. In the end, all of this has become part of the sad symphony we call neoliberalism or capitalism and we must shamelessly admit that all our efforts to go beyond this framework have failed miserably; our lives are surrounded by trash, and the only reason we see for our existence is to submit to the workings of the market and discard our loved ones as disposable. Or as Dwivedi and Mohan conclude: “The relations of specific orders of trash are inherently incapable of forming componential relations with each other. The chimera of this trash power progressively seizing the familiar institutions of democracy looks more and more imminent.” (23) In conclusion, trash is an integral part of human life which will never be removed and trying to overcome this excess is beastiality at its purest, namely a self-immune force of stasis. Trash points to important parts of human life: from antagonism and division to the ballistics of life and capitalist metabolism. Therefore, understanding the existence and ways to overcome the upcoming crises may require a more accurate understanding of the nature of waste and residues that humans are involved in various dimensions. And this is exactly what Mohan and Dwivedi's article seeks to demonstrate. NOTES 1. Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan, “Trash: Evil”, Philosophy World Democracy , 20 March 2023: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/trash-evil 2. I edited a special issue of the journal Episteme , on the philosophy of Dwivedi and Mohan. Consult it for the various ways in which “evil” and ethics appear in their philosophy and politics. Episteme , issue 4: Philosophy for Another Time: Towards a Collective Political Imagination, February 2021. https://positionspolitics.org/episteme-4/ For further reading, the publication of the texts from the Unesco conference “Confronting Evil” organised by Jean-Luc Nancy and Divya Dwivedi in Dwivedi, Divya (ed.) (2021), Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Also, Mohan, Shaj & Dwivedi, Divya. Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. 3. Thomas Adamson, "Long Paris trash strike ends, workers face daunting cleanup", Associated Press , 29 March 2023: https://apnews.com/article/france-protests-pensions-sanitation-strike-macron-b0a0dbc47e151af1a306b4cf64e5f893 4. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”. 5. Mohan, Shaj & Dwivedi, Divya, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics , Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019, p 150 - 155. 6. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”. 7. Clapp, Jennifer, Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries , Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. 8. Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce , London, New York: Verso, 2009, p.35. 9. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class , London: Penguin Classics, 1994. 10. Rob Wallace, Coronavirus: “Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths”, Marx21 , March 1st 2020: https://www.marx21.de/coronavirus-agribusiness-would-risk-millions-of-deaths/ 11. Gandhi and Philosophy , p 119 - 122. 12. Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. I , translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach, London: Penguin, 1976, p.283. 13. Marx, Karl Capital, Vol. III, translated by David Fernbach, London: Penguin Books, 1991, p.216. 14. See: Laporte, Dominique, History of Shit , translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 15. Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: Volume I , translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 34. 16. https://www.ru.nl/radboudreflects/terugblik/terugblik-2017-0/terugblik-2017/17-10-31-500-jaar-maarten-luther-lezing-filosoof/info/english-report-the-reformation-started-on-the/#:~:text=But%20in%20the%20only%20heated,revealed%20the%20Scriptures%20to%20me%E2%80%9D 17. See: Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection , Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 1982, p.3. 18. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”. 19. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural , translated by Anne O'Byrne and Robert Richardson, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 20. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus , Trans. Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p.170. 21. Mohan’s position on culture is different, “A culture is a system of regularities which seek greater integration with other kinds of regularities in order to ensure endurance and range. To ensure its dominance, a particular culture – say the culture of de-postcolonialism – will eliminate other cultures. The co-existence of many cultures depends on the comprehending law of cultures. For example, the museum-art-finance-capital complex is invested in capturing as many distinct cultures as inert artefacts. The supermarket is interested in capturing as many brands as possible on display. But cultures are not inert, they jostle, struggle and battle for more room.” See Mohan, S., & Adams, R. (2022). ‘I take, and I am taken, by what belongs to philosophy’: Philosophy and the Redemption of Democracy. South African Journal of Science. https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2022/14926 22. Baraheni, Reza, Ishamel , translated by Poupeh Missaghi: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/reza-baraheni-ismael/ 23. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Trash: Evil”. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

A Hole That Does Not Speak: Covid, Catastrophe and the Impossible Button 28 May 2022 Button Untitled, Bahman Mohasses; Image Credit: Wikiart Jack Black asks the vital question, namely whether it is at all possible under our current circumstances to discern an 'end' to the Covid-19 virus. In his essay, he argues that outlining how we must now retroactively align ourselves with the impossible, the Covid catastrophe sits as an impossible that happened; an impossibility which, in our response to its ongoing and unending impact, can only be conceived as well as tackled via a paradigm shift in our current social-political coordinates. To this extent, a retroactive perspective is not simply a ‘return to the past,’ but a considered attempt to theoretically, and, thus, philosophically, redefine the very framework in which our Covid-past is retroactively conceived and, as a consequence, how our Covid-future is impossibly determined. Black elaborates that attributing any meaning to the catastrophic era of coronavirus “is itself a way of curtailing the anxiety that we face when confronted with the indeterminacy of the Other’s desire – a desire which the virus provokes.” He proposes to approach the catastrophe as a “hole that does not speak,” and thus not to give “any deeper meaning” to this hole. To this end, he brings together accounts of the trauma of the pandemic that point to the urgency of transfiguring the linear concept of time in which the Covid-19 era is compellingly embedded. In this new temporal framework, Black embeds the concept of “second retroaction,” epitomized in the temporal modus of “the will always have been.” This modus confronts the acts willing to deal with the catastrophe, and even to prevent new ones, with the conditions of their own (im)possibilities, with the multitude of possibilities that, having been there but having not been realized, led to the catastrophe in which we find ourselves in. The second retroaction cares for a “sense of fatigue,” which re-symbolizes the new normal – a normalcy accustomed to catastrophe. What about this possibility which, one way or another, is always caught in its own impossibility? Maurice Blanchot (1) I. Covid-19 presents itself as a strange catastrophe. It has neither destroyed the planet nor has it erased humanity… but it has, in many ways, served to upend and alter what was previously considered ‘normal.’ As a result, what is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Covid catastrophe is the very way it endures. Beyond any notion of catastrophic shock, the Covid catastrophe continues, indeed, it lingers in daily news cycles, changes to working environments and restrictions on travel. It is an enduring presence, from which any determination of its ‘end’ is either nullified by an unending stream of Covid reports, or worse, ignored altogether. On this basis alone, is it even possible to discern an ‘end’ to Covid? Answering this question requires us to ascertain whether Covid represents a new form of ‘ending’ or a continuation of the end, the latter of which can be identified in the Fukuyamian ‘end of history’. As noted by Alenka Zupančič, what the “end of history” proclamation provided was “the disappearance of any real Outside” and, as a consequence, this “meant that we have reached a point where we are living in times that cannot end, at least not for any intrinsic reasons or contradictions.” (2) The ideological significance of this failure has meant that political events – such as the election of Donald Trump – are often viewed as a catastrophe to the very prevalence of a political system that can only account for disruption and change by directing culpability to some abject ‘outside’ force… either an asteroid or some other form of natural disaster. Consequently, whether it be fantasies of ‘the End’ or even a humble acceptance of our own guilt, in each case we resort to similar frameworks of protective reassurance – all of which help us to ‘make sense,’ temporally overcome, but ultimately avoid the far more catastrophic acceptance of the present deadlock. To this extent, the Covid catastrophe is not ‘new,’ but rather a mere continuation of the fact that, for many, the very social and political frustrations enacted under Covid-19 remain a miserable component of the day-to-day lives of large proportions of the world’s population – many for whom the Covid catastrophe has bared no considerable change or alteration to their daily lives. Certainly, such examples do not seek to encourage feelings of guilt – or worse, a far more perverse ‘race to the bottom’ (‘well, if you think this is bad, imagine how bad it is for those in the third-world’); instead, it is to recognize the catastrophes and cataclysms that constitute our presence on this planet. It is in this regard that the Covid catastrophe lays bare a certain paradox in how we confront the End: In the last couple of years, after the SARS and Ebola epidemics, we were told again and again that a new much stronger epidemic was just a matter of time, that the question was not IF but WHEN. Although we were convinced of the truth of these dire predictions, we somehow didn’t take them seriously and were reluctant to act and engage in serious preparations – the only place we dealt with them was in apocalyptic movies like Contagion. (3) Echoing these sentiments, Kamran Baradaran highlights how these failures follow the structure of fetishist disavowal: “I know these warnings are true, but at the same time I do not take them seriously; these catastrophes will not happen for several centuries, so why bother?” (4) What this disavowal posits, however, is a failure to acknowledge the elementary inconsistency of our social and political systems, as well as nature itself. Therefore, instead of attributing an end to that which has become ‘accepted’ (the end of history), and while refraining from the ‘unexpected’ end of something which was widely known, but disavowed (I know very well, but nonetheless…), we can begin to approach the Covid virus in a proper Hegelian mode: as an ‘end’ for which the Covid catastrophe has always-already happened. II. This orientation towards catastrophe, as that which has always-already happened, is not an attempt to bluntly accept the ongoing hardships which the virus has brought to light and made worse; nor, as the below will discuss, is it an attempt to offer some simple closure to what has occurred. Both of these falsehoods advocate a ‘no simple way out’ approach (for better or worse, we’re left with Covid). If anything, such claims should be unconditionally accepted: no matter what our course of action, we will have to acknowledge the various catastrophes that continue to shape our future on Earth. What remains of crucial importance is the extent to which our current catastrophic predicament reveals a sense of fatigue: a re-symbolization of the normal which is now accustomed to catastrophe. We are in danger here of ending up like the dystopian future depicted in Alfonso Cuaron’s, Children of Men (2006): a world, for whom after becoming bereft of children, simply trudges along with no real sense of how the catastrophe occurred or how it can be curtailed (instead, it would seem that in accordance with the film’s depiction of internment camps the path of fascism is all that remains). Mladen Dolar approaches this fatigue in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectic at a standstill” ( Dialektik im Stillstand ): a “tate of maximum tension” that Benjamin believed would help to invigorate an “awakening.” (5) Instead, Benjamin’s desire for the standstill to encourage a “waking-up” is, today, repurposed to “the point of [an] excessive fatigue which rather instigates indifference and irritation.” (6) A Boat Beached in a Port at Low Tide, Richard Parkes Bonington, 182; Image Credit: Wikiart For Gavin Jacobson, this “excessive fatigue” would suggest that we are already existing in a Children of Men present: an “eternal present, ideologically directionless and politically unmotivated to improve our lot.” (7) It is this catastrophe – the lack of any end – which provides “a weird immobility” to the pandemic (8) ; one reflected in the constant threat of further lockdowns or a mutation of the virus beyond the reach of present vaccines. Again, what seems to characterise this fatigue is “a fake appearance of normality” (9) , one that, echoing Children of Men , serves to avoid and/or obscure the question: what is to be done? (10) In answer to this question, we can echo Žižek’s contention that one trap to avoid is “futurology,” which, “by definition ignores our not-knowing.” (11) Here, he notes that: “Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem – futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies.” (12) Such extrapolation from present tendencies can be identified in examples of ‘risk management.’ In his articulations on our “risk society,” Beck sought to underline the fact that, today, whether rich or poor, we remain subject to the same levels of risk which, at best, must be analysed and thus rationalised under present conditions. What this argument ignores, however, is the fact that this risk is dependent upon those very conditions and forms of action that subsequently seek to prevent the risk it creates. (13) As an apologist of ‘risk,’ such management poses a number of ‘riskier’ contentions. Indeed, why, following Beck, would we use our current knowledge to manage the risks involved in oil spills and other ecological catastrophes instead of confronting the (disavowed) knowledge that such spills are a direct result of an economic infrastructure that encourages oil consumption? (14) In addition, what risk is there for the company manager or corporate/financial CEO, who, while exposed to risk, has the knowledge to manage and reduce (i. e. ‘cash-in’) this risk, leaving lower-level employees and banking customers subject to the subsequent risk of losing it all? (15) In each instance, any mitigation and modification is just as likely to maintain or even cause the very risk that such management sought to curtail. Instead, what these risks fail to consider – in fact, what they fundamentally ignore – is the very Real risk of acting on what we know we do not know. One way of approaching this knowledge is to conceive the Covid-19 virus as a hole that does not speak: The message that some people might read from [… this hole] is phantasmatic. And these phantasms circulate like the virus itself, from one cell to another. We know about the transmission and we can make projections like an election poll, we can make forecasts like a weather forecast, we can use all the instruments of the symbolic apparatus to generate data around this hole in knowledge. But the hole itself remains and it doesn’t speak. (16) In such instances, it is of particular importance not to provide this ‘hole’ any deeper meaning. Any meaning attributed to the catastrophe is itself a way of curtailing the anxiety that we face when confronted with the indeterminacy of the Other’s desire – a desire which the virus provokes. It is our lack of knowledge regarding the Other’s desire which posits a ‘hole’ that serves to expose how “in today’s constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse.” (17) However, it is when left with the catastrophe of the Other – that is, with the realization of its indeterminate form – that we can begin to determine the ‘new.’ Note the following from Vieira: … when we encounter an otherness with an essentially indeterminate desire, in addition to the anxiety that it can bring, something new can emerge. The Other of anxiety is imagined by Lacan as a giant praying mantis. What does this inscrutable thing, anxiety, do? This Other, as a Praying Mantis, the devil, but also the mugger on the corner or even the loved one, what does he want from me? However, it is precisely in this indeterminacy of the Other’s desire that we find the possibility of interpreting our own desire: ‘How did I end up here? What am I doing with my life?’ (18) What remains integral to this indeterminacy and, specifically, to Vieira’s questions, is that such interpretation provides the possibility to retroactively (re)interpret our desire. Here, the significance of the Covid catastrophe resides within its retroactive importance: an importance that requires a ‘risk’ far outside the parameters prescribed by our risk society and one that seeks no middle ground in evaluating the implications of catastrophe, today. III. In his appraisal of the virus, Žižek has frequently drawn from Jürgen Habermas’ concern that what the virus reveals is an “existential uncertainty.” (19) This uncertainty is predicated on the fact that, much like other catastrophes, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.” (20) To this, Žižek underscores the following: “Note his [Habermas’s] precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.” (21) The Catastrophe, Eduard von Grützner, 1892; Image Credit: Wikiart Certainly, while knowledge of a potential global pandemic was widely disavowed, both Habermas and Žižek help to emphasise that it is not the disavowal of this knowledge, which proves problematic to our present circumstances, but, rather, the revelation that the virus brings to bare a knowledge predicated on our very non-knowledge; or, as previously noted, to a ‘hole’ in knowledge. (22) Moreover, it is this gap in knowledge – this not-knowing – which is inscribed in the actions of our institutions; actions which lay bare their own temporality: a form of retroaction whereby what is not-known is already known. (23) To return to our previous assertion that the Covid catastrophe has always-already happened, we can consider how it is our (non-)knowledge of the Covid catastrophe and our responses to it that are inevitably entwined in the very catastrophe we seek to manage. In extending this consideration, we can begin to perceive how “every work of mourning, every symbolization of a catastrophe misses something and thus opens a path toward a new catastrophe.” (24) What’s more, “Our acts are never self-transparent, we never fully know what we are doing or what the effects will be.” (25) This approach is echoed in Ruda’s “comic fatalism” (26) , which, alongside Žižek (27) , echoes the work Jean-Pierre Dupuy on time and catastrophe. (28) What remains significant to Dupuy’s account (as well as the Ruda and Žižek variations) is the retroaction it posits. Opposing the concern that time presents a linear progression, Dupuy considers how our relation to time can be conceived as a ‘loop.’ In what he refers to as the ‘time of the project,’ which works in contrast to the perception that the past is fixed and the future open to possibility (potential options/choices, for example), Dupuy outlines how we should reconfigure this relationship so that it is the future which is determined and the past which is open to counterfactual possibility. In the case of catastrophe, this requires conceiving the catastrophe as predetermined, or, as noted above, as a catastrophe that has always-already occurred. By conceiving the future catastrophe as predetermined, we are driven to consider counterfactual possibilities to this future, thus, directing our action in the present. In summary: we should first perceive it [catastrophe] as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourself into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (‘If we had done this and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!’) upon which we then act today. Therein resides Dupuy’s paradoxical formula: we have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, it is our destiny – and, then, against the background of this acceptance, we should mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. (29) Certainly, any consideration of the very possibilities which led to the always-already catastrophe can just as easily be subject to examples of superegoic injunction: “Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means and at any price. You can do it, therefore you must!” (30) Under such circumstances, “we are expected to […] realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities.” (31) Instead, following Dupuy, we can concern that what is required is not the complete understanding of the multitude of possibilities that led to the catastrophe, but to a rethinking of the very framework which structured these possibilities in the first place. Subsequently, while any pre-Covid prevention may have seemed ridiculous (perhaps being viewed as scaremongering), it is only in hindsight that we can retroactively conceive of these ‘ridiculous’ actions as being drastically required. In light of the Covid catastrophe that happened (as well as the possibilities that led to it happening), what we require now is no longer ridiculous, but impossible. Interior Strandgade 30, Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1901; Image Credit: Wikiart IV. What remains unique to the Covid catastrophe is that we don’t require an ‘as if’ – the catastrophe has happened. (32) In other words, what was perceived as impossible – or, at least, what was disavowed as possible (not believed) – has occurred. As a result, “Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up the space of freedom.” (33) This space of not-knowing prescribes an “impossible in-sight” (34) , which, from a preordained ‘future’ position, retroactively determines what, at present, we do not know. The catastrophe of the present, therefore, is that it posits this very contradiction in our knowledge. More importantly, when set against a predetermined future, past possibilities are not merely other potentialities working towards the same end, but are instead prescriptions of a retroactive ‘cut’ which announces the advertence of a contradiction – a point of impossibility – that fundamentally discloses the inconsistencies in our current socio-political frame. Though interpretations of this ‘cut’ work in accordance with Lacan’s account of the Act – defined, by Žižek, as what “changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility” (35) – we can consider how this ‘change’ transpires via a self-determining ‘cut’ that retroactively proposes – and, thus, serves – its own self-limitation. (36) This suggests that one is not simply ‘free’ to ‘choose’ the past in whatever way they see fit (this would have to assume that one’s future remains non-determined, if only on the basis that one’s choice would determine this future); instead, the underlying logic of a future that is determined is that it can only ever be retroactively determined by the self-limitation it establishes. For example, consider Ruda’s appraisal of Jameson’s program of utopia, an account which highlights how any determination is limited by its own ‘self-limitation’: in a first move, the very act of proposing an impossible utopia posits its own conditions of possibility – creates a new possible imaginary – and as soon as this act is performed there is a second retroaction involved, that leads to the fact that after the act the utopia will always have been a political program. (37) It is this ‘second retroaction’ (‘the will always have been’) which lays bare the limitation that underscores any act which posits its own (impossible) determination. Today, such an act must be identified “in a series of modest demands that are not simply impossible but appear as possible although they are de facto impossible.” (38) It is our fated catastrophe which determines that we must now retroactively align ourselves with the impossible. In part, proclamations of the “impossible” can work to cover-over the fissures in the symbolic order; a pretence echoing that of the ‘outside’ catastrophe which unexpectedly changes the present-state of things. Yet, to encounter the impossible is to perceive it as that which happens under our current ideological coordinates. Under such circumstances, the impossible is a foreclosure of what is perceived to be possible under present conditions . It is in this sense that the Covid catastrophe highlights how the impossible is possible: an impossibility in the very sense that retroactively such an impossible possibility has always-already occurred. Encountering the impossible in the context of catastrophe requires what can only be conceived as a paradigm shift in our social-political coordinates. More to the point, it requires (retroactively) recognizing the necessity of failure as constitutive to our knowledge of the virus. It is in reconciling with this failure (conceived in the above discussion as a hole in knowledge, the knowledge in not-knowing and as the impossible) that our relation to catastrophe can help us identify the possibility of new failure. The necessity of such failure suggests that it is only in failing that we establish what it is that failed. (39) We are Making a New World, Paul Nash, 1918; Image Credit: Wikiart In the wake of the Covid catastrophe that has always-already happened, we can assert the following: what we retroactively require are institutions that at present are impossible (i.e. do not exist, unless conceived from some future position). Though widely derided, Žižek’s call for a communist response to the Covid catastrophe is not an attempt to reassert the communist past, marred by Soviet terror, but is instead a demand for ‘collective principles’ set on orchestrating an international response to an international catastrophe (pessimistically, if these institutions were ‘presupposed’ to fail, they would have to be established in order to know what it is that failed). On this basis alone, a retroactive perspective is not simply a ‘return to the past,’ but a considered attempt to theoretically, and, thus, philosophically, redefine the very framework in which this past is conceived and, as a consequence, how our future is impossibly determined. NOTES 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community . Trans. Pierre Joris. Station Hill, 1988, 2. 2. See Alenka Zupančič, “The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 119.4 (2020): 833–844, https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/119/4/833/166844/The-End-of-Ideology-the-Ideology-of-the-End?redirectedFrom=fulltext Accessed 31 October 2021. 3. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World . OR Books, 2020, 64. 4. See Kamran Baradaran, “The Ruins of our Lives: A Plea for Fatalist Sleeplessness.” The Philosophical Salon , 9 August 2021, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-ruins-of-our-lives-a-plea-for-a-fatalist-sleeplessness/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 5. Dolar adds: “The standstill involves the heightened tension which is at a crossroads – there was a lot of standstill, but where is the dialectic? The pervasive wish to go back to normalcy is the escape from this tension, which also offered, and continues to offer, a chance of a different path.” (Qtd. in Mladen Dolar, “Interview with Mladen Dolar: Dialectic at a Standstill? Hegel at the Times of COVID.” By Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda. Crisis & Critique 7.3 (2020): 480–497, here 495–496, http://www.crisiscritique.org/uploads/24-11-2020/interview-with-mladen-dolar.pdf . Accessed 31 October 2021. 6. Ibid., 496. 7. See Gavin Jacobson, “Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.” New Statesman , 22 July 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/children-men-alfonso-cuaron-2006-apocalypse-coronavirus . Accessed 31 October 2021. 8. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost . OR Books, 2020, 12. 9. See Slavoj Žižek, “The will not to know.” The Philosophical Salon , 24 August 2020, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-will-not-to-know/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 10. Matt Colquhoun, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher . Repeater Books, 2020. 11. See Slavoj Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset, Not a Corporate ‘Great Reset’.” Jacobin , 31 December, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/slavoj-Žižek-socialism-great-reset . Accessed 31 October 2021. 12. Ibid. 13. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity . Sage, 1992. 14. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times . Verso, 2010. 15. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates . Verso, 2002. 16. See Markus Zöchmeister, “Life.” Lacanian Review Online , 7 April 2020, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/life/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 17. See Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce . Verso, 2009, 154. 18. See Marcus André Vieira, “Notes on Desire and Isolation.” Lacanian Review Online , 27 April 2020, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/notes-on-desire-and-isolation/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 19. Habermas qtd. in Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset.” 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Let it be clear that this account of ‘non-knowledge’ is not a cynical discrediting of the work of medical researchers and practitioners attempting to understand and treat the virus. It is, rather, an attempt to acknowledge that there are aspects of the virus that remain unknown and, more importantly, that the impact of our interventions in treating the virus are unknown (or, at least, we know what we don’t know). 23. Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism . U of Nebraska P, 2016, 126. 24. Žižek, Pandemic! 2 112. 25. Ibid., 112. 26. Ruda, Abolishing Freedom . 27. Žižek, Slavoj. In Defence of Lost Causes . Verso, 2009. 28. In what follows I draw entirely from Žižek and Ruda’s interpretations of this work. 29. Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes 459–460. It is from this point of projection that further links can be made with the ‘inhuman’ and the Lacanian ‘not-all’ (see Jack Black, “COVID-19: Approaching the In-human.” Contours Journal 10 [2020]: 1–10; Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing.” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 10–11 [2017]: 16–30, http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/article/view/82/101 . Accessed 31 October 2021). 30. Zupančič, “The End of Ideology” 2. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. See Zupančič’s critique of Ruda’s ‘comic fatalism’ (Zupančič, “The End of Ideology”). 33. Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset.” 34. Frank Ruda, “The Impossible InSight.” Coils of the Serpent 8 (2021): 23–33, here 31, https://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A73702/attachment/ATT-0/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 35. Žižek, Living in the End Times 420. 36. The reference to self-determination is drawn from Todd McGowan’s Hegelian interpretation of freedom (Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution . Columbia UP, 2019). 37. Frank Ruda, “Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism.” An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army . Ed. Slavoj Žižek. Verso, 2016, 200. 38. Slavoj Žižek, Disparities . Bloomsbury, 2016, 382. 39. Here, I deliberately re-work Zupančič’s account of Blanchot’s, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing.” For Blanchot: “The true choice is not between tolerating the Bomb (and hence running the risk of losing everything) on the one hand, and preventing the looming destruction of the world (but thereby running the risk of losing our liberal freedoms) on the other hand; the true choice is between ‘losing it all’ and creating what we are about to lose (even if we lose it all in the process): only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense” (Zupančič, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing” 21). Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Brownian Society Button 7 June 2021 Button “Le Radeau de la Méduse” (The Raft of Medusa) by Théodore Géricault. Wikimedia Commons. The time has come to take a radically non-Hegelian view of history. Hegelianism seems to me the most sophisticated version of a comforting metaphysics according to which history has a transcendent meaning, and converges towards absolute knowledge. The fact is that history has no meaning, and therefore no secret rationality. History is not cunning: we may say that real history – what actually happens – is rather the multiplicative product of human naiveté. Scene One In 1905, a young man aged 25 sent an article on Brownian motion to a prestigious German physics journal. Brownian motion is the name of a rather banal phenomenon: it describes the fact that very small particles, for example tiny grains of dust, when suspended in air or in a liquid, flicker and slowly “drift”. This motion, or rather these fluctuations, led the young man –who lived in Zurich – to infer that molecules suspended in air or in a liquid cannot be infinitely small, that they have a discrete and minimum size, and that they are atoms – from the Greek word, which means indivisible and individual . In fact, if it were possible to have infinitely small molecules, their impact on the grains of dust would balance the grains which would remain stationary. Instead, they drift. It is interesting that the Japanese call the sensible world, the everyday world in which we live, “the drifting world”. Einstein (the name of the boy who lived in Zurich) had a view similar to that of the Japanese. Then came quantum mechanics, which tells us that everything is granular, even space and time, and that for this reason if Achilles allows the tortoise a head start, he will sooner or later overtake it, because he will have to cover a finite number of segments. Since the world is not continuous, its motion is a kind of eternal Brownian motion. “Space is a fluctuating swarm of gravity quanta – gravitons – acting on each other.” (1) According to modern physics our world drifts, like a piece of wood floating on the surface of a river. Scene Two I read about the political situation in India today. Which is now ruled, I would say dominated, by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), “the largest political party in the world,” (2) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Challenging the principle according to which it is not correct to interpret Asian parties as counterparts of Western parties, I would like to say that the Bharatiya Janata Party Janata Party is essentially a fascist political force: it expresses Hindu nationalism, combining a strong national identitarianism with a religious one, it relies partly on paramilitary forces, and is fiercely anti-Muslim. The fact is that 14.2% of the1.3 billion Indians are Muslims. Indian Muslims occupy the lowest position in society, also from an economic perspective. Commenting on the 2014 Indian election results, renowned political scientists were not surprised that only 10% of Muslims voted for the BJP, whose support increases the more one moves up the Indian caste system (the most prestigious caste, that of the Brahmins, accounts for most of BJP’s votes, 60%). Also, they were not surprised that the Muslims of India prefer to vote for the Indian National Congress (INC, Gandhi’s party), which had a project for the secular and extra-religious unification of India (46% of Muslims vote for the INC). Now, my reaction is opposite to that of these political scientists: how is it possible that 10% of Indian Muslims vote for a party that preaches a kind of religious war against them ? And also: how is it possible that only 46% of Muslims vote for the INC ? It is said that sociology and political science should not focus on details, on small minorities, that overwhelming and undemocratic majorities rarely exist... That 10% of Muslims probably voted for the BJP by mistake, or because they were ill-informed, mentally ill, or snobs... The fact is, however, that social and political reality always includes people who make mistakes, who are ill-informed, who are mentally ill, or snobs... And it is wrong to believe that these marginal phenomena have no social impact. The exceptions do not necessarily confirm the rule, we may say that the exceptions are the rule , and that the rule always results from the intersection of exceptions. Is it wise to approximate, to exclude the fringes, the unpredictable foam generated by the splitting of things, so that the edges of things are never sharp, but always dissolved and uncertain? history has no destination, which basically means it makes no sense. In the double sense of “sense”. It does not zigzag towards a specific destination, rather, it drifts aimlessly like dust particles in liquid. The movement of history is a Brownian movement. When the emperor Theodosius promulgated the edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD.– which made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire – the Nicene Christians of the Empire (as opposed to Arian Christians) amounted to less that 10% of the total inhabitants (so the same ratio as Muslims voting for their enemies in India). The masses, especially in rural areas and small towns, remained pagan. Yet historians tell us that the reign of Theodosius can be considered as the starting point of a completely Christianised Europe. It is a rather incomplete completeness. The truth is that a minority – in this case a Christian one – can be historically decisive. So why shouldn’t the fact that as many as 10% of Muslims voted for Modi be historically important? Interlude Some might say that the Christian minority coincided more or less with the ruling class at the time of the Empire: an example of a minority dominating the majority. However, also in oppositional or revolutionary contexts, it is often the smallest minorities that bring about change in the world. We may think of the Italian Risorgimento : how many people in the various States that were later to constitute Italy were really interested in Italian unification? No polls were produced in the 19th century, but it is easy to imagine that very few thought about a united Italy. Indeed, most Italians were illiterate at the time, and therefore could follow political events very little. History books claim that Giuseppe Mazzini’s followers played an important role in the Risorgimento , but how many followers could there be? It was the intellectual and political elites that made Italy, not “the masses”. Along with ruling elites, also opposition elites exist. This is what makes me doubt so much quantitative sociological research. In this domain the conventional divisions that sociologists speak of when considering or interviewing people are treated as real divisions. For example, many sociological studies label interviewees as “Farmer”, “Labourer”, “Clerk, middle-level manager”, “Senior manager, industrialist, freelancer”, and conclusions are drawn about social classes : as if the rough division that sociologists trace between very different individuals, even though they might have a similar job, corresponded to specific and definable social objects . The truth is that these are hypothetical distinctions, largely arbitrary, which always include a wide range of exceptions. Hence the idea, now increasingly widespread, that social classes are not ontological entities but nominalist classifications . (3) Pierre Bourdieu; Image credit: Bernard Lambert, Wikimedia Commons For example, in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu asked women from all walks of life what they thought about a series of things. He also asked “Do you have a bath or shower at least once a day?” (4) In relation to the profession of the head of the household, this is what emerged: “Have a bath or shower at least once a day” – Farmer Labourer Clerk Upper social class 9.8% 16.9% 36.6% 43.2% In addition, 23.2% of women who did not work and 32% of those who did work responded positively. The conclusion that should be drawn, as sociologists, is that the higher the social status the more people wash. Which is itself an interesting piece of information to explain. However, I would be inclined to go further and investigate the almost 10% of farmers who shower every day; or the more than 50% of women in the upper classes who do not wash every day. It is precisely what deviates from an expectation, from a norm that in this case is statistical, that can be the most interesting. Perhaps the only farmer in ten who washes every day is the one who indicates in what direction the peasant way of life is going to evolve. It is for this reason that – unlike what certain superficial and dogmatic neo-Marxists do – we cannot reduce all political, religious, and cultural forces, all economic activity to a rigid class, as if society were a series of distinct boxes in which individuals cluster, with a few individuals who wander from one box to another, presenting exceptions considered irrelevant. This mistake was made by the German Social Democratic Party at the end of the 19th century, when it saw that it was being increasingly voted by workers in elections. Since the majority of the German population at that time comprised more or less manual workers, the conclusion was that sooner or later the German SPD would come to power, once all workers had voted for that party. To the point that people were surprised when not all the workers in a small town voted Social Democratic ! Obviously things didn’t work out that way, because the minority of workers who (at that time) did not adhere to Marxism at some point directed other workers away from socialism... and, in the 1930s, to a large extent, towards the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. No human being is completely defined by his or her social qualification: worker, wage earner, entrepreneur, young, old, man, woman, highly qualified, badly qualified, heterosexual, LGTB, married, single... etc. Drawing a circle between individuals who share common traits and saying “this is a social identity” is a big mistake. If things were so simple, human history would not be so chaotic and unpredictable. History would be like a train ride along a track, a train that might have to stop every now and then because of an unforeseen event, a cow standing on the track, for example, a traveller who commits suicide... but sooner or later it would arrive at destination. In my opinion history has no destination, which basically means it makes no sense. In the double sense of “sense”. It does not zigzag towards a specific destination, rather, it drifts aimlessly like dust particles in liquid. The movement of history is a Brownian movement. Third scene As we have said, Einstein understood Brownian motion existed because each fluctuating element is affected not by continuous pressures, which would keep the element in a state of balance, but by discontinuous, discrete and individual pressure. I believe that in society something similar occurs: being formed by individuals, i.e. discontinuous elements, societies push the various social entities – institutions, parties, churches, cultural movements – in all directions. This seems to confirm the sociological line of research called methodological individualism . Albert Einstein on the cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, December 14, 1919; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. For more than a century, sociologists and philosophers of society seem to have been beset by this dilemma: are societies holistic entities, i.e. are they a whole that more or less conditions individuals? Or are societies to be understood as the result of the actions of individuals , each with their own desires and beliefs? When Margaret Thatcher claimed that society does not exist, she was evidently referring to the latter philosophy, according to which social entities are nominal, not real: only the individuals who make up societies exist. The moral is: “mind your own business and society will be just fine”. It is usually said that methodological individualism is typical of a right-wing approach, while holism is typical of a left-wing approach, but this is not true. Many thinkers on the left were or are individualists (one name stands out: Norberto Bobbio), while thinkers on the right can be holists. In fact, individualism is very often understood in relation to how important individual rationality is believed to be, whereby individuals are seen as representatives of the homo oeconomicus , that is, – according to the fictitious narrative of most modern economics – they are individuals who tend to make wise choices, who use the information they have, following their beliefs, in order to try to maximise their profit. (5) Here is not the right place to address this topic. I will limit myself to saying that the opposition between holism and individualism is a false dilemma, because human society is both the effect of the choices and behaviour of individuals and of institutions (what Hegel termed the Objective Spirit) that shape human choices and behaviour. In Aristotelian terms, (6) I would say that individuals as such are the material cause of society, while the óla , the “all”, are its formal cause. As for the efficient cause, it consists of the desires, needs, hopes, drives of individuals. While the final cause – although this is rarely consciously acknowledged – is the survival of the species. After all, the “aim” of any society is to perpetuate itself biologically, even though this aim might be an implicit one, so to speak (but not always: fascism taxed unmarried men and women). When I say that many “holistic” sociologists ignore individual fragmentation, I am not referring to this – more or less idealised – image of homo as a rational decision maker. Human individuals are often no less adrift than a speck of dust: precisely because they shift, the whole of society ends up fluctuating, taking unexpected directions. Individuals are not coherent units, they are – as psychoanalysis teaches us – an often contradictory combination of mostly irrational impulses. When a poor Muslim, for example, decides to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party, his choice is a specific one, it can be isolated, but the impulses that lead to that choice may be the most idiosyncratic and often conflicting. Political scientists know that many people in our democracies decide who to vote for on the day they go to the polling station, sometimes they even decide while standing inside the voting booth… And what determines a choice may be something that has no direct relation with the vote itself. This man may decide he wants to vote for BJP that day because he has quarrelled with his wife earlier, or because his football team lost the day before, or because it is raining... Sociologistic sociologists – sociologists who study society as if it existed to be studied by sociologists – will say that there may very well be random individual variations, but that in the end it will be possible to draw a coherent picture that makes sense. However, precisely this overall and coherent sense is the great illusion of sociologistic sociology, according to which social processes have simple, linear, identifiable, describable causes... I would not disregard the 10% of Indian Muslims who vote for Modi, or the 10% of French peasants who take a bath every day, as insignificant deviations from the average, as the indistinct contour of the clear-cut figures of sociological ontology (social classes, income levels, ethnic groups, confessional groups). Because the whole of society is, in fact, indistinct contour continuously turning into another indistinct contour. For example, we have read in several places that European suicide bombers and terrorism are the effect of the condition of marginality of many young people of Muslim origin in certain European societies. In fact, Europe’s kamikazes were mostly second or third generation immigrants, who came from families that were mostly not particularly religious. Hence the simplified and linear reasoning: the marginalisation of so many young people in European banlieues is the cause of fundamentalist terrorism . This simplification points us in the wrong direction. A young person of Muslim origin who feels dissatisfied, economically or culturally marginalised in a European country, can “react” in multiple ways: he or she might turn to petty or organised crime, to drugs or alcohol, re-emigrate to the family’s country of origin, fall into depression, become a social worker specialised in Muslim issues, be interested only in nightlife, become an animal rights activist, etc. If, at a certain point, this person turns to jihad in the form of terrorism, it is because this person embraces a ready-made ideology which seems to provide an answer. All ideologies interpret our problems, the same way poetry does, rock or funk music, videos, political demagogues, etc. Society offers us languages, signifiers, (7) through which we try to express our idiosyncratic discomfort, our problems – and jihadism is an effective means to express the envious anger of some people. However, there is no linear causal relationship between a type of social marginality (which does not necessarily mean extreme poverty) and some “heroic” ideological options. Increasing technological development is to be expected, of course, but it is difficult to say where this technological development will take us. It could lead to the atomic or ecological destruction of the planet, or to a more balanced and peaceful society, or to something different that science fiction authors strive to predict. Who can say? The fact that individuals are the raw material of society – in the sense that if there were no individuals there would be no society – is self-evident. The point is how these individuals interact and create history. Certainly institutions, ideas and ideals, faiths, philosophies, works of art... exist to provide a direction. But the reasons and ways in which each individual embraces institutions, ideas and ideals, faiths, etc., can be the most diverse, and for this reason the outcomes are unpredictable. Who has ever really predicted history? How many predicted the Stalinist evolution of Bolshevism? Who predicted Hitler’s advent to power in the most cultured and scientific country in Europe? In 1932 a naïve Bertolt Brecht bought a house in Germany... In the spring of 1989, who predicted that that same year Soviet communism would commit suicide? Five years ago, who would have predicted the rise of anti-globalist sovereignty, Brexit, Trump, and Matteo Salvini in Italy? Thirty years ago, who could have predicted that China was to become an economic super-power? If some did predict the future it was by accident, and when they did they predicted certain things about the future, not the entire future. It has been repeated to the point of boredom that Marx predicted socialism. However, the kind of socialism experienced by the Soviet Union, and then elsewhere, was not a prophesied event, it was precisely the application of Marx’s programme, it was the attempt to carry out a conscious historical project. Surely Marx did not foresee that the revolution would break out in a capitalistically immature country such as Russia, that it would take a Stalinist turn, that two opposing military blocs would be born... He did not foresee anything about actual history. Nowadays, we often quote something the meteorologist Lorenz said: “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Japan may cause a hurricane in Argentina”, (8) to say that small causes can have significant effects, or vice versa; that in short, the future is largely unpredictable. And this expresses the notion that history is as fluctuating as Brownian motion. Every epoch has constructed a certain sense of history . In Antiquity, a decadentist view of history prevailed: a golden age of heroes, of glorious ancestors was followed by present times characterised by what was continuous decadence (this was essentially the Greek and Roman conception). There was also an idea of circularity : at a certain point a flood would exterminate human societies, or most of them, and humanity would have to start its journey all over again, starting from barbarism. The idea of the present as a decadent epoch compared to a marvellous past was common also among Humanists from the 15th century onwards: the Ancients, especially the Greeks and the Latins, were better and more intelligent than contemporaries. With Christianity, a messianic and therefore non-decadentist vision of history took hold: the world was moving towards the end of time, when God would finally judge the living and the dead. A progressive idea of history has therefore prevailed in the West for about the last three centuries: exposed in part by Vico, then by Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spencer and positivism... Progress means marching in the direction of Reason or knowledge: humanity gradually emerges from the darkness of ignorance and superstition (i.e. from religions) and moves towards the light of rationality, of which science is the paradigm. When I say that many “holistic” sociologists ignore individual fragmentation, I am not referring to this – more or less idealised – image of homo as a rational decision maker. Human individuals are often no less adrift than a speck of dust: precisely because they shift, the whole of society ends up fluctuating, taking unexpected directions. Perhaps, after a couple of centuries, we are at another turning point: the development of chaos and complexity theories, together with the impact that the second principle of thermodynamics has had on our worldview, is causing us to open up to an indeterministic view of history. That is, humanity is seen as a boat floating in the ocean. Increasing technological development is to be expected, of course, but it is difficult to say where this technological development will take us. It could lead to the atomic or ecological destruction of the planet, or to a more balanced and peaceful society, or to something different that science fiction authors strive to predict. Who can say? On the other hand, the theories about the circular nature of history, such as those professed by the Ancients, do not seem to play the slightest role today – and in this sense, our view of history is not at all Nietzschean. In short, the time has come to take a radically non-Hegelian view of history. Hegelianism seems to me the most sophisticated version of a comforting metaphysics according to which history has a transcendent meaning, and converges towards absolute knowledge. The fact is that history has no meaning, and therefore no secret rationality. History is not cunning: we may say that real history – what actually happens – is rather the multiplicative product of human naiveté. NOTES 1. C. Rovelli, La realtà non è come ci appare , Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2014. loc. 2193. 2. Because it counts 110 milion members, more than the Chinese Communist Party. 3. Already Raymond Aron claimed that social classes had a nominalist value. See R. Aron, La lutte de classes , Gallimard, Paris 1964. 4. P. Bourdieu, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement , Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1979. 5. Economic psychology was later used to counter this rationalist axiom, its focus on the irrationality of economic behaviour. See the works of Daniel Kahneman, Eric Kirchler, Dan Ariely, Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, etc. 6. Aristotle ( Physics , 194b 15-195a 2; 198a 24-25) distinguished four causes: material, formal, efficient, final. The material cause of a statue, for example, is the marble from which it is made. The formal cause is the form that the sculptor’s mind wants to give the marble. The efficient cause is the action of the hammer or planer on the marble. The final cause is the intention of the sculptor to provide the City with a beautiful statue. 7. As in structuralist linguistics, but mostly in the sense given to this word by Jacques Lacan. 8. E. N. Lorenz, “The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow ”, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences , 1963, 25 (4): 409–432. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

JOHN HARTLEY John Hartley is a schoolteacher in London and a part-time doctoral student at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge. His research focuses on the philosophy of religion of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ontological Rupture: Platonist Foundations of Pavel Florensky’s Vision of Moral Evil 12 December 2024 Read Article

The Other Beginning of Philosophy 15 July 2021 Illustration par Ikue Nakagawa The Other Beginning of Philosophy L'autre commencement de la philosophie The end of philosophy is an accomplishment that opens a passage to something else or to nothing at all. Philosophers have interpreted the world. Scientists have made it into a mastered technical world. It remains to be seen whether there is a beyond to mastery. This is not a matter of debate. There is nothing to discuss: everything has to assert itself and the everything-other or the nothing-of-everything will manifest itself. No other philosopher determined philosophy’s directions more than Heidegger in recent decades, to the point of it being held hostage within a corpus which has come to have mystical and spiritual force. Heidegger while setting forth a history of philosophy and its end also conceived of an “other beginning”. Is there another beginning possible for philosophy which is free from the inaugural conditions of a Heideggerian history. To open philosophy towards another beginning, while retaining the insights of deconstruction, Philosophy World Democracy published three texts by Jean-Luc Nancy, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan together. Jean-Luc Nancy’s wager is that we either surrender to the end of philosophy – instead of letting the philosophical chatter senselessly spreading everywhere which has nothing to do with philosophy – or begin again. It is here that what Heidegger himself received as philosophy becomes important. Divya Dwivedi questions the very concept which conditions this history—ontico-ontological difference—behind which the oriental-occidental difference still awaits its deconstruction. This history of philosophy that Heidegger himself received, like all canons, leaves out questions, texts, concepts and inventions which were taking place beyond what it could recognise as philosophy. Shaj Mohan shows the forgotten question and experience—the obscure experience—which generated the principles of metaphysics, especially the law of identity. The question « what is philosophy? » was determined at first by theologies for this reason that from the absolute identity of God all the other identities are derived. Theology took possession of the « The End of All Things »; and then philosophy surrendered the concepts and concerns which were its circulatory system to the sciences. It was an impoverished philosophy which could only wage a war for meaning and culture that came under Heidegger’s consideration. We can begin again, provided we do not attempt to philosophise according to the ‘logics’ of Heidegger’s system and follow its list of ‘tasks’. We begin again by taking the questions philosophy surrendered to religions and to the sciences, and it might require that we re-think our relation to logic itself. Philosophy World Democracy Editorial Team Related Articles And the Beginning of Philosophy SHAJ MOHAN Read Article Nancy’s Wager DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article

ZEYNEP DIREK Zeynep Direk is professor in the Philosophy Department at Koç University, Istanbul. Previously she taught at Galatasaray University between 1998-2014. She specializes on Contemporary European Philosophy, Ethics, and Feminist Philosophy. She also works on Social and Political Philosophy and the History of Turkish Thought. Direk is the co-editor with Leonard Lawlor of Jacques Derrida: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (Routledge, 2002) A Companion to Derrida (Blackwell, 2014) and the author of Ontologies of Sex: Philosophy in Sexual Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Sur la laïcité et sécularisme en Turquie. 11 February 2024 Read Article Introduction: Rethinking Laicity in Africa 15 November 2023 Read Article Radical Feminism and the Abortion Ban 28 November 2022 Read Article

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Calls for literature to be politically active have always been energized by situational and conjunctural pressures. The Political Uses of Literature 17 February 2024 LITERARY THEORY Article PDF Notebook 1931-1932 , Bertolt Brecht, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Bertolt Brecht Archiv, BBA 325/36. Image credit: Suhrkamp Verlag. Calls for literature to be politically active have always been energized by situational and conjunctural pressures. Undoubtedly, ‘capitalist realism’ is one such pressure, and despite a variety of interlinked crises—economic, climate, famine, migration, and wars—it still proves powerful enough to block any form of agency that might be capable of fundamentally challenging its globally imperious status quo. There are those who would argue that we should not bother looking to literature for solutions to this prevailing status quo. However, activist literature and art do not just constitute a dead or fossilized archive—instead they provide the tools required for preserving radical political impulses and articulating anew in new conjunctures. To this extent, they provide a reservoir of future-oriented modes of thinking, feeling, and being-in-the-world that we desperately need today. Authors BENJAMIN KOHLMANN and IVANA PERICA “Only a new purpose can lead to a new art,” the German playwright Bertolt Brecht declared in a short essay of 1929 entitled “On Form and Subject Matter.” (1) Presented as a rationale for the development of his Lehrstücke (“pedagogical plays”) around 1930, Brecht’s comment offers a useful route into the conversations about the political uses of literature not only from the interwar years but also in our own contemporary times. While Brecht’s phrasing (“ Only a new purpose…”) is intended to give the sentence an air of unshakable artistic dogma, the comment in fact hovers ambivalently between two seemingly contrary positions that concern the question of committed art’s primary obligations. On the one hand, Brecht’s sentence appears to insist on the absolute priority of political commitment over aesthetic concerns by suggesting that literature’s internal workings are by necessity subservient to some external (i.e., political or social) purpose; on the other hand, it contends that politics is of value to the artist only insofar as it enables a radical remaking of the patterns and forms of art itself. To put it another way: artistic innovation seems unthinkable without some prior commitment to (political, social) purposes that are imagined as existing outside of art; yet at the same time, as far as the work of the writer is concerned, the value of these ‘prior’ commitments must be measured in light of their ability to generate new aesthetic forms. Brecht presents the question of art’s commitments as an unresolvable dialectic: in his formulation, art and political purpose are not external to one another; their relationship is characterized not by conflict and mutual exclusion but rather by the promise of generative friction and mutual enrichment. This is not how literary scholars have traditionally thought about literature’s relationship to the sphere of politics. Instead, those working within the discipline of literary studies have tended to see the attempt to make art do political work as a category mistake—as an alien imposition that does damage to art and politics. To offer only one particularly prominent example, the Marxist literary and cultural critic Fredric Jameson influentially proposed that the politics of literary works are located at the level of a textual ‘unconscious.’ Rejecting the attempt to think of politics in terms of a manifest or explicit purpose, Jameson argued that the politics of aesthetic objects are best described in terms of the relations that obtain between the text’s various formal and generic structures: the political unconscious is found “not by abandoning the formal level for something extrinsic to it—such as some inertly social ‘content’ [or political ‘purpose’]—but rather immanently, by construing purely formal patterns as a symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic.” (2) On this view, politics is intimately woven into the texture of the literary work itself: by sublimating politics into form, literature carries politics within itself as its immanent or intrinsic subtext. In reclaiming buried literary-historical genealogies for the sake of offering up alternative routes for theoretical inquiry, we take our cue from recent attempts to think of the selected episodes of politicized writing not as literary-historical anomalies but as key moments in the configuration of the relationship between literature and politics—as influential epicenters of interventionist art from which debates about literary politics and practices of committed writing are able to radiate out into new and globally expansive contexts. (3) The experimental periodization we propose here connects three periods of intensely politicized and activist art and writing: the interwar years, the ‘long 1960s,’ and the present. (4) This reperiodization is meant to make visible “alternative traditions” which, according to Raymond Williams, have too often been left abandoned “in the wide margin of the century.” (5) It deliberately resists advancing a single or univocal history of politicized art. However, its linking of the interwar years with the long 1960s and our contemporary moment restores to view what the artist and art-theorist Gregory Sholette has recently called the “fragmented and boisterous reservoir of past interventions.” (6) Sholette emphasizes the unauthorized and non-formalized quality of this “reservoir of past interventions” —he also speaks of the non-canonized “phantom archive of activist art, overflowing with interventions, experiments, repetitions, compromises, minor victories and outright failures.” (7) Sholette suggests that the reasons for the ‘fragmentation’ of this buried archive—and also for a good deal of its ‘boisterousness’—derives from the highly particularized nature of activist art, i.e., from the fact that it addresses itself so intently to the specific situations and historical moments in which it seeks to intervene. It is precisely in this latter sense that Brecht’s comment affords a valuable insight into the broader problematic that concerns us here. For, while Brecht’s observation seems to dispense a general truth about the relationship between literature and politics, it is arguably best understood as an immediate response to the darkening political atmosphere of the later Weimar Republic—to the rise of fascism, to the Communist Party’s (CP) ‘class-against-class’ policy, to the banning of the CP’s paramilitary organization (the Roter Frontkämpferbund ) by the governing Social Democrats, and to the subsequent denunciation of Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ by the CP. In the eyes of Brecht and his collaborators, these developments necessitated a new type of interventionist, activist art capable of educating the masses—a pedagogico-artistic weapon suited to the new stage in the political struggle, which the Lehrstücke were meant to provide. The case of Brecht shows that certain literary-political constellations cannot be understood without taking into account their immediate (historical, geographical, social, political, but also aesthetic) contexts. Taking our cue from this insight that art is unintelligible without its constitutive orientation towards a particular site or historical situation in which it seeks to intervene, we claim that renewed scholarly debate about the political uses of literature cannot but echo the logic of site-specificity that characterizes art which aims to be politically ‘useful’ in the broadest sense. This requires from scholarly work to intensely focus on specific local situations and investigate works that intervene in broader historical conjunctures. To illustrate, whereas the canonical Sartrean term littérature engagé implies a decisionist emphasis—i.e., humans’ ability to commit themselves freely to this or that cause rather than another (8) —Antonin Artaud’s concept of culture orientée (developed in his Messages révolutionnaires ) conveys the sense of an ineradicably anthropological orientation towards the world, a quasi-physical ‘positioning’ that is also foundational to all types of literary-political commitment. It is in this latter sense that the local fathoming of the political uses of literature can build towards a larger sense of literature’s interventionist potential, not as a historical dead end or aberrance, but as a foundational modality of artistic production as such. New Commitments: Literary Studies and the Uses of Literature Scholarship in literary studies has long been interested in the politics of writing, although comparatively less attention has been paid to works that explicitly seek to intervene in their historical contexts of production or reception—as though these works maintained too narrow a focus on a particular extraneous ‘purpose’ to matter artistically. Among the scholars who have defended literature’s political usefulness, many have taken recourse to well-rehearsed twentieth-century arguments about the ways in which the political commitments of literary texts become encoded in their formal features; by contrast, others have defaulted to the assumption that literature’s engagement with politics is best understood as a form of metapolitics, i.e., that literary works are political insofar as they work to defamiliarize the hegemonic social protocols that create forms of political visibility or enforce political invisibility. (9) While it’s true that some scholars have recently begun to think more specifically about the ‘uses’ that literature has served in a wide range of different contexts, this scholarship has generally subscribed to a pragmatist interpretation of the concept of ‘use’: literature is useful, critics such as Rita Felski inform us, to the extent that it meets some individual (affective or intellectual) need. This line of inquiry has produced much important critical work, but it has tended to sideline the question of literature’s explicitly political uses: in rejecting the binary between “the Scylla of political functionalism and the Charybdis of art for art’s sake,” (10) recent scholars have inadvertently neglected the diverse purposes that literary texts have served in the contexts of the countless social and political movements evolving ‘out there.’ Literary theorists have developed rich critical vocabularies to displace the question of direct agency or instrumental use from the academic study of literature. “It is crucial,” observes Gabriel Rockhill in a notable recent study, “to rethink the operative logic of political efficacy outside of the instrumentalist framework”: instead, we are told, we need to understand literature’s attempts at agency in the context of a complex “conjuncture of determinants with multiple tiers, types, and sites of agency.” (11) We are very much in agreement with the second half of this statement: political agency is always complex and the sense of what it means for a text to ‘intervene’ and become politically active will depend on the particular historical moment and situation in question. (12) However, we also wish to further complicate the first half of this statement: literary critics, we submit, have precisely failed to think hard enough about the attractiveness which the “instrumentalist framework” has held for writers seeking to endow their works with a sense of “political efficacy” and purpose. These, then, are some of the questions that contemporary literary scholarship needs to address: How do literary works respond to the powerful and attractive fantasy of direct instrumental agency? How do certain works seek to align themselves with this fantasy while others endeavor to resist its allure? These questions run counter to some of the guiding ideas that have characterized literary criticism in the twentieth century in general and world literature studies in particular. The idea of world literature —from the concept’s initial articulation by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to its diverse afterlives, e.g., in the still highly influential work of Pascale Casanova, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or David Damrosch—has too often served to sideline or eclipse literature’s complex local entanglement in the grassroots struggles that characterize practical politics. In a related vein, some of this scholarship has prioritized the possibility of an “aesthetic education in the era of globalization”—i.e., the expansion of (western) readers’ ethical imagination—at the expense of a more detailed consideration of the ways radical politics play out in a wide range of historical situations and geographical locales. (13) This purging of the activist, more explicitly political agency of literature has, furthermore, also occurred in self-declared left-wing theoretical circles, most notably in the stalemated confrontation between Formalism and Marxism—or between the avant-garde and realism—as represented by theoretical greats such as Theodor W. Adorno and Georg Lukács. With the canonization of this confrontation, the poles ossified, and it was subsequently forgotten how problematic and historically contingent these binaries were to begin with. As Joe Cleary has noted, from the 1930s onwards, modernism and realism were produced “at once as reified categories and as the obvious termini of modern ‘world literature’”: while the Soviet Union “took ‘ownership’ of realism, … modernism was taken into custodianship by New York (with generous backing from Washington).” (14 ) Extending Cleary’s world system perspective, we can now see that the view that pits a formally innovative but largely inward-looking modernism against an artistically retrograde but socially active realism is also implicitly affirmed in key left-wing contributions to the debate about literature and politics, such as Aesthetics and Politics , the landmark anthology of 1977 that brought together key contributions (by Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Lukács, and others) to the realism-modernism debate of the 1930s. Aesthetics and Politics has been the go-to book on the topic for several generations of literary scholars, but it has dramatically narrowed our understanding of the literary-historical map we seek to recover here. It is an unintended effect of the sedimentation and canonization of such theoretical constructs that they tend to dehistoricize certain oppositions, presenting them as natural or ontologically given rather than socially produced. As a result, the stark dichotomization of artistic debates that marked the Cold War years has led many critics to embrace misleading or reductive views of literature’s political uses. While we do not wish and cannot engage here in a systematic or sustained revision of the two key concepts (‘realism’ and ‘modernism’) around which these debates were structured, we propose to move towards an alternative configuration of the relationship between these concepts: on the one hand, literary realism does not appear as a “single form” but is rather defined “by what it is able to accomplish in the world” (15) ; on the other, formal experimentations of the kind often associated with modernism were themselves frequently deployed in the service of the ‘realist’ project of mapping and interrogating the social totality. Against this backdrop, we propose to reopen discussion of literature’s political and activist potential by considering individual literary works as well as by reclaiming broader theoretical debates about literature’s ability to intervene in social reality. Our proposal finds support in a growing body of scholarly work that has homed in on the long cultural (after)lives and global entanglements of literary production in the transnational world of the ‘Cominternians’ as well as in the colonial peripheries, past and present. (16) For example, we are deeply sympathetic to recent efforts—for instance by the contributors to Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee’s edited collection Comintern Aesthetics— to “unearth a lost genealogy for present-day activism, demonstrating ways of connecting the local and the global, the personal-as-political and world revolution.” (17) Similarly, we take inspiration from the work of scholars of anti-colonial literature, including J. Daniel Elam, who seeks to reclaim a spirit of “egalitarian readerly internationalism,” (18) and Sonali Perera, who, in her exploration of a “literary internationalism of working-class literature,” (19) mentions that “[w]orking-class writings from different parts of the globe share more points of connection than are acknowledged by most literary histories.” (20) Indeed, what remains to be considered today, is a kind of non-formalized International of engaged writers whose works contribute to a shared project of political construction and renewal. Literature, in the hands of these writers, does not appear primarily as a commodity that competes with other commodities for the limited attention of potential consumers—as it does in Casanova’s model of the world literary system, for example—but as a medium of world-making that opens out towards larger political projects of collaborative world-making. Such projects, which are as much literary and scholarly as they are political, are able to build on an important new body of studies that draw attention to the interventionist arts emerging from the interstices between Western literatures and the literatures of anti-colonial resistance around the world. We recognize that literature in the Global South has often sought (and still seeks) direct alliances with political movements—and that such alliances must be central to any account of politicized writing in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century processes of globalization. (21 ) As we have already noted, this horizontal extension across different geographical spaces and locales should always be complemented by a highlighting of affinities that manifest diachronically, that is, across several distinctive historical moments (of these, the aforementioned revolutionary writing of the interwar era and the committed literature of the long 1960s are only the most prominent instantiations). However, rather than suggesting that these local affinities and diachronic correspondences ever solidify into uninterrupted historical continuities or unified teleologies, we propose to imagine them in the spirit of a constellation or montage: glancing back at the use which left-wing filmmakers such as Chris Marker (e.g., Le Fond de l’air est rouge , 1977) have made of montage in their attempts to convey the (dis)continuity of revolutionary traditions, the individual literary studies should explore the local instantiations of activist art that are capable of speaking to each other across time. (22) The literary-activist constellations which such a scholarly procedure is expected to bring to light should resist a hardening into fixed genealogies. In this way, they remain open and malleable, offering new footholds for future political uses. Eingreifendes Denken : Literature and Politics beyond Left-Wing Melancholy These new critical interventions, we claim, can be organized along three interrelated axes : First, a renewed attention to especially intense moments of radical literary production might create openings for new and future-oriented genealogies of activist literature. These plural histories, as we envision them, resist the tendency to associate the reclaiming of revolutionary pasts with the nostalgically retrospective (and politically impotent) mode of “left-wing melancholy.” (23) When taking the discussion of such radical instants up to the present, one should trace how the vital literary and theoretical interventions that were formulated between the two global wars were rearticulated in the light of new and emerging political demands (including feminist and anti-colonial struggles) in the long 1960s as well as in our own historical moment. It is certainly true that literature’s political efficacy continues to be an open question today—a fact that is partly to do with politicized literature’s enduringly uncertain position between its large-scale, revolutionary horizons and its commitment to constituting a marginalized or subterranean “counter-public sphere.” (24) The critical analysis of the now can be invigorated by placing contemporary interventions in dialogue with earlier historical moments in which literature and politics vitally informed each other. In this context, theoretical production itself comes to perform a radical role, playing the part of what Brecht once called “interventionist thought” (Brecht’s German phrase, penciled in radiant red in a 1931–1932 notebook, is “eingreifendes Denken”). (25) Second, we wish to emphasize that explorations of the political uses of literature must take into account the global portability of these practices and debates as they evolved across a wide range of geographical contexts and historical situations. To illustrate, the configurations of the relationship between literature and politics in interwar Europe remained attuned to the particular articulations of this relationship in other far-flung (‘peripheral’) geographical contexts, and vice versa: As the literary scholar Snehal Shingavi has observed, “aesthetic and political notions put forward through various organs of the Communist Party were translated, reinterpreted, reimagined, and refigured” (26) in colonial contexts. This critical attunement to processes of cultural translation and refiguration indicates that we are better served by attending to particular formations of the political rather than applying the term political as a blanket label. In the words of Sholette, all activist art, “whether contemplating a prison break, or a revolution, or merely the reconceptualization of existing institutions,” is “haunted by the elusive dream of historical agency and its unceasing hunger for total emancipation.” (27) Third, contemporary investigations of political activism through literature build toward new conceptualizations of literature’s ‘uses’ for literary history and literary theory . In fact, attending to the question of literature’s overtly political uses is both a necessary task and an urgent one. Focusing on politics as conscious commitment and principled action, these investigations must push beyond the fashionable (and politically weak) assertion of form’s literary “affordances” by exploring how literary works come to be deployed as moments of activist intervention. (28) This does not mean one should take a naïve view of literary agency as unmediated—on the contrary, one should defend the recognition that even “the flat[test and most] ephemeral pamphlet” (to adapt W. H. Auden’s famous phrase from 1937) is a highly mediated form of political engagement. (29) Responding to this insight, one should always consider a diverse range of literary genres, textual forms, and artistic representations. Simultaneously, one should venture a crucial shift in emphasis: away from the belief that the question of ‘use’ depends primarily on the affordances of the object (literary forms, aesthetic structures, and so on), and towards the view that artists actively ‘make use’ of particular forms in order to achieve particular ends. The art theorist Stephen Wright has recently noted that ‘making use’ of artistic forms (rather than merely ‘using’ them) involves an activist ‘retooling’ and ‘ repurposing ’ of these forms themselves. (30) This ‘crafting’ of new forms in response to new ‘purposes’ entails a distinctive set of difficulties: the attempt to turn literature into an instrument of social and political change does not mean that we should simply dispense with questions of (aesthetic) mediation altogether; rather, and as Brecht knew, this activist remaking of forms unsettles our understanding that the work of mediation is all we should be paying attention to, especially when it comes in the modernist guise of artistic ‘complexity’ or ‘difficulty.’ As we have noted, calls for literature to be politically active have always been energized by situational and conjunctural pressures. Undoubtedly, “capitalist realism” (Mark Fisher’s term for the contemporary closing-down of revolutionary horizons) is one such pressure, and despite a variety of interlinked crises—economic, climate, famine, migration, and wars—it still proves powerful enough to block any form of agency that might be capable of fundamentally challenging its globally imperious status quo. (31) As the members of the Endnotes Collective have recently observed, our current historical situation produces “ revolutionaries without revolution , as millions descend onto the streets and are transformed by their collective outpouring of rage and disgust, but without (yet) any coherent notion of transcending capitalism.” (32) There are those who would argue that we should not bother looking to literature for solutions to these deeply political problems. However, activist literature and art do not just constitute a dead or fossilized archive—instead they provide the tools required for preserving radical political impulses and articulating anew in new conjunctures. To this extent, they provide a reservoir of future-oriented modes of thinking, feeling, and being-in-the-world that we desperately need today. NOTES 1. Bertolt Brecht, “On Form and Subject-Matter,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1982), 29–30, here 30. Brecht’s German reads: “Erst der neue Zweck macht die neue Kunst.” See: Bertolt Brecht, “Über Stoffe und Formen,” in Werke , vol. 21: Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 302–4, here 303–4. 2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, 63. 3. For theorizations of a ‘long 1930s’ and its legacy of politicized art, see Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox, “Introduction: The Long 1930s,” Critical Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2015): 1–9; and Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, “Introduction,” in A History of 1930s British Literature , eds. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 1–13. 4. Analogously to the concept of the long 1930s, Jameson has suggested that we treat the 1960s as an elongated decade, making it the focal point for new analyses of capitalism’s crises and cultural transformations in the twentieth century. As such, the 1960s signifies not “an omnipresent and uniform shared style” or way of thinking and writing, but “the sharing of a common objective situation to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible.” See Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text , 9–10 (1984): 178–209, here 178. 5. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists , London: Verso, 2006, 131–35, here 135. 6. Gregory Sholette, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art , London: Lund Humphries, 2022, 18. 7. Ibid., 18. 8. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?,” in What Is Literature? And Other Essays , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 21–245. 9. For an influential version of this account, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible , London: Bloomsbury, 2011. 10. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature , Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, 9. 11. Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History and the Politics of Art , New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 53–4. 12. The Scottish playwright and theater theorist John McGrath, one of the great anglophone inheritors of the theatrical agitprop tradition of the later interwar years, cautioned that “perhaps the most important, and neglected, fact is that the relationship [between art and politics] is determined by many concrete historical phenomena, occurring on all kinds of level, so that the relationship changes. There is no point in elaborating a timeless, idealized structure somewhere outside history for this relationship.” See McGrath, Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form , London: Nick Hern, 1996, 82. 13. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 14. Joe Cleary, “Realism after Modernism and the Literary World System,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 255–68, here 262–3. 15. Steven S. Lee, “Introduction: Comintern Aesthetics–Space, Form, History,” in Comintern Aesthetics , ed. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven Lee, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020, 3–29, here 17. 16. On the lost world of the Comintern, see, e.g., Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds , London: Verso, 2004; Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011; and Comintern Aesthetics , ed. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven Lee, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. On the complex positionality of anti-colonial struggles within internationalist political projects, see, e.g., Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization , New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World , Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020; and J. Daniel Elam, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics , New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 17. Lee, “Introduction,” 14. 18. Elam, World Literature , xiii. 19. Perera, No Country, 5. 20. Ibid. 21. For usefully synthetic recent accounts, see, e.g., on the Latin-American context: Sophie Esch, Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America , Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018; on artistic activism in the Middle East: Ryan Watson, Radical Documentary and Global Crises Militant Evidence in the Digital Age , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021; and on the African context: African Literatures as World Literature , ed. Alexander Fyfe and Madhu Krishnan, London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 22. Marker’s powerful Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977) links up articulations of the revolutionary impulse across the twentieth century by connecting scenes from different radical moments, such as the 1917 Revolution and the anti-colonial protests of the 1960s and 1970s. 23. For Walter Benjamin’s influential discussion of this idea, see: “Left-Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästner’s new book of poems)” (1931), Screen 15, no. 2 (1974): 28–32. For a related recent account, see Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory , New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 24. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere , Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 25. Bertolt Brecht, “Eingreifendes Denken,” in Werke , vol. 21: Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 524–5. By contrast, more recent accounts of the rise of literary theory and the institutionalization of ideology critique have emphasized that critique developed as an intellectual ersatz for ‘real’ revolutionary activity: on this reading, theory constituted a compensatory response to the failure of left-wing political revolutions in the West in the 1920s and 1930s. See, e.g., Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 26. Snehal Shingavi, “India-England-Russia: The Comintern Translated,” in Comintern Aesthetics , ed. Amelia M. Glaser and Steven S. Lee, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020, 109–32, here 109. 27. Sholette, The Art of Activism , 151. 28. On the concept of affordances, which has roots in design theory, see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 29. For Auden’s phrase “To-day the expending of powers / On the flat ephemeral pamphlet,” see his civil war poem “Spain 1937,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writing, 1927–1939 , ed. Edward Mendelson, London: Faber and Faber, 1986, 210–12, here 212. 30. The phrase ‘making use,’ Wright observes, “suggests that using is not something given” but rather “that using itself needs to be crafted.” See Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership , Arte Útil, www.arte-util.org . 31. On capitalist realism, see Mark Fisher’s eponymous Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books, 2009. 32. Endnotes Collective, “Onward Barbarians,” Endnotes , https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/endnotes-onward-barbarians . Emphasis in original. Related Articles tertium datur IVANA PERICA Read Article Art Front Magdalena Bernhard | Christoph Blocher | Stella Chupik | Claudia Geringer | Nora Licka | Ivana Perica | Alessandra Sciurello Read Article

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