BRAD EVANS: For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

In my view, Benjamin’s understanding of what he calls mythic violence is the key to understanding all of these questions. Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life, projecting a form of authority out into the world that then becomes accepted as reality itself. It is mythic because there is no true or ontological basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism; its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality.

In describing mythic violence, I think it’s very important to remember that this doesn’t always refer to actual physical violence per se. The German term that we translate into English as “violence” in Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” is gewalt, a word that may be better translated as force or projection. This is important because it shows first of all that a lot of what Benjamin calls mythic violence is not actually always literally violent (although, as already noted, literal violence is a critical part of what does). Mythic instantiations such as that are violent in a much deeper sense with physical violence being only the ultimate and last resort in their arsenal. But it is also important to note that Benjamin is not against responding to mythic violence with an answering form of physical violence at times. In the “Critique of Violence,” he tells us that even so seemingly clear a commandment as “thou shalt not kill” does not mean that we can never kill. It means, as he tells us, that we must struggle with the meaning of that commandment both separately and together and at times ignore or abandon it (that is to say to commit violence but in a way that sits squarely on our own shoulders, in a way that can’t be pawned off as “following orders” or obeying dictates from God or some other transcendent form of authority).

If we keep these two things in mind (that the state and capitalism are not always physically violent and that the resistance to these things can itself be violent at times) it helps to specify what Benjamin means in terms of a critique of and resistance to modern forms of mythic violence. The key thing to resist is not physical violence per se but rather projections of some kind of external source of authority (whether it is God or gods, nature or some mystical origins) which become the basis for illicit and anxious — hence often physically violent — forms of control.

What seems important to recognize here is how these categories, most notably concerning our allegiance to the mythical order of things, are applicable to both leftist and conservative ideologies, which history shows can author the most extreme violence.

For Benjamin, without an understanding and critique of mythic violence, any would-be vanquisher of capitalism and liberalism will swiftly become co-opted into the very same political and economic forms that it opposes, ultimately replacing one form of mythic violence with another. In Benjamin’s view, the left itself is far from immune from projections of authority (and anxious and violent ones at that). Even so, there is a key difference between the left and the right for Benjamin insofar as the right is based on nothing but mythic projection, projections about racial purity, ancient (false) forms of authority and hierarchies and so on, whereas the left tends to seek to denaturalize these relationships for the sake of a different and better form of political life. Benjamin speaks of a political and aesthetic form that is “useless for the purposes of fascism,” which means that it does not allow for the sedimentation of mythic projections. Instead of such projections, Benjamin looks to local and episodic forms of collective decision making, akin to what he calls “pure means” (that is to say, forms of politics that are not related to ends or teleologies which are invariably mythic).

Such a political form would indeed be useless for the right insofar as it denies and undermines precisely what the right is based on even as it is useful for a left that sought to discern political forms that do not reproduce mythic violence. This discerning mechanism, one that allows us to distinguish between what is mythic and what is not, determining what comes from false projections onto externalities and what comes from within our own communities, is, I think, the key political insight that Benjamin offers us for our own time.

While he wasn’t the first to ask what makes humans violent toward each other, we owe it to Benjamin for raising in union the two most pressing of all questions. Namely — “what time are we living in”? And “how can we develop a critique of violence adequate to these times”? What do these two questions say to you in the context of his legacy?

I think we are living in a time when the contradictions of mythic violence are perhaps especially legible in a way that has not been the case since Benjamin’s own time. More precisely, these contradictions are more visible in the West and the North; even in the richest and whitest of communities, the conflation between fascism and liberalism, the violence that undergirds both systems, has become particularly evident even to those who would prefer not to be reminded of this. In much of the Global South and in communities of color and poor communities within the West and the North as well, that violence has always been plainly visible (and by design).

In my view, Benjamin helps to explain why the neoliberal order seems to be collapsing into a fascist one. For Benjamin, liberalism and fascism are not as distinct as they are usually considered to be (at least by liberals and fascists!). It’s not that liberals and fascists are somehow in secret league with one another; they don’t have to be for the homeostasic nature of the systems of mythic violence to function. All that is required is the common mythic form itself and the deep anxieties that this produces in the system. As the inequalities fomented by neoliberalism become increasingly apparent, a turn to more violence (and thus fascism) is required to keep the core capitalist center of mythic violence protected and intact.

Clearly, we live in very scary times, but from a Benjaminian perspective this is also a time of tremendous potential for a revived radical left politics. One of the first things you get taught in a political science department (my own discipline) is that authority weakens the more you have to demonstrate the violence that underlies it. If you have to resort to outright violence, that is a sign that the fabric of reality that Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria” is unraveling and is no longer doing the job of producing political and economic quiescence.

This is where the opportunity for radical change comes into play. For Benjamin, even as liberalism gives way to fascism, the vulnerability of mythic systems becomes that much more exposed. The need to resort to physical violence, and, perhaps just as critically, the need for those subjected to such violence to respond with terror and awe instead of defiance becomes that much more central to the perpetuation of mythic violence. The exposure of this vulnerability may be the reason that we are seeing an increasing refusal on the part of political subjects in our time to obey or even recognize these powers as such. Today we are seeing outbursts of resistance all over the world to mythic and neoliberal power. In Lebanon, Iraq, France, the UK, Bolivia, Chile, Hong Kong, and so many other places, resistance is growing even as repression and state violence are growing in equal measures (as Benjamin would predict).

I am reminded here of Arendt’s insistence that violence and power are qualitatively different. Whilst I do find some of this analysis too deterministic, from what you say it is important to remember the reason why totalitarian systems require so much violence is that they ultimately cannot persuade people to follow their systems of empowerment. And in this regard, totalitarian systems are marked not by their absolute power but rather by how precarious they really are when it comes to their durability. Does this resonate with the types of potentiality in Benjamin?

Yes, I think one of the most important things that Benjamin has to tell us is that fascism, for all of its terrifying appearance, is always and inherently on the brink of collapse. That is to say, that fascism is trapped by its own violence, forced to turn to a greater and greater degree of violence as it continually seeks to ground and reground itself. Usually when we think of a very violent and powerful system, we think that it is utterly in control of the situation and that it only collapses, if ever, by virtue of some externality (kind of the way that the combined force of the Allies in World War II ended fascism, at least for a moment). Yet, fascism in some sense does not even need external enemies because it bears its own vulnerability within itself. I’m not saying that a fascist regime can’t last for a very long time — Franco’s regime lasted for four decades after all — but rather that fascism’s requirement for a display of its violence (and just as importantly, as I was saying before, the requirement that its violence be received in a way that supports rather than undermines its political authority) means that it only survives from moment to moment; each moment could be its end. It could vanish in an instant because its power is entirely mythic and not based on any collective decisions. (Even though it always clothes itself in a relationship to “the people”; for this reason, I think that “populism” is not the right name for what we are experiencing in our own time. I would not call this populism but maybe something more like mythic groupthink, which is something very different and actually maybe the opposite of something that is inherent in a collective.)

I agree that Arendt’s distinction between violence and power has its limitations but I think it might be helpful here to think about the difference between what Benjamin calls (mythic) violence and nonviolence (with the latter corresponding roughly to Arendt’s notion of power). If nonviolence for Benjamin is marked by a refusal of externalities, then we can see that it actually has a far more stable basis than fascism does. Again, this does not mean that moments of nonviolence have a longer shelf life than fascist moments do. History tends to show the opposite; the real expressions of collective power have tended to be short lived indeed. Yet this lack of duration does not itself mean that nonviolent political moments are always doomed to short forms of duration. I think that in this case, the situation is the direct opposite of fascism: while fascism is internally unstable (because mythic) and doesn’t require an external threat to end (although those do help, of course), with nonviolence, the internal form is very stable because it comes out of actual collective forms of decision, which are made without recourse to externalities like racial purity, ancient history, or the like. It is in fact only externalities that can bring it to an end. Unfortunately those externalities are all too readily found; the creation of a nonviolent society seems to always bring a fascist response. (At this point, even a liberal regime, recognizing the threat that nonviolence poses to its markets, will turn into a fascist regime until the “emergency” is dealt with.)

This sounds like bad news, but I think that in the long run nonviolence may have the stronger hand. Arendt’s notion that power is always stronger than violence is very important here. As she informs us, in a clash between nonviolence and violence (recalling yet again that nonviolence for Benjamin does not always mean that it refrains from actual violence; maybe that is one big difference between him and Arendt), nonviolence will win every time. That is precisely why mythic violence is always frantically trying to assert its own existence, why liberal regimes readily give way to fascist ones, why the state must always kill no matter how benign it appears (or desires) to be. But in a way, mythic violence is the one facing an uphill battle; it has vulnerabilities that nonviolent forms do not have; all it has in the end is its own violence, and that cannot be counted on to produce its desired results in every single instance that it finds itself confronted by a nonviolent alternative.

Returning to his most celebrated essay, “Critique of Violence,” while appreciating its theoretical richness, I am still nevertheless troubled by the way various scholars simply take its key terms and comport them into the 21st century as if the logics and rules for power and violence remained the same. What do you think is required in updating the critique?

That is such an important question. I think that Benjamin must be held in his own time even as he speaks to ours. If not, such a juxtaposition threatens to lose that critical distinction that for Benjamin is the basis for why the thought or materiality of one period of time can disrupt another (and vice versa). If we make Benjamin into a 21st-century thinker, then we are making him into something that he is not, and in so doing, the critical perspective that he offers us is lost as well. One example of what you are talking about that I already touched on comes from a failure to understand what Benjamin means by violence in his “Critique.” (I think a related failure is to misunderstand what he means by nonviolence too.) Another example is to think that any number of actions constitute a General Strike, which for Benjamin takes very specific — and nonviolent — form.

Perhaps an even better example is the question of what constitutes what Benjamin calls “divine violence.” He describes divine violence in the “Critique” as a way for God to reject the fetishism and mythic violence that is often projected onto or attributed to divine sources. For Benjamin, divine violence does not create new laws and truths but merely acts to remove false ones. In my view — and I’ll admit that this is hardly a settled point — it is crucial to distinguish between divine violence and any form of human agency. As I see it, if human beings themselves can be said to engage in divine violence, then that defeats the whole purpose of exposing what is mythic and what is not. If people can be said to act as agents of God, then that simply reproduces mythic violence in a new guise. (How would you know when they are acting on God’s behalf and when they are not?) Benjamin himself really muddies this distinction in the “Critique,” offering that some human activities, including education, may constitute acts of divine violence. For this reason, some thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek have offered that when the poor rise up and attack the rich they are acting as agents of divine violence. I think this is a big mistake. What I’d say instead is that people act in the wake of an opening that divine violence produces. Divine violence is, in this account, what offers human beings a chance to act in ways that are not constituted by mythic violence, that is to say, to act in ways that are nonviolent. The General Strike is an example of such nonviolence, a way to say no to the entire apparatus of mythic violence.

Despite the fact that we must, as you suggest, keep Benjamin’s concepts distinct from those of our own time, I think that there is a huge benefit in connecting his time with our own and thinking alongside him. For me, Benjamin has helped me to see the big picture even if I use different terms than he does to describe our contemporary political moment. The name that I would give to the projections from mythic externalities is archism, a basis for much of our political and economic structures today. The name that I would give to non-mythic and collective nonviolent practices is anarchism (a term that Benjamin himself often uses although he tended to call himself a communist). In my opinion, to speak of archism helps us to avoid the mistake of thinking that the state is the only form of mythic violence that matters. (If it were, then taking over the state would end the predations of mythic violence. Yet, as we have seen in history, such a takeover generally leads to a mere change in rulers.) To speak of anarchism offers us a way to think of a collective and widespread form of resistance that is not merely utopian but is already extant. In fact, I would say that for Benjamin, anarchism is a widespread practice, a form of political nonviolence that archism sits atop, claiming credit for the support and possibility of political forms that in reality it only predates and parasitizes.

In conclusion, I am taken by the already extant forms of resistance you allude to here. Despite the pessimism of the types, then as now, what I still find in Benjamin is the idea that people will resist what is patently intolerable and will try to retain something of the human despite the desperate weight of historical persecution. If Benjamin offers us a single lesson moving forward, what do you think this demands from us?

I think that more than offering us something, Benjamin actually takes away one of the great conceits that allows us to remain ensconced in mythic violence, namely the idea that “there is no alternative.” This notion, akin to what Benjamin himself calls “left melancholia,” is a kind of self-defeatism that allows leftists and those who are against violence the comfort of thinking that there really isn’t anything that they can do, that leftist attempts to avoid violence all produce results that are no less violent than fascism and that therefore we must perforce make our peace with capitalism and just do the best we can. What Benjamin shows us, I think, is not only that a nonviolent life is possible, but that it exists all around us. We are actually engaged in it already. In his view, nonviolence is just another name for daily life, for the infinite decisions, agreements, arguments, and resolutions that we all make with one another each and every day and without any recourse to law or the state. This is what I like to call the anarchist life that we are already living. Nonviolence, then, is not some pie-in-the-sky utopia but an ongoing presence that we always have recourse too. We do not need to destroy everything and then start over. Rather we must remove the parasitic and mythic overlord that rules us through its violence and its lies. The greatest deception that mythic violence has ever pulled over on us is the notion (popularized by novels like Lord of the Flies) that if the state or other archist forms were to remove themselves from our life, we would all be stabbing one another within minutes. Benjamin shows us that it is the state itself, the veritable fox guarding the henhouse, that is the source of violence in our life. We may respond to it with various acts of violence of our own, but that is only to repeat the way that we are enmeshed in a violent and mythic order.

If I thought that nothing that I did could ever lead to things being better or different then I would probably be entitled to engage in a bit of left melancholia, to sigh over how awful capitalism is and romanticize the various failed leftist assaults on capitalism’s reign. But if I knew, as Benjamin informs us, that capitalism was far more vulnerable than I thought, that I lived amid an entire network of mutually nonviolent collectivity (however much it was overlaid with echoes of state and other forms of mythic violence) then the onus is on me to actually do something about it.

I so admire the courage and clearheadedness that Benjamin displays in his last essay, “On the Concept of History.” This was written in 1940, the year of his death and a year that fascism was literally coming down all around him. Rather than allow himself into being terrified into quiescence, at the (fascist) end of history, Benjamin wrote an essay where he understood time itself as defeating the linearity of history and the sense that fascism is fated and cannot be resisted. I don’t think we are today quite where the world was when Benjamin wrote that essay, although that depends, once again, on who and where we are talking about, but we are clearly getting closer to this situation on a global scale. I hope that we can demonstrate the same resolve in our time that Benjamin showed in his. Even in the heart of fascism, he saw its true colors, its vulnerabilities, and the fact that it was never as powerful as it seemed. He was able to see mythic violence for what it is even when it ended up costing him his life. If he could do that in the face of Hitler, I hope we can do the same in the face of Trump and Johnson and the like and whomever, or whatever, is to come next.

¤
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

The post Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today appeared first on Void Network.

1. PRINCE SIDDHARTHA DEFIED HIS FATHER, OLIGARCH ŚUDDHODANA

The Buddha’s life story is very essential to the Buddhist tradition because many of its main concepts are delivered in a parable fashion. As the story goes, the Buddha was born as Siddhartha Gautama, the prince of a regent Kshatriya family. The caste system was ubiquitous in the Buddha’s life. So his father, the Oligarch Śuddhodana, had absolute power over his subjects as an oligarch of the Shakya tribe’s Mahājanapada (oligarchic republic) before it was subjugated into the greater Kosala realm. And people below Śuddhodana were given various tasks suited to their caste. But from one perspective, no person’s life was more under the thumb of Śuddhodana than Siddhartha himself. Before he was born, the Buddha’s coming is said to have been foretold by a yogi named Asita. He told Śuddhodana that his precious son will either become a warrior king, conquering all rival territories by conquest, or a sagely spiritual leader who will influence the world with his wisdom. Being the patriarch that he was, Śuddhodana wished for his son to become a warlord. He cringed at the notion of his son becoming a religious sage. So he did everything in his power to make sure Siddhartha would become a king by conquest. Śuddhodana ordered all of his subjects to create an alternate reality for Siddhartha within the palace so that he would be unwise to the experiences of the outside world and thus unable to become a sage. This parable is so valuable because we can clearly see a crucial trait of authoritarianism laid bare: the need to control and distort knowledge from others. If you find yourself among people who attempt to hide knowledge from you, and whom prevent you from learning, they are either acting out of self-interest, or almost certainly trying to subjugate and oppress you. Śuddhodana forbade Siddhartha from leaving the palace and made it so that his subjects would only teach him things that lead to his success as a conquering king. But eventually Siddhartha disobeyed his father’s commands and left the palace to experience the Four Sights: first, an old man; second, a sick man; third, a corpse; and fourth, an ascetic hermit (yogi). There is an extensive narrative regarding these four sights that I recommend you read, but in summary they symbolize Siddharta’s insights into certain truths: aging is inescapable, we will all succumb to illness, we all die, and these realizations have led many people to seek transcendence from these unfortunate truths. But the main moral of the Four Sights is that we cannot delude ourselves they are not our shared reality no matter how hard we try. This is called impermanence or anicca in Pali.

The Four Sights troubled Siddhartha so much that he could not find peace living a life of luxury in the palace, doing as his father commanded. It is said he felt a personal conviction and call to action that he needed to do something to help people as well as himself. Meanwhile, his father heard of his desertion and resolved even more to ensure Siddhartha remains in the palace. In the end, the Buddha would not be kept from deserting the palace for good. When he reached the outskirts of town, Siddhartha cut his hair and shed his regal garments and jewels and gave them to his charioteer, Channa. In this tale, we can see a clear rejection of several hierarchical and political preconceptions. Despite being the son of the oligarch Śuddhodana, Siddhartha disobeyed his commands. Despite being the autocrat of the Shakya tribe’s domain, regent in Kapilavastu, his decree was not obeyed with unquestioning loyalty. And the fact this story was carried down through oral tradition in the region for hundreds of years before it was written into the Pali canon is indicative of an anti-establishment narrative. The Buddha’s defiance against his oligarch father, Śuddhodana, is in direct contrast with the patriarchal values of hierarchical societies so ubiquitous in the ancient Shakya and Kosala realms of India. Not only was his refusal to obey his father’s commands an affront to oligarchic rule, but it was also a rejection of its governing principles. This included the Vedic concept of caste, which Shakyamuni Buddha and his Sangha would go on later to deconstruct through various suttas. The Buddhist movement would dissolve the hierarchical caste system wherever it went, for the majority of its spread throughout Asia.

2. THE DHAMMA VS. CASTE

The caste system during the Vedic period leading up to the time of the Buddha’s life, the Mahājanapada period (600-345 BCE), decreed that people ought to live their lives serving the function of their status. This meant that everyone was born into their status and were not permitted to engage in any activity of the upper or lower castes in the hierarchy. It is usually stated that the Brahmin (priest) caste is the most revered, but this was not always the reality and was subject to change by region, regime, or period. In the Mahājanapada period, the Kshatriya (warrior) caste enjoyed the higher status and authority within the Shakya tribe. The Vaishyas (propertied land owners and merchants) answered directly to the Kshatriya, and managed the Sudras (peasant farmers or laborers). The final caste was the Dalits or Panchamas (untouchables) who were responsible for unwanted labor, such as cleaning and handling animal waste or corpses. We know from the Esukari Sutta that this lifestyle was still in practice through the Buddha’s life, but was challenged thereafter. In the Madhura Sutta, the arahant (enlightened monk) Kaccāna was visited by King Avantiputta in Gunda Grove where he would spend most of his time as a hermit monk. King Avantiputta sat upon his chariot to ask Kaccāna what he thought of the caste hierarchy. The abridge version goes something like this: “Venerable Kaccāna, the Brahmins say they are to be honored more than any of the other castes. What do you think about this?” inquired King Avantiputta. “It is just a saying in the world, great king, that ‘Brahmins are the highest caste…heirs of Brahma.’ But what do you think, King Avantiputta— Do not other Brahmins (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Sudras (laborers) precede and succeed members of their own caste? And if they were to achieve a following of servants eager to please them, and wealth and an abundance of food, will there still not yet be others who have achieved and will achieve the same success?” said Kaccāna, Buddha’s arahant disciple. “There will be, Venerable Kaccāna” admitted King Avantiputta. “Then what would you think, King Avantiputta, if I said Brahmins (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Sudras (laborers) are still yet capable of shameful deeds, such as murder, ill treatment of corpses, robbery, rape, and debauchery? Would you not admit that they were all capable of the same measure of shame regardless of their caste, or are they not?” asked Kaccāna. “I would say they are all capable of the same misdeeds. I see your point, Venerable Kaccāna.” admitted King Avantiputta.

Kaccāna continued, “Then you see it is just a saying in the world that ‘Brahmins are the highest caste…heirs of Brahma.’ …And suppose a Kshatriya or a Brahmin or a Vaishya or a Sudra were to shave their heads and don the monk’s robes, renouncing the world and giving up unwholesome habits, such as killing, debauchery, and poor diet. Would you be able to determine their caste? Would they not appear the same to you?” King Avantiputta responded eagerly, “They would all appear the same to me, Venerable Kaccāna.”

“And how would you treat them, King Avantiputta?” asked Kaccāna. “I would pay them homage, and treat them as a guest in my presence. Myself and my entourage would offer medicinal attention and accommodation if needed.” And suddenly the realization of the dhamma came over King Avantiputta. He praised Kaccāna for his teachings, and the realization that all people are equal when we understand superficial privileges for what they really are. Buddhism itself exists as an alternative to the Vedic tradition and other practices of society because the Buddha dhamma rejects previous assertions about reality. Buddhism’s very existence in Northern India was a direct critique of early Vedic Hinduism, Jainism (Nigathas in Pali suttas), and strictly Upanishadic Hinduism of the time. As with Kaccāna’s instruction, the Brahmins naturally preach their high status because it is in their own self-interest to do so. And anyone else in that position of privilege would be tempted to do the same. It takes a strong-willed doctrine, such as the Buddha dhamma to transcend from this oppressive mentality. Not only did the Buddha dhamma teach a strict doctrine of egalitarianism, but it also taught that any person could take refuge in the Sangha and seek enlightenment if they were up to the task. Though this did not completely dissolve strife experienced outside of the Sangha, surrounding upāsaka (lay communities) did become less oppressive, especially among lay practitioners whose family members joined the Sangha. Furthermore the idea of the Dalit (outcast) was challenged by the Buddha on many accounts. The most pertinent being the Vasalla Sutta where the Buddha rebukes an arrogant Brahmin at length, and here is my abridged version: One day Shakyamuni Buddha left Anathapindika monastery for receiving dāna (alms) at Savatthi city. He donned his robes and begging bowl and set out to the city as usual. Now, Shakyamuni Buddha was passing by Brahmin Aggika Bharadvaja’s house as he was cooking an offering for the Buddha. The Brahmin was not yet done cooking and lost his temper, so he yelled obscenities at Shakyamuni Buddha, “Stay there, baldy! Wretched monk! You Vasala!” (Vasala is a synonym for Dalit/outcast, which literally means “little man”. A similar term is used in Chinese- “xiăo rén”). The Buddha stopped and spoke to the Brahmin, “Tell me Brahmin, do you know the conditions that qualify someone as being a Vasala (outcast)?” “No I do not, Venerable Gautama Buddha. Please teach me the dhamma’s conditions for who qualifies as being a Vasala.” admitted the Brahmin. “Listen then, Brahmin, and pay attention, I will speak.” said the Buddha. “Yes, Venerable Sir,” replied the Brahmin. “

1. Whosoever is hateful and slanderous.

2. Whosoever murders and lacks sympathy for living beings.

3. Whosoever besieges towns as an oppressor.

4. Whosoever burgles.

5. Whosoever avoids paying their debts.

6. Whosoever assaults pedestrians on the road to steal from them.

7. Whosoever lies at the expense of others.

8. Whosever causes a married woman to be unfaithful.

9. Whosoever being wealthy refuses to support their aging parents.

10. Whosoever assaults and batters their relatives.

11. Whosoever is asked for good advice but answers with ill-advice.

12. Whosoever attempts to conceal their misdeeds.

13. Whosoever is treated as a guest and is served food in other’s homes, but does not do the same for others.

14. Whosoever lies to mendicant monks or Brahmins (about having food).

15. Whosoever is present at mealtime and insults monks or Brahmins [for seeking dāna (alms)].

16. Whosoever self-deluded, speaks asatam (harsh words of intimidation) or falsehood expecting to gain something.

17. Whosoever is boastful and belittles others.

18. Whosoever is capricious and unaware of the harm they cause by their actions.

19. Whosoever reviles the Buddha, the Abbot, or the Sangha.

20. Whosoever not being an arahant pretends to be so is the lowest of outcasts, for they are thieves of all the cosmos.

21. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.

22. This I recite from experience: There was a Dalit’s son, Sopaka, who became known as Matanga.

23. Matanga attained the highest of fame despite the odds. He was so revered by the Kshatriyas and Brahmins that they attended to him.

24. He achieved this feat by living as Matanga, the ordained monk and following the Noble Eightfold Path. By doing this, he attained enlightenment.

25. His birth as a Dalit did not prevent him from being revered and a witness to the Brahmin’s point of view.

26. High birth does not prevent one from falling into inner-turmoil, or from shame.

27. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.”

Upon hearing this dhamma, Brahmin Aggika Bharadvaja knelt in praṇāma before Shakyamuni Buddha saying, “O Venerable Gautama Buddha, I promise to participate as one in the upāsaka (laity) with you from now on. I will take refuge in you, the Buddha, your dhamma, and the Sangha. That I promise until the day I die!” The concluding details from this sutta imply that even the proud Brahmin spent the rest of his life supporting the Buddha’s community. And this is surely different from how Brahmins thought society ought to function. The caste was challenged by the Buddha in every way. It may seem the Vasala Sutta states certain aspects of caste society as facts of life, but we can see that anyone could be revered or outcast by their deeds and not by pure accident of birth: “21. Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a Brahmin. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a Brahmin.” We can see that the weight of the caste system was lessening, and was more regarded as a means of compliment or showing reverence. And in the following centuries the Jatakas suggest that intermarriage between castes began during or just after the Buddha’s life. This was a considerable sign of progress from the Vedic caste system. Such confrontation with the Vedic caste is very much compatible with the emancipatory agenda of anarchists.

We can see that the real lesson in the Buddha dharma is one I call the ‘three potentials’ that are found in Buddhist thought and a plethora of other doctrine: potential 1) all people have the potential to do great moral deeds, 2) all people have the potential to do shameful deeds, and 3) all people have the potential to be mediocre in their deeds. Of course, I grant other variables are possible; this is not a false trichotomy. Rather, this triadic moral principle is meant to highlight the universality of moral potentials. The third potential is one I think not enough people fully understand: being a bystander and enabler to bad deeds/karma, though not a malicious deed renders a person morally dubious. But on the other hand, it is inappropriate to expect direct action from others; this is an imposition that could lead to undue harm. In any case, this principle of ‘three potentials’ is a moral device aimed at showing there is no innate difference between people. There is no way to impose a hierarchy such as the caste on people declaring one is more virtuous or deserving of differential treatment based on the accident of birth. Buddhism declares that it is a person’s deeds that show whether they are honorable. But honorable or not, the Buddha instructed that all living beings are to be treated with the same respect and shall go unharmed by our deeds. This is possible by practicing mettā (benevolence), and avihiṃsā (nonviolence). The Buddha’s dismissal of caste beliefs as roles determined by birth have been present throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia ever since his Sangha was around to spread the dhamma. This is a legacy that anarchists can appreciate.

For India herself, many Indians in the independence movement (1857-1947) did look to Buddhism as a model for liberation from both the oppression of the British Empire and the caste system itself. In regards to whether the caste system would go on to exist, if but as an underlying tradition rather than a visible apparatus for governance, Har Dayal stated, “I do not acknowledge any caste-system, good, bad, or indifferent.” What’s more he would later praise Venerable Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to uplift the downtrodden untouchables. Dayal voiced his own protest against caste in his essay “Modern India and European Culture” by highlighting India’s subaltern position on the world stage, “All Hindus are pariahs in the society of civilized men and women, whether they are rajas or valets, priests or sweepers. . . .” and concluded, “[the caste system] is the climax of all social inequality.” Like the Madhura Sutta and the Vasala Sutta, Dayal’s statements highlight the sameness in potential regarding all people, and in the latter quote he implied the mundanity of attempts in Indian society to prop up higher castes while the whole of India was deemed subaltern by the world powers of the time. And he would later add that “love transcends all castes” which further points to the sameness of all people regardless of birth. In his paper, “Three Ideas on Education” published in the December issue of Modern View (1925) Dayal called to action the passionate removal of caste: Caste is the curse of India. Caste, in all its forms, has made us a nation of slaves. . . . The priest is our master, but he himself (and all of us) are the slaves of foreigners. This is the fruit of caste. … It is not Islam, and it is not England, that has destroyed India. No, our enemy is within us. Priestcraft [Barahminism] and caste have slain us. This is the truth of history. Hindu Society twice committed suicide. . . . Caste must go, and it must not go slowly and gradually, but immediately and completely and irrevocably. This should be our vow: No compromise with caste in any shape or form, and Hindu unity as our practical social ideal. Har Dayal would later advocate the translation of Pali texts in Western academia, and could be credited as a major influence in this endeavor [to which I am grateful]. He similarly spoke against dogmatism, as in the unquestioned obedience to the Hindu and religious practices within India (to include Islam and Christianity). His strongest case against Hinduism’s dogmatism was written in the September 1926 issue of Modern View where he stated the inevitable result of unquestioned obedience manifested as “child-marriage, purdah (seclusion of women), caste, polygamy, hideous idols, illiteracy and the condition of slavery “ which he then declared, “the Shame of India”. But many religious people might think this is a mere skew of Buddhist doctrine, and that Buddhism merely promotes an alternative dogma in place of other belief systems. But this is not the case, and the next subsection will explain why.

3. THE DHAMMA AND NONDOGMATISM

The term dogma has a few definitions. Its origin in English derives from Catholic Christianity, and is etymologically linked to the Greek word, δόγμα (dogma) which literally means “that which one thinks is true”. The Roman Catholics repurposed the word into Latin to mean, “an inconvertible truth made known through divine revelation”. And since roughly the second century CE, dogma was used as a means to control discourse and enforce a clerical and feudal hierarchy among residents of Christendom. Dogma has come to mean a set of beliefs that are not only “incontrovertible truth”, but enforceable under arbitrary rule. Any challenge against such dogmas in Christendom, and the other Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism) has been at one time or another suppressed and condemned. This notion was exacerbated by the concept of divine right that meant the kings or other feudal regents would have unquestioned authority over their people. At certain periods and in some societies, denial of dogma was punishable by death. As a contrast, Buddhism does not have any such requirements. Of course there are social pressures is many communities for people to be Buddhist, but there has been no literature or governing body that mandated subscription to a specific set of beliefs. Of course we can assert instances of violence or suppression in Myanmar, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. But these instances are not caused by disbelief in specific doctrine. If you search for “Buddhist dogma” on Wikipedia you will come across diṭṭhi (right view). The tenet of diṭṭhi has been offered as an example of Buddhist dogma. But this is a flimsy analogous term, because right view is just one tenet of eight within the Noble Eightfold path. Diṭṭhi cannot be equated with Christian dogma because it is not broad enough to be the framework for most of the Buddhist doctrine in the same way dogma does for Christians. If I were to put on my Christian hat for a moment and try to make an analogy here: it would be like trying to say the keystone tenet of Christianity is the first Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount, “blessed are the poor [in spirit if Matthew]”. As you may know, there are a few more Beatitudes in that sermon (ten in Matthew and four in Luke). So too is the same for the Noble Eightfold Path, there are eight tenets, and they all comprise just one component of the Buddha’s dhamma (teaching). So I hope that illustrates the incompatibility of diṭṭhi serving as a substitute to dogma. Then there is the collective dhamma being presented as another stand-in for dogma in Buddhist thought. But this cannot be the case either, because the dhamma is the summation of all of Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings. And if this is the case, then the dhamma would be self-contradictory as a dogma due to various suttas that speak against compulsory belief. The most prevalent sutta is the Kesamutti Sutta, as it specifically addresses the problem with unquestioned beliefs in this excerpt [numbers are my own]:

1. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava),

2. nor upon tradition (paramparā),

3. nor upon rumor (itikirā),

4. nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna)

5. nor upon conjecture (takka-hetu),

6. nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu),

7. nor upon fallacious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka),

8. nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā),

9. nor upon another’s seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya),

10. nor upon the consideration, The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)

Kalamas, when you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness”, enter on and abide in them.

It just so happens that the above passages hit on every aspect of political indoctrination. This is quite astounding for how advanced they are in terms of discussions regarding belief.

The first instruction, anussava, relates to belief by rote memorization. This is often forced upon pupils or citizens through educational institutions and quite often the news media today. Less resolute or acquiescent people will exhibit strong beliefs in things simply because they hear about them so often.

The second instruction, paramparā, is just as astounding as the first because it warns against the appeal to tradition. This is often known as the informal fallacy, argumentum ad antiquitatem (appeal to tradition), that states that a claim is not true simply because people hold it as a tradition or have believed it was true for some amount of time. Similarly, rumors or hearsay, the third instruction, itikirā, are not reliable sources of truth because, even if a person is convinced of the truth of something, it does not mean they remember it completely and clearly. This is why hearsay is not admissible as evidence in any scientific setting. Yet, corrupt governing officials and business owners appeal to hearsay as a source for decision-making processes all the time. It is interesting the fourth instruction, piṭaka-sampadāna, uses the term piṭaka which is self-referential to the Buddhist doctrine, the Pali Canon. So, in English it is translated as scripture, but the scripture in question is the sutta itself as it exists within the Sutta Piṭaka which is a pivotal source of the Pali Canon as a whole.

The fifth teaching, takka-hetu, warns against conjecture, or assumptions based on preconceived notions. The sixth, naya-hetu, warns against axioms and again I think this is self-referential, because the axioms in question here would be popular phrases the Buddha or similar instructors would be preaching at the time. Axioms, maxims, truisms, or aphorisms, have strength in being memorable and seem true enough that many people simply repeat them and use them heuristically in society- which is often fast-paced and unaccommodating to lengthy discussion. But when we go through our whole lives assuming the truth of an axiom without investigation, it could lead to the acceptance of a fallacious rationale or bald assertions. The other weakness of axioms is that people can remember their content, but not the context nor the deeper meaning to them.

By extension of the sixth instruction, the seventh, ākāra-parivitakka, warns against fallacious reasoning at all. The term ākāra is literally defined as shape or form, but it has another definition meaning appearance, aspect, or image. And parivitakka means a reflection or consideration. And I think this is founded in the Buddha’s description of reality— the Three Marks of Existnece: anicca (impermanence), dukkha (dissatisfaction), and anattā (non-self) — and our delusions about reality, known as the Five Aggregates or Khandha. These are delusions we have that prevent us from seeing reality for what it is. The Five Aggregates are: rūpa (form), vedanā (sensation), saññā (perception), saṅkhāra (mental formations), and viññāṇa (consciousness).

In summary, these five concepts we have about the world are fallacious because they fail to recognize anicca (impermanence), our inability to sense certain aspects of reality, our biases, our unskillful thoughts, and they delude us into clinging to the delusions of the self that have no basis in the aforementioned aspects. The eighth instruction, diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā, is also self-referential and is really about not misinterpreting the origins of one’s insight as it could be skewed by bias.

As stated above, the term diṭṭhi means right view. Nijjhān means insight, akkh refers to what the eye sees, and antiyā are the ideas we have pondered before. The ninth instruction, bhabba-rūpatāya, should be of interest to anarchists in that it speaks against following charismatic leaders or those we think are particularly skillful on those qualities alone. That disposition only leads to unquestioned servitude via admiration. The tenth instruction, samaṇo no garū, also leans towards anarchism because it is the antithesis to the appeal to authority fallacy. A proposition is not true merely based on the assertion that a person in authority said it was true. And a person’s perceived rank is not sufficient to substantiate their claims just as it is not enough for any other person. Every person needs to demonstrate and justify why their viewpoint merits consideration, and they come under greater scrutiny if they are claiming to state the truth about a subject. If Buddhists really apply the Kesamutti Sutta as a logical device, then they absolutely cannot be dogmatic in any sense. And if this is the case, the nondogmatic disposition of Buddhism allows adherents to question and analyze any propositions that come their way, including the basis of authority of others. The Kesamutti Sutta is a powerful instrument that warns against indoctrination and unquestioned loyalty to so-called leaders, secular or religious. And in a time when Brahmins were believed to have privileged authority over other castes, the Buddha’s Sangha (community of bikkhu monks and bikkhuni nuns) functioned as a rapidly spreading commune that would provide an alternative to established society.

4. THE SANGHA: A COMMUNE SEPARATE FROM POLITICAL AUTHORITY

The Buddhist Sangha is often compared to the Benedictine and Augustinian orders of European Christian monks. And this parallel has some uses. But the deference and reverence of the Christian monk vis-à-vis the Buddhist monk is quite different. The Buddhist monk or nun is a renunciant, not to get closer to God and receive rewards in heaven, but to achieve enlightenment, or in the very least, renounce the world as it is polluted with undue suffering. The Sangha was essentially a movement that would attract thousands of followers within Shakyamuni Buddha’s lifetime, and it was founded by people who lived off of the charity (dāna) of their surrounding communities. Any veneration for monks or nuns received from people in those communities was out of sincere respect alone, and clearly not from a tradition of obedience.

There was a sense of shared dignity that emanated from the Sangha, as it was attested in the suttas. And though many monks were indeed venerated, they were not so until they proved themselves to be sagacious in deed and speech. Authority in early Buddhist society had no linkage to possessions, status, or wealth. Their critique of property ownership is even compatible with the works of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Rocker. The Dhammapada, possibly chief among all Pali Canon texts, states in the subsection Dhammattha Vagga: (discourse on the just), that one is not deserving of respect merely because of their perceived status from birth, age, or charisma, but rather the sum of all their deeds: 260. A monk is not an elder because his head is gray. He is but ripe in age, and he is called one grown old in vain. 261. One in whom there is truthfulness, virtue, inoffensiveness, restraint and self-mastery, who is free from defilements and is wise — he is truly called an Elder. 262. Not by mere eloquence nor by beauty of form does a man become accomplished, if he is jealous, selfish and deceitful. 263. But he in whom these are wholly destroyed, uprooted and extinct, and who has cast out hatred — that wise man is truly accomplished. Shakyamuni Buddha also warned against false confidence in obedience to rules, rituals, and pedantry.

These habits so often manifest as means of authoritarianism, and this principle would ideally promise that Sangha would remain an egalitarian commune that guaranteed equal opportunity to its residents. And if an anarchist commune would be modeled with a similar ethic to these principles, it could safeguard against the rise would-be despots: 271-272. Not by rules and observances, not even by much learning, nor by gain of absorption, nor by a life of seclusion, nor by thinking, “I enjoy the bliss of renunciation, which is not experienced by the worldling” should you, O monks, rest content, until the utter destruction of cankers (Arahantship) is reached. In the Dhammapada’s Bhikkhu Vagga (discourse on monks), Shakyamuni Buddha gives an emancipatory instruction, 376.

“Let him associate with friends who are noble, energetic, and pure in life, let him be cordial and refined in conduct. Thus, full of joy, he will make an end of suffering.” This passage provides an impetus for would-be members of the Sangha to retreat from oppression. Similarly the Buddha warned against oppression by means of violence in the Danda Vagga (discourse on violence). 131. “One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.” And it has been the anarchist critique that oppressive violence has always been the basis for anarchist thought, or as Proudhon described it, “oppression, misery, and crime”. Like many anarchist communes today, the Sangha is meant to survive on charity (dāna) and barter alone. This communal subsistence is often called “the economy of gifts” and would ideally allow monastics to sever ties from whatever political regime that existed around them at the time.

These days a Sangha exists within a nation-state regardless of their means of subsistence, and this typically renders the upkeep of a Sangha nearly impossible where the tradition is not the norm. And this is just another sign of oppression and systemic violence. But this doesn’t change the fact that wherever a Sangha exists, there is a potential for people within a political realm to seek refuge in the Buddhist community and attain a new life, and oftentimes a new name upon ordination. Many ordained monks went on to be given the title of arahant (an enlightened monk) and they continued Shakamuni’s teachings, assembling in the First Council in Rajagada (5th c. BCE) and Second Council in Vesali (4th c. BCE) whereby much of the Buddhist tradition was chronicled and passed down verbally until written tradition took over during the reign of King Vaṭṭagāmiṇi in the 1st century BCE, and this was when the Pali Canon was formed. Since much of the early Canon survived while containing suttas that encouraged critical thought, it is only logical to conclude that the Sangha upheld emancipatory doctrine at least until Vaṭṭagāmiṇi’s reign. So far we have seen Buddhist thought challenge filial piety through the tale of young Siddhartha Gautama’s escape from this oligarchic father’s rule, notions of hierarchy existing as the caste system, and political life by way of the Sangha.

Finally this essay will conclude with a discussion about how the Buddha was viewed vis-à-vis the Hindu pantheon, and the parables that narrate discourses he has with the gods of Hinduism.

5. THE BUDDHA VIS-À-VIS HINDU GODS

The Ayacana Sutta contains a discourse between the Buddha and a syncretic deity called Brahma Sahampati. This is most likely the chief creator god of the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, of which the Brahmin caste is said to descend from. Yet, this notion is somewhat ambiguous because certain tales regarding Brahma, as opposed to the Brahman, in Buddhist literature is inconsistent at times. In any case, the Ayacana Sutta provides a narrative discourse that I like to think of as a parable, but I will provide an abridged version first before explaining what I mean: In a time when Shakyamuni Buddha had attained Buddhahood, he meditated at Uruvela on the bank of the Nerañjara River, at the foot of a goatherd’s Banyan Tree.

In deep reflection the Buddha thought, “This dhamma I have attained is so deep, and so refined, that it will be hard to transmit to others. It seems the whole world is living in delusion, and it will be next to impossible for them to comprehend this dhamma. And if I set out to teach the dhamma to them without proper preparation, it will only result in dissatisfaction.” After some time meditating on these thoughts, the Buddha slowly shifted into an equanimous trance, preferring to be at peace with himself over ruminating over failure in transmitting the dhamma.

In this state the god Brahma Sahampati perceived what Shakyamuni Buddha was thinking and spoke to him from the heavens, “All is lost, Tathagatha (great teacher). You prefer to remain in your equanimous state rather than teach the dhamma. If you dare not teach the dhamma you just attained, the world will not know the just from the unjust!” Brahma Sahampati left his heavenly realm to appear in front of the Buddha. He knelt in praṇāma, placing his right hand over his heart. “Lord Buddha, I implore you to teach your dhamma. In the past there appeared among the Magadhansan impure dhamma devised by the stained. Your dhamma is unstained and whole. Please emancipate this world’s people from their pitiful state of suffering. Free them from the oppression caused by craving and suffering.” The Buddha envisioned the world and its people in many different walks of life. He glimpsed people of keen awareness and presence of mind, and individuals worn and dulled by nature and the experiences of life. It was just as in a pond of blue or red or white lotuses, some lotuses — born and growing in the water — might flourish while immersed in the water, without rising up from the water; some might stand at an even level with the water; while some might rise up from the water and stand without being smeared by the water. He could see the potential for those who might learn the dhamma, and those who are not yet capable due to their karma.

Upon this revelation, the Buddha spoke, “I shall open my doors to those who are willing to enter. Let them show their conviction. I realized that I was not willing to teach the dhamma for I thought trouble would arise. O Brahma, I did not tell people the sublime dhamma.” Upon hearing this, Brahma Sahampati understood the Buddha resolved to teach the dhamma and disappeared. This parable places the Buddha above the god Brahma Sahampati from the moment he appeared to the Buddha. He knelt in praṇāma, and placed his hand on his heart. This gesture is a reverential salutation, and his hand on his heart signifies his reverence deeper still. The dialogue also suggests the Buddha is placed above the god, as he does not change his position or demeanor upon Brahma Sahampati’s arrival. All visual depictions of this moment show the Buddha in padmasana (the lotus position) above Brahma Sahampati, and the latter kneeling in praṇāma. The prevalence of this fact shows the dhamma is superior over any belief in gods and their supposed authority on Earth. This deity is meant to be chief and progenitor of the Brahmin caste, and Buddhists dared to place their patriarchal creator god below the god they appealed to legitimize their own status over other castes. Thanissaro Bikkhu’s translation of the Brahma-nimantanika Sutta is prefaced by an interesting observation regarding the habit of Brahmins and other monotheistic proponents. He states that Mara (the god of craving, delusion, and death) is the source for those who demand obedience to a creator god. This observation also concludes for us that Buddhist thought is opposed to dogmatism, and hierarchy for a number of reasons. Brahmanism is a hierarchical belief-system that justifies all its practice by appealing to a creator god as the source of goodness.

Here, Mara is understood as imitating the figure of Brahma and also possessing the minds of Brahmins subordinate to their chief, named Baka. Baka is shown to be self-deluded in thinking he has achieved a Brahmanic form of enlightenment, but Shakyamuni Buddha shows him that this is Mara taking over and deceiving him. Shakyamuni Buddha’s initial critique of Baka was that he claimed his revelation was unchanging and eternal. This is a denial of the dhamma’s tenet of anicca (impermanence) and in reverse to how Brahma Shampati appeared to the Buddha— the Buddha appeared to Baka to glimpse his delusional realm at the royal sal tree in the Subhaga forest in Ukkattha. And in a similar fashion the Buddha was greeted by Baka as an honored guest saying, “Welcome good sir. It has been long since you arranged to come here — for this place is constant. This is permanent. This is eternal. This is total.

This is not subject to falling away — for here one does not take birth, does not age, does not die. And there is nothing beyond this.” Shakyamuni Buddha rebuked Baka, “How immersed in your delusion you are, Brahmin Baka! This is your ignorance: what is inconstant you declare constant! What is impermanent you declare permanent! What is partial you declare total! Where all is subject to falling away- you declare it will not fall away! What is born, ages and dies, you declare does not!” At the Buddha’s words, Mara possessed one of Baka’s subordinates in protest, “Monk, monk, do not rebuke this Brahmin. He is the most revered among us, for he has achieved a state of enlightenment in the company of our Lord Brahma. The creator of all, and father to us all.” Mara went on to state the division of Brahmins who disobeyed Brahma’s law, and those who obeyed. Of course, he stated that the disobedient were incarnated into a “coarse body” and those who obeyed were given “refined bodies”. He then implored the Buddha, “So please obey Lord Brahma, don’t you see his assembly is gathered here?” The Buddha’s attention was turned towards the gathering of Brahmins. The Buddha leveled his rebuke towards Mara directly as he was in possession of the gathering, “I know you, Evil One. Don’t assume, ‘He doesn’t know me.’ You are Mara, Evil One. And Brahma, and Brahma’s assembly, and the attendants of Brahma’s assembly have all fallen into your hands. They have all fallen into your power. And you think, ‘This one, too, has come into my hands, has come under my control.’ But, Evil One, I have neither come into your hands nor have I come under your control.”

At this the Brahmin Baka addressed the Buddha once again, “But surely you understand that what is constant is constant… …what is permanent is permanent, and what is not born, ages, and dies, is eternal. That from this realm, there is nothing beyond. Surely you know that Brahmins before me have attained this insight and their attainment was passed on for generations to come.” Shakyamuni Buddha heard Baka and went on to explain that his appeal to tradition and delusion was a self-imagined realm created in his own mind. The Buddha explained, “The realm you describe contains celestial bodies that revolve around the Earth- that come and go. They illuminate the world and cast shadows from either direction. You have influence over beings who come and go. There are epochs here. This is not eternal. But there are other realms known as the Ābhassara that you have not seen, and do not know exist- at least not any longer. You have been here for so long that your memory of the impermanent is faded. You have mistaken me to be of ordinary birth and insight, but I am the Tathagata (teacher of the dhamma) and I have seen beyond your delusion. Having come to known the rudimentary elements for what they are, I have insight into your realm as well as all the others” Baka Brahmin was displeased at the Buddha’s dhamma and protested, “If this is what you think of my realm, I will disappear from you this instant.” “Disappear from me if you can.” Shakyamuni Buddha responded. Then Baka strained pensively thinking “Disappear, I will disappear.” But he could not. So then the Buddha retorted, “Well if you will not disappear, I will in your stead.” Baka looked up from his concentration, “Yes, disappear from me, monk- if you can.” The Buddha said he fabricated a psychic trick that made it seem as though his body was gone, but his voice remained. He recited to the congregation of Brahmins, “Having seen danger right in becoming, and becoming searching for non-becoming, I didn’t affirm any kind of becoming, or cling to any delight.” The whole congregation was astounded by this trick and praised the Buddha saying, “How awesome that he could do this!” and “This is the power of Shakyamuni, sage of the Shakya tribe, the Buddha. No Brahmin has done this before.”

Then Mara spoke from the congregation again, “O Buddha, if this is your dhamma, it should not be taught to the laity. As many enlightened ones before you did not lower themselves to teach the laity, so you should also abstain from this practice. You have more to gain from remaining at peace with yourself, in seclusion away from others.” Shakyamuni Buddha exposed Mara again for what he is, “I know it is you, Mara. Evil One. You are ever on your mission to prevent the dhamma from being taught. For you lack sympathy for those who suffer. You would rather the laity to remain ignorant of the dhamma so they may go on suffering as they do. I am the Tathagata, and my duty is to teach the dhamma. Your Brahmins have carried on telling the world they are self-awakened and delude themselves and others into thinking they were self-awakened. But I am truly self-awakened. Just as a palmyra tree that grows to have its canopy cut off is incapable of growing again; so, too, the fermentations that defile, that lead to further becoming, that that cause stress, suffering, aging, and death: Those I the Buddha have renounced, their root destroyed, like an uprooted palmyra tree, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising.” Mara could no longer deny Shakyamuni Buddha was indeed self-awakened and enlightened, so he vanished as he always had from the Buddha.

The Brahma-nimantanika Sutta puts the Buddha above the gods by proxy of the Brahmin Baka, and Mara. Not only that, but this sutta renders all means of control for the Brahmin caste ineffectual. The political and metaphysical assertions of the Brahmin are no longer legitimate so long as the Buddha is around to teach the dhamma. And here Mara is shown to be the proponent of obedience to hierarchy and theocracy by way of allegory. Since Mara is the embodiment of corruption and delusion in humans, and he possesses the Brahmin congregation in this parable, it is very clear that the Buddha dhamma is opposed to oppression by show of authority of any kind. Other gods in the Hindu pantheon, such as Indra, function as supplicants in Buddhist suttas. These tales put them below the Buddha in reverence, and this also shows a notion of irreverence to the Hindu pantheon as a whole.

The Hindu pantheon fell into irreligion in the minds of early Buddhists, and functioned merely as a narrative conduit through which the dhamma was transmitted. In Thanisarro Bikkhu’s translation of the Sakka-pañha Sutta the Buddha delivers an entire sutta to Indra (called Sakka in the Pali) as council on the problem of evil: that is, despite the dhamma’s teaching that everyone should abstain from doing evil (including hypothetical beings existing elsewhere), wrongdoing is a common occurrence (the hypothetical beings are said to do immoral things in scriptures as well). Below is my abridged version: Shakyamuni Buddha answered Indra, “As you know, the devas, asuras, and nagas, and all the other hypothetical beings are said to be fettered by envy and greed. They preach they are above violence and rivalry, but we find they are constantly thrown into jealous conflict.” Indra was delighted by the Buddha’s words and praised him. “You speak of the truth, venerated sage. Your words have allayed my doubts.” he said. Yet, Indra had more to ask of the Buddha, “But sage, what is the cause of their envy and greed?”

The Buddha answered, “The source of their envy and greed is caused by the bias of what they hold dear and what they do not. This bias is caused by taṇhā (desire) which indicates the fallibility of these souls. And instead of viewing all with the same impartial gaze, with equanimity, they live per their biased preference.” Indra understood but then asked, “But what is the source of taṇhā, dear sage?” Shakyamuni Buddha replied, “The source of taṇhā is the mind. The mind has a habit of papañca (objectification) which stems from the mistaken belief in attā (permanent self).

This is a mistake because all things are impermanent including the self. When the mind develops, this habit of objectification is increased over time, and so too does taṇhā since there was no skillful intervention. Thus this is the unskillful mental state.” Hearing this, Indra then asked, “Venerated sage, how does one treat this unskillful mental state?” Shakyamuni Buddha spoke, “Everyone understands the concepts of joy, grief, and equanimity at some point in their lives. Joy, grief and equanimity each have two outcomes that separate by whether one makes an effort or does not. Knowing the emotion of joy without making an effort is but a way to feel suffering. The pursuit of joy through effort will decrease suffering and lead to true joy. Similarly, grief without effort will linger and compound suffering, but grief with the effort promoted by the dhamma brings peace. The pursuit of equanimity without skillful effort will lead to suffering. But seeking equanimity with effort by way of the dhamma leads to equanimity indeed.”

The Buddha instructed Indra further about how the senses deceive us into unskillful mental states. Indra humbly thanked Shakyamuni Buddha and admitted, “Taṇhā is a disease and a yearning arrow! It seduces even devas like me. Surely, we devas were brought to war with the asuras, and when we won I though all the spoils of both realms would fall to the devas. But upon hearing the dhamma and the teachings of avihiṃsā (nonviolence) I became disillusioned with our kamma. And when I questioned the Brahmins for council, they could never answer my burning questions regarding these unskillful states. Yet you have! The Brahmins could only return my question with further questions. They doubted my identity, but when I admitted I am Indra, the deva king come as Sakka, and spoke to them of your dhamma as much as I knew, they delighted in me and praised me as their patron. But lord, Buddha, you are my Tathagata: the keeper of the true and whole dhamma.” Indra was satisfied with the Buddha’s teachings and praised him three times declaring him the worthy, the blessed, and the self-awakened one (the meaning of the word ‘Buddha’). This parable of Indra’s visit to the Buddha highlights again the subjugation of Hindu gods. Indra states above that the Brahmins praised him for only imparting a fragment of the Buddha’s dhamma.

This sutta fully illustrates the deconstruction of the Hindu pantheon, caste and subsequent political structures. The parables within the dhammas also serve the function of teaching the dhamma by way of dialogue. This rhetorical device, though found in Vedic texts and the Mahabharata, the role of the deva god is always subjugated below the man, the Buddha. At some point Indra as Sakka was declared by Buddhagosa to have transcended into becoming the Bodhisattva, Vajrapāṇi. This ascension within Buddhist thought is actually a means of dissolving hierarchy, as any person can achieve Buddhahood. What’s more a Buddha is considered further on the path to enlightenment than a Bodhisattva.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, we first discussed Prince Siddhartha’s defiance against his father, Oligarch Śuddhodana and how this defiance broke from hierarchical concepts such as patriarchy and filial piety; secondly we explored the dhamma’s stance on the Hindu caste system in Northern India, in the Buddha’s time and in the 20th century; thirdly we examined specific texts and concepts accredited to the Buddha that oppose dogmatism; fourthly, we saw that the Sangha has functioned as a commune existing beyond the limits of monarchies and oligarchies, and how they often function as sanctuaries beyond political realms; finally we examined abridged tales of the Buddha and his discourses with the Hindu gods where the justifications for oppression, oligarchy, hierarch, patriarchy, and monarchy were deconstructed within the suttas. And the above is just a fraction of the literature available regarding the Buddha’s dhamma. Siddhatha Gautama, the Buddha of the Shakya tribe, Shakyamuni, was declared by the hermit yogi Asita that he would either be a conqueror or a sage. And despite oligarch Śuddhodana’s wishes, Shakyamuni Buddha determined to become a sage.

From the very beginning he rejected the premise of political life in Mahājanapada period India. His early life story warns against information being concealed in order to manipulate others. The Buddha’s dhamma would then live on to be one of the single-most convicting critiques of the caste system.

The Buddha himself declared all people are created equal. And later Mahatma Gandhi, Indian independence activists, and anarchist theorists would look to Buddhism for answers regarding how to undo the caste’s hierarchy. Suttas like the Kesamutti Sutta warned specifically against gullibility and acceptance of authority prima facie, which departs from all other belief systems deemed religious in some way and is in accordance with anarchist principles. What’s more, the Buddha’s Sangha was a refuge from political life for all people, from Kshatriya kings to Brahmins, to Dalit untouchables. the Sangha is an equal-opportunity commune that subsists without the use of money or assets.

This was a direct affront to the market system of the time, and even drew the ire of nearby merchants. And the entire basis for hierarchy in ancient Indian society was challenged by the Buddhist dhamma. Their creator gods were subjugated, allegorically dismissed, and so the concept of divine right of rule in the Indian rendition was challenged by the dhamma.

I will be first to admit that Buddhism and anarchism part ways at a few very important junctures, but they remain compatible if we remain nondogmatic about either tradition. Both worldviews have indeed come to be synthesized in my own mind in the same way this essay was written, as I have taken the precept of avihiṃsā nonviolence.

____________

written by Nico Armin

MAIN IMAGE: Uchiyama Gudō (内山 愚童; d. 1911), Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest and anarcho-communist activist, who was one of the few Buddhist leaders who spoke out against the Meiji government in its imperialist projects and was amongst the twelve anarchists executed in the High Treason Case (幸徳事件 / Kōtoku Jiken), born. Gudō was an outspoken advocate for redistributive land reform, overturning the Meiji emperor system, encouraging conscripts to desert en masse and advancing democratic rights for all. He also criticised Zen leaders who claimed that low social position was justified by karma and who sold abbotships to the highest bidder.

The post Buddhism and Anarchism: Exploring the Unlikely Compatibility of Two Distinct Traditions appeared first on Void Network.

At an almost planetary scale, and for some years now – certainly ever since what was called ‘the Arab Spring’ – we are in a world awash with struggles, or, more precisely, with mass mobilisations and assemblies. I propose that the general conjuncture is marked, subjectively, by what I would term ‘movementism’, namely the widely shared conviction that significant popular assemblies will undoubtedly achieve a change in the situation. We see this from Hong Kong to Algiers, Iran to France, Egypt to California, Mali to Brazil, India to Poland, as well as in many other places and countries.

All these movements, bar none, seem to possess three characteristics:

1. They are composite in their social origin, the pretext of their revolt, and their spontaneous political convictions. This polymorphous aspect also elucidates their number. They are not groupings of workers, or demonstrations of the student movement, or revolts of shopkeepers crushed by taxes, or feminist protests, or ecological prophecies, or regional and national dissidences, or marches by what are termed migrants and I call nomadic proletarians. It’s a little bit of all of these, under the purely tactical rule of a dominant tendency, or several, depending on the place and circumstances.

2. There follows from this state of affairs that the unity of these movements is – and cannot fail to be given the current state of ideologies and organisations – strictly negative in kind. Needless to say, this negation bears on disparate realities. One may revolt against the actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, against the power grab by military cliques in Algiers, against the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy in Iran, against personal despotism in Egypt, against the manoeuvres of nationalist and racial reaction in California, against the actions of the French Army in Mali, against neofascism in Brazil, against the persecution of Muslims in India, against the backwards stigmatisation of abortion and non-conventional sexualities in Poland, and so on. But nothing further – in particular nothing that would amount to a counter-proposal with a general scope – is present in these movements. At the end of the day, lacking a common political proposal that would break clearly with the constraints of contemporary capitalism, the movement ends up directing its negative unity against a proper name, usually that of the head of state. One moves from the cry ‘Mubarak must go’ to that of ‘Out with the fascist Bolsonaro’, by way of ‘Racist Modi, go away’, ‘Trump out!’ or ‘Bouteflika, retire’. Without forgetting, of course, the invectives, notices of dismissal, and personal attacks against our own natural target, who is no other than the little Macron. I propose then that all these movements, all these struggles, are ultimately ‘get out-isms’ (dégagismes). There is a wish that the leader in place sling their hook, without having the least idea, neither of what will replace him nor of the procedure through which – supposing he does in fact go – one can be assured that the situation will indeed change. In brief, negation, which unifies, is not the bearer of any affirmation, any creative will, any active conception of the analysis of situations and of what could be, or must be, a politics of a new type. In the absence of which, one ends up – and this is the signal of a movement’s end – with that final form of its unity, namely that of rising up against the police repression it has been the victim of, against the police violence it has been forced to confront. In other words, the negation of its negation by the authorities. I am directly familiar with this from May ’68 when, in the absence of common affirmations – in any case at the beginning of the movement – one shouted in the streets: ‘CRS = SS!’ Happily, this was followed at the time – once the primacy of the rebellious negative had passed – by more interesting things, at the price, of course, of a clash between opposing political conceptions, between distinct affirmations.

3. Today, over time, planetary movementism only achieves the reinforced reproduction of the powers that be or largely cosmetic changes that can turn out to be worse than what one revolted against in the first place. Mubarak went, but Al-Sisi, who replaced him, is another (possibly worse) version of military power. In the end, China’s grip on Hong Kong has been reinforced, with laws more in line with the ones prevailing in Beijing, and massive arrests of activists. The religious camarilla in Iran is intact. The most active reactionaries, like Modi or Bolsonaro, or the Polish clerical clique, are in fine shape, thank you very much. And little Macron, with 43% favourability ratings, is in much better electoral health today – not just compared to the beginning of the struggles and movements, but even by contrast with his predecessors whom, whether we’re talking about the very reactionary Sarkozy, or the ersatz very socialist Hollande, who, after the same length of their presidential term, were barely managing around 20% in terms of positive opinion.

A historical comparison springs to mind here. In the years between 1847 and 1850, there were, across large swathes of Europe, great movements of workers and students, great mass risings, against the despotic order established after the Restoration of 1815 and shrewdly consolidated after the French revolution of 1830. Lacking a firm idea of what – beyond a fervid negation – could represent an essentially different politics, all the furore of the revolutions of 1848 only served to introduce a new regressive sequence. In particular, the French balance sheet was the endless reign of a typical proxy for emergent capitalism, Napoleon III, a.k.a., according to Victor Hugo, Napoleon the Little.

However, in 1848, Marx and Engels, who had taken part in the German uprisings, drew the lessons from this entire affair, both in texts of historical analysis – like the pamphlet entitled Class Struggles in France – and in that finally affirmative handbook, which described – in some sense for eternity – what an entirely new politics must be, and whose title is Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is around this affirmative construction, bearing the ‘manifesto’ of a Party that does not exist but must, that begins, in the long run, another history of politics. Marx will reoffend twenty-three years later, by drawing the lessons of an admirable attempt that, notwithstanding its heroic defensive stance, once again lacked the effective organisation of its affirmative unity, namely the Paris Commune.

Needless to say, our circumstances are quite different! But I believe that everything today turns around the need for negative slogans and defensive actions finally to be subordinated to a clear and synthetic vision of our own objectives. And I am convinced that in order to achieve this, we must in any case recall that which Marx declared to be the kernel of his thought. A kernel that is of course negative in its turn, but at a scale such that it can only be supported by a grandiose affirmation. I am referring to the slogan ‘the abolition of private property’.

Taking a closer look, slogans such as ‘defend our freedoms’ or ‘stop police violence’ are, strictly speaking, conservative. The first implies that we enjoy, within the status quo, true freedoms that must be defended, while our central problem should instead be that without equality, freedom is but a lure. How could the nomadic proletarian deprived of legal papers, and whose arrival here is but a cruel epic, call herself ‘free’ in the same sense as the billionaire who holds real power, the owner of a private jet and of its pilot, protected by the electoral decoy of his proxies working within the state? And how could any coherent revolutionaries imagine – if they do indeed entertain the affirmative and rational desire of a world other than the one they contest – that the police of the established powers can always be friendly, courteous and peaceful? That it might say to the rebels, some of them masked and armed: ‘The path to the Elysée palace? The great gate, on the street to the right.’

It would be better to go back to the heart of the question: property. The general unifying slogan can immediately and affirmatively be: ‘collectivisation of the whole process of production’. Its negative intermediate correlate, within immediate reach, could be ‘abolition of all the privatisations decided by the state since 1986’. As for a good, purely tactical slogan, giving some work to those dominated by the desire for negation, it could the following: let’s install ourselves in the offices of a very important department of the Ministry of Economy and Finances, called the Commission of Participations and Transfers. Let’s do so in the full knowledge that this esoteric name, ‘participations and transfers’, is but the transparent mask of the Privatisation Commission, created in 1986. And let’s have people know that we will station ourselves in this privatisation commission until the disappearance of every form of private property in what concerns everything which, in one way or another, can be considered a common good.

Simply by popularising these objectives, both strategic and tactical, we will, believe me, open another epoch, after that of ‘struggles’ and ‘movements’ and ‘protests’, whose negative dialectic is in the process of exhausting itself, and us. We will be the pioneers of a new mass communism whose ‘spectre’, to speak like Marx, would once again haunt not just France or Europe, but the whole world.

________________________________

Alain Badiou

translated from French by Alberto Toscano

source: Verso
21 December 2020

The post On the Current Conjuncture- Alain Badiou appeared first on Void Network.

Probably this is not the end of the world. But a plague is creeping around the globe at a seemingly exponential rate, killing some of us and affecting all of us. And this pandemic is only the most recent and most sudden of a series of afflictions facing humanity. We are rapidly replacing our natural habitat with one that is, on the one hand, made by human beings, and, on the other, proving difficult for us to manage—a situation we euphemistically refer to as “climate change.” On the political front, the past decade has seen a rise in civil unrest worldwide, and the leaders of a number of countries have given us reason to be less optimistic than we used to be about the prospects for global democracy. Given the ever-cheapening technology, weapons—including those of mass destruction—must be proliferating unnoticed. And all of the above is happening against a backdrop of low economic growth and stagnant wages, at least for most of the world’s wealthiest countries.

We may not have arrived at the end, but we have certainly arrived at the thought of it. Medical, environmental, political, economic and military problems seem to have joined forces to remind us that the story of humanity is, at some point, going to draw to a close. That’s a very painful thought to have. It also raises a serious philosophical problem.

The philosopher Samuel Scheffler illustrates the problem with reference to the “infertility scenario” in the movie Children of Men. In the film, people have stopped being able to get pregnant, and the knowledge that there is no future for humanity has produced a world filled with equal parts catastrophe and indifference. We witness suffering on a massive scale, terrorism, genocidal racism—and none of it seems to really matter to anyone.

On the face of it, it is incredible that the simple knowledge that “we are the last humans” should lead to complete ethical and political collapse. Scheffler believes this is possible. He explains that so many of our practices—seeking a cure for cancer, building a new building, writing a poem or a philosophy paper, fighting for a political cause, giving our children moral lessons we hope will be handed down again and again—depend, in one way or another, on positing a world that will go on without us. The meaning of our lives, in the here and now, depends on future generations; without them we become narrowly self-interested, prone to cruelty, indifferent to suffering, apathetic.

First personally, I can see Scheffler’s point: it fills me with childlike panic to contemplate the possibility of my sons’ generation as the final one. I cannot allow myself to imagine humanity being snuffed out—not even in the gentlest way possible, by infertility.

The best scene in Children of Men comes toward the end, during a bloody battle in an apartment building: everyone stops what they are doing when they hear a baby’s cry as it is being carried through the carnage. They stop fighting not in order to protect the baby, nor in order to threaten it, but just to look at it—they find it absorbing, wonderful. They would rather listen to the baby cry than dodge an oncoming bullet, or stab an attacker. The baby is the drop of the ethical introduced into a gray and demoralized world; the baby is the glimmer of the possibility that human life might actually be worth fighting for. Future generations matter because they are a condition on the possibility of goodness and evil for every generation in the here and now. So suggests the movie, and Scheffler concurs. But he had better be wrong.

Because here is something we know for sure: there will not always be future generations. This is a fact. If the virus doesn’t do us in, if we do not do one another in, if we manage to make everything as sustainable as possible, nevertheless, that big global warmer in the sky is coming for us. We can tell ourselves soothing stories, such as the one about escaping to another planet, but we are embodied creatures, which is to say, we are the sorts of things that, on a geological time scale, simply do not last. Death looms for the species just as surely as it looms for each and every one of us.

●

How long have we got? At a recent public talk, the economist Tyler Cowen spitballed the number of remaining years at 700. But who knows? The important thing is that the answer is not: infinity years. Forever is a very long time, and humanity is not going to make it.

A crisis of meaning looms, one that will only deepen as we feel ourselves approaching the end. The Schefflerian edifice is doomed to collapse. Just as the thought that other people might be about to stockpile food leads to food shortages, so too the prospect of a depressed, disaffected and de-energized distant future deprives that future of its capacity to give meaning to the less distant future, and so on, in an kind of reverse-snowball effect, until we arrive at a depressed, disaffected and de-energized present.

The last generation is the linchpin of the whole system. But how can their lives have meaning, if the mere thought of the abyss sends a person collapsing into panic and depression? The answer is that the last generation is going to have to be composed of people better and braver than we are now—and it is our job to help them end up that way. We must take the first steps toward learning to make the unthinkable thinkable, so that they can take the last ones.

On 9/11, some of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 did something very heroic: they rose up against the terrorists holding them hostage, with the result that their plane crashed into a field rather than the Capitol building. Viewed from a certain angle, you might wonder why this was so impressive: if you know you are going to die either way, why not do some good while you are at it? But this would be a mistake. It takes incredible energy, passion and conviction to rush at your captors, and mustering all that up in the face of the certainty of death is an astonishing feat. Courage means that things can still matter to you—a lot—even when you know you are going to die. Courage means seeing the value of your life as being about more than survival—living ethically, not merely biologically.

Now in a certain sense, relative to the last generation, the Flight 93 passengers had it easy. They could say to themselves, “Something still matters—namely the lives of other and future people.” What force beyond concern for others is strong enough to drive one’s energies, projects, attachments and commitments all the way through to the end? Scheffler seems right in saying that many human projects would lose their meaning in the infertility scenario. And we can see this on a smaller scale by observing that no one would take up the violin, start building a cathedral or search for a cure for cancer hours before they are to die. So we have to ask, what is the last generation going to be able to care passionately and deeply about?

I do not know the answer, nor even whether there is one. But I do know that my instinctive recoil from asking it is cowardly, and that the terror I feel every time I try to face it needs to be overcome.

●

We are living in frightening times. We should do everything possible to keep the human project going as long as possible, but we should also appreciate the fact that we cannot defer the question about the value of this project indefinitely. These two tasks are not the same; they belong to different groups of people.

For a long time, philosophy and the other humanistic disciplines have been concerned with how to achieve advances that might mirror those of the sciences. But it will not be through science that we come to reconcile ourselves to the fact that unlimited scientific progress is impossible.

The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when the infertility scenario should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy.

At times like this, when a window opens, and all of humanity sees the End rushing at us from the future, it behooves the humanists to be the ones who refuse to shut our eyes.

The Last Generation. Scientists and politicians must work to delay their arrival as long as possible; humanists, by contrast, must help prepare us for them.

Image credit: still from Children of Men (2006)

The post The End Is Coming- by Agnes Callard appeared first on Void Network.

It’s equally possible that nowhere on earth has a ‘universal democracy of humanity’ ever existed; that, with the earth divided into states, it is within such states that one seeks to realize democracy, that is, in the last instance, a politics of the state which, by clearly distinguishing between its own citizens – those who are seen to belong – and the rest, keeps at a firm distance all those who are not seen to belong. [3] At any rate, the contemporary era is undoubtedly characterized by forms of exclusion, hostility, hate movements, and, above all, by the struggle against an enemy. As a result, liberal democracies – already considerably ground down by the forces of capital, technology and militarism – are now being drawn into a colossal process of inversion. [4]

The disturbing object

The term ‘movement’ necessarily implies the setting into motion of a drive, which, even if impure, is composed of a fundamental energy. This energy is enlisted, whether consciously or not, in the pursuit of a desire, which is ideally a master-desire [désir-maître]. This master-desire – at once comprising a field of immanence and a force composed of multiplicities – is invariably directed towards one or several objects. ‘Negro’ [Nègre] and ‘Jew’ were once favoured names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few.

Desire (master or otherwise) is also that movement through which the subject – enveloped on all sides by a specific phantasy [fantasme] (whether of omnipotence, ablation, destruction or persecution, it matters little) – seeks to turn back on itself in the hope of protecting itself from external danger, while other times it reaches outside of itself in order to face the windmills of the imagination that besiege it. Once uprooted from its structure, desire then sets out to capture the disturbing object. But since in reality this object has never existed – does not and will never exist – desire must continually invent it. An invented object, however, is still not a real object. It marks an empty yet bewitching space, a hallucinatory zone, at once enchanted and evil, an empty abode haunted by the object as if by a spell.

The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid, for separation and enclosure, the phantasy of extermination, today all haunt the space of this enchanted zone. In a number of cases, a wall is enough to express it. [5] There exist several kinds of wall, but they do not fulfil the same functions. [6] A separation wall is said to resolve a problem of excess numbers, a surplus of presence that some see as the primary reason for conditions of unbearable suffering. Restoring the experience of one’s existence, in this sense, requires a rupture with the existence of those whose absence (or complete disappearance) is barely experienced as a loss at all – or so one would like to believe. It also involves recognizing that between them and us there can be nothing that is shared in common. The anxiety of annihilation is thus at the heart of contemporary projects of separation.

Everywhere, the building of concrete walls and fences and other ‘security barriers’ is in full swing. Alongside the walls, other security structures are appearing: checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, all manner of demarcations that in many cases have no other function than to intensify the zoning off of entire communities, without ever fully succeeding in keeping away those considered a threat. Such is the case in those Palestinian towns that are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. [7]

In fact, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories can be seen to serve as a laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance and separation, which today are being increasingly implemented in other places on the planet. These range from the regular sealing off of entire areas to limitations on the number of Palestinians who can enter Israel and the occupied territories, from the regular imposition of curfews within Palestinian enclaves and controls on movement to the objective imprisonment of entire towns. [8]

Permanent or temporary checkpoints, cement blocks and mounds of earth serving as roadblocks, the control of aerial and marine space, of the import and export of all sorts of products, regular military incursions, home demolitions, the desecration of cemeteries, whole olive groves uprooted, infrastructure turned to rubble and obliterated, high- and medium-altitude bombardments, targeted assassinations, urban counter-insurgency techniques, the profiling of minds and bodies, constant harassment, the ever smaller subdivision of land, cellular and molecular violence, the generalization of forms adopted from the model of a camp – every feasible means is put to work in order to impose a regime of separation whose functioning paradoxically depends on an intimate proximity with those who have been separated. [9]

In many respects such practices recall the reviled model of apartheid, with its Bantustans, vast reservoirs of cheap labour, its white zones, its multiple jurisdictions and wanton violence. However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis. The apocalyptic and catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. [10]

Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable that the relatively primitive operations undertaken by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s. This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. [11] It is also evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing. [12] In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale.

If all forms of inclusion are necessarily disjunctive, separation can conversely only ever be partial. In South Africa wholesale separation would have undermined the very survival of the oppressor. Short of exterminating the entire native population from the outset, it was impossible for the white minority to undertake a systematic ethnic and racial cleansing on the model of other settler colonies. Mass expulsions and deportations were hardly an option. Once the entwining of different racial segments had become the rule, the dialectic of proximity, distance and control could never reach the paroxysmic levels seen in Palestine.

In the occupied territories, such proximity is attested by Israel’s continued control over the management of the population register and its monopoly over the issuing of Palestinian identity cards. This is also the case with nearly all the other aspects of daily life, such as regular transfers, the authorization of various permits, and the control of taxation. Peculiar to this model of separation is not only that it can be tailored to the demands of occupation (or abandonment, if need be). [13] It can also, when required, transform itself into an instrument of strangulation. Occupation is in every respect a form of bare struggle, a kind of combat between bodies in a dark tunnel.

The desire for apartheid and the phantasy of extermination are not new phenomena, however. They have continued to metamorphose over the course of history, particularly within the old settler colonies. Chinese, Mongols, Africans and Arabs – in some cases long before Europeans – were responsible for the conquest of vast territories. They established complex long-distance trade networks across seas and oceans. But it was Europe, perhaps for the first time in modern history, which inaugurated a new epoch of global resettlement. [14] This resettlement of the world, which occurred between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was double faceted: it was at once a process of social excretion (for the migrants who left Europe to found overseas colonies) and a historic tipping point, which, for the colonized, came at the cost of new forms of enslavement.

Over the course of this long period, the resettlement of the world often took the shape of innumerable atrocities and massacres, unprecedented instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’, expulsions, transfers, and concentrations of entire populations in camps, and indeed of genocides. [15] The colonial enterprise was driven by a mixture of sadism and masochism, applied gropingly and in response to largely unexpected events. As such, it was inclined to smash all forces standing in the way of its drives or inhibit their course towards all sorts of perverse pleasures. The limits to what it might have considered ‘normal’ were constantly broken, and few desires were subject to straightforward repression, let alone embarrassment or disgust. The colonial world’s capacity to make do with the destruction of its objects (natives included) was astonishing. If any object came to be lost, the thought was that it could easily be replaced with another.

Further still, the principle of separation lay at the root of the colonial project. Colonialism had to a large extent consisted in a constant effort to separate: on one side, my living body; on the other, all those ‘body-things’ surrounding it – with my human flesh as the fundamental locus through which all other exterior ‘flesh-things’ and ‘flesh-meats’ exist for me. On one side, therefore, is me – the basic nexus and source of orientation in the world – while, on the other, are the others with whom, however, I can never completely fuse – others with whom I may relate, yet never genuinely engage in relations of reciprocity or mutual implication.

In a colonial context, this constant effort to separate (and thus to differentiate) was partly a consequence of an anxiety of annihilation felt by the colonizers themselves. Numerically inferior but endowed with powerful means of destruction, the colonizers lived in perpetual fear of being surrounded on all sides by ‘evil objects’ threatening their very survival and existence: natives, wild beasts, reptiles, microbes, mosquitoes, illnesses, the climate, nature as such, even witches.

The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation. Apartheid in particular openly challenged the possibility of a single body comprehending more than one individual. It presupposed the existence of originary and distinct (already constituted) subjects, each made of a ‘race-flesh’ or ‘race-blood’ able to evolve according to its own rhythm. It was believed that assigning them to specific territorial spaces would be enough to neutralize the otherness of one with respect to the others. These originary, distinct, subjects were called upon to act as if their past had never been a past of ‘prostitution’, of paradoxical dependencies and all manner of intrigues. Such was the phantasy of purity underpinning their existence. [16] Historical apartheid’s failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between different fleshes can therefore be understood as an a posteriori demonstration of the limits of the colonial project of separation. This is because, short of total extermination, the Other can never be external to us: it is within us, under the double figure of the alter ego and the altered ego [l’autre Moi et du Moi autre], each mortally exposed to the other and to itself.

The colonial project drew a great deal of its substance and surplus energy from its basis in all sorts of instinctual drives, more or less openly acknowledged desires, in the main located below the conscious I of the agents concerned. In order to exercise a durable project on the native people they had subjugated, and from whom they wanted to differentiate themselves at all costs, the colonists had to somehow constitute them into various kinds of physical objects. In this sense, the whole game of representations under colonialism consisted in turning the natives into a variety of typical or type-images.

These stereotypes largely corresponded to the debris of their real biographies, their primary status preceding their first encounter with the colonizers. By producing this imagined material, an entirely artificial secondary status of psychic objects came to be fixed onto their primary status as authentic human persons. For natives within their daily lives, the dilemma thus became how to distinguish between the psychic object they had been asked to interiorize – and often forced to accept as their true self – and the human part of themselves that they had once been and that was still theirs despite everything, but which, under colonial conditions, they were now being forced to forget.

Once created, these psychic patterns became constitutive of the colonial self. Their position of exteriority with respect to the colonial self was thus always, at the same time, one of ultimate dependence. The continued psychic functioning of the colonial order rested on investment in these objects. Affective, emotional and psychic life under colonialism orbited around such objects and patterns; without them it would have lost its substance and coherence. It depended for its vitality on permanent contact with them, and indeed showed itself to be particularly vulnerable to being separated from them. In colonial or para-colonial situations, the ‘evil object’ (the object that has survived from initial destruction) can never be thought of as completely exterior from the self. Divided from the very start, it is always already at once subject and object. Since it depends on me at the same time as I depend on it, I cannot simply be rid of it through sheer persecution and obstinacy. In the end, I may choose to destroy everything I abhor, but this can never release me from my link to this other entity – even as I destroy it or separate myself from it. This is because the evil object and I can never be entirely separated. At the same time, however, we can never be entirely one and the same.

The enemy, that other that I am

The desire for an enemy, for apartheid, the phantasy of extermination, such irrepressible forces can be seen as shaping the basic line of fire, indeed the decisive struggle, at the beginning of this century. As the fundamental vectors of contemporary brainwashing, they push democratic regimes everywhere into a kind of vicious stupor, and, inebriated and reeking, to a life of drunks. As both diffuse psychic structures and generic passionate forces, they are responsible for the dominant affective tonality of our times and serve to sharpen many contemporary struggles and mobilizations. These struggles and mobilizations in turn feed on a threatening and anxiogenic vision of the world, privileging a logic of suspicion where everything must be seen as secret or as belonging to a plot or conspiracy. [17] Pushed to their ultimate consequences, they lead almost inexorably towards a wish for destruction, one according to which blood (spilt blood) makes law, in an explicit application of the ancient dictum of retaliation, the eye-for-an-eye or lex talionis of the Old Testament.

In this depressive period within the psychic life of nations, the need, or rather the drive, for an enemy is no longer purely a social need. It corresponds to a quasi-anal need for ontology. In the context of the mimetic rivalry exacerbated by the ‘war on terror’, having an enemy at one’s disposal (preferably in a spectacular fashion) has become an obligatory stage in the constitution of the subject and its entry into the symbolic order of our times. Indeed, it seems as if the denial of the enemy were lived, within oneself, in the form of a deep narcissistic wound. To be deprived of an enemy – or to not experience a terrorist attack or any other bloody acts inflicted by those who hate us and our way of life – means being deprived of the kind of relation of hatred that would authorize the free exercise of many otherwise forbidden desires. It means, in other words, to be deprived of that demon without which almost nothing is allowed, even at a time when calls for absolute licence, unbridling, and generalized disinhibition appear to ring out with great urgency. It is equally to hinder that compulsion to scare oneself, one’s capacity to demonize, and that kind of pleasure and satisfaction one feels when a presumed enemy is shot down by special forces or when he is captured alive and subjected to endless interrogations, rendered and tortured in one of the many so-called ‘black sites’ that stain the surface of our planet. [18]

This is an eminently political epoch, since ‘the specific political distinction’ from which ‘the political’ as such is defined – as Carl Schmitt argued, at least – is that ‘between friend and enemy’. [19] If our world today is an effectuation of Schmitt’s, then the concept of enemy is to be understood for its concrete and existential meaning, and not at all as a metaphor or an empty lifeless abstraction. The enemy Schmitt describes is neither a simple competitor, nor an adversary, nor a private rival whom one might hate or feel antipathy for. He is rather the object of a supreme antagonism. In both body and flesh, the enemy is that individual whose physical death is warranted by their existential denial of our own being.

However, to distinguish between friends and enemies is one thing; to identify the enemy with certainty is quite another. Indeed, as a ubiquitous yet obscure figure, today the enemy is even more dangerous by being everywhere: without face, name or place. If they have a face, it is only a veiled face, the simulacrum of a face. And if they have a name, this might only be a borrowed name, a false name whose primary function is dissimulation. Sometimes masked, other times in the open, such an enemy advances among us, around us, and even within us, ready to emerge in the middle of the day or in the heart of night, every time his apparition threatening the annihilation of our way of life, our very existence.

Yesterday, as today, the political as conceived by Schmitt owes its volcanic charge to the fact that it is closely connected to an existential will to power. As such, it necessarily and by definition opens up the extreme possibility of an infinite deployment of pure means without ends, as embodied in the execution of murder. Underwritten by the law of the sword, it is the ‘meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice [their] life’ (to kill themselves for others), and, under the aegis of the state, that in the name of which such men could be ‘authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings’ (to kill others) on the basis of their actual or supposed belonging to an enemy camp. [20] From this standpoint, the political can be understood as a particular form of association or grouping established with a view to a combat, which is at once decisive and profoundly opaque. But it is not merely the business of the state, and hence an exercise in delegated death, since it also concerns not only the possibility of sacrifice – or self-sacrifice, the giving of one’s life – but also, and very literally, the possibility of suicide.

This is because, in the end, suicide serves to brutally interrupt all dynamic of subjection and any possibility of recognition. To willingly relinquish one’s existence by giving death to oneself is not necessarily to make oneself disappear. Rather, it is to willingly abandon the risk of being touched by the Other and by the world – a gesture of disinvestment that forces the enemy to confront his own emptiness. The person who commits suicide no longer wishes to communicate, neither by word nor violent gesture, except perhaps at the moment when, by putting an end to his own life, he also puts an end to the life of his target. The killer kills himself while killing others or after having killed. Either way, he no longer seeks to participate in the world such as it is. He disposes of himself, and disposes of some of his enemies as he does so. He thus discharges himself of what he once was and of the responsibilities that as a living being were once his to attend. [21]

The person who commits suicide – killing his enemies in an act in which he also kills himself – shows the extent to which, as far as the political is concerned, the true contemporary fracture is the one opposing those who cling onto their bodies, who take their bodies as the basis of life itself, to those for whom the body can only open the way to a happy life when expunged. The martyr-to-be is engaged in a quest for a joyous life, one that he believes rests only in God, and that is born of a will to truth in turn converted to a will to purity. There can be no authentic relationship to God other than through conversion, that act through which one becomes other than oneself, and, in so doing, escapes from the facticity of life – that is, impure life. By committing to martyrdom, one takes a vow to destroy such impure corporeal life. Usually, nothing is left of the fundamentalist’s body but debris, scattered among other objects: bloody traces that appear more vivid against other traces, prints, enigmatic fragments such as bullets, guns, phones, sometimes scratches or marks. Today, however, there is rarely a suicide attack without its technical devices, at the intersection between ballistics and electronics – chips to unsolder, memory chips to test. In the strict sense of the term, to bring an end to one’s life, to abolish oneself, is thus to undertake the dissolution of that seemingly simple entity that is one’s body.

The contemporary age can be seen to embody the fundamental character of the political as a hatred of the enemy, the need to neutralize him, and a generalized desire to avoid the sorts of dangers and contagion he is perceived to bring. Convinced they now face a permanent threat, contemporary societies have therefore come to experience their daily lives as a series of ‘small traumas’ – an attack here, a hostage there, first a shoot-out, then a permanent state of alert, and so on. New technologies have also deepened access to the private lives of individuals. Thus, secret, invasive and sometimes illegal techniques of mass surveillance are able to target people’s most intimate thoughts, opinions and movements. Indeed, by heightening and reproducing the affect of fear, liberal democracies have also gone on to manufacture bogeymen designed to scare their citizens – today a young veiled woman, tomorrow a terrorist novice returning from the battlefields of the Middle East, lone wolves and sleeper cells hidden away in the crevices of society, observing us, looking for the right moment to strike.

What about the ‘Muslim’, the foreigner or the immigrant, those about whom one has continued, beyond all reasonable bounds, to weave images that, little by little, have begun to connect into vicious chains of association? That such images do not match reality matters little. Primary phantasies know neither doubt nor uncertainty. As Freud argued, the mass is only ‘excited by immoderate stimuli. Anyone seeking to move it needs no logical calibration in his arguments, but must paint with the most powerful images, exaggerate, and say the same thing over and over again.’ [22]

The current epoch is marked by the triumph of mass morality. [23] Contemporary psychic regimes have brought to a maximum level of exacerbation the exaltation of affectivity and, paradoxically, within an age of digital telecommunications, the desire for mythology, a thirst for mysteries. The increasing expansion of algorithmic reason – which, as everyone knows, serves as the crucial basis for the financialization of the economy – goes hand in hand with the emergence of new modes of mytho-religious thinking. [24] Fundamentalism is hence no longer considered as antithetical to rational knowledge. On the contrary, the one serves as support for the other, as the two are put in the service of a form of visceral experience culminating, among other things, in the notion of a ‘communion of martyrs’.

Convictions and firm certainties acquired at the end of a long ‘spiritual’ path, punctuated by revolt and conversion, reveal neither feeble fanaticisms nor barbaric madness or ravings, but rather a type of ‘inner experience’ only shared by those who come to profess the same faith, obey the same law, the same authorities, and the same commandments. Essentially, they belong to the same community. This community is made up of communicants, the ‘damned of the faith’ who are condemned to testify, by word and act, and to the bitter end if necessary, to the ‘to-the-bitter-end’ character of divine truth itself.

Within the mytho-religious logic of our times, the divine (just like the market, capital or the political) is almost always perceived as an immanent and immediate force: vital, visceral and energetic. The paths of faith are believed to lead to states or acts considered scandalous from the standpoint of simple human reason, or to risks, apparently absurd ruptures and bloody stirrings – terror and catastrophe in the name of God. One of the effects of faith and fundamentalism is to arouse a sort of great enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm that opens the door to a great decision.

Indeed, there are many today who live purely in wait of such an event; and martyrdom is one of the means used by the damned of the faith to bring an end to this waiting. Today, such men of faith and enthusiasm seek to make history through a great decision, namely through the enactment of vertiginous acts of an immediate and sacrificial nature. By means of such acts, the damned of the faith come face to face, and with open eyes, with a dimension of excess and loss. Animated by a will to totality, they seek to become singular subjects by scoping the depths for disjunctive forces, daemons of the sacred. Embracing a form of voluntary loss – that which destroys language as much as the subject of discourse – they allow for the inscription of the divine into the flesh of a world become gift and grace. This is no longer a matter of mere mortification, but of annihilation: a crossing from the self to God. The ultimate aim of these sacrificial acts is to master neither life nor the outside world, but an interior dimension; to produce a new morality and, at the end of a decisive (and if need be bloody, and at any rate definitive) battle, to eventually experience an exulting, ecstatic and sovereign form of affirmation.

The damned of the faith

Mytho-religious thinking is not the exclusive preserve of terrorist groups. In their effort to curb terrorism and complete their transformation into security states, liberal democracies no longer hesitate to turn to grand mythological schemas. In fact, there are hardly any today that do not appeal to bellicose enthusiasm, often with the aim of patching back together their old nationalist fabrics. For every attack that results in casualties a kind of tailor-made mourning is automatically produced. The nation is summoned to shed its tears of rancour in public and show its defiance against the enemy. And with each tear, a shining path is traced. Clothed in the rags of international law, human rights, democracy, or, simply put, ‘civilization’, militarism no longer needs a disguise. [25] To relight the flame of hatred, old allies are suddenly transformed into ‘enemies of humanity as a whole’, while might becomes right.

Having only relatively recently counted on dividing humanity into masters and slaves, liberal democracies today still depend for their survival on defining a sphere of common belonging against a sphere of others; in other words, friends and ‘allies’ on the one hand, and enemies of civilization on the other. Indeed, without enemies they struggle to keep themselves going alone. Whether such enemies really exist matters little. It suffices to create them, find them, unmask them, and bring them out into the open.

Still, this endeavour became increasingly onerous when one began to believe that the fiercest and most intrepid enemies had lodged themselves in the deepest pores of the nation, forming a kind of cyst that would destroy the nation’s most fertile promises from within. The problem, in this sense, is how to separate the nation from that which gnaws at it without harming its very body (i.e. civil war). Searches, raids, various forms of control, house arrests, the recording of charges under emergency laws, increases in exceptional measures, extended powers for police and intelligence services, and, if required, loss of nationality: everything is put to work, and with ever-growing harshness, in order to pin down these evils – yet not onto their true authors, our attackers, but, as if by accident, onto those who merely resemble them. In doing this, what else is one doing but perpetuating the very thing one claims to oppose? By demanding the death of all those who are not unconditionally on our side, do we not risk forever reproducing all that is tragic of a humanity in the grip of hatred and unable to free itself?

Just as in the past, this war against existential enemies is once again framed in metaphysical terms. As a great challenge, it engages the whole of being, its whole truth. These enemies, with whom no agreement is either possible or desirable, thus appear in the form of caricatures, clichés and stereotypes, granting them a figural sort of presence. In turn, this presence only serves to confirm the type of (ontological) menace we perceive as confronting us. In an age marked by a re-enchantment of blood and soil as much as increasing abstraction, the enemy therefore emerges as a spectral figure and a figural presence, while the cultural and biological elements of enmity are combined to constitute a single dimension.

With their imaginations whipped up by hatred, liberal democracies do not hesitate to feed on all sorts of obsessions about the real identity of the enemy. But who is this enemy really? Is it a nation, a religion, a civilization, a culture or an idea?

State of insecurity

Hate movements, groups invested in an economy of hostility, enmity, various forms of struggle against an enemy – all these have contributed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to a significant increase in the acceptable levels and types of violence that one can (or should) inflict on the weak, on enemies, intruders, or anyone considered as not being one of us. They have also contributed to a widespread instrumentalization of social relations, as well as to profound mutations within contemporary regimes of collective desire and affect. Further, they have served to foster the emergence and consolidation of a state-form often referred to as the surveillance or security state.

From this standpoint, the security state can be seen to feed on a state of insecurity, which it participates in fomenting and to which it claims to be the solution. If the security state is a structure, the state of insecurity is instead a kind of passion, or rather an affect, a condition, or a force of desire. In other words, the state of insecurity is the condition upon which the functioning of the security state relies in so far as the latter is ultimately a structure charged with the task of investing, organizing and diverting the constitutive drives of contemporary human life. As for the war, which is supposedly charged with conquering fear, it is neither local, national nor regional. Its extent is global and its privileged domain of action is everyday life itself. Moreover, since the security state presupposes that a ‘cessation of hostilities’ between ourselves and those who threaten our way of life is impossible – and that the existence of an enemy which endlessly transforms itself is irreducible – it is clear that this war must be permanent. Responding to threats – whether internal, or coming from the outside and then relayed into the domestic sphere – today requires that a set of extra-military operations as well as enormous psychic resources be mobilized. The security state – being explicitly animated by a mythology of freedom, in turn derived from a metaphysics of force – is, in short, less concerned with the allocation of jobs and salaries than with a deeper project of control over human life in general, whether it is a case of its subjects or of those designated as enemies.

This freeing of psychogenetic energy can be seen in an increasing attachment to what was once called illusion. In its classic conception, illusion is opposed to reality. Mistaking effects for causes, illusion empowers the dominance of images and the world of appearances, reflections and simulacra. It draws from a world of fiction that is opposed to a real world founded in the fundamental fabric of things and of life. The demand of an originary surplus, which has always been necessary for life, today has not only accelerated – it has become uncontrollable. This imaginary surplus is not perceived as the complement to an existence that would be more ‘real’ because supposedly consonant with Being and its essence. For many, it is instead experienced as the very motor of the real, the very condition of its plenitude and radiance. The production of this surplus, which was once administered by religions of salvation, is today increasingly delegated to capital and to all kinds of objects and technologies.

The domain of objects and machines, as much as capital itself, is increasingly presented in the guise of an animistic religion. In this context, everything is put into question up to and including the status of truth. Certainties and convictions are held as genuine truths. There is no need to employ reason. It is enough to simply believe and surrender oneself to belief. As a result, public deliberation, which is one of the essential features of democracy, no longer consists in discussing and seeking collectively, under the eyes of all citizens, the truth and, ultimately, justice. The great opposition no longer being that between truth and falsity, the worst crime becomes doubt. This is because, in the concrete struggle opposing us to our enemies, doubt hinders the total freeing of voluntarist, emotional and vital energies necessary for the use of violence and, when required, the shedding of blood.

The reserves of credulity have similarly increased. Paradoxically, this increase has gone hand in hand with an exponential acceleration of technological development and industrial innovation, the continuing digitalization of facts and things, and the almost universal advance of what might be called electronic life and its double, or robotically adjusted life. [26] A new and unprecedented phase in the history of humanity has effectively begun, in which it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish human organisms from electronic flows, the life of humans from that of processors. Such a phase is made possible by advances in algorithmic computation, leading to an accumulation of know-how through the storage of enormous data flows, processed at maximum power and speed. This digital-cognitive turn will culminate in a general incorporation of microchips within biological tissues. The coupling of human and machine, which is already under way, has led not only to the emergence of new mythological conceptions of the technical object. It has also, as an immediate consequence, put back into question the very status of the modern subject inherited from the humanist tradition.

The other decisive factor in this freeing process is a lifting of inhibitions – a return of the excluded part, of the structures embracing the repressed element – and a multiplication of enhanced pleasures resulting from this freeing of psychogenetic energies and drives. Such a process also results in an adjournment – if not a wholesale suspension – of the powers of moral reflection. What gratificatory pleasures might be possible today for those whose inhibitions are lifted and whose moral conscience is withdrawn? What might explain the contemporary attraction exerted on the multitude by the idea of absolute and irresponsible power? What of many people’s seeming acceptance of the most extreme actions, their receptiveness to the simplest and most confused arguments? And what of the readiness with which many appear to fall into line, and with which world powers can be led towards all sorts of crimes simply by acknowledging the force of this idea?

In order to answer these questions one needs to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of affective life under present conditions. [27] The almost total interconnection between individuals made possible by new technologies has not only given rise to new strategies in the formation of masses. Today, constituting a mass is nearly the same as constituting a horde. In truth, this is no longer an era of masses. It is rather an era of virtual hordes. In so far as the mass survives, however, it is still only ‘excited by immoderate stimuli’. [28] As Freud argues, the mass ‘respects strength and is only moderately influenced by the good, which it sees simply as a kind of weakness. What it expects in its heroes is brawn, even a tendency to violence. It wants to be dominated and suppressed and to fear its master.’ [29] 

Almost everywhere, then, the traditional field of antagonisms has collapsed. Within national borders, new forms of association and social struggles have emerged. These are motivated less by class identity than by familial relations and thus by blood. The old friend and enemy distinction is now embodied in the conflict between kin and non-kin, namely between those linked through blood or origin and those considered to belong to a different blood, culture or religion. According to this vision, these are people who, having come from elsewhere, can never be considered our fellow citizens and with whom we can have almost nothing in common.

Though they live among us, they can never be one of us. They must therefore be expelled, put back in their place, or simply led back beyond our borders under the aegis of a new security state that has come to dominate our lives. Domestic pacification, what might be termed a molecular or ‘silent civil war’, mass incarcerations, the decoupling of nationality from citizenship, extrajudicial executions sanctioned by new legal and criminal powers – all these factors contribute to a blurring of the old distinction between internal and external security against a background of heightened racist affects.

Nanoracism and narcotherapy

At first sight, the case is clear. Our epoch seems to have finally discovered its truth. It only lacked the courage to declare it. [30] Having reconciled itself with its true side, it can finally allow itself to proceed naked, free of all inhibition, without any of the old masks and obligatory disguises that had once served as its fig leaves. The great repression (which never really happened) is therefore followed by a great release. But at what price, for whom, and for how long?

With nothing left to hide, the start of this century stands as if gazing out onto a wide-open expanse: vast salt marshes extending without a shadow towards the horizon. The barrel has been scraped. All taboos have been broken. Any notion of the secret or the forbidden lies face down, dead on the ground. Everything becomes see-through and called to its final consummation. The vessels are almost full and twilight cannot be delayed. Whether this ending takes place in a shower of bullets or not, we shall find out soon enough.

In the meantime, the tide does not stop rising. Racism – whether in Europe, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, the Caribbean or the rest of the world – will remain with us for the foreseeable future. [31] It will continue to proliferate not only as a part of mass culture, but also (we would do well not to forget it) within polite society, not only in the old settler colonies, but also in other areas of the globe, long deserted by Jews and where neither Negroes [Nègres]nor Arabs have ever been seen.

In any case, one had better get used to it: in the past it was games, circuses, plots, conspiracies and gossip that provided the entertainment. As the continent of Europe begins to turn into a sort of boring iceberg (but also elsewhere), one will soon have to entertain oneself through nanoracism, that form of narcotherapy somewhat resembling a little woodland owlet: diminutive, cute, but sporting a powerful beak that is hooked and sharp at the point. These are the bromides of our times, soothing and numbing everything into a kind of flaccid paralysis. Once everything has lost its elasticity, it now appears as if to suddenly contract. Spasms and contractions – that is what we ought to be talking about. Anywhere one finds cramps, spasms, a general shrinking of the spirit – these are the places where nanoracism treads.

Yet, in the end, what is nanoracism if not that narcotic brand of prejudice based on skin colour and expressing itself in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate dig or jab, a profound desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to wound and humiliate, to degrade those not considered to be one of us?

Of course, even in an era of shameless nanoracism – where everything comes down to ‘us versus them’, whether expressed in upper or lower case it doesn’t matter – no one wants to hear about it anymore. They should stay home, people say. Or if they really insist on living next to us, in our home, it should be with their pants down, rears out in the open. Nanoracism defines an era of demeaning lowest-common-denominator racism, a sort of pocket-knife racism, a spectacle of pigs wallowing in dirt.

Its function is to turn each of us into callous boors. It consists in placing the greatest number of those whom we regard as undesirable in intolerable conditions, to enclose and marginalize them daily, to continually inflict on them an endless series of racist jabs and wounds, to rob them of all their acquired rights, to smoke them out of their hives and dishonour them to the point where they have no choice but to self-deport. And, speaking of racist wounds, it should be remembered that these are cuts and bruises endured by a human subject and thus of a quite specific character: they are painful blows that are difficult to forget because inflicted on the body and its materiality, but also, above all, on intangible elements such as dignity and self-esteem. Indeed, their traces are mostly invisible and their scars difficult to heal.

Speaking also of cuts and bruises, it is now clear that on this iceberg continent of Europe – as well as in America, South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere – those who suffer daily racist injuries must today be counted in the hundreds of thousands. They constantly run the risk of letting themselves be touched in the most intense manner by someone – an institution, a voice, a public or private authority – asking them to justify who they are, why they are here, where they come from, where they are going, why they don’t go back to where they came from; in other words, a voice or authority which deliberately seeks to cause them a large or small shock, to irritate them, to hurt them, injure them, to get them to lose their cool and self-composure as a pretext to violate them, to slander and debase without restraint that which is most private, most intimate, and vulnerable, in them.

With regard to this sort of constant abuse, it should be added that nanoracism is not the exclusive preserve of narrow-minded ‘white people’, that subaltern group of individuals tormented with resentment and rancour, who hate their own condition profoundly but who would nonetheless never commit suicide, whose nightmare is to one day wake up in the garb of a Negro or with the brown skin of an Arab, not far away in some colony, but right here at home in their own country – the worst of all nightmares.

Nanoracism has become the obligatory complement to hydraulic racism – that of micro- and macro-juridical, bureaucratic and institutional apparatuses – the racism of the state machine, one which eagerly shuffles stowaways and illegals around, which continues to confine the rabble within urban peripheries like a mass of jumbled objects, which in fact multiplies the number of undocumented people, fencing off its territories and electrifying its borders, sometimes content with merely observing the shipwrecks at high seas; a state which controls every aspect of transportation, buses, airport terminals, underground trains, streets, unveiling Muslim women and handling them as it sees fit, multiplying detention centres and transit camps, investing lavishly in deportation techniques; a state, therefore, which practises discrimination and segregation under the full light of day while swearing to the neutrality and impartiality of the secular Republican order – ‘indifferent to difference’, as the saying goes – and still talking nonsense about that putrefying miasma of ‘the rights of man and the citizen’, so-called against all good sense, and despite the fact that for today’s state they are hardly the hard-on fodder of yesteryear.

Nanoracism is racism turned culture, a kind of all-pervading breath in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the very pores and veins of society at a time of generalized brainwashing, automated stupidity and mass stupor. The great visceral fear is that of the Saturnalia, the moment when today’s jinns, which are very much like those of the past – in other words, Negroes, Arabs, Muslims, and, never far away, Jews too – like the scattered droppings of a Pan-god, take the place of their masters and transform the nation into an immense dump, Muhammad’s dump.

Still, the distance that separates the phobia of the dump from the camp has always been very short. Refugee camps, camps for the displaced, migrant camps, camps for foreigners, waiting areas for people pending status, transit zones, administrative detention centres, identification or expulsion centres, border crossings, welcome centres for asylum-seekers, temporary welcome centres, refugee towns, migrant integration towns, ghettos, jungles, hostels, migrant homes, the list goes on, as observed in a recent study by Michel Agier. This endless list serves to capture not only an ever-present (though often largely invisible, not to say all-too-familiar and perhaps banal) reality. The camp has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has also ceased to scandalize. Or, rather, the camp is not just our present. It is our future, namely our solution for ‘keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste’. [32] In short, it is a form of government of the world.

Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more language to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. Everywhere, appeals to good sense, to common sense, appeals to the good old Republic – as we watch it bend over, bearing the weight and grinning while its spine cracks – appeals to our old friend the humanism of cowards, and appeals to a specific type of degenerate ‘feminism’ for which the term ‘equality’ translates as duty-to-make-the-veiled-muslim-girl-wear-a-thong-and-shave-the-bearded-man. [33]

Just as in the colonial era, the disparaging interpretation of how blacks and Muslim Arabs treat ‘their women’ draws on a combination of voyeurism and envy – the envy of the harem. The instrumentalization of questions of gender for racist ends, highlighting the Other’s tendency towards modes of masculine domination, is almost always aimed at obscuring the existence of phallocracy at home. The overinvestment of virility as a symbolic and political ingredient belongs not only to the so-called ‘new barbarians’. All forms of power, including our democracies, sit on a continuum in which such symbolic investments can be seen to correspond with a gain in speed and force. Power is always in some sense a mode of confrontation with the statue [la statue], while investment in femininity and maternity serve to orient sexual pleasure towards a politics of rapture, whether secular or not. Yet, to be taken even remotely seriously, it is important at some point to show that one has balls. The fact is that as part of our hedonistic culture the father is still conferred the role of first planter, and it’s the man who is supposed to sow the first seeds. In a culture haunted by the figure of the incestuous father, driven by a desire to have sex with his own virgin daughter or son, the notion of annexing the woman to one’s body as a complement to man’s defective statue has become utterly banal. One should therefore forget all these charred mythologies with no muscle, and move on without hesitation. But to what exactly?

Despite all the horrors of the slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially, even with their bowels distended by a whole variety of gases, continue to mobilize racism in the service of all manner of wacky and murderous histories. These are histories that are as new as they are old: those of foreigners, hordes of migrants in whose face our doors must be shut, barbed wire that must be hastily erected lest we be swamped by a tide of savages, histories of borders that must be established as if they had ever gone away, histories of nationals including some from very old colonies still labelled with the epithet of immigrants, intruders that must be banished, enemies that must be eradicated, terrorists who are after us because of our way of life, who must be targeted from high altitude and from a distance by drones, histories of human shields transformed into the collateral damage of our bombardments, histories of blood, slaughter, soil, fatherland, traditions, identity, pseudo-civilizations besieged by barbarian hordes, histories of national security, and all kinds of euphemistic, coarse histories, frightful histories that turn everything as black as soot, endless histories that are continuously recycled in the hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of the most gullible.

In fact, having fomented misery and death far away – far from the gaze of their own citizens – Western nations now dread the return of the law of the sword, that brand of pious vengeance demanded under the old lex talionis. In order to protect themselves from these vengeful drives, they employ racism like a hooked blade, the poisoned supplement to a beggar’s nationalism now reduced to its last rags, as the true centres of decision-making are denationalized, wealth is offshored, the majority become disenfranchised from real power, debt accumulates, and whole territories are zoned off while entire populations suddenly become superfluous.

But if racism has become so insidious, it is also because it has now become a part of the constitutive drives and economic subjectivity of our times. It has not only become a product to be consumed alongside other goods, objects and commodities. In this epoch of salaciousness, it is also the fundamental basis for the kind of ‘society of the spectacle’ described by Guy Debord. In many cases it has acquired an almost sumptuary status. It is something that one allows oneself not because it is unusual, but because it provides an answer to the general call to lust and abandon launched by neoliberalism. Out with the general strike. In with brutality and sex. In an epoch so dominated by a passion for profit, this mixture of lust, brutality and sexuality gives rise to a process in which racism comes to be incorporated into the ‘society of the spectacle’ and molecularized by the structures of contemporary consumption.

It is practised without one being conscious of it. This explains our amazement when the other draws our attention to it or when the other calls us out on it. It feeds our hunger for entertainment and allows us to escape the surrounding boredom and monotony. We pretend that it is just a matter of harmless acts that do not possess all the meanings some would like to assign to them. We take offence when the police of another country deprive us of our right to laugh, of the right to a humour that is never directed against ourselves (self-derision) or against the powerful (satire), but always against those weaker than ourselves – the right to laugh at the expense of those we wish to stigmatize. A kind of hilarious, utterly moronic, almost dishevelled form of nanoracism that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence it serves to sanction – herein lies the spirit of our times.

We should fear that the switchover has not already happened. That it is not too late. That the dream of a decent society has not been reduced to a mirage. We should fear a violent return to an era in which racism did not yet belong to only the ‘shameful parts’ of society, which one merely seeks to hide without eradicating. In such a scenario, a hearty and bold brand of racism would become a kind of habit, and the muted rebellion against society would become increasingly open and virulent, at least on the part of the recluse.

The question of belonging still remains unanswered. Who is from here and who is not? Those who should not be here: what are they doing in our home? How do we get rid of them? And, in any case, what do ‘here’ and ‘there’ mean in a world that is both networked and re-balkanizing? If the desire for apartheid is really one of the characteristics of our times, then in reality Europe, for its part, will no longer be as it once was – that is, monochrome. In other words, there will no longer be (if it was ever the case) a unique centre of the world. From now on, the world will be conjugated in the plural. It will experience itself as plural and there is absolutely nothing one can do to reverse this new condition. It is irreversible, irrevocable. One of the consequences of this new condition is the reactivation in many places of the phantasy of annihilation.

This phantasy is present in every context where the social forces tend to conceive of the political as a struggle to the death against unconditional enemies. Such a struggle is then called existential. It is a struggle without the possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation. It opposes distinct essences, each possessing a quasi-impenetrable substance, or a substance that can be possessed only by those who – under the law of blood and soil – are said to belong to the same kin. The political history as much as the history of philosophy and metaphysics of the West are in fact permeated by this problematic. As everyone knows, the Jews paid its price at the very heart of Europe. Before that, Negroes [Nègres] and indigenous peoples, especially in the New World, were first to embark on this bloody Way of Sorrows.

This conception of the political can be understood as the almost necessary completion of Western metaphysics’ time-honoured obsession with the question of Being and its supposed truth, on the one hand, and the ontology of life, on the other. According to this myth, history is seen as the unfolding of the essence of Being. In Heideggerian terminology, ‘Being’ is opposed to ‘beings’. Moreover, the West is the crucial site of Being’s disclosure since it alone could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception, the reactivation of existential origins. Everything else is just beings. Only the West could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception since it is the crucial site of Being. That is what makes it universal. As a result, its meanings must be valid unconditionally, beyond all topographical specificity, namely in all places, all times, independently of all language, history, indeed any condition whatsoever. With respect to the history of Being and the politics of Being, however, one could argue that the West has never properly thought its own finitude. It has always posited its own horizon of action as something inevitable and absolute, and this horizon has always been intended as being by definition planetary and universal. Such a conception of the universal does not necessarily correspond to something that would be valid for all humans as humans. Neither is it synonymous with a broadening of my own horizons or a care for the conditions of my own finitude. The universal here is the name given to the truth of the victor, or, rather, to the violence of the victor, to his wars, which are always predatory conflicts. These predatory conflicts are also and above all onto-historical conflicts, since it is through them that a history of truth is staked out in its destinal unfolding.

Pushed to its logical conclusion, the phantasy of annihilation or destruction envisions not only the bombing of the planet, but also the disappearance of humans, their outright extinction. This is not an apocalypse as such, if only because the notion of the apocalypse presupposes the survival, somewhere, of a witness whose task it is to recount what they see. It is a form of annihilation conceived not as a catastrophe to be feared, but rather as a sort of act of purification by fire. However, it remains the case that this purification would be the same as an annihilation of present humanity. Such an act of annihilation is supposed to open the way to another beginning, the inception of another history without today’s humanity. It is, in this sense, a phantasy of ablation.

In these anxiogenic times, the clues of a return to the question of ontological difference are all there. Under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’, and through aerial bombardments, extrajudicial executions (preferably with the help of drones), massacres, attacks and other forms of slaughter, which constitute the overall tone of this new era of warfare, the idea of the West as the only province of the world capable of understanding and instituting the universal can be seen to resurface. The division of humanity into native and foreign peoples is far advanced. If the fundamental demand was once that of finding the enemy and bringing him out in the open – as Schmitt and Heidegger believed – today it suffices to create him in order to stand up to him, to confront him with the prospect of total annihilation and destruction. For, indeed, these are enemies with whom no communication is either possible or desirable. No understanding is possible with those who lie beyond the confines of humanity.

Can one truly come to presence in the world, dwell in the world, or traverse it, on the basis of this impossibility of sharing it with others, this impassable distance? Is it enough to shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to eternity, to forget them for all time? This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity. The task of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm. 

Translated by Giovanni Menegalle

source: Radical Philosophy magazine

Notes

This article first appeared as chapter 2 of Achille Mbembe, Politiques de l’inimitié, La Découverte, Paris, 2016.

1. As Freud argued in 1915, history ‘is essentially a series of murders of peoples’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey et al., Vintage, London, 2001, pp. 289–300; p. 292. Lacan went further in the 1950s, remarking that ‘our civilisation is itself sufficiently one of hatred’. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester, Norton, New York, 1991, p. 277.

2. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, p. 10.

3. Ibid., pp. 10–16.

4. Wendy Brown speaks of ‘de-democratisation’ in Les Habits neufs de la politique mondiale, Les Prairies Ordinaires,Paris, 2007. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale Anne-Brault and Michael Naas, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010.

5. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Zone Books, New York, 2014.

6. Eyal Weizman, ‘Walking Through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict’, Radical Philosophy 136, March–April 2006, pp. 8–22.

7. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Verso, London and New York, 2012.

8. Amira Hass, ‘Israel Closure Policy: An Ineffective Strategy of Containment and Repression’, Journal of Palestinian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2002, pp. 5–20.

9. Cédric Parizot, ‘Après le mur : Les représentations israéliennes de la séparation avec les Palestiniens’, Cultures & Conflits 73, 2009, pp. 53–72.

10. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010; Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2007; Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012.

11. See Saree Makdisi, ‘The Architecture of Erasure’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, 2010, pp. 519–59. See also Mick Taussig, ‘Two Weeks in Palestine: My First Visit’, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu.

12. See especially Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Verso, London and New York, 2015, pp. 125–73.

13. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, eds, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zone Books, New York, 2009; Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008.

14. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.

15. See especially A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History,Berghahn, New York, 2008; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409.

16. Cornelis W. De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1957; Nigel Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonists and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2006.

17. See Peter L. Geschiere, Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique: La viande des autres, Karthala, Paris, 1995.

18. See Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Les Carnets de Guantanamo, Michel Lafon, Paris, 2015.

19. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, p. 26.

20. Ibid., p. 35.

21. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007.

22. Sigmund Freud, Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. J.A. Underwood, Penguin, London, 2004, p. 26.

23. Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules, PUF, Paris, 2013 (1895).

24. See Jean Comaroff, ‘The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier’, Social Analysis, vol. 53, no. 1, 2009, pp. 17–38.

25. Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015.

26. On these developments, see Éric Sadin, L’Humanité augmentée: L’administration numérique du monde, L’Échappée, Paris, 2013.

27. ^The following remarks are largely inspired by Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. Gabriel Ash, Verso, London and New York, 2014.

28. Freud, Mass Psychology, p. 26.

29. Ibid.

30. The following remarks reproduce in part my ‘Nanoracisme et puissance du vide’, in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Ahmed Boubeker, eds, Le Grand Repli, La Découverte, Paris, 2015, pp. 5–11.

31. See David Theo Goldberg and Susan Giroux, Sites of Race, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014; and David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet?, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015.

32. Michel Agier, ed., Un monde de camps, La Découverte, Paris, 2014, p. 11.

33. Nacira Guénif-Souilamas and Éric Macé, Les Féministes et le garçon arabe, Éditions de L’Aube, Paris, 2004; Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2009.

34. Michel Foucault, ‘Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme’, in Dits et écrits, vol. 4, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 708.

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• S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’[1]

[includes spoilers]

To the reader who has seen what has been justifiably called a “cultural Behemoth”, Eliot’s phrase may not seem an entirely accurate depiction of the series’ ending. After all, a capital is practically burned to the ground, in the penultimate episode, by what is the equivalent of a modern weapon of mass destruction, a flame throwing dragon; so, there is certainly something of a “bang” involved. Yet, it is noteworthy that the show unravels its plot in such a way that it does not end with an epic battle between Good and Evil, as many would probably expect. Put in the context of the huge stakes that the story has patiently built in previous seasons, the last episode truly has the tonality of a whimper. Considering the extremely noisy finales of many blockbuster films today, this is not necessarily regrettable. At the same time though, it is impossible to ignore a conservative mood driving the less-epic-than-anticipated finale. This is not the conservativism of Eliot though; rather, as Žižek has quickly noted, it is the tepid conservatism of a liberal mindset. To this point however, another needs to be added: that the conservatism of the finale is tampered by a progressive twist, the transition to elective monarchy, which is also liberal at its heart.

To be sure, Game of Thrones (just like George Martin’s books on which it was based) is not “liberal” in any obvious, straightforward manner. In fact, when the whole series is considered, the opposite would seem to be the case: passions have the upper hand over reason, individual autonomy is hard-pressed between familial obligations and status constraints, consensus consistently gives way to violence as the ultimate arbiter of rivalries and conflicts. And yet, the way the fundamental issues of power and justice are resolved – arguably, the twin themes around which the whole narrative revolves and develops – is at its heart liberal. In other words, the way the series’ creators decided to close a story that hardly qualified for a liberal narrative of gradual-but-steady-progress towards a more enlightened state of being, betrayed a fundamentally liberal sensitivity. In delivering, thus, its “liberal-conservative-progressive” conclusion, Game of Thrones gives a good glimpse of the poverty of the liberal imagination, its inability to stay faithful to radical potentials which are immanent to a situation or even appreciate how significant sociopolitical change occurs.

Setting aside for the moment the theme of justice, Game of Thrones, as its title quite clearly suggests, is predominantly a story about power: about the desire to seize it, hold it, escape it, and about the unavoidably corruptive effects of its pursuit. There is in fact something of a Foucauldian wisdom in the way power is shown to circulate throughout Westeros and Essos (the continents where the story unfolds), in the complex relations that the protagonists enter. However, the “King’s head” has most certainly “not been cut off”[2] and power, despite the many centrifugal tendencies, is concentrated symbolically and materially in the Iron Throne, the seat of the monarch who has united the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros into a medieval type of centralized political form. Fantasy apart, this is essentially a feudal world.

In whatever form it comes, premodern, modern and more, “power corrupts”: this is both a philosophical truism and a popular cliché and if Game of Thrones was simply driving this point home it would have hardly made such sensation, no matter how much nudity, sex and gore were thrown in the mix. What rather distinguished the show from the start is the way it unfolds its central thematic line through multiple story arcs and a rich tapestry of realpolitik and intrigue. For these two aspects the series (as before it the books) has been praised, justifiably so. There is one more element though that defines Game of Thrones: there are two story lines, one intruding, the other leaking, which disrupt the story’s central thematic, whilst also affecting its direction. On the one hand, there is the story of the white-walkers coming from beyond the wall (the boundary between civilization and barbarism), who embody a force that exceeds entirely the calculative rationality of power-politics (and, it should be added, of economic reason). This story-arc acts as a dreadful reminder that all of humanity’s works and days are shadowed by a coming oblivion, towards which no argument or negotiation is possible. In this way, the narrative throws a critical light on the illusions of power and human ambition. While the white walkers come from the outside, the second story is an immanent line of flight from within power-politics, something that does not make it less subversive. This is the story-arc of Daenerys Targaryen, her becoming: from a legitimate contender of the Iron Throne to a popular-cum-messianic leader who promises to “break the wheel”, i.e., to abolish the established order of things and its entrenched hierarchies. Thus, if through the march of the white walkers justice is to disappear along with power, here it emerges as a potent force of change, marking the passage from a legal entitlement within an existing structure of right towards a radically different form of being. Overall, we have two lines of deterritorialization upsetting the narrative’s central line of meaning: one is a total deterritorialization accelerating towards the formless immanence of dead matter. The other carries the promise of a reterritorialization towards a better, more just world.

The way that these two lines could converge in the end was one of the great thrills the series offered. There was for sure one common trope: both bespoke and prepared for a violent event that would decide their fortunes. This allowed the idea of a convergence into one great, final battle. But, thrilling as it sounds, that would be impossible, and it is to the merits of the creators that they avoided the temptation. For these two lines of deterritorialization point to radically different directions. Hence, while they could conjunct, they could not be decided on a single event (other than in the sense that the victory of the white walkers would de facto destroy the dreams of a better world, which justifies Daenerys’ decision to join the forces of the Army of the Living.) The real question concerned their temporal arrangement, that is, which story would take precedence, and which would set the stage for the finale. The imperative tone that set its stakes made it seem that it was the white walkers story-arc that would come last; after all, what is more, significant than the battle between life and death? Again, it is to the merit of the series that it chose to follow the other route. For in this way (whether intentionally or not), it avoided the moralistic, apolitical assumption that there is a danger that unites us all. Given how this assumption tends to obscure the real political and social stakes in the looming environmental crisis, this is no trifling matter. Surely, without life there is no problem of justice, but without justice is life tolerable? At any rate, our own predicament is the political and social fortunes of the world, rather than a cosmic clash between Good vs. Evil, hence in its arrangement of events Game of Thrones strikes a contemporary chord.

If the structure of the narrative was compelling the execution suffered. The last season has been rightly criticized for failing the stories, mainly under pressure of time constraints. However, even if it had been told better, the end would remain conservative, or as Žižek has it, “liberal-conservative”. For the target in the last season is the prospect of radical change and the violence it inescapably entails. Daenerys incinerating the people of Kings Landing is entirely forced, and no reference to madness or a subtext patriarchy can redeem it. This plot-twist was necessary however in order for the audience to get emotionally estranged from the character and the revolutionary justice she embodied (or so she claimed). For, especially at a time such as our own, where class discrepancies are astutely felt, the burning of nobles and slave-owners could only be experienced as right. Hence, the burning of laymen needs to be turned into a necessary next step. Not to let the association be missed, this is made clear in Tyrion’s pep talk to Jon Snow, to convince him to assassinate Daenerys.

To be sure, that violence can develop its own dynamic and run rampant; also, that revolutionary justice has a despotic aspect, are valid, historically testified insights. But this is why they deserve nuanced theoretical reflection. At its best, liberalism is an insightful warning on the dangers of undifferentiated power, especially one armed with conviction. But the dialectics of violence, justice and power escape it, and it is not a coincidence that the series’ liberal conclusion typically confuses revolutionary dictatorship with fascism (Daenerys is depicted as a fascist leader in front of her Army). Moreover, this inability of liberal thought is not only because of its conservativism. It is only when liberalism’s progressive dimension is given its due that its poverty becomes properly elucidated.

In resolving for elective monarchy as “the breaking of the wheel”, Game of Thrones reveals how narrow the horizons of the liberal imagination are. There is also an element of naivety, since rational consensus has rarely resolved anything of world-historical consequence. In England for one, the unnamed model of the new regime installed in Westeros, political compromise passed through civil conflict and the defeat of every radical democratic alternative. And the same is true of representative democracy, which is dismissed by the nobles but clearly alluded as an even more desirable form of polity. The real poverty of the liberal imagination is that it cannot even pay proper tribute to its own historical constitution.

Then again, the summary dismissal of the prospect of plebs getting the right to vote and, even more, the frustration of the messianic promise of a savior-Queen point to a radical alternative. Nothing is ever given to the plebs. In good old Marxist terms, their emancipation will come from their own activity. But this is a story Game of Thrones could not have told.

[1] Collected Poems 1909-1962, (Main edition), London: Faber & Faber, 2002.

[2] M. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, Essential Works 1954-1984 vol.3: Power, ed. James, D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al, London: Penguin, 1994, p.122

George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory. He is a member of Void Network. Recently he published the book A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (published by Rowman and Littlefield International). You can find info about his Greek language book here 

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“We believe we pretend to believe that we share in some pre-understanding. We act as if we have some common sense on what “religion” means in the languages we believe we know how to speak. We believe in the minimum trustworthiness of this word. […] Well nothing is less pre-assured that this factum, and the entire question of religion comes down perhaps in this lack of assurance”.

A similar point can be made about justice. When we talk about justice, we believe that we utter a word that can be translated and understood in different languages. Even more, we can be assured that our utterance will be understood to refer to something whose existence, absence or violation is or should be a matter of great concern. There are cultural and ideological traditions that value freedom over equality, or freedom and equality over authority and hierarchy (or vice versa), and so on. However, it is hard to find social formations and political systems that do not aspire to some form and notion of justice. This can be arguably seen to provide empirical support for John Rawls’ famous thesis in his Theory of Justice that justice is to social systems what truth is to systems of thought, that is, their “primary virtue”.

And yet, to return to Derrida, nothing is less certain than that when the word justice is uttered, we know what is being talked about. As Raymon Geuss has pointed out in Philosophy and Real Politics, “it is striking how unclear this concept is in ordinary language and to what extent conceptions of justice differ from one context to another and in different human societies at different times”. In theoretical terms, this is “the problem of justice”: the existence of a notion that is highly valued across cultures, but whose content and form is open to many contested and conflicting articulations.

Confronted with this quandary, the path usually followed in the relevant theoretical field, the main-stream of theories of justice, is to argue in favor of a specific conception of justice over against other rival ones. This is indeed what Rawls has done: after he posits justice as the primary virtue of social order, he moves on to flesh out its content by identifying justice with fairness. But many other options are available: justice as entitlement, as self-determination, as equal opportunity, as social equality, as meritocracy, to name a few other well-known conceptions. Mindful of the unavoidable element of simplification that generalizations entail, the theoretical discussion on justice can be largely depicted as a continuous debate over the notion that identifies what justice truly is.

In this sense, despite their different and even conflicting assessments, normative definitions operate on the same register: they posit an ideal (justice) which they identify with another ideal (fairness, equality etc.) that effectively defines the form of a just society or more specifically of a just course of action. Thus, theoretical normativism yields a philosophical idealism: an ideality is elevated to a general principle that materiality must adjust in order to acquire its proper or true form. In this way, justice becomes a judgment upon bodies and their affective partiality. In Deleuzian terms, justice “is the judgment of god”.

For all that, the quandary identified earlier does not vanish, it rather intensifies so as to become a true aporia: every normative definition of justice necessarily excludes other available options. And while it aspires to do that on rational, non-partisan grounds, on closer look there is always a political commitment lurking. Justice thus appears to be helplessly enmeshed into the very political antagonisms whose normative framework and proper resolution it theoretically claims to offer.

Now, from the numerous theoretical and philosophical currents existing today, post-structuralism seems to be the least suitable to lift us from this aporia. I most certainly do not claim to offer ‘the post-structuralist theory of justice’. After all, unlike Marxism or even psychoanalysis, there is no single author whose corpus can serve as a unitary point of reference and from which theory may seek support and legitimacy. The difference that poststructuralism has been said to praise defines it also as a current of thought. There are different starting points and theoretical trajectories that speak different languages, even critical to each other. Foucault’s and Derrida’s debate sparked by the History of Madness is well known. Less critically, Deleuze has stated that he admires deconstruction, but it has little to do with his own philosophical project. Yet, the common determination to problematize cherished notions of the western philosophical and political tradition and to think difference in a positive way generates substantial points of encounter. Justice, a true shibboleth of western political philosophy, is one such point.

What I would like to suggest is that the relevant reflections of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, three of the most famous poststructuralist thinkers, can be fused to a single stream of thought, which allows us to think the problem of justice in a way that overcomes the impasses of normative-cum-idealist political theory, without adopting the objectivist reductionism or functionalism of traditional materialism neither the flat ontology of new materialisms, which tends to disable a differentiated and differentiating theory of justice.

A spectral promise

I begin with Derrida since it is to him that we owe partly the emergence of a new critical discourse over justice, which re-cognizes the link between justice, power and violence yet tries to sustain the notion’s radical valence and political integrity.

Derrida’s own reflection revolve around one key idea: the irreducibility of justice to law. As he put it programmatically in ‘Force of Law’,

I want to insist at once to reserve the possibility of a justice, indeed of a law that not only exceeds or contradicts law, but also, perhaps, has no relation to law, or maintains such a strange relation to it that it may just as well demand law as exclude it.

In its essentials, the argument is not new. Benjamin, with whom Derrida engages extensively, has unequivocally asserted that there is an “infinite chasm between justice and Right”. To make a huge leap back in time, the non-identity and irreducible tension between justice and law is a key theme in attic Tragedy, which let us not forget had a huge formative impact on the intellectual environment where philosophy grew.

Derrida places himself in this critical tradition and gives it a radical inflection. Justice cannot be contained by law because it resists representation, hence, deconstruction. Τhis strong apophatic standpoint claims not to advance passive resignation or normative relativism (as it has often been accused of). Rather, the impossibility to name justice in a definitive manner, and thus to encapsulate it into a normative/legal order of imputation and representation, creates the possibility of thinking and practicing justice in innovative ways. Indeed, since justice may sometimes exclude or be against law, it can on principle be indexed on social struggles that breach legally sanctioned codes of conduct: wildcat strikes, mutinies, riots, revolts. In this way, justice becomes a category that pertains and allows us to think not (only) ordered procedures but disruptive events.

Yet, real events of insurgency – from which the philosophical concept of the event draws nourishment – never enter Derrida’s purview in a systematic manner. How can indeed the positive presence of justice in social struggles and uprisings be marked, when every claim to presence has been on principle displaced? Not accidentally, Derrida takes a critical distance from the great historical alternative to the legalistic conception of justice that liberalism has promoted, the revolutionary justice preached by the socialist (Marxist, anarchist, communist) tradition. Even more, in his critical commentary of Benjamin, Derrida suggests that ideas of an anomic justice delivered by revolutionary violence are germane with the logic of arbitrary, sovereign rule.

As a way of response, it is worth noting that the link between sovereign Power and revolutionary terror is not forged directly in the moment of popular (resentful and redemptive in equal measure) violence but during its statist mediation. In this respect, a more dialectical analysis of the phenomenon of revolutionary Terror is called for. At any rate, the main issue here is that Derrida entertains the possibility of an alternative to prevailing liberal conceptions of justice, epitomized in the rule of law, but never names it, nor does he systematically reflect on the social forms that have historically embodied it. Even his references to the “new international” are distinctly vague and careful not to give a concrete shape to the militancy that they evoke.

Attributing this standpoint to purely theoretical reasons is to decontextualize thought and obscure its historical mediations. Derrida’s reflections on justice can be plausibly seen as “a theory of defeat”, a notion proposed by Ahlrich Meyer in reference to the work of Marx after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions. That is, Derrida’s late work on justice is expressive of a period when the revolutionary hopes that the “red utopias” have nourished were fading away, after their last upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, the “justice beyond the law” that Derrida conjures lacks a concrete anchoring point.

To be sure, like every genuine thought, Derrida’s is an active reflection on his epoch, one that is bent to resist the liberal triumphalism that we have come to associate with Fukuyama’s infamous “end of history”. Derrida’s thought traces in the ruins of past defeat an indelible residue. Struggles arise and fade, political systems come and go, hopes for a world-historical plebeian redemption have been defeated, the neoliberal utopia that replaced them is swept away by a post-apocalyptic mood; but justice remains. It remains as a promise, a point which allows Derrida to critically broach the messianic potency of justice. But it also remains as a specter that effectively subverts every attempt to offer an ontology of justice. Discerning the “hauntology” that displaces every onto-political configuration of justice is Derrida’s lasting legacy, open to a fertile appropriation: there is an excess that is proper to the idea of justice, which unsettles existing forms of Right by evoking the specter and promise of a justice to come

Yet the fact remains that Derrida’s thought is too steeped into the discursive in order to direct the theorization of justice into a theory of material forms. Nor thus do we ever get a robust analysis of how or why justice emerges in the world. Justice for Derrida dwells essentially on the sphere of ideality; as such, his thought must be seen as a radical idealism set to defer the moment when the necessarily violent application of the ideal of justice comes. There is certainly a critical moment built into this gesture. However, it comes at the expense of a systematic accommodation of the collective praxis that originally displaces the identity between justice and law and raises the problem of justice to the level of political and theoretical consciousness. To attain its fully radical sting and thus become adequate to the violent complexity of the real history of justice, Derrida’s notion of a justice beyond the law needs to be fleshed with the materiality of struggling and desiring bodies.

Power/Justice

Here is where Foucault enters. To be sure, even less so than in Derrida, there is nothing that resembles a “theory of justice” in Foucault’s work. On principle however Foucault’s thought is designed to clarify the way that normative concepts like justice operate and assume their meaning within organized systems of power/knowledge. In brief, from a Foucauldian perspective, justice is not an infinite judgment either of God or of Reason on finitude but a “thing of this world”, whose actuality is always entangled with concrete power relations.

Here we clearly have a perspective that critically embeds normative claims to justice in their material context without reducing them to a fixed metaphysical category, be it “Matter” or “Power”. Given that power is not a univocal substance but a relation generating and unfolding in a complex interface of domination, control and resistance, justice should also not be expected to play a univocal function. Indeed, in the distinction that Foucault draws in Society must be Defended between two types of history, a significant differentiation for justice is also touched upon. In both histories, (whose paradigmatic expressions are respectively Roman and Biblical history) justice holds a key place, but unlike the first “official” history, in the second “anti-history” justice is not found in the lawful constitution of the present, which has fulfilled the past and aspires to mold the future into its own image. It is rather present in its current absence, as a memory of struggle and defeat, as resentful anticipation of a coming vindication, and as a raging battle-cry against the powers that be. In this respect, justice is operative both in rituals of power as well as in events of revolt.

From this inference another crucial insight can be drawn: if justice is indeed not only “what is established”, as Pascal had once asserted, then this is primarily because the historical continuum – discursively established by the narratives of linear progress and triumphant Power – is interrupted by uprisings and struggles that pose a practical challenge to every sanctioned partition of the sensible, i.e. to every nomos, even to the one which claims to rule by virtue of its self-sustaining rationality. This insight gives substance to the notion of a justice “beyond law” by embedding justice to the activity of defiant and insurgent bodies. But what is exactly embedded? Is it an idea, a principle, a virtue, a fantasy? Disappointingly, on the one occasion where he attends to this theme in a reflective manner, during his famous debate with Chomsky, Foucault reverts to a rather conventional functionalism. In his own words:

I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and say that the proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time on history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just.

And then in a more generalizing fashion:

it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.

Now, I do not deny that justice plays both functions. What I find spurious is the genealogical reduction that allows for a definitional identity: “justice is a device”.  For such a verdict ignores that power is not the end of which justice serves as a supporting means. This can be seen in the idea of workers-power, which intensifies the link that Foucault makes between proletarian struggles and power to the level of a political principle. Workers-power names sociopolitical forms – from the dictatorship of the proletariat to autonomia operaia (workers autonomy) – that enable the laboring masses to change and improve their lives. In every case, the change is experienced to provide justice with its content, while conversely justice concerns precisely these conditions – from a higher wage to self-administration – that enable a better life for the workers.

Rather therefore than a crude functionalism a more intricate relation is suggested, a fusion of justice and power in processes of biopolitical production. For justice specifically, a non-derivative potency is implied, of justice as a mobilizing force in the struggles of those who in the context of existing dispositifs of power/right are subject to multiple forms of disenfranchisement. Interestingly, in his later article on revolt Foucault hints towards this direction. For if at the heart of the irreducible event of revolt an experience of injustice is involved, does not the latter experience imply a more positive desire for justice?

 Becoming-justice

The real question of course here concerns the exact relation between affective experiences of injustice and the alleged desire for justice. Foucault himself did not pursue this issue. One reason may be that, despite his positive review of Anti-Oedipus, he continued associating desire with lack (at least this is what he confined to Deleuze).

It is not that difficult to comprehend why Foucault insisted on the identification of desire and lack. Don’t we desire what we don’t have? Money, time, bodies, pleasures, power? More substantially, the link suggests itself because both phenomena act as vectors between two points: “desire for…”, and “lack of …”. In both cases, a space is denoted that needs to be covered. For the case of justice specifically, the link is further fortified by the fact that the desire for justice denotes a chasm between an Ought and an Is, which as Hegel has perceptively commented leads people to react against the existing order of things. However, there is a crucial difference: lack designates a void, a constitutive absence; hence it is essentially a category of negativity. Desire, on the other hand, designates a positive magnitude and quality, that is, a movement and an interplay of bodies that always and already fills the space between them. It is this this key idea that Deleuze and Guattari develop by elaborating on the productivity of desire. For to say that desire is a “factory of production” is effectively to conceptualize the way that desire produces the trajectories, connections and assemblages which actualize it.

In terms of a theory of justice this opens an extremely fertile path, signposted by Deleuze and Guattari (although not systematically pursued). The desire for justice is much more than the search of an absent ideal, which will finally give to those who find it what they rightfully deserve. It is a productive trajectory that co-extends to the forms that actualize it: to unions, associations, communes, NGO’s, courts, militias. All these forms are invested by a desire to set things right, that is by a desire for justice. And since there is no “desiring production” which is not at the same time “social production”, the desire for justice ultimately unfolds as a biopolitical process. “We have our being in justice” (Becket).

This perspective yields nothing less than an open and expansive topography of justice: as an immanent determination of social/desiring production the actuality of justice is not reduced to law-making. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in their Kafka book, justice spreads throughout social being, wherever things are taking place: “in the hallways of the congress, behind the scenes of the meeting, where people confront the real, immanent, problems of desire and power, the real problem of justice”. Moreover, as they continue, since everyone is involved into the problems of desire and power, everyone is also an “auxiliary of justice”. In this respect, as they conclude, “justice is the continuum of desire, with shifting boundaries that are always displaced”.

This perspective gives to justice a rhizomatic and dynamic potency. What all the singular instantiations have in common is that justice in order “to be” must “become”. Actualizing justice is a becoming-justice. The notion is not a metaphor. Far from it, the Deleuzian notion of becoming is important precisely because it grasps that justice does not concern the self-realization of a primary identity, not even a dialectical one of the “in-itself” to “for-itself” type. It concerns the production of difference through a combination of heterogeneous elements. Resisting austerity, revolting against a dictator, establishing a temporary occupation or a permanent commune, fighting for a better wage, initiating a jihad, joining a crusade. In all these cases, a differential passage is involved, becoming something other than what you are supposed to be, creating new connections, entering into new assemblages: becoming other, becoming-many, becoming-justice.

Of course, this process may stabilize so as to form a field of interiority with new allocated roles and identities. This is the moment when justice is captured by the state and the thought peculiar to it, “state-thought”. However, such a capture remains always incomplete, negotiable, fragile. The history of justice in this respect may be legitimately seen as the contentious and intensive interplay between stratification and deterritorialization, the composition of majorities and the formation of minorities, transcendent judgement and immanent critique. From this perspective also, the idea of justice, i.e. the noetic actualization of justice as a conceptual/ideational generality, can be seen to serve a double function: it operates both as an “order-word”, that prescribes to the present its proper form, and a “pass-word”, which evokes an earth and a people that “do not yet exist”.

Interestingly, in this context justice operates as a necessary mediation that prevents the dualities which frame Deleuze’s philosophy to break down into an onto-political dualism. At the same time, the reduction to a crude, reductionist monism is also avoided. Instead, the theorization of justice invites an analysis of different diagrammatic lines: one “hierarchical-stratified”, the other “horizontal-egalitarian”. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms: “another justice, another movement, another space-time” (A Thousand Plateaus).

Two further crucial insight follow: no single normative definition of justice is possible since the becoming of justice involves as its intrinsic moment the decoding and disordering of existing forms. This means that riots, revolt, and other forms of popular insurgency, up to and including revolution, are not symptoms of dysfunction but positive forms of becoming-justice. Finally, insofar justice is (a) becoming it belongs to history but also it constitutes one of its points of excess, since every actualization of justice is shadowed by non-derivative potentials which stand as its virtual alternatives.

Clearly, there is much more that needs to be said to substantiate the theorical perspective proposed. My goal here however was not to offer an exhaustive theory. It was to show how poststructuralist thought offers tools and a space for thinking justice afresh. In this context, I have articulated a series of suggestive points which are meant to ground a key programmatic insight: a theory of justice should be a critical analysis of differential forms ordering, regulating, subverting, transforming, and haunting our world.  Thus, instead of prescribing to the world its one true form, to think justice is to open ourselves to the world’s potential figures. As a French graffito (recently restated during the “gillets jaunes” mobilizations) astutely puts it: “other ends of the world are possible”.

George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory. He is a member of Void Network. Recently he published the book A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (published by Rowman and Littlefield International)

The post Becoming-Other, Becoming-Many: Poststructuralism and the Problem of Justice – George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

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• Free eBook available here.
• Chopin, Kate – Selected Stories – Multiple Formats
• Christian Andersen, Hans – Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, including The Emperor’s New Clothes, read by Sir Michael Redgrave – Free Spotify
• Christian Andersen, Hans – Andersen’s Fairy Tales – Free MP3
• Christian Andersen, Hans – The Emperor’s New Clothes – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Clarke, Arthur C. – «A Walk in the Dark» (A dramatized version of the text) – Free MP3 Stream
• Clarke, Arthur C. – «Breaking Strain» – YouTube
• Clarke, Arthur C. – Childhood’s End (Excerpts read by the author) – YouTube
• Clarke, Arthur C. – «Hammer of God» – Free MP3
• Clarke, Arthur C. – «The Nine Billion Names of God» and «The Star» – Free Stream/Download
• Clarke, Arthur C. – «The Star» (Read by the author) – YouTube
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – Beyond the City – Free MP3
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Radio Drama, Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson – Free Stream
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (64 Hours of Readings) – Spotify
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Conan Doyle, Arthur –  The Mystery of Cloomber – Free MP3
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Return of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Speckled Band – Free iTunes
• Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness (Narrated by Hayward Morse) – Spotify
• Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness (Orson Welles’ radio drama from 1938) – YouTube
• Conrad, Joseph – Lord Jim – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Conrad, Joseph – The Secret Agent – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – Free MP3 Zip File
• Conrad, Joseph – The Secret Sharer – Free MP3
• Conrad, Joseph – The Secret Sharer – YouTube
• Cooper, James Fenimore – Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef – Free MP3
• Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans – Free iTunes – Free MP3–  Free MP3 Zip File
• Crane, Stephen – The Open Boat – Free MP3 – Free iTunes
• Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – Alternate MP3
• Free eBook available here.
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy (English) – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Free eBook available here.
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy (Italian) – Free Stream from Princeton University
• Dante Alighieri – Divina Commedia  (Full reading in Italian) – Free Stream/MP3
• Dante Alighieri – The Inferno, Cantos I-VIII (Read by John Ciardi) – Spotify
• Danticat, Edwidge – Water Child (read by Junot Diaz) – Free MP3 – Free iTunes
• Danticat, Edwidge – «Seven» (read by Junot Diaz) – Free Stream
• Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – Free MP3 Zip file
• Free eBook available here.
• Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe (alternate version read by Nigel Graham) – Spotify
• DeLillo’s, Don – “Baader-Meinhof” (read by Chang-rae Lee) – MP3
• Diaz, Junot – «Alma» (read by Victor Rasuk) – YouTube
• Diaz, Junot – «How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)» – Free MP3
• Diaz, Junot – «The Cheaters Guide to Love» – YouTube
• Dick, Philip K. – «Beyond Lies the Wub» – Free MP3
• Dick, Philip K. – «Mr. Spaceship» – Free iTunes – Free Stream & Download
• Dick, Philip K. – «Second Variety» – Free MP3 Zip File – Free iTunes
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Crystal Crypt» & «Beyond the Door» – Free iTunes – Free Stream
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Defenders» – Free MP3
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Eyes Have It» – Free MP3
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Gun» – YouTube
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Hanging Stranger» – Free MP3
• Dick, Philip K. – «The Skull» – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Dick, Philip K – «The Variable Man» – Free Stream – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Dick, Philip K – «Tony and the Beetles» – MP3 Part 1 – MP3 Part II
• Dick, Philip K – Radio Plays – Stream
• Dickens, Charles – 24 Hours of Dickens Stories Featuring Classic Recordings by Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles & More – Free YouTube
• Dickens, Charles – A Christmas Carol – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – Free MP3 Zip File
• Dickens, Charles – A Christmas Carol (Read by Neil Gaiman) – Free Stream
• Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – Bleak House – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – Christmas Stories – Free MP3s
• Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – Free MP3s
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – Hard Times – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – Oliver Twist – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Dickens, Charles – «The Christmas Tree» (Read by Simon Callow) – Free MP3
• Dodge, Mary Mapes – Hans Brinker – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Notes from the Underground – Free MP3
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Brothers Karamazov – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Dream of a Ridiculous Man – Free Stream/Download
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Gambler – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Grand Inquisitor (dramatic reading) – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Idiot – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – The Possessed – Free MP3
• Doyle, Roddy – “Bullfighting” (Read by Dave Eggers) – Free MP3
• Dr Who Audio Dramas – Spotify
• Dreiser, Theodore – Sister Carrie – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Dreiser, Theodore – The Lost Phoebe – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible.com
• Dumas, Alexandre – The Comte de Monte Cristo – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Eliot, George – Silas Marner – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Eliot, George – Middlemarch – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Eliot, T.S. – The Cocktail Party (Performed by Alec Guinness & Cathleen Nesbitt) – Free Spotify
• Faulkner, William –  «Shingles for the Lord» – Free Stream
• Faulkner, William – Faulkner Reads Faulkner – Free Stream
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Bernice Bobs Her Hair – Free iTunes –  Free MP3s/Stream
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Flappers and Philosophers – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Tales of the Jazz Age – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Beautiful and Damned – Free iTunes – Free MP3s/Stream
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby – Free Stream
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott – This Side of Paradise – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Flaubert, Gustave – Three Short Works
• Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Ford, Richard – «Displaced» (Read by Richard Ford)
• Free Stream
• Forster, E.M. – A Room with a View – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Forster, E. M. – Howards End – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Forster, E.M. – «The Machine Stops» – Free iTunes
• Gaiman, Neil – Coraline (Read in its entirety by Neil Gaiman and friends) – Video
• Gaiman, Neil – «A Study in Emerald» – Free iTunes
• Gaiman, Neil – «How to Talk to Other Girls at Parties» – Free MP3
• Gaiman, Neil – «Orange» (read live) – Free Video
• Gaiman, Neil – «Other People» (read by Neil Gaiman) – Free Video
• Gaiman, Neil – The Graveyard Book (read by Neil Gaiman) – Free Video
• Gaiman, Neil – «Troll Bridge» (read live, starts at 4:00 mark) – Free iTunes
• Gaiman, Neil – «The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury» (read by Neil Gaiman) – Free Stream
• Gaiman, Neil – «The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains» – Free MP3
• Gaitskill, Mary – «The Other Place» (read by Jennifer Egan) – Free MP3
• Geng, Veronica – “Love Trouble Is My Business» (read by Jonathan Franzen) – Free MP3
• Gogol, Nikolai – Dead Souls – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Gogol, Nikolai – «The Nose» – Free MP3
• Gogol, Nikolai – The Overcoat and Other Short Stories – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Gordimer, Nadine – «A Style of Her Own» and «The Bridegroom» (read by the author, 1961) – Free Stream/Download
• Gordimer, Nadine – «City Lovers» – Free MP3
• Gordimer, Nadine – «Loot» (read by author) – YouTube
• Grahame, Kenneth – The Reluctant Dragon (read by Boris Karloff) – YouTube
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel – House of the Seven Gables – Free MP3s
• Free eBook available here.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel – Rappaccini’s Daughter – Free iTunes
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter – Spotify
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel – «Wakefield» (Read by Paul Auster) – YouTube
• Hayden, Julie – “Day-Old Baby Rats” (read by Lorrie Moore) Free MP3
• Heinlein, Robert – Methuselah’s Children (abridged) – Free Stream/MP3
• Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms (1948 radio drama) – YouTube
• Hemingway, Ernest – Ernest Hemingway Reads Ernest Hemingway – Free Stream
• Hemingway, Ernest – Homage to Switzerland (read by Julian Barnes) – Free MP3
• Hemingway, Ernest – «In Harry’s Bar in Venice» (a short story read by Hemingway: .au format, .gsm format, .ra format)
• Hemingway, Ernest – «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» (read by Charleston Heston) – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
• Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha – Free MP3 – Spotify
• Hitchcock, Alfred – Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People – Spotify
• Homer, The Iliad (Based on Samuel Butler Translation) – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Homer, The Odyssey (Based on Samuel Butler Translation) – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Hughes, Langston – «Simple on Indian Blood»(read by Ossie Davis) – Free Stream
• Hughes, Langston – «A Toast to Harlem» (read by Ossie Davis) – Free Stream
• Hughes, Langston – «Last Whipping» (read by Ossie Davis) – Free Stream
• Hughes, Langston – «Feet Live Their Own Life» (read by Ossie Davis) – Free Stream
• Hugo, Victor – Les Misérables Vol. 1 – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Hugo, Victor – Les Misérables – Radio drama narrated by Orson Welles – Multiple formats
• Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Free MP3 – Free iTunes
• Free eBook available here.
• Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Abridged version read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
• Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World (Dramatized version read by Huxley) – Free MP3s
• Huxley, Aldous – Crome Yellow – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Irving, Washington – Rip Van Winkle – Free MP3
• Irving, Washington – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• James, Henry – Daisy Miller – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• James, Henry – «Greville Fane» (read by Cynthia Ozick) – Free Stream/Download
• James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Johnson, Denis – “Emergency” (read by Tobias Wolff) MP3
• Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Free eBook available here.
• Joyce, James – Chamber Music – Free iTunes – Free Stream
• Joyce, James – Dubliners – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream – Free on Spotify
• Joyce, James – «Eveline» (read by Sebastian Barry) – Free MP3
• Joyce, James – Finnegans Wake – Free Stream
• Joyce, James –  «The Dead» – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Joyce, James – «The Dead» (Read by Cynthia Nixon & Colum McCann) – Free Stream
• Joyce, James – «The Dead» (Read by Bart Wolffe) – Spotify
• Joyce, James – Ulysses – Free Stream Various Formats – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• July, Miranda – «Ron Spivey» (read by David Sedaris) – Free MP3
• Kafka, Franz – «A Little Fable» (Read by David Foster Wallace) – Free Stream
• Kafka, Franz – «A Hunger Artist» (read by Hanif Kureishi) – Free MP3
• Kafka, Franz – «Before the Law» – Free MP3
• Kafka, Franz – «In the Penal Colony – Free MP3
• Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – Free Stream – Spotify
• Free eBook available here.
• Karloff, Boris – Tales of the Frightened – Web
• Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, etc — 18 Hours of Beat Readings — Spotify
• Kincaid, Jamaica – “Figures in the Distance” (read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) – Free MP3
• Kincaid, Jamaica – “Girl” and “Wingless” (read by Edwidge Danticat) – Free Stream
• King, Stephen – «Afterlife» – YouTube
• King, Stephen – «Laurie» – YouTube
• Kipling, Rudyard – Kim – Free iTunes
• Kipling, Rudyard – Just So Stories for Little Children – Free iTunes – Free MP3/Stream
• Kipling, Rudyard – Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Kipling, Rudyard – «The Elephant’s Child» – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Kipling, Rudyard – The Jungle Story – Free MP3 Zip File
• L’Heureux, John – «Three Short Moments in a Long Life» – Free MP3 Stream
• Lawrence, D.H. – Everlasting Flowers – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Lawrence, D.H. – A Woman and Her Dead Husband – Free MP3
• Le Guin, Ursula – «The End» (Dramatized version) – Free MP3 Stream
• Leroux, Gaston – The Phantom of the Opera (abridged) – Spotify
• Lewis, C.S. – The Chronicles of Narnia – Free MP3s
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• The Silver Chair
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Magician’s Nephew
• The Last Battle
• Lewis, C.S. – Spirits in Bondage – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Lewis, C.S. – The Screwtape Letters (narrated by John Cleese) – YouTube
• Lewis, Sinclair – Babbit – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Free eBook available here.
• Lewis, Sinclair – It Can’t Happen Here (reading of an adapted play) – YouTube
• Lewis, Sinclair – Main Street – Free MP3s – Free iTunes
• London, Jack – Call of the Wild – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• London, Jack – The Heathen – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• London, Jack -To Build a Fire – Free MP3
• London, Jack – White Fang – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth – Selected Works – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Lovecraft, H.P. – The Call of of Cthulhu (Read by Garrick Hagan) – Free YouTube – Free Stream Part 1 – Free Stream Part 2
• Lovecraft, H.P – The Call of of Cthulhu & Other Stories – Spotify
• Lovecraft, H.P. – The Collected Public Domain Works of H. P. Lovecraft – Free Mp3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Lucretius – On the Nature of Things – Free MP3 Zip File – Free iTunes
• Lu Xun – A Madman’s Diary and Other Stories – Free MP3 Zip File
• Mann, Thomas – Death in Venice – Free MP3s/Download
• McCabe, Eugene – Annahullian (read by Colm Tóibín) – Free MP3
• McCann, Colum – “Transatlantic” (read by author) – Free MP3
• McEwan, Ian – «My Purple Scented Novel» (read by the author) – Free Stream
• Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick read by Celebrities (Benedict Cumberbatch, John Waters, Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton & More) – Free iTunes – Soundcloud – Big Read – More details
• Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick read by Other Celebrities – SoundCloud
• Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick (Abridged version read by Hayward Morse) – Spotify
• Melville, Herman – Typee – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Miller, Arthur – Readings from The Crucible and Death of a Salesman – Spotify
• Miller Jr, Walter M. – A Canticle for Leibowitz (Dramatized Version) – MP3s
• Miller, William – Rent Party Jazz (read by Viola Davis) – YouTube
• Milne, A.A. – Winnie the Pooh (read Disney Book Group) – Free iTunes
• Milton, John – Paradise Lost – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Milton, John – Paradise Regained – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Anne of Green Gables – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Moore, Lorrie – «Paper Losses» (read by Gary Shteyngart) – Free Stream
• Munro, Alice – «Axis» – Free MP3
• Murakami, Haruki – «On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning» – Free Stream
• Nabokov, Vladimir – My Russian Education (Read by Orhan Pamuk) – Free MP3 – Free iTunes
• Nabokov, Vladimir – «Pnin» – Free Stream
• Nabokov, Vladimir – Signs and Symbols – Free iTunes
• Nabokov, Vladimir – Vladimir Nabokov Reads from Lolita & Selected Poems – Spotify
• Nin, Anais – «Under a Glass Bell» (Read by the author) – YouTube
• Northup, Solomon – Twelve Years a Slave – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• O’Connor, Flannery – “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” (Read by author in 1959) – Stream/Download
• O’Connor, Flannery – «Everything That Rises Must Converge» (Read by Estelle Parsons) – YouTube
• O’Connor, Flannery – “Revelation” (Read by Studs Terkel) – Stream
• O’Connor, Frank – “The Man of the World” (read by Julian Barnes) MP3
• O Henry, The Gift of the Magi – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Oates, Joyce Carol – «Mastiff» (read by Louise Erdrich) – Free Stream
• Orwell, George – 1984 – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File – Multiple Versions – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Orwell, George – 1984 (Radio Drama from 1949 starting David Niven) – Free Stream
• Orwell, George – 1984 (Complete reading by Pacifica Radio) – Soundcloud
• Orwell, George – Animal Farm – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Free eBook available here.
• Orwell, George – Animal Farm – Spotify version
• Orwell, George – Homage to Catalonia – Chapter 1 here – Remaining Chapters here
• Oz, Amos – «The King of Norway» (read by Jonathan Safran Foer) – Free Stream
• Ozick, Cynthia – «The Shawl» (read by Joyce Carol Oates) – Free Stream
• Paley, Grace – «Love» (read by George Saunders) – Free Stream
• Plath, Sylvia – Three Women (a radio play) – Free Stream
• Poe, Edgar Allan – 5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone – Spotify
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Essential Edgar Allan Poe – Spotify
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Complete Works Vol. 1 – Free iTunes – Free Stream/Download
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Complete Works Vol. 2  – Free iTunes – Free Stream/Download
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Complete Works Vol. 3  – Free iTunes – Free Stream/Download
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Complete Works Vol. 4  – Free iTunes – Free Stream/Download
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Complete Works Vol. 5  – Free iTunes – Free Stream/Download
• Poe, Edgar Allan – “The Masque of the Red Death” and Annabel Lee (read by William S. Burroughs) – Free YouTube Audio
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Cask of Amontillado – Free MP3/Stream – FREE from Audible.com
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Mask of the Red Death (read by William S. Burroughs) – Spotify
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Pit and the Pendulum – Free MP3
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
•  Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by Stan Lee) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by James Earl Jones) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by Neil Gaiman) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by John Astin) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (as read by Anne Waldman) – SoundCloud
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by Christopher Lee) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by Vincent Price) – YouTube
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Raven (read by Christopher Walken) – YouTube
• Alternate version read by actor John de Lancie (video)
• Free eBook available here.
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Tell Tale Heart – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Tell Tale Heart (read by Christopher Lee) – Free YouTube Audio
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Tell Tale Heart (read by Iggy Pop) – Free YouTube Audio
• Poe, Edgar Allan – The Tell Tale Heart, Silence, Annabel Lee (read by James Mason) – Free Stream
• Porter, Eleanor – Pollyanna – Free MP3 Zip File
• Price, Vincent – The Price of Fear (Classic radio show featuring Vincent Price) – Free Stream
• Pritchett, V.S. – The Rescue (Read by Jonathan Lethem) – Free Stream
• Prokofiev, Sergei – Peter and the Wolf (Narrated by David Bowie) – Spotify
• Proust, Marcel – À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (Œuvre Intégrale) (in French) – Free Stream
• Pushkin, Alexander – Eugene Onegin – Free MP3 Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Ratcliffe, Stephen – Continuum – Free MP3 Stream
• Rand, Ayn – Anthem – Spotify
• Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front – Free Stream
• Ruskin, John – The Golden River – Free MP3
• Safran Foer, Jonathan – «Love is Blind and Deaf» – Video Animation
• Saramago, José – «The Centaur» (Read by Nadine Gordimer) – Free MP3
• Sedaris, David – “The Mouse and the Snake» from Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary – Free MP3 – Web site
• Sedaris, David – «Six to Eight Black Men» from the album ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’ – YouTube Audio
• Sedaris, David – “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle”from When You Are Engulfed in Flames – Free MP3
• Sendak, Maurice – Where the Wild Things Are (read by Christopher Walken) – YouTube
• Seuss, Dr. – Green Eggs and Ham (read by Neil Gaiman) – YouTube
• Seuss, Dr. – How The Grinch Stole Christmas (read by Boris Karloff) – Spotify
• Seuss, Dr. – How The Grinch Stole Christmas (read by Keith Morrison) – YouTube
• Sewell, Anna – Black Beauty – Free iTunes – Free MP3s
• Schwartz, Delmore – “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Read by Lou Reed) – Free Stream
• Shakespeare, William – A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Performed by Great Actors: Gielgud, McKellen & More – Free on Spotify
• Shakespeare, William – 10 Plays Performed by Orson Welles on the Radio – Free Stream
• Shakespeare, William – All’s Well Ends Well – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – Antony and Cleopatra – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – As You Like It – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free Mp3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – Comedy of Errors – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – Coriolanus – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – Cymbeline – Free iTunes – Free Stream – Free MP3 Zip File
• Shakespeare, William – Hamlet – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – Hamlet (French translation by Marcel Pagnol) – Spotify – YouTube
• Shakespeare, William – Hamlet (Starring John Gielgud) – Spotify + Archive.org
• Shakespeare, William – Julius Caesar – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – King Lear – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – Macbeth (with Alec Guinness) – Free Spotify
• Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – The Merchant of Venice – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Free eBook available here.
• Shakespeare, William – The Sonnets – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Shakespeare, William – The Sonnets (read by Sir John Gielgud) – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• Shakespeare, William – The Tragedy of MacBeth – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein (narrated by Aaron Mahnke of the Lore podcast) – Free iTunes
• Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Also check out the 1938 radio broadcast that is faithful to Mary Shelley’s text. (iTunes)
• Free eBook available here.
• Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein (Abridged version read by Christophe Lee) – Spotify
• Silverstein, Shel – The Giving Tree (Animated film narrated by the author) – YouTube
• Silverstein, Shel – The Giving Tree (Read by Arianna Huffington) – YouTube
• Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Free eBook available here.
• Singer, Isaac Bashevis – Disguised (read by Nathan Englander) – Free MP3
• Smith, Zadie – «Escape from New York» (read by Zadie Smith) – Free Audio Stream
• Stein, Gertrude – If I Told Him: a Completed Portrait of Picasso – Free MP3
• Stein, Gertrude – Matisse – Free MP3
• Stein, Gertrude – The Fifteenth Of November . . . T. S. Eliot – Free MP3
• Stein, Gertrude – The Making of Americans – Free MP3
• Steinbeck, John – «The Snake» and «Johnny Bear» – Free Stream – Spotify
• Sterne, Laurence – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Free Stream: Vol 1. – Vol 2. – Vol 3. – Vol 4. 
• Stevenson, Robert Louis – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Stevenson, Robert Louis – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
• Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island (Read by Hans Conried) – Spotify
• Stoker, Bram – Dracula – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible.com
• See alternative version here. (full zip file)
• Stoker, Bram – Dracula (Read by Christopher Lee) – Spotify
• Stone, Tanya Lee – The House That Jane Built: A Story About Jane Addams (Read by Kiernan Shipka) – YouTube
• Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Free iTunes – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Thayer, Ernest Lawrence – Casey at the Bat – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Thomas, Dylan – A Child’s Christmas in Wales (read by Thomas) – Youtube
• Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina – Free Stream
• Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina –
• Book 1 – Free Zip File
• Book 2 – Free Zip File
• Book 3 – Free Zip File
• Book 4 – Free Zip File
• Book 5 – Free Zip File
• Book 6 – Free Zip File
• Book 7 – Free Zip File
• Book 8 – Free Zip File
• Tolstoy, Leo – Five Short Stories – Spotify
• Tolstoy, Leo – Selected Short Stories – Free Stream/MP3
• Tolstoy, Leo – What Men Live By and Other Tales – Free iTunes
• Tolstoy, Leo – War & Peace Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4, Book 5, Book 6, Book 7, Book 8, Book 9 (Zip Files) – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Tolstoy, Leo – Selected Short Stories – Free Multiple formats
• Wells, Tower – «Leopard» (Read by David Sedaris) – Free MP3 Stream
• Trollope, Anthony – Barchester Towers – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com
• Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Multiple versions here
• Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Spotify version
• Twain, Mark – The Prince and the Pauper – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – Free Stream
• Unknown – Epic of Gilgamesh – Free iTunes
• Unknown – Sir Gawain and the Green Night – Free MP3 Zip File
• Updike, John – «Playing with Dynamite» (read by Roger Angell) – Free MP3
• Updike, John – “A & P.” (read by Allegra Goodman) – Free MP3
• Updike, John – “Twin Beds in Rome” – Free Stream
• Verne, Jules – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Free MP3 Zip File – Free iTunes
• Free eBook available here.
• Verne, Jules – Around the World in 80 Days – Free iTunes – Free MP3s – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Verne, Jules – Mysterious Island – Free iTunes
• Verne, Jules – The Master of the World – Free MP3
• Voltaire – Candide – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Vonnegut, Kurt – 2BR02B – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Vonnegut, Kurt – «Harrison Bergeron» – Free MP3
• Vonnegut, Kurt – The Big Trip Up Yonder – Free MP3
• Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse 5, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House (Abridged readings by Vonnegut) – Spotify
• Vonnegut, Kurt – «The Drone» – Free Stream
• Wallace, David Foster – «Consider the Lobster» (read by DFW) – Free MP3
• Wallace, David Foster – «The View from Mrs. Thompson’s» (read by DFW) – Free MP3
• Welles, Orson – «The Shadow» radio drama (Performed by Welles) – Free MP3
• Wells, HG – The Invisible Man- Free iTunes – Free Stream – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Wells, HG – Magic Shop – Free iTunes
• Wells, HG – Time Machine (narrated by Kelsey Grammer) – Free iTunes
• Wells, HG – Time Machine – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Wells, HG – Time Machine (dramatized version) – Spotify
• Wells, HG – The War of the Worlds – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
• Wells, HG – The War of the Worlds (Famous 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles) – Stream
• Wells, HG – The War of the Worlds (Read by Maxwell Caulfield) – Spotify
• Welty, Eudora – «The Wide Net» (read by the author) – YouTube – Cornell Web Site
• Welty, Eudora – «Where Is the Voice Coming From?» (read by Joyce Carol Oates) – MP3
• Welty, Eudora – «Why I Live at the P.O.» – YouTube
• Wharton, Edith – The Age of Innocence – Free iTunes
• Wharton, Edith – The Fulness of Life – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Wilde, Oscar – The Happy Prince – Free MP3
• Version read by Stephen Fry – YouTube
• Version read by Orson Welles and Bing Crosby – YouTube
• Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest (Performed by John Gielgud) – Free
• Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible.com
• Free eBook available here.
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• Free eBook available here.
• Wolff, Tobias – «Bullet in the Brain» (read by T. Coraghessan Boyle) (MP3)
• Wolff, Tobias – «The Night in Question» (read by Akhil Sharma) (MP3)
• Woolf, Virginia – «A Haunted House» – Free MP3 – Free iTunes
• Woolf, Virginia, – Jacob’s Room – MP3 Zip File
• Woolf, Virginia – «The Legacy» – Free MP3 – Free Stream
• Woolf, Virginia – «The Searchlight» – Free MP3
• Woolf, Virginia – The Voyage Out – Free Stream
• Woolf, Virginia – The Short Stories – Spotify
• Wyss, Johann David – The Swiss Family Robinson – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible.com

Non-Fiction

Audio Book Podcast Sites

• Librivox iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • Librivox should be your first stop when looking for audio books. It’s the biggest and best collection. Then there are the others.
  • Audiobooks with Annie iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • Audio Literature Odyssey iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • A collection of classics. Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, etc.
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    • These poetry podcasts provide readings of the great poems of the past.
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    • The whole point is to make unabridged classics not only available, but approachable.
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    • Podcasts that bring quality crime stories to an audience worldwide. Produced by crime writer Seth Harwood.
  • Escapepod iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • Collections of well-reviewed audio short stories.
  • Great Books – A Chapter a Day iTunesWeb Site
  • Great Speeches in History iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • JC Hutchins iTunes Feed Web Site
    • The author of the 7th Son Trilogy has made available more than 200 hours of audio and video stories and interviews, all of which are available for free download.
  • Kara’s Free AudioBooks iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • Learn OutLoud.com
    • Founding Documents of America iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • Great Speeches in History iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • Philosophy Readings iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • Haverford College – Classic/Ancient Text Read Aloud iTunesWeb Site (see site for feeds)
  • Internet Archive
    • Listen to free audio books and poetry recordings courtesy of the Internet Archive.
  • Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture
  • Lit2Go iTunesWeb Site
    • An extensive collection of free audiobooks provided by the University of Southern Florida.
  • Litterature Audio
    • Over 700 free audio books in French. Here are the most downloaded books.
  • Naropa Poetics Audio Archives
    • Hosts audio recordings of the Beats — Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and more.
  • The Penguin Podcast
    • Excerpts read from books newly published by Penguin UK.
  • Podiobooks
    • Provides podcasts of largely sci-fi books that we’ve never heard of before. But, you never know.
  • Podlit Classic Literature iTunesWeb Site
    • A new classic short story each week.
  • Pseudopod iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • The world’s first audio horror magazine
  • Radioboeken iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • «Radiobooks» are just like books, but they will never be printed. They are created by important Dutch and Flemish writers, and will be available in French, English and Spanish versions in 2007.
  • Scott Sigler’s Audiobooks iTunes – Feed – Web Site
    • Very well reviewed sci-fi horror works
  • Stories to Go iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • Stranger Things iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • This high-quality video podcast features stories of ordinary people stumbling into strange worlds (a la The Twilight Zone).
  • The Classic Tales Podcast iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • The Classic Tales Podcast makes unabridged classics not only available, but approachable. Includes professional performances.
  • The Public Domain Podcast iTunesFeedWeb Site
  • The Time Traveler iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • Explores vintage American fiction. Orson Welles, Philip K. Dick, etc.
  • The Twilight Series
    • Get information here.
  • Utopod iTunes – Feed
    • A free French-language podcast, created by Lucas Moreno and and Marc Tiefenauer, that offers readings of fantasy and sci fi stories written by noted authors across the Francophone world.
  • Well Told Tales iTunesFeedWeb Site
    • Pulp fiction audio tales….!!!

_____________________________________________________________________

source: https://www.openbook.gr/900-free-audio-books/

Also please see our related collection: 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks

The post 900 FREE audio BOOKS Masterpieces – ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΑ 900 ηχητικά Βιβλία αριστουργήματα appeared first on Void Network.

by Andrew Robinson

Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, also known as “Theses on History” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, deals with the question of social transformation. This insightful short work is one of Benjamin’s best-known and most cited works. Of all his works, it develops Benjamin’s messianic ideas most completely.

The theses can be summarised as follows:

Thesis 1: Benjamin suggests that Marxism relates to theology much as an automaton relates to its operator. Despite its illusory determinism, Marxism is really articulating a theological response to capitalism-as-religion (see below).

Thesis 2: Every generation is endowed with a ‘weak messianic power’, because every past generation hoped for redemption or resurrection in the future. Benjamin implies that present revolutions ‘redeem’ or continue past revolutions – there is a line connecting them which is not that of linear time.

Thesis 3: Nothing is completely lost to history, but the past is comprehensible only from the position of redemption.

Thesis 4: The ‘spiritual’ is present in class struggle – even when it is about material things – as the drive towards redemption.

Thesis 5: The truth of the past is visible only as a tentative image which threatens to slip away. This image, presumably, is apparent in the continuity between past and present struggles.

Thesis 6: A revolutionary historian should not focus on ‘how it really was’, but rather, on seizing the image as it flashes by. This means one should seek to rescue ‘tradition’ from a ‘conformism’ which threatens to overwhelm it. The task is to set light to the sparks of hope in the past. On the other hand, the past is not safe from a victorious enemy. Today, images of the past threaten to disappear if the present does not recognise them.

Thesis 7: Current rulers are always the inheritors of the series of victories, and the guilt of past rulers. Every achievement of civilisation or culture is marred with barbarism, with the suffering of the exploited and excluded. The cycle cannot be broken by victory. This claim is based on Benjamin’s discussion of law as fate. The only way to escape such ongoing guilt is to ‘brush history against the grain’. This also means to be in continuity with the defeated of the past.

Thesis 8: The state of emergency is not an exceptional, but a normal situation (this idea is expanded by Agamben). The rise of fascism requires the rejection of an idea of ongoing progress. Instead, revolution is directed against the current direction of history. The claims in theses 7 and 8 are critiques of the Marxian view of the ascension of humanity through progressive historical stages. As Benjamin argues elsewhere (in Central Park), Hell is not something to fear in the future, but is already present. The catastrophe is not around the corner if the system collapses. The catastrophe is the continuation of things as they are.

Thesis 9: Benjamin here analyses Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. This work of modern art is characteristically ambiguous, allowing the viewer to construct meanings from it. Benjamin sees it as depicting the Angel of History, looking back to the past. The Angel sees, not progress, but a growing pile of rubble. The Angel desires to redeem and put back together what is broken. But s/he is unable to do so because of a ‘storm blowing from Paradise’. This storm is what is called ‘progress’. In this analysis, Benjamin suggests a powerful image of history as an accumulation of ruins. He suggests that the power to resist this cumulative worsening is simultaneously ruptural and healing. Elsewhere he metaphorises it as pulling a stop-chord on a runaway train – the present system is a train with broken brakes, speeding towards disaster, and the messianic moment is like a stop-chord. In another passage, history is awakened with a slap born of long-contained frustration, not a kiss.

Thesis 10: Benjamin desires to make the current world and its drives repugnant, and critcises socialist politicians for their attachment to the goods of the present.

Thesis 11: Benjamin offers a critique of social-democracy for the idea of progress. The view of modernisation as progress is taken to ignore the effects of produced commodities on workers. It produces a corrosive conformity to the present, and lays the seeds for fascist technocracy. Here, Benjamin also contrasts the exploitation of nature to the release of its potentialities.

Thesis 12: Revolution avenges past generations. Progressivism reduces it to the salvation of future generations, and thus loses its ‘hate’ and its ‘spirit of sacrifice’ – which it needs.

Thesis 13: The idea of progress is inseparable from the idea of homogeneous empty time.

Thesis 14: The transformation of history does not occur in homogeneous empty time. It occurs in moments of immediacy (jetztzeit). It blasts particular moments of the present and past out of the linear sequence (and presumably the order of fate).

Thesis 15: Revolutions are necessarily experienced as rupturing the continuity of history.

Thesis 16: The present is not a transition between moments. Time originates and reaches a standstill in the experience of the present. Instead of an eternal past depicted as linear, we need a ruptural experience of particular moments which stand out. (This suggests an expressive relationship to temporal experience).

Thesis 17:  The difference between progressivist and truly Marxist theories of history is that the former lists dates whereas the latter constructs time from a structure. The structure is based on the idea of a messianic zero-hour in which thought concentrates into a monad. This messianic moment explodes particular epochs, lives, or works out of linear history.

Thesis 18:  Human existence is itself like a messianic zero-hour in the entire history of Earth.

Addendum A: Past events are given their historical meaning retrospectively, in messianic moments.

Addendum B: Awaiting redemption prevents time from becoming homogeneous and empty.

Analysis of the Theses

The most notable aspect of the theses is that they provide the clearest statement of Benjamin’s non-linear conception of time. Homogeneous empty time is associated specifically with capitalist effects on experiences of time. This is radical in its implications. Most everyday experiences of time are problematised as effects of capitalism. This is confirmed by studies suggesting that non-capitalist social groups experience time differently – as natural cycles rather than interchangeable instants, for example. Benjamin suggests that time would formerly be ‘filled’ by festivals and memorial days, creating connections between moments through time.

Homogeneous empty time is the kind of time measured by clocks and calendars. In homogeneous empty time, every moment of time is equivalent and empty. It is homogeneous because one “day” or “minute” or “hour” is treated as equivalent to any other. It is empty because, on the whole, it lacks special moments which give it meaning (in contrast to cyclical, ritual and biological time). It simply passes, and people fill it with contingent contents.

Homogeneous empty time passes in an eternal present which remains fundamentally the same. The new reproduces the old in a series of structurally similar moments. This experience of time arises from the constant replacement and renewal of commodities. People experience time this way because of its technological and social underpinnings in the capitalist way of life. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin associates homogeneous empty time with boredom.

The critique of homogeneous empty time has inspired authors studying phenomena such as nationalism and capitalism. Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ shows the ways in which national identity, and modern cultural forms such as the novel and newspaper, depend on homogeneous empty time as an underpinning. E.P. Thompson shows how the imposition of homogeneous empty time was crucial to the creation of capitalist work-discipline when the working-class was first formed. Scholars working on global modernity often portray homogeneous empty time rubbing up against other, historically rooted ways of experiencing time.

Benjamin’s theory also resonates with Marx’s discussions of the importance of labour-time in commodity-production. Labour and commodities are only exchangeable because they can be treated as equivalent – and they can only be treated as equivalent because units of time are treated as identical. Commodity fetishism depends on homogeneous empty time. Homogeneous empty time is also associated with the closed world of fate and guilt.

Benjamin goes further than simply criticising capitalist forms of time. He suggests that excluded groups and revolutionaries can access another way of experiencing time, even in capitalist contexts. He suggests that the ‘messianic’ moment exists as a form of time.

This other kind of ‘messianic’ time is associated with the experience of immediacy, and the creation of non-linear connections with particular, past or future points. The present revolt is connected in spirit to past revolts. The present generation of activists is always potentially the messiah which past revolutionary movements were waiting for. If our own resistance ‘fails’ in the present, it may nevertheless be redeemed by some future movement, and is not in vain – unless the system wins so absolutely that the past is also ‘lost’.

Some similarities and differences can be listed as follows:

Homogeneous empty time is quantitative; messianic time is qualitative.

Homogeneous empty time is a continuous flow; messianic time is fully immediate.

Homogeneous empty time is experienced as anaesthetising, desensitising and meaningless. Messianic time is experienced as emotionally intense, like a drug high. It is filled or fulfilled.

Homogeneous empty time is continuous; messianic time is ruptural.

Homogeneous empty time is meaningless (empty); messianic time is the time of a ‘specific recognisability’ – it means something specific to those who experience it.

This view of time also suggests the possibility of ‘newness’ in history. The moment of messianic rupture – redemption or revolution – is also a moment when past debts and complicities are cancelled-out. This should be cross-read with the idea of law-destroying violence. By destroying the ability to enforce hierarchical exclusions and binaries, law-destroying violence ends the reign of fate. As expressive violence, law-destroying violence is ‘non-violent’, destroying the possibility of instrumental violence and therefore the ongoing complicities in past oppressions. This possibility is more radical than those considered by most poststructuralists.

In Esther Leslie’s reading, Benjamin sees messianic time filling the place left empty by capitalism. Capitalism sucks memory out of everyday life, leaving a space which messianic time can enter. Similarly, Gibbs argues hat messianic time unsticks the present from its seemingly necessary future. Instead, it establishes continuities with other, subterranean histories.

The revolutionary presence of now-time – jetztzeit – blasts open the linear continuum of history. In German, Benjamin contrasts jetztzeit or jetztsein – the present as ‘now’, as immediate – with erlebnis – the present experienced as if already past, as a moment in a process. This idea of immediacy is similar to that of Hakim Bey, and to accounts of the immanence of activist subjectivity, such as Peterson’s.

A revolutionary moment is a moment when messianic time enters and explodes homogeneous empty time. In such a moment, the whole of time is experienced as a monad. It is as if all life is reconciled and compressed into a single moment. The implication is that every singularity is brought into the new future, but minus the existing relations among different things. This moment is accessed through the dialectical image or profane illumination. ‘Truth’, in an expressive sense, appears in such moments. It causes things to leap out of their context.

The messianic moment also ruptures things from their particular locations in an order of things. Objects, ruins, ideas and language become rearticulable, or can be ‘redeemed’ (something Benjamin also relates to allegories, collecting, and non-standard uses). An old factory is ‘redeemed’ as a squat, a commodity is ‘redeemed’ as meaningful to a collector, a word is ‘redeemed’ by being used allegorically. A date such as Mayday, or November 17th in Greece, can capture a range of historical precedents and ‘redeem’ them in present revolt, ignoring the time-lapses inbetween.

The potential of allegory and montage is to seize upon the fragments of an experience which is already fragmenting, so as to create recognition or insight; the potential of collection is to rearrange objects in an esoteric world of their own. This removes the taint which the system (as order of things) otherwise places on objects, language and so on. Hence Benjamin is suggesting the possibility of a non-binarised, open-ended relationship to the world which occurs through praxis. This corresponds to the desire of the Angel of History to put back together the ruins left behind by history.

In writing, this “putting back together” occurs through the arrangement of references. For Benjamin, all texts are actually composites of different citations, or intertextual references. Every text is like a montage. In One-Way Street, Benjamin describes quotations in his work as akin to robbers, who leap out and rob the reader of her/his convictions.

In the article ‘Unpacking my Library’, Benjamin discusses the relationship of a collector to objects which are collected. Crucially, collecting is about liberating objects from their status as commodities or as instrumental objects for use. Instead, the collector places objects in a kind of magical arrangement. Collecting is thus a way of renewing the world. An object acquired for the collection is ‘reborn’ into it. The collector feels responsible towards the objects, rather than the reverse. Further, the collector comes to life in the objects. A collection exists between order (the arrangement of objects) and disorder (the passion for collecting). It is a passionate phenomenon. Collecting creates a mood of anticipation, and always carry memories from the moments of acquisition.

In One-Way Street, Benjamin re-enchants stamp-collecting via the idea of the postmark marking the face with weals or cleaving a continent like an earthquake. The collection of stamps can inventory places and dates in magical ways, and capture part of the power of great states.

In language, redemption occurs by way of allegory, or symbolic representation. Allegory overfills the present by filling it with a flash from the past. Allegories are akin to ruins. They are what is left when meaning or life is lost. It provides a vision of time and history which shows them in ruins. It also has a power to make anything mean anything else. Through allegory, the present is reconstituted as ‘expected’ – as the messianic moment which redeems the past. The way to make past phenomena present is to resituate them in the present space, connecting them to the present as a constellation.

In discussions of the poet Baudelaire, Benjamin celebrates the power of allegory. Allegory, according to Benjamin, stems from the gaze of an alienated viewer. It arises from flânerie. The  flâneur stands at the margins of the bourgeois city. Intellectuals in particular were drawn into this stance by the precarity and uncertainty of their social position, creating the phenomenon known as ‘Bohemia’. Pre-Marxist revolutionary conspiracies emerged from the ‘rebellious pathos’ of this group, its ‘asocial’ stance. But  flânerie is recuperated in the form of the department store. It was the means whereby intellectuals were ultimately brought into the market.

In the seventeenth century, allegory was the usual basis for the dialectical image – in this case, the perception of alienation. In the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire was writing, it was nouveauté(novelty). Nonconformists opposed the commercialisation of art and called for ‘art for art’s sake’ (perhaps seeking to preserve the aura of art). Benjamin sees this as a step backwards. The nonconformist as much as the commodifier ignored social phenomena. Ultimately, this view of art leads to epic delusions. Benjamin later connects this approach with the rise of fascism.

In relation to qabalah, Benjamin shares the idea that messianism can only be experienced outside the existing world. It requires us to turn away from the affairs of the world, as in a monastic withdrawal. But Benjamin’s withdrawal is more active. He is calling for the messianic moment to be experienced and used to transform the world.

Revolution is thus a kind of transubstantiation. A substance of one kind – commodities, homogeneous empty time, ordinary language – is transformed into another. It is the end of homogeneous empty time and of commodity fetishism.

It is also called ‘discovering the new anew’. Capitalism always presents us with the new, but the capitalist new is a return of the same. The new discovered anew is the possibility of radical novelty which is not a return of the same.

However, Benjamin is inconsistent regarding the extent to which messianism is realisable. In the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, Benjamin argues that the messianic moment consummates history, and is therefore necessarily incommensurable with it. The historical world therefore cannot be built on a divine or messianic model. It should be built on a model of happiness instead. This pursuit of happiness both contradicts and assists the messianic moment. Messianism is also the passing-away of the world. How can this be reconciled with the revolutionary role of messianism? It is possible that Benjamin saw messianism as a means of rupture between two ‘historical’ worlds, or that he simply changed his mind. I wonder, however, if the issue has more to do with how messianism can be used – in particular, an insistence that it must be lived in immediacy, and that politicians must not claim ‘divine’ authority for themselves.

The idea of ‘redemption’ in Benjamin’s work stems from his theory of messianism. Objects are redeemed by being used in alternative ways, distinct from their usual connections, and especially their exchange-values and their sign-values (e.g. as fashionable). This might be termed a bricolage or deconstruction of objects. Many examples can be found in the practices of squatters and other activists, in terms of the DIY reconstruction of everyday objects for new purposes – old stereos rescued from the roadside and reconfigured, scrap materials used in artworks and so on. One might think of this in terms of a ‘just in case’ rather than ‘just in time’ approach to objects, resonant with local knowledge and resilience rather than commodity systems.

Language is similarly transformed through allegory and translation. Technology also contains such potentials, revealed by children’s playful associations, designers’ fantasies and so on. Traditions of literature and theory can also be renewed through creative applications which are not confined to repetition.

Another important insight is the view that Hell or disaster is now. The theme of impending disaster is important both to reactionaries (the pending Hobbesian chaos if the system collapses) and to many progressives. Yet modernity already provides impending and ongoing disasters. Benjamin has in mind fascism and the First World War. Today we could also include nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, deaths due to capitalist enclosure in the South, the atrocities committed in the ‘war on terror’ and in many small wars worldwide, and maybe even 9/11.

It is common for such disasters to be portrayed as a violent eruption of an ‘outside’, which breaks into the otherwise peaceful development of (white, Northern) humanity. Benjamin reverses perspective, seeing such events as the Hell of the present. Benjamin seems to be seeing the ‘present’ in process here, so future disasters (World War 2 for Benjamin; today, such dangers as climate change, global war and increasingly dystopian regimes of social control) are extensions of the present, not threats to it. To stop these effects of the dominant system, it is necessary to put the brakes on it. Hope appears, not in what history brings, but in what arises in its ruins.

Benjamin here rejects the idea of progress as the extension or defence of elements of the existing situation. Instead, the messianic moment – Benjamin’s substitute for progress – is a radical interruption of the present. The messianic moment is in a sense radically exterior to the history it interrupts.

The idea of a permanent state of emergency is connected to this sense of ongoing disaster. Benjamin extends and criticises Carl Schmitt’s view, in which the state of emergency is the way the state (or ‘sovereign’) maintains its power in a context of contingency. Benjamin uses the idea of emergency to criticise, rather than reinforce, the social order.

There are both everyday and eruptive aspects to the implications of Benjamin’s critique. On an everyday level, Benjamin’s approach points towards activist practices of reappropriation of spaces and objects – squatting, DIY, bike repair, guerrilla gardening, home construction for projects such as pirate radio, and so on. He also implicitly endorses ‘subvertisement’, parody and other such symbolic means of disrupting established connections.

But he also seems to be calling for a moment of decisive rupture – a total insurrection, a Sorelian general strike, or a general movement of exodus. It is unclear how these two aspects of his project fit together. I would suggest that the messianic moment can occur firstly as an individual or small-group realisation, but that it can “redeem” the world only if it expands its scope.

Capitalism as Religion

The Theses on History provide a theological response to capitalism, because for Benjamin, capitalism is religious in nature.  In ‘Capitalism as Religion’, Benjamin argues that capitalism did not simply stem from Protestantism (as Weber argued), but is a religion in its own right. It developed parasitically by attaching itself to Christianity. Firstly, it reduces all of existence to its own standards of value. Secondly, it colonises all of time with this regime of value, as if every day were a day of worship. Thirdly, it is a cult based on guilt and blame (not repentance). It declares everyone to be guilty. It is a ‘cultic’ religion, of ritual practices, without ‘dogma’ or religious doctrine. Objects such as banknotes carry religious symbolism. It is an unusual religion because it offers not transformation but the destruction of existence. It flourishes on anxiety or ‘worries’, which ‘index the guilty conscience of hopelessness’.

Benjamin criticises Nietzsche and Freud for accepting what he takes to be aspects of the capitalist religion – Nietzsche because of the absence of a transubstantiation or messianic moment, Freud for reproducing capitalism in the unconscious. A rather literal activist equivalent of this reading of capitalism is offered by the performance activist Reverend Billy, who parodies traditional religious practices as means to protest against consumerism.

source: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/

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κύκλος 3ος
Πέμπτη 1 Φεβρουαρίου 2018 8.00μμ

Επανάσταση και Ουτοπία, οι συνδηλώσεις ενός Ρομαντικού Πεπρωμένου.
Ομιλητής:
Στέφανος Ροζάνης (Καθηγητής Φιλοσοφίας, συγγραφέας)

Ελεύθερος Κοινωνικός Χώρος ΝOSOTROS
Θεμιστοκλέους 66 Εξάρχεια

Παρουσίαση-συντονισμός συζήτησης
Γιάννης Ραουζαιος (Κριτικός κινηματογράφου, συγγραφέας, μέλος της συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο)

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