°Catastrophe, Apostrophe
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” - Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.
Or, as mentioned elsewhere: Capitalism is the catastrophe. Matt asks, in the middle of a couple of posts worth reading, “What will it take for the African-American to recognize the Marrano, the Muslim, the Arab in herself? Perhaps a flood?” Alphonse has been posing similar questions.
Benjamin goes on to write:
The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
That the trauma consists, for so many in the “This couldn’t be happening here or now, here and now, in this place” is the problem. The question, then - aside from the confrontation with notions of Progress and its geopolitical divisions - is whether the “we” in the above fragment is shared. Not sharing conceived as a communion, in which the dead are revived (sacrificed one more time) for the sake of community. “Even the dead are not safe from the enemy if he wins”, wrote Benjamin. Rebecca Comay says of this, “To give voice to the voiceless is thus to redouble silence by submerging dissonance within the infinite tautology of a subject hearing-itself-speak. The dead are thus killed off again in being reanimated, re-silenced in being ventriloquized, reified in the very act of anthromorphisation by which the humanistic tradition (’family of man’) constitutes itself as a continuous ‘chain’ or whole.” For “family of man” one can, of course, substitute the nation-as-family, which is in any case much the same thing.
Nor sharing as the restoration of loss or as compensation, for which there would have to be a measure that, itself, would remain indifferent to difference. A calculus which works through Halliburton no more than certain notions of justice. Nor sharing as identity. Each of these forms of ’sharing’ renounce - or simply digest - finitude and difference.
So, then, sharing without presupposition and always posed as a question of one’s relation toward finitude, difference and alterity - each time. Because, as Levinas says somewhere, “Death is the death of other people”. If one only responds to catastrophe if it can be apostrophised as one’s own personal catastrophe, then it will always succumb to the response-management systems of sovereignty and its exceptions - just think about the work that the stories of gangs of child-raping young black men has done to alibi the state of emergency in Louisiana. Death is the death of other people. What’s at stake is how one responds to the other, others.
