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So, a symposium on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” over at Long Sunday next week - or after Thanksgiving, for all you pilgrims. It promises to be both a challenge and a delight, given the rest of the participants. Craig has been kind enough to put a copy of “Critique of Violence” up on Theoria.

Passagen (left) was built near the site of Benjamin’s suicide in 1940, in Portbou, the border between France and Spain. As is well known, the border was closed, Hitler and Stalin had just signed their infamous pact, and Benjamin took his own life. Just as well known, is that the border was opened the day after, with some suggestion that Benjamin’s suicide prompted a reconsideration by the border guards. In so many ways, Benjamin’s writings and his death cannot be relegated to the past, as if progress has obtained, or indeed should have been expected, and as if the writings no longer speak to ‘us’, in every sense in which that little word - us - might be turned over.

Since I’m going to be netcaffing it in another city for most of the time between now and the LS discussion, some backtracking to previous posts on or around Benjamin here and here. And an excerpt from something I baked earlier, from a review of Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, as I gather my thoughts to re-read “Critique of Violence”, and rethink earlier approaches:

[…] What “survives into the present”—the condition of making sense of Caliban and the Witch—is, I would argue, that experience which renders the present time, ‘our time’, as the state of a seemingly permanent but, significantly, global civil war. That is to say: the mobility of the threshold—or, as some have argued, the indistinction—between violence and habituation that the concept of ‘the transition’ sought to delineate. In short: a state of emergency. Of his experience of the state of emergency, Benjamin argued that the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ’still’ possible […] is not philosophical.” For Benjamin, thought—which is to say the possibility of thinking about the state of emergency that he confronted in 1940—is immobilised by the idea of history as an inexorable and “triumphal progression”. “This amazement”, he wrote, “is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable” (1992:249). So that thought might escape the apocalypse that Benjamin himself attempted to flee, the thought of history as a line of development must be relinquished. For Benjamin, that flight was tragically halted by border guards and, perhaps one should add, his own understandably desperate yet untimely resignation.

The importance of Benjamin’s argument and experience is not simply his critique of a destinal conviction that, confronted with the terror of the state of emergency, was only capable of evincing stupefaction or acquiescence. Nor is it crucial to point out Benjamin’s idealism, which is more than apparent. What needs to be emphasised here is the phrase “we are experiencing”. A question, then, of sense—in every way it is possible to understand this word and beyond any separation between thought and matter. In that simple phrase rests the key to understanding how it becomes possible to characterise the current time, ‘our time’, as that of a global civil war—and how, in doing so, it might be possible to reconsider an exodus from it that is something other than the reterritorialising consolation of the ‘exit strategy’ for some. […]

[To add a bit of administrivia: blogsome has installed a new spamkiller which seems to be working overtime. ]