°Gewalt redux
Something to add to the readings of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Gewalt’: Alexander Karschnia’s “Down by Law - A Critique for the 21st Century”:
It’s irritating that while Agamben bases his whole work on his interpretation of the Shoah, the other contemporary Italian philosopher who influences contemporary global political discourse, Antonio Negri, seems not to pay any attention to it at all. While Agamben draws on the dreadful consequences of bio-politics, Negri bases all his hopes on them. Both thinkers form a Janus-like head, a manic-depressive philosophy of liberation that Derrida would have referred to as different phases of political Trauerarbeit (’labour of mourning’). While Negri/Hardt set the constitutive forces prior to the constituted forces, Agamben insists on the Schmittian paradox of power. Now, after having argued pro-Benjamin contra-Derrida and pro-Derrida contra-Agamben, let’s not continue pro-Agamben contra-Negri, but instead look for a common ground. This ground has been prepared by Benjamin. The Italian language provides us with an understanding of his politics: potenza. It translates as ‘power’, but also encompasses ‘potentiality’, the possible. The strongest argument against any politics of ‘bare acts’ that tend to end in barbarian acts could be condensed to an affirmation of ‘means without ends’, as constituting moments of a state of being located vis-à-vis (in)decisiveness, poised between action and mere potentiality; a gesture, a remaining rest which does not realise itself in any act.
This is our only hope. The only hope that ‘another world is possible’ is based on our recognition of the fact that peace is possible, because peace embodies possibility. Peace is Possible = Peace as the Possible = the Possible as Peace. What is common to all these fragments of potenza is the possible: the ‘ability, communicability: the Mittelbarkeit. It is possible only within a multitude.
We are also ghosts - millions of them. Our struggle shouldn’t be based on life or death, but on Benjamin’s idea of Glück, meaning ‘luck’ and also implying the pursuit of happiness. This shall be the direction for a new world politics, Benjamin said at the end of his last text, his testament, whose method might be called ‘nihilism’. The force that brings about change works in two ways: it never goes directly towards salvation - towards ‘God’s Empire’ - but like recoil also works the other way - towards profane joy. This might be the direction for a radical secular jihad, the oldest hedonist imperative and most trite advertisement: ‘Enjoy your Life!’ Against any politics of sacrifice, situate a politics of joy: Lucky strike! Remember that peace is a twofold word, pointing not only to the opposite of war, but also to an idea of eternity: ‘eternal peace’. Get ready, it can happen any second - but by pure means only.
The full text is in the most recent Sarai Reader, here as pdf.
Though, doesn’t this seem strangely close to Agamben’s discussion of ‘passive politics’, as well as ‘the happy life’? Also perhaps tending toward discussions of Althusser’s aleatory materialism, or more specifically: chance, virtue, fortuna.
