°Precor
What would it mean to explore precariousness without seeking to resolve its tensions, to regard it as the space of experimentation whose significance is reducible neither to a catastrophe brought down from some transcendental realm nor the destruction of a prior commonplace considered to be the premise of antagonism as such? Both of these approaches, in understanding precariousness as the unconditioned consequence of a capitalist strategy for decomposing an identity that was neither universal nor indisputably (or effectively) antagonistic, constrain politics to the eliciting of a victimised, at times emasculated, subject. Here, capital assumes a god-like demeanour; and it is not surprising that politics becomes ever-more theological, as the prayer that the state might deliver us from its own contingencies through a codification of rights or in the recourse to an explicitly Christian figuration of Lenin.
:: trackback url | permanent link |
Interesting then the etymological intersection of ‘precarity’ with ‘prayer’ (according to the OED ‘prayer’ comes from ‘precaria’) - something I’ve been thinking about lately in terms of how activism operates as an entreaty or petition (generally always addressed to the state or similar sovereign) … a train of thought I imagine you to have followed too!
ana-konda [January 31, 2008 @ 3:02 am]
Ah, yes, here some time ago. And returning to it for this bit of rethinking, the above post being a rather too-dense first paragraph of.
Precor, precari, etc. The connection to precariousness, as we tend to use it in relation to work and suchlike, is not without significance. One prays so that life, which is supposedly subject to God’s whims, might be better. And nor is the connection between activism and prayer so tenuous either, since activism is more like work than many are prepared to admit. Some earlier musings on activism here.
s0metim3s [January 31, 2008 @ 3:11 am]
Yes. Great. Thanks :)
In that final piece you link to, you talk about contemplation and solitude as spaces of dis-connection from activism. This could be quite a prayerful state, if it were de-ontologized/de-theologized …?
ana-konda [February 1, 2008 @ 3:15 am]
Ana, can you explain what you mean by a prayerful state?
s0metim3s [February 1, 2008 @ 12:16 pm]
I’m thinking about how, in Judaeo-Christian mysticism (and other traditions as well I’m sure, but this is the only one I’m really familiar with), prayer is linked to contemplation and solitude: they happen in the same space. So the prayerful state in that scene is also one of contemplation and solitude.
I was wondering whether a reconceptualization of prayer could be useful in theorizing activism. To critique its address to the sovereign, but also to remind of the ‘value’ in disconnection. If it is worthwhile to disconnect in the sense you offer, if that is done in solitude and it is a space of contemplation, one could call that prayer: a practice of disconnection, formed in precarity, that is still petitioning for something different than the world of the present (though not necessarily something un-precarious). Like Derrida’s conception of messianic time without a messiah.
But now that I think about it, perhaps all I am trying to do there is make that disconnecting into a form of work, i.e. prayer!
ana-konda [February 3, 2008 @ 9:01 am]
I think I get where you’re heading. Not sure if I mentioned it in the previous, related post but my own inclination is to explore these questions through Agamben’s remark about ‘playing with the law as if it is a toy’. Mostly because of the nexus here, for me, between law (norm) and work.
I don’t think I would try and go the path of prayer for this, and I mentioned contemplation in the piece on activism because it is so often posited, by activists, as what non-activism amounts to (wrongly, I think), and by Arendt as that which is not ‘public’.
Anyway, I don’t know how to invoke prayer without supposing a transcendental realm to which one prays. Which is to say, I was thinking more along the lines of submission as a form of play.
I’m not sure if, by the end of writing, that’s precisely what I’ll do. But for the moment that’s what I’ve been turning around.
s0metim3s [February 3, 2008 @ 1:41 pm]