archive : s0metim3s

Yes, spoilers - if you’ve not watched ‘The Hub’, rewind. Or throw caution to the wind. **[Spoilers for episodes 9 and 10, season 4]**

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

Three texts - as is obvious, written at the same time (August-September 2007), and which unwrap as an onion might: “Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony” (in the new Sarai Reader: Frontiers as a pdf, though there’s also a hardcopy of the edition); “The Failure of Political Theology” (a review of Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and Forrest Hylton’s, Evil Hour in Colombia) at metamute; and “The Materialisation of Race in Multiculture”, in darkmatter’s new edition, Race/Matter. The last of these is the most pithy, but they neverthless form something of a trilogy, written as they were under the shock of the Intervention.

[Pocket’s remix of Kristin Hersh’s Slippershell, just because I’m enjoying that combination of squishynote earcandy and guitar/voice earbleed right now. It’s a compelling mix. Northsea’s remix is kind of ok, but doesn’t push it, really. And the flakeout remix is, well, a soporific.]

I await the Second Coming, amidst the state of emergency. It looks a lot like an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Really. Update: Very much like that episode, as it turns out.

Erik M. Vogt, in “Schmittian Traces in Žižek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters)” (diacritics 36.1), writes:

the (Christian) miracle of incarnation functions, for Žižek, as the elementary matrix for the act out of which a politics of true universality is to be generated. However, does the mutilated body of Christ really suffice as a bearer for a universalist position of defense against globalized cyberspace, against the mediatization of the miracle? As far as I can tell, Žižek never considers the possibility and actual ubiquity of a mediatized incarnation. Could it be because this would require the admission of “a certain artificiality and technicity, rendering the miracle as what de Vries calls “special effect” [“In Media Res” 25]? And if one grants the possibility of this interface between Christianity on the one hand, and the medium and mediatic on the other hand, would one not have to reposition Christianity — no longer along the lines of a politicizing logic of universality, but rather along the lines of a depoliticizing logic of globalization or “globalatinization,” that is, in terms of a “strange treaty between Christianity as experience of the death of god and the tele-techno-scientific capitalism”?

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.

A redux of Hamacher’s “Guilt History - Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” (and the graphic I used last time), apropos recent debates. (I won’t blockquote it though, because it’s long and easier to read without doing so.) Trans. Kirk Wetters, Diacritics 32:3-4 (2002).