Getting Ready for the RPA: On Agamben and Benjamin

I'll admit that I didn't write much for The Notes Taken over the month of October. Instead, most of my time, outside of teaching, that I would spend writing was consumed by preparing job applications and preparing my paper for the upcoming Radical Philosophy Association meeting at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Take a good look at the schedule (PDF), and you will see that our own Sean Moreland is giving a talk on "Visceral Re:Visions: Genre and the Syntax of Violence in Haneke's Funny Games and Laugier's Martyrs" (Friday's 2:00-3:30pm session) our friend Mark Raymond Brown will be presenting on "A Remedy for Violence: The Necessity of Healthcare Reform in the US" which I swear has something to do with Sartre (during Saturday's 10:30am-12:00pm session), and I will be giving a paper on Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and the critique of violence (during Saturday's 2:00-3:30pm session). At the moment the paper doesn't have a title (I've changed it several times), but I'm leaning toward "Anomic Violence: Toward a Benjaminian Critique of Agamben."

I read a less organized draft of my paper at the end of October at CSU Stanislaus. While it must have been confusing for the audience, as I jumped from Fredric Jameson to Agamben to Georges Sorel to Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," many of their questions helped me clarify why exactly (1) I was interested in this early essay of Benjamin's, and (2) why I need to cut the long sections on sovereignty and the state of exception out of the paper. 

Let's start with (2): Agamben is best known for returning sovereignty to the forefront of political thought. I know, because the first article I managed to publish applied Agamben's critique of the state of exception to the war on terror and its localization in Guantanamo Bay. I started writing the paper in early 2003 and it finally saw the light of day as "The Absence of Evidence is Not the Evidence of Absence: Biopolitics and the State of Exception" in Philosophy Against Empire, Today, Vol. 4, edited by Tony Smith and Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006). Since then I've found that Agamben's critique brings with it a large amount of philosophical "history of metaphysics" baggage that he inherited from Heidegger, not to mention his extensive use of Schmitt. Back in 2006, the last few pages of the article dealt with the absence of the concept of event or the act as a moment of subjectification in Homo Sacer. But I found I needed to say more about what I found so off-putting.

To get the current paper down to a manageable size, I've cut all the exegetical talk about sovereignty and assumed that my audience will be familiar with it. The exegetical discussions were adding too much weight to the presentation. All you get now is my central problem with Homo Sacer: Agamben accepts from Schmitt that the sovereign has a monopoly on the capacity to decide and the capacity for violence. This is important because Agamben's State of Exception rejects the sovereign monopoly on violence (there are passages in HS that hint at this, but Agamben doesn't pursue the consequences); the whole of the 'gigantomachy concerning a void' that he stages between Schmitt and Benjamin turns on the possibility of anomic violence, or, since violence is a cipher for human action, praxis (and subjectification) with no relation to law.

Which leads to (1): the task is now to show how Benjamin's concept of divine violence is one of the many figures he proposes for anomic praxis. Unlike Agamben, I think this kind of praxis and subjectification leads through Benjamin's work on aesthetics, as well as some of his theological debates with Gershom Scholem (which are really just debates about aesthetics and politics anyway).

Thus I've found my way back to something like the framework of my Schelling book, when I didn't really expect to: investigating how artistic production is presented as an alternative to law (which for Schelling was Kant's and Fichte's categorical imperatives) as a model for free human praxis. With Benjamin, the problem will be very different, given that his work on aesthetics is so closely connected to anarcho-syndicalist  (Sorel again!) and Marxian politics, although for the moment, it sets the course for how I will be approaching his work in the future (although Marx's critique of 'creativity' as found in the "Critique of the Gotha Program" hangs over part of this investigation).

And here we all thought I was joking when on my profile I wrote that I am "working on a book about the convergences and divergences of history, politics, and art in the work of Walter Benjamin, which is a loose sequel to Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art."

Talk, Talk, Talk at CSU Stanislaus

One of the new features of the Fall semester at the University of Ottawa is what is called the Fall 'study week,' a week off from October 24th to October 30th (those are the official dates; you'll see that they don't exactly line up with weekdays). We (my wife and I) originally planned the trip to visit family and friends out in California, but I've also arranged to give a talk, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, on "Benjamin, Sorel, and the Critique of Violence." It will be an early draft of a paper that I will be giving a few weeks later at the RPA conference on violence in Eugene; some of my thoughts on the lesser known Sorel are already posted here.

For those who know me, I did my last two years of undergraduate work at CSUS. I suppose that makes it a homecoming of sorts. It's also the first time I will have given a paper in the Central Valley, which means some of my old friends who are academically inclined and interested in what I have been researching, and who still live in the area, will have a chance to see some of that research in progress.

When I have a time and room number, I will post them. Here's the information thus far:

"Benjamin, Sorel, and the Critique of Violence"

Devin Zane Shaw

October 29, 2010, California State University Stanislaus 

Saramago Dies

José Saramago: writer, communist, iconoclast.  Also a Nobel Prize laureate and, more recently, a blogger. The Guardian UK reports that Saramago died today at age 87.

Saramago is, for somebody like myself who is merely a reader of his work, difficult to eulogize or to mourn. 

For so many of his characters, and even the narrator, who ever so often directly addresses the reader to offer criticisms and reassurances, live out their stories either in anonymity or trapped by antonomasia, becoming only the doctor's wife, the interior minister, the boy, etc. Saramago, at least as a literary persona, tried to disappear behind these other voices. In his Nobel Lecture, he states:

I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink, those people I believed I was guiding as I the narrator chose according to my whim, obedient to my will as an author, like articulated puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the burden and the tension of the strings I moved them with.

In reflecting on his own writing, Saramago drew the conclusion he learned something from each story. Certainly a consoling statement in abstraction, but what he learned is hardly the kind of self-congratulatory humanism that is today's ideological currency. Saramago always found the reverse; every traditional sacred object was, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, much more a document of barbarism than a document of culture. And like Benjamin, the task was to see this egalitarian-- here, communistic and iconoclastic-- insight through to its conclusions, which were most aptly realized in his novels Blindness and, in my opinion, the much stronger 'sequel' Seeing.

Hence it's hard to mourn and to eulogize a writer, who, in Death with Interruptions, had twisted the idea of personal immortality around into a burden. The book opens when, in an unnamed country, people stop dying on midnight of New Year's Day, a change that is initially celebrated by its citizens, but quickly deteriorates into calamity. Far from Paradise, immortality proves to be undignified as daily life becomes haunted by the near-dead, for, certainly, the absence of death does not stop aging or accidental casualty.Very quickly people begin to look for ways to let people die, until, one day, months later, death returns.

Perhaps it's inappropriate to draw a conclusion about Saramago from one of his novels, but it seems to me that he would have recognized that death, as he notes in his Nobel Lecture, is "a pity," but the alternative is worse. At best, the writer has the chance to document the barbarism endured by so many, to capture the "human dignity [that] is insulted every day by the powerful of our world." At best one can be an echo of some of these voices of protest and affirmation, voices that bear witness to the fact that one of the fallen ought to be mourned, and yet there's still a world to be won. Perhaps here it is possible to conclude. Saramago, comrade, writer, iconoclast:

I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don't have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.

Historical Opportunity: Marx, Heidegger, Benjamin

Two of our contributors will be participating in a round-table at the Canadian Philosophical Association's annual meeting next week. Matt McLennan, Devin Zane Shaw, and their colleague David Tkach (also completing his PhD at the University of Ottawa) will be discussing "Historical Opportunity" in the works of Marx and Marxism, Heidegger, and Benjamin. We've included a partially updated version of their panel description below (the original is here in PDF format):

The collapse of Communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to have offered a stark choice between two competing philosophies of history. On the one hand, grand narratives of progress and emancipation were claimed to have definitively foundered, leaving in their wake a plurality of individual viewpoints and social micro-histories (Lyotard). The collapse of Communism was also read in precisely the opposite way, as heralding the triumph of a grand narrative of historical progress, specifically that of liberal democracy (Fukuyama).

McLennan, Tkach and Shaw begin from the intuition that each option, starkly posed, misses something vital: a proper assessment of the concept of historical opportunity. Events since the collapse of Communism (the rise of religious fundamentalisms, the current crisis of capitalism) fuel the suspicion that we have neither reached the end of the era of grand narratives, nor properly accounted for the power of competing micro-histories. For theoretical and practical reasons, the present historical conjuncture renders a critical re-visitation of the “happy 90s” of utmost importance.

Matthew McLennan

Presenting a grand narrative of historical progress alongside an emphatic insistence on the importance of human agency, the works of Marx contain fascinating material for the philosopher of history. The seeming tension between determinism and freedom at the heart of his work has led to widely divergent interpretations of Marx, from the more or less deterministic, evolutionary historical picture of German Social Democracy and the Second International, to the voluntarism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Guevara. McLennan begins the proposed roundtable by arguing that Marx‟s philosophy of history is not only consistent, to the extent that the tension between determinism and freedom is only apparent, but also that it better lends itself to interpretations tending towards voluntarism. More specifically, after showing to what extent Marx was able to square his notion of the end of history with his emphasis on human agency, McLennan offers an argument that the Leninist notion of historical intervention, of “hitting upon the right moment”, was a more faithful application of Marx in its day than was that of the evolutionist faction of German Social Democracy and the Second International; this will set the stage for Shaw and Tkach‟s contributions by suggesting that Germany missed its opportunity to grasp the concept of historical opportunity, at least in the way Marx intended. Finally, tentative reflections will be offered with regard to the question of how such an interpretation of Marx might figure in an approach the present historical conjuncture.

Update: Matt adds a more recent abstract:

Matt McLennan surveys the development of Marxist philosophies of history, providing a schematic interpretation. Weighing in on where he thinks the emphasis of a properly Marxian philosophy should lie with respect to the question of historical opportunity (i.e. the "right moment" for revolutionary or militant activity) as well as that of eschatology or "the end of history", he argues that the most important advances in recent Marxism come from David Harvey. The notion of historical opportunity is enriched via Harvey to include a necessary spatio-geograpihical dimension; essentially, historical opportunity is interpreted as meaning that there is a "right space-time" for revolution.

 David Tkach

David Tkach's paper is a close reading of several sections of Heidegger's Being and Time, conducted in order to outline the problem of 'historical opportunity' in relation to the understanding of political action derivable from that work. In light of the book's three interrelated concepts of historicity, freedom, and the eschatological understanding of death in relation to Heidegger's understanding of a people [ein Volk], the result for the purposes of the round table is ultimately to call into question any possibility of political action that is directed toward a better situation for everyone. Thus, in contradistinction to certain attempts to rehabilitate aspects of Heidegger's book for ostensibly 'progressive' political purposes, Tkach concludes that it is at least problematic, not to say impossible, to do so.

Devin Zane Shaw

Shaw argues that class struggle is central to Walter Benjamin's concept of history. It is Benjamin's solidarity with the oppressed class that drives his critique of progress, and that orients his discussion of the legibility of dialectical images. It is only when an image is recognized as an image of emancipation that the history of its transmission becomes legible. Thus history is not the site of realizing Progress (Soviet Marxism), nor is it the site of a recovery of a past or heritage that has been covered over by an inauthentic understanding of history (Heidegger). History can only be written by blasting the events of the past out of the continuum of linear (or as Benjamin states, "empty, homogenous") historical time. Only then is it possible to clearly evaluate the documents of culture as both redemptive and barbaric.

BE prepared to get up bright and early; the panel is on Tueday, June 1st, from 9:00 ­ 12:30 in MB ­ S2-455 -- which we hear is the John Molson School of Business building.

In addition, Devin will present a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, on Wednesday, June 2nd, from 3:40-4:50pm at EV 2-204. He will be presenting:

"Cartesian Reversals: Badiou and Heidegger on Mathematics and Modernity"

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy, ontology (or onto-theology) and mathematics an in the work of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. Despite Badiou's praise for Heidegger's 'subtraction' of truth from the domain of epistemology, he attacks Heidegger's equation of mathematics with the essence of modern technology. Against Heidegger, Badiou shows that mathematics thinks ontology, because it must decide on what is. He does this by drawing the philosophical consequences of the continuum hypothesis. I argue that these consequences undermine Heidegger's connection between poeisis and ontology and his claims about the essence of technology. If mathematics is a thought, it cannot be essentially a projection of calculation into being or equated with the essence of technology.

A Short Critique of Benjamin's Fragment "Capitalism as Religion"

Walter Benjamin argues, in an early fragment entitled “Capitalism as Religion” (dated 1921), that capitalism serves a religious function insofar as it “allay[s] the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.” This short critique will ask if Benjamin’s thesis is adequate to a critique of capitalism, a question that is pertinent insofar as much of contemporary ‘continental’ political philosophy is undergoing a ‘post-secular’ turn.

Benjamin identifies three features of the religious structure of capitalism:

1. Capitalism is purely cultic, it lacks a theology or specific dogmas. All things take on meaning in relation to this cult.
2. This cult is permanent; every day demands that one participate in it. As Benjamin states, there are no “weekdays.”
3. The cult of capitalism is a system of guilt (Schuld, also ‘debt’) and despair rather than atonement.

It is notable that each of these features is structured as an exception to the rule, that each could be read as ‘Capitalism is a religion, except that…’. Beyond the emphasis on paradox in these formulations, Benjamin’s central thesis seems structured to fail. So why insist that capitalism should be understood in relation to religious structures?

The ‘exceptional’ status of capitalism serves a dual purpose in this short fragment. First, it defines what is unprecedented in capitalism vis-à-vis other religious forms: capitalism is a permanent cult that “offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction” rather than its salvation. Despite these differences with other religious forms, Benjamin’s thesis also establishes a sense of continuity, specifically the possibility of atonement, or as he later calls it, redemption. As is well-known, redemption is central to Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but in the two texts, the concept named by atonement or redemption possesses different features.

In “Capitalism as Religion,” atonement is thought as a threshold (note how this will direct us, elsewhere, to a critique of Giorgio Agamben). The concept of atonement cannot arise from the cult, religious reformation, or even renunciation, rather “the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end…the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.” Only by completely following through with this movement, and traversing this threshold where the relations of capitalism become– as Marx would say– the fetters of the productive forms of society, is salvation possible.

In “On the Concept of History,” redemption is not thought as threshold; Benjamin now thinks it as intervention or event. Rather than pursue the destructive movement through which ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ the later Benjamin (in the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”) writes that “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train– namely, the human race– to activate the emergency break.” Or, as he also mentions, the task is to blast open the “continuum of history.” In both cases, redemption is not set off to the future as threshold; it is a subjective intervention in the present. Between the two texts, moreover, Benjamin relocates his analyses; no longer satisfied with a critique of sociological forms (note the references to Weber and Sorel in “Capitalism as Religion”), he now pursues an anti-Stalinist historical materialism (against, specifically, the idea that there are forces of objective necessity in history).

We will leave aside, for the time being, the question of whether the theory of intervention in Benjamin’s historical materialism ought to enlist “the services of theology.” For now, we will confine the critique to whether the thesis that “capitalism as religion” imparts any advantage to understanding either the ideology of, or the relations of production in, capitalism. I think it is self-evident that this kind of critique cannot advance an analysis of the productive forces of society as they are organized by society, so we are left with the question of ideology.

Hence the question: do any of the religious features of capitalism advance our critique? We will address them in the order that they are proposed by Benjamin.

1. Contrary to “Capitalism as Religion,” we know that capitalism possesses at least one dogma (although the religious metaphor does not advance our critique): the right of private property, i.e. the right of capital.
2. Here, Benjamin is right: one not need believe in capitalism to participate (even if by force). Because it is a system that structures social relationships, it has to be fought at the level of these same relationships. Thus:
3. Capitalism, at least in its contemporary form does not disseminate guilt. Instead, it is productive of desire, even to the degree that it can ‘accommodate’ many of the micro-resistances that so many critics of capitalism espouse. Hence the difficulty of struggle.

Finally, does capitalist ideology answer the same concerns that religion does? As Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” but the same– the simultaneous ‘expression of’ and ‘protest against’ real suffering– is not expected of capitalism, although religion and other ideological appartatuses do attempt to account for this suffering. Instead of proposing that capitalism should be understood as religion, we ought to separate the specific roles of, and contradictions between, various apparatuses.

In sum, the ‘capitalism as religion’ thesis cannot assist us in social struggle. Benjamin later recognizes that theology can be more pertinent to the oppressed than as a form of the critique of oppression. Nevertheless, we ought to be hesitant, today, with enlisting the services of theology. As Marx recognized, ideological struggles or contradictions are also lived as real struggles or contradictions. But when their concepts are no longer ‘descriptive’ or ‘instructive,’ they become impediments to social struggle. We will draw from “Capitalism as Religion” its implicit conclusion: capitalism is not like a religion; the critique of political economy requires altogether different concepts.

Benjamin's Writings on Hashish

I've been trying to work up an abstract on Walter Benjamin for the CPA meeting in June for a panel on German philosophy with two friends. With all that has been going on lately, I haven't really had a chance to do so, which is complicated by the nature of Benjamin's work, being quite diverse and yet singular. So I've posted this piece for some motivation (it's due on Monday), and for all of those who have been nice enough to visit the site on the recommendation of The Tao of Stieb. This review was originally published in De Philosophia, Volume 19, number 2, page 124.

The recent interest in this translation of Walter Benjamin’s texts on hashish seems to indicate that the general reading public maintains a greater interest in drug-literature than philosophy. Or, perhaps, this book forms the comical obverse of the proliferation of volumes such as On Belief, On Authenticity, et cetera. Typically, one’s journals never face the scrutiny of broad readership, but apparently hashish should not be left to specialists. As such, On Hashish takes the form of a light-hearted chapter in what is often considered as Benjamin’s pensive, and terminally tragic, biography.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is composed of Benjamin’s protocols of drug experimentation. Some are written by him, while others are composed by either the doctors administering the dose, or Benjamin’s friends. The second part of the book compiles several completed texts, along with excerpts from other texts and letters with passages on intoxication. Despite Benjamin’s repeated complaints concerning dosage, the protocols are nothing like the libertarian hedonism of say William S. Burroughs. Benjamin’s interest in hashish and opium had a basis in both literature– especially Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels (144)– and his philosophical-political preoccupations, which fall somewhere between the Frankfurt School and Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie.

What is notable in Benjamin’s texts is the refusal to give intoxicated experience a mystical status. Instead, as in the excerpts from his essay “Surrealism,” intoxication provides the possibility of what he calls “profane illumination,” a materialist anthropology. However, in a properly dialectical twist, the immediate experience of intoxication is overtaken by the concepts which allow us to find the surprises of intoxication in the everyday world. Thus, “the most passionate investigation of hashish intoxication will not teach us half so much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking will teach us about hashish intoxication (133-134).” This dialectical approach is much more apparent in the finished texts, while the protocols record the brief hallucinations, non sequiturs, erratic behaviors (for instance, Benjamin– apparently sober– “offers a light when J picks up a wafer”) and fleeting lucidity.

The bulk of the finished texts are comprised of two stories: “Myslovice–Braunschweig–Marseilles” and “Hashish in Marseilles.” Both draw heavily on the fourth protocol, dated Saturday, September 29, 1928. A Freudian knows that the true story is in repetition: first, we encounter a rather literary set of notes (the protocol); second, a version published in 1930 which Benjamin ascribes to a fictional character; and finally, a ‘memoir’ version published in 1932. Between the slips and displacements, the reader is left to reflect upon questions of narrative, intoxication, and identity; if, of course, these reflections have not been interrupted with bursts of laughter…