through europe

Vandalised mansion in Aley, used as an IDF outpost during the 1982 Lebanon War.

 

This text started as a result of a workshop in June 2013 called On the Politics of Silence and Speaking by the Danish artist Sidsel Nelund and philosopher Nikita Dhawan at 98 Weeks, Beirut, part of Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks 6. I have tried to incorporate Sidsel and Nikita’s ideas to my own disparate ideas and footnotes about conceptual art that are not necessarily about identity and representation and to tie in ideas from Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance into some of my own ideas about Palestine, Israel and Lebanon - and finally two despondent scenes from Richard Linklater films.

 

I would like to discuss the legal ambiguity of other but it is such a large subject and it needs serious legal qualifications. Examining The Special Trial for Lebanon in The Hague, to the cases of Assange and Snowden and also the Protected Characteristics Act in relation to the case of JK Rowling’s moniker Robert Galbraith being leaked; they are all of great importance and hopefully to be addressed at a later date.

 

 

I

 

Everywhere we look there are crises. A banking crisis, a crisis in the Eurozone, an ecological crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a democratic crisis – crises in economics, crises in morality, crises in attitudes. Of course we know the power of the crisis narrative, we know that it is endlessly employed in order to perpetuate that which it presents as in crisis, in order to adjust itself an amount just small enough to avert collapse without any real change to form, we know that it serves as a scapegoat and a mass motor of subjectivity. But does this mean there is no crisis to be found beyond discursive webs? Does crisis simply remain a plane of discourse, some how separate from ontology? No. There are crises today, crises of subjectivity, discourse and ontology. We are in the midst of an anthropological crisis, a crisis of vitality, of the very foundations of intimate relations and of what it means to live.

 

Der Arbeiter

 

In 1932, Ernst Junger published the first edition of Der Arbeiter (The Worker), one of the most penetrating and controversial investigations of modernity to have appeared during the 20th century. At that time, Junger – later to become an anarchist – was one of the most prominent voices of the young German national-bolshevik movement, and one of the sources of inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s party. Decorated as a hero after WWI, Junger wrote Der Arbeiter both as a description of a future world in which the ‘form’ of the Worker (a new human ‘type’ which expresses itself through ‘technic’) would take dominion over the world, and as an invitation to take part to the ‘total mobilization’ operated by the new regime of ‘total work’.

Mixing a crystalline prose with ante litteram cyberpunk visions, Der Arbeiter reads today as a bleak premonition of the world that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Its prediction of the rise of a ‘new race of the Worker’, transcending nationality and ethnicity, finds its realisation in the human landscape of today’s metropolises. Its description of a future ‘cult’ of work - so deep as to invade every aspect of the daily, social or personal, rational or emotional life – loses its sci-fi tone if applied to the world we live in. Junger’s vision of a world ‘totally mobilised’ by work appears to have found a much greater application within contemporary capitalism, than it ever did during the brief experience of national-socialist Germany. It might not be a coincidence that Heidegger’s text The Question Concerning Technology – deeply inspired by the book of his friend Junger – only appeared in 1949, under the dawning light of the new world order.

 

Hopes and dreams in the Susa Valley

Some two months ago the national housing activists met the NO TAV* movement in the sunny green Susa Valley. The plan was a week of national mobilization culminating with a general strike (of the rank-and-file unions) followed by a mass demonstration against austerity and precarity in Rome. Putting together the whole Italian movement sounded like wishful thinking. No one could imagine what was going to happen.

 

Weeks of hard work and national coordination followed. Bit by bit the 19^th October general uprising was taking shape. The week before was marked by numerous appropriation events: from empty buildings being squatted by students to families sieging shopping centers for food at fair prices.