through europe - English

THE EUROPEAN UNION IS DEAD: How can we get rid of the corpse? How can we restart the process of creation of the union?

Franco Berardi Bifo — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 17:44:38 +0000

“While our colleagues, friends and comrades in Southern Europe continue to rebel against the depletion and impoverishment policies of the Troika, the ECB moves into its new palace,” the FF Blockupy website says. “Blockupy moves on to the road. We will make our own move to the new building and give back to the ECB the garbage – in and with many moving boxes – that should have been thrown into the dustbin of history: racist and sexist division, impoverishment, privatization of public funds and goods and wars to secure resources.”

During the last month, after the victory of Syriza we have been finally obliged to understand the meaning, the nature and the destiny of the European Union.

Aggression against society, predation of social resources, this is the meaning of the Union. Obliteration of democracy is the nature, systemic collapse and civil war the destiny. On March 18th in Frankfurt a demonstration will take place to celebrate the inauguration of the new building of the European Central Bank whose cost is 1.3 billion Euros.

Until one month ago my opinion was based on a principle: reclaiming national sovereignty is a reactionary act that opens the way to nationalism. The interesting mission is the transformation of the Union.

Fragments for a radically negative anthropology

Toby Austin Locke — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 18:54:20 +0000

What follows are various fragments that emerged from the efforts to explore what a radically negative anthropology might be. They were written a number of years ago now and are revived to assist in a rethinking of what the project of a radically negative anthropology might entail, that is if it is not to be abandoned. Pride and egoism had kept them from previously being made public as they are written with the naivety and arrogance that I’m sure I will always find in the writings of my younger selves. Further, I had previously sought a level of coherence that was unrealistic, and in fact undesirable. I have now made additions, corrections and further considerations in the footnotes rather than updating the original text as I considered it useful to be able to identify what has changed since they were written and what has not. A very few have been removed entirely as they did little to assist rethinking the project or simply regurgitated tired old motifs. As such there are times when the roman numerals for each section skip forward in the series. I have left the original numbers in order that the removals and absences remain identifiable and are not effaced. Finally, I would ask the reader to approach them with a critical compassion in as much as we may seek out what is useful within these pages, rather than focusing upon their obvious insufficiency and incoherence. To use Deleuze’s words, “Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything.”(1) Let us try and locate points of departure for creative lines of flight rather than obstructive blockages. Let us enter the spaces of and… and… and…, whilst overcoming the not… not… not… Let us not succumb to the pits of nihilistic despair, but read these fragments as active and affirmative free spirits.

A Donor Presented by A Saint

Rebecca Lamarre — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 10:58:18 +0000

Here is A Donor Presented by A Saint, attributed to the Flemish painter Dieric Bouts, a painting I have been using as a focal point to play with different material relationships between artworks and texts, to see what this can and cannot tell us about the people who produce them. As an artist and performer my primary interest is in people, and this puts me at the exact point of tension where it is unclear where a person begins and an object ends.

I first noticed the painting because of the hovering hand. Why is it there? Who does it belong to? I read the painting’s information card and learned that it was cropped from a larger alter-piece, dismantled during the Calvinist Reformation in Belgium. Typical of church paintings at the time the tableau would have been an allegorical lesson from the Bible. The faces of the characters would have been painted by monks in the church’s employ, using faces from members of the community for reference - it was not uncommon to see, for example, the face of the local baker masquerading as one of the three wise-men visiting the baby Jesus. The more money a patron donated to the church, the more likely their face would be used to depict a more desirable character, like St. Peter guarding the gates to heaven.

How does it feel to have someone’s hand resting on your shoulder in that way? How would it feel to see your face painted on the church wall in such intimate proximity to your landlord? Before I read to you I want to try an experiment. Please form a pair with the person sitting in front or behind you. The person in the back should put their hand on the shoulder of the person sitting in front. Please rest your hand on their shoulder and leave it there while I play you a song.

The New Black Jacobins: On the Rejection of the Clergy in the Ferguson Revolt

Paolo Mossetti — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:03:25 +0000

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

- C. L. R. James

Something new and important happened during the “weekend of resistance” in St. Louis, Missouri. The event, organized by the campaign group Hands Up United plus a myriad groups from across the US, was billed as four days of civil disobedience, mass protest and debates to respond to the killing of an unarmed 18 year-old by a white police officer on August 9 in Ferguson.

What happened there went beyond the routinely protest against police violence and grotesque militarization of urban space. It entered a deeper confrontation: that taking place between the younger and the older generation of black activists. A generational divide that may probably mark and set the tone for the future fights to come.

On October 12, I was one of the 2,000 people who attended an interfaith rally at St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena. The event featured noted author Cornel West as keynote speaker, in front of an audience composed by a majority of black people and a numerous contingent of “white allies” (as they are dubbed in activist circles) cheering at every intervention. It was the “American tradition” of civil rights movements ready for the usual show-off.

A Misosophical Confession

Toby Austin Locke — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:38:24 +0000

“Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy:

everything begins with misosophy.”(1)

“As far as ‘thought’ is concerned, works are falsifications, since they eliminate the provisional and the non-repeatable, the instantaneous and the mingling of purity and impurity, disorder and order.”(2)

“I distrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty”(3)

What has become of lovers of knowledge today? What is the fate of those once revered and proud seekers of truth, those honest and upstanding journeymen of essences and universality? The shadows of these lovers of knowledge and wisdom appear to flit across the mirrors in which we seek ourselves, never leaving more than a fleeting impression, a muffled articulation that no sooner has found expression than it once more disintegrates amidst the determined babble of self-assured objection. And these shadows whisper to us of their own demise, of their submission to the systematisation of knowledge as utmost morality that rests never far from the surface of the façade which emerges of the demand and insistence for a unitary reality. If there is a philosopher of the future, their voice is meek amidst the uproar of accusation and blame; their gaze powerless when confronted with the piercing eyes of certainty; their will ensnared by the blockages and channels of a continually reinforced spiral of systematisation that sets before it the task of absolute universalisation.

Ernst Jünger, the forest anarch

Federico Campagna — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 10:10:28 +0000

“We were both Waldganger.
We preferred the forest to the city.”
Albert Hofmann on Ernst Jünger

103 Years

In 1895, the year Ernst Jünger was born, Wilhelm II was holding the reins of the German Empire, while Wilhelm Rontgen experimented with the first X-rays machine. In 1998, when Jünger died at the age of 103, Pathfinder had already landed on Mars and Google was about to launch its campaign to conquer the digital world. In the course of his life, fit for a Biblical patriarch, Jünger survived two world wars, twice witnessed the passage of the Halley comet, and took part to the full unfolding of modernity. Yet, it would be fair to say that he was scarcely ever there. Whether fleeing to the Algerian desert, fighting in the mud in La Somme, or secluded in his hermitage in High Swabia, Jünger shared with monks and dandies the ability to be in the world, while remaining at an observant distance from it. He was a theoretician in the original meaning of the word: in a contemplative position even in the heat of battle.

It was as if sliding along an orbit around the present that Jünger managed to turn his perspective almost at 360 degrees, moving from the revolutionary conservatism of his youth, to the extreme existential anarchism of his old age. It was also for this reason that my first encounter with his work left me at once fascinated and skeptical. Jünger, the anarcho-nazi? How could anyone take this man seriously?
Yet, how could I remain indifferent to the flying architecture of his prose, the blade of his thinking, and the charm of his life? I learned to love Jünger against my ingrained ideological judgement, like a slowly acquired taste. Over the years I’ve kept returning to Jünger’s toolbox, and every time, without fail, I’ve found in it new weapons and methods to apply to my own existence.

Image as Target

Nathan Witt — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 12:17:16 +0000

This is where I was. Images taken not for their image; the file data from walking around the West Bank in 2012, a month before Pillar of Smoke started in Gaza, of spending weeks lying on my back looking at planes under the Jordan flight path, stupidly thinking they were drones. Or getting up at 5 in the morning to get a bus somewhere to go for a walk, either with people or without people. Of going to 5^th Century AD Greek Orthodox monasteries that ISIS would be burning today if they were there. Of badly avoiding being a tourist or NGO worker in one place and an interloping gentile in the other. Of not wanting to take any sense of identity with me, either as a colonial and especially as a privileged artist/ hired gun.

Images taken because of I have always distrusted the image and not because of the cultural value in critiquing the occupation of Palestine, or the cultural value in discussing remote controlled surveillance and targeted assassinations. Distrusting an image is one of the few rights that I have as a person and it is both my responsibility and job when I have to call myself an artist. Those positions are not immutable or fixed, and neither, I - or my emotions - are fixed. I wish I could be a better, more objective conceptual artist who is coolly detached from the shit of the world but that would be a lie. What is underneath the surface of an image or embedded into it is a part-rejection and a part-suspension of things, it started by rejecting the social pandemic of the question or assumption that in an image: quantity of labour equals quality of an argument. The social/ cultural obsession with production, labour, sheen and veneer... Now, the labour is in the data of an image.

The Discovery Of A Malign Host: Anxiety and Work

Federico Campagna — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:48:41 +0000

Apollonio di Giovanni, Ulysses and Nausicaa, 1435

Notes for a talk at South London Gallery, 20th June 2014, as part of Anxiety Festival

I would like to discuss anxiety and its relationship with work today, from a philosophical perspective. I will examine anxiety as connected to the problem of hospitality, and particularly to broken hospitality, then I will explore the changes that the traditional concept of hospitality has undergone under the current condition of Nihilism. It will be in the field of Nihilism that I will explore the connections between anxiety and contemporary work. Finally, I will try to look for a philosophical alternative.

Before starting, I must acknowledge two debts. Most of the first part of this talk derives from a conversation I had with my friend and fellow writer Robert Prouse, whom I would like to thank. The final part of this talk, on the other hand, has been very influenced by the poet Lucy Mercer, and I would like to thank her for that.

TEXT 'FEED' NOW! The gamification of charity

Federico Campagna — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 09:49:55 +0000

On trains travelling in and out of British cities, it’s common to be confronted by a gallery of sorrowful portraits, peeping through the surface of ad posters. Kelly is distressed, John is abused, Samira is desperate. They need your help. But they don’t live in the same universe as you. Differently from the homeless person outside the station, or from the exploited migrant worker travelling next to you, their bodies live off the flow of digital data that springs from mobile phones worldwide. So grab yours NOW! By simply texting ‘life’, ‘feed’, ‘save’ to a phone number, you can restore their life-bars and improve the living conditions of these human tamagotchis. On the same phone on which you are playing Hay Day and Farmville, and by using very similar commands, you will be able to magically feed or shelter the virtual avatars Kelly, John, Samira, etc.

If this sounds like the description of a mediocre video game, it’s because it is. Gamification has been all the rage for years, and now it has reached the shores of charity campaigns. It goes without saying that a great number of charities provide very useful help to people in need, and it would be unfair to deride their efforts. Yet, their recent communication campaigns reveal something rotten at the heart both of the charity system, and of our own, contemporary reality-system.

Tendencies of Life and Death

Toby Austin Locke — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 14:32:13 +0000

Life forever holds within itself, coiled at the very centre of its unfolding, the fearful promise of death. That death, emerging from the shadows of the living, from the darkness that forever follows the living, brings about an absolute end-of-life, brings down its sickle upon the vitality of the existent in order to return it to nonexistence. Death then, the absolute, final end-of-life, is that nothingness, that emptiness, that hollow darkness, which is forever stalking the living, anticipating that twilight upon which it may exercise its right to return ashes to ashes and dust to dust, restoring that which is living to the barren desolation of the non-living. This is the terror that has plagued the thought of the Western episteme since at least the conception of episteme as such.

Such a conception of death, as that which brings an absolute end-of-life, has been persistent, and for all good sense, and indeed philosophy, it appears as though it could be no other way. How can it be possible for one to speak of death other than as an absolute end-of-life? Is it not precisely a complete and absolute lack of life that is characteristic of death? It would appear foolish to attempt to think otherwise, to think death as something other than the final, absolute and total end-of-life. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent stupidity, its total lack of good sense, its absurdity, and indeed as some might say, its impossibility, that is precisely the task to now be placed at hand, that of thinking life and death tendentially; that is to say what is here sought is an interrogation of the tendential relationship between the living and the non-living. The failure of the Western episteme to think death in a manner other than what I shall be calling the finalist conception does it great disservice (and let me be clear early on that on the one hand there is indeed a episteme, the episteme—that is the episteme of ontology, metaphysics and logos—for in no other way and at no other time has episteme been thought as such, that is as episteme and as Western; whereas, on the other hand, there is indeed a heterogeneity of epistemes that is irreducible to an episteme, a difference that is not internal but rather demonstrates unavoidably the open and connective nature of episteme itself, that allows episteme to form from that which is other than episteme and forever prevents its closure). Such a conception, that of absolute death, paralyses thought under the stifling force of fear and sorrow, and leaves us unable to even approach questions regarding the living. Our minds, moulded as they are by the episteme of finalist death, reel in horror at anything that is not static, clear and oppositional, anything that approaches the fluidity of life and indeed its relationship with the non-living.