through europe

(music: ‘Stress’ by Justice)

As a matter of fact, economy is the religion of the current era. It is through the economy that the inhabitants of today’s world are given the possibility to achieve a better life (once the afterlife has disappeared), to enter the Olympus of glamour, and to be today’s equivalent of a good believer: that is, a winner. Like every religion, the economy also has its churches, its priests and its wars.

The main religious war ended just twenty years ago, when the crusaders of Western Capitalism defeated the infidels of Soviet Marxism. A few years of jubilee followed, through the 1990s, when the gods of growth, credit and liquidity (the holy trinity of GDP) cast their benevolent gaze all over the chosen people of the West.  But then, inevitably, as soon as the golden age ended, a new wave of war took over.

(Italian version of this article)

Europe will be the product of your mind

Spring 2011 : the European Union is on the brink of the catastrophe, as Neoliberal dogmatism is imposing the diktat of the financial class upon the interests of society.
Let’s look back, before we try to understand what has to be done.

In the year 1933 in his Discours à la nation européenne, Julien Benda wrote the following words :

Vous ferez l’Europe par ce que vous direz, non par ce que vous serez. L’Europe sera un produit de votre esprit, de la volonté de votre esprit, non un produit de votre être. Et si vous me répondez que vous ne croyez pas à l’autonomie de l’esprit, que votre esprit ne peut être autre chose qu’un aspect de votre être, alors je vous déclare que vous ne ferez jamais l’Europe. Car il n’y a pas d’Être européen.

Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone  else ‘Comrade’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Try and leave a tip to a bus driver, or a worker in the London Underground. And hope they don’t have good aim, as they throw your money back at you.

“But how then is ambiguity manifested? What happens, for example, when one lives an event as an image?

To live an event as an image is not to remain uninvolved, to regard the event disinterestedly in the way that the esthetic version of the image and the serene ideal of classical art propose. But neither is to take part freely and decisively. It is to be taken: to pass from the region of the real where we hold ourselves at a distance from things the better to order and use them into that other region where the distance holds us – the distance which then is the lifeless deep, an unimaginable, inappreciable remoteness which has become something like the sovereign power behind all things”

Maurice Blanchot, The space of Literature.

do what you want. do not do what you do not want. you do what you want. you do want what you want. you do not want what you do not. do not do what you do want not. do what you do want not what you want not.