A Propaedeutic

"Power no longer has today any form of legitimation other than emergency, and because power everywhere and continuously refers and appeals to emergency as well as labouring secretly to produce it".  Giorgio Agamben from Means Without End

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.  Walter Benjamin, VIII Thesis on the Philosophy of History

Comments

[hyacinth chabert]

... there remains a clinging to this idea that the conditions in Haiti or Afghanistan or Iraq today are 'backward,' archaic; Thomas Friedman spoke of bombing Belgrade 'back' to 1394. That Haiti wallows in some +former+ age is a comforting notion. somehow, due to accidents and blundering and savage muckdemucks in power who resist the forces of 'development,' time is moving in te wrong direction but if these places are gathered into the empire time will resume going 'forward.' Its an essential piece of propaganda. Of course the conditions existing in these places, or threatened, are deliberate creations and not at all 'backward,' but specifically modern and new, state of the art conditions, brought about by design, with great planning and resource expenditure and effort; they are conditions wholly unknown to the people of the past and utterly unlike anything previous generations experienced. Recognizing how modern they are and how they characterize 'our age', and probably embody the future for other patches of territory, the destiny of much more of the earth, is perhaps not common because its just too scary and horrible.