fragilekeys

In a dialog entitled “Something’s Missing,” Ernst Bloch and Theodore Adorno agree that there shall be no positive conception or vision of utopia. Adorno even links this interdiction to the biblical one against graven images. Utopian thinking then consists in the “determinate negation” of the structures in society as they currently exist (much like Marx’s project was a criticism of capitalism before it was a positive vision for communism). Utopian thinking ought to emphasize the “u-“: that utopia is “n0-place” and that revolutionary consciousness derives its most urgent creations from this “no.” In a similar vein, Fredric Jameson speaks of “The Future as Disruption“: the difficulty of translating Utopias into a viable political-practical alternatives to the current system forces us to “concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, the unrealizable in its own right”: Continue reading →

This update from Hell is brought to you as a footnote to Georges Bataille’s book “Erotism.”

The day will come when the measured approach betrays you. You’ll want to do violence to something: violence itself will prove unsuppressible, insufferable. And yet you will not know what it means, or what it looks like, for that violence to break out, for it’s the silence of the immobile, the inert, the fixed. It’s the violence of silence as such. And this day is silence’s day– silence you deem immeasurable to restore a sense of hope to your approach. But to proclaim silence immeasurable is not violent enough. You are not happy with your love.

On that day you will struggle, not for the first time, to say “I” and know what you say. And when you do say it, you won’t only say it without certainty, but with terror. The terror that befalls anyone who says “I” (though we hardly know it). Not only terror at the silence that comes afterwards, but the silence that rides under the words, the silence between syllables. You’ll feel your own enunciation doing violence to you and the others — a violence that you, however, do not wield. A violence you can only call “immeasurable,” because silent. A violence that we not without frenzy and confusion misname “death.”

On such a day, you would not be surprised by Syrian or American violence. You would know precisely what it was after: continuity where none could be applied. All of this you would feel in yourself; and you would feel that, somehow, you yourself were at stake in all struggles. Throughout all of time: this you would know. Silence of the dead, silence of violence, silence of excess and the untouched: these would be your monikers, your exchange. You’d want to lash out against your work and your approach, for seeming to deny these variables, sensing your profound solidarity with all that goes on in America and Syria when you lie to others in such ways — when you use language. But it would lash right back at you with silence either way. All of it would remind you of your own high aspiration: no one cares. Your very intention to assuage the violated would be struck down by the violence of such a message. Your message of love: it would mean nothing but more disorder for them. And yet: this alone you chose to bear. Continue reading →