…

From generation to generation, a larger and
larger number of us are supernumerary, “useless to
the world” -in any case, to the economic world.
Seeing that for sixty years there have been people
like Norbert Wiener who prophesy that automation
and cybernatization “will produce an unemployment
compared to which the current difficulties
and the economic crisis of the years 1 930-36 will
look like child’s play,” it eventually had to come to
pass. The latest word is that Amazon is planning to
open, in the United States, 2000 completely automated
convenience stores with no cash registers
hence no cashiers and under total monitoring,
with facial recognition of the customers and
real-time analysis of their gestures. On entering
you make your smartphone beep at a terminal and
then you serve yourself. What you take is automatically
debited from your Premium account,
thanks to an app, and what you put back on the
shelf is re-credited. It’s called Amazon Go. In this
shopping dystopia of the future there is no more
cash money, no more standing in line, no more
theft, and almost no more employees. It’s predicted
that this new model, if implemented, will turn
the whole business of distribution, the greatest
provider of jobs in the U . S . , upside down.
Eventually, three quarters of the jobs would disappear
in the sector of convenience stores. More generally,
if one limits oneself to the forecasts of the World
Bank, by about 2030, under the pressure of “innovation,”
40% of the existing jobs in the wealthy
countries will have vanished. “We will never
work,” was a piece of bravado by Rimbaud. It’s
about to become the lucid assessment of a whole
generation of young people.

The Invisible Committee, 2017.
This translation© 2017 by Semiotext(e)

 

All the reasons for making a revolution are there.
Not one is lacking. The shipwreck of politics, the
arrogance of the powerful, the reign of falsehood,
the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of
industry, galloping misery, naked exploitation,
ecological apocalypse-we are spared nothing,
not even being informed about it all. ” Climate:
20 1 6 breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces,
the same as almost every year now. All the reasons
are there together, but it’s not reasons that make
revolutions, it’s bodies . And the bodies are in
front of screens.

The Invisible Committee, 2017.
This translation© 2017 by Semiotext(e).

 

In the first place biopolitical production means that people living today are in the process of being ‘produced’ in such a way that they can adapt successfully to the way that capitalism functions. Think of the manner that mainstream psychological counselling enables one to ‘cope’ with the demands of consumer society; and compare this to Lacan’s opposition (captured in the phrase ‘against adaptation’; see Van Haute 2002) to mainstream psychology, which merely assists the subject to ‘adapt’ to an alienated and alienating society. If this seems far-fetched, ponder the implications of the familiar exhortation, to ‘brand’ or ‘rebrand’ yourself; that is, deliberately turn yourself into a ‘commodity for sale’. Only people who have been thoroughly brainwashed by consumerist capitalism would fail to realise that this surrender to the cynical ‘anthropology of competitiveness’ reduces their human freedom to virtually zero. And yet, people seem to be quite happy to market themselves as commodities, blissfully unaware of the fact that they are participating in their own liquidation as ‘human’ beings capable of freedom of thought and action.

Bert Olivier

Човекът е средоточие на суверенни жестове, които не е способен да похаби, нито пък те него.
Жестовете са безработни.
Ние все още не знаем какво може пришиваното към тях тяло.

WHAT AGATHA KNEW
Agatha Christie’s eightieth book, Passenger to Frankfurt – published in 1970 with the subtitle ‘an extravaganza’,
one of the few of her works with no movie or TV adaptation – is a novel that ‘slides from the unlikely to the
inconceivable and finally lands up in incomprehensible muddle. Prizes should be offered to readers who can explain
the ending. Concerns the youth uproar of the ’sixties, drugs, a new Aryan superman and so on, subjects of which
Christie’s grasp was, to say the least, uncertain.’1 However, this ‘incomprehensible muddle’ is not due to Christie’s
senility: its causes are clearly political. Passenger to Frankfurt is Christie’s most personal, intimately felt and at the
same time most political novel; it expresses her personal confusion, her feeling of being totally at a loss with what
was going on in the world in the late 1960s – drugs, sexual revolution, student protests, murders, etc. It is crucial to
note that this overwhelming feeling of confusion is formulated by an author whose speciality was detective novels,
stories about crime, stories about the darkest side of human nature. The deeper reason for her despair is the feeling
that, in the chaotic world of 1970, it was no longer possible to write detective novels that still presupposed a stable
society based on law and order, momentarily disturbed by crime but restored to order by the detective. In the society
of 1970, chaos and crime were rife, so no wonder Passenger to Frankfurt is not a detective novel: there is no
murder, no logic, no deduction. Christie’s sense of the collapse of the elementary cognitive mapping, her
overwhelming fear of chaos, is rendered clearly in her Introduction to the novel:
It is what the Press brings to you every day, served up in your morning paper under the general heading of News. Collect it from the front page.
What is going on in the world today? What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England.
Look at that front page every day for a month, make notes, consider and classify.
Every day there is a killing.
A girl strangled.
Elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meagre savings.
Young men or boys – attacking or attacked.
Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted.
Drug smuggling.
Robbery and assault.
Children missing and children’s murdered bodies found not far from their homes.
Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels – no – not yet, but it could be.
Fear is awakening – fear of what may be. Not so much because of actual happenings but because of the possible causes behind them. Some
known, some unknown, but felt. And not only in our own country. There are smaller paragraphs on other pages – giving news from Europe –
from Asia – from the Americas – Worldwide News.
Hi-jacking of planes.
Kidnapping.
Violence.
Riots.
Hate.
Anarchy – all growing stronger.
All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure in cruelty.
What does it all mean?
So what does all this mean? In the novel, Christie provides an answer; here is the storyline. On a flight home from
Malaya, Sir Stafford Nye, a bored diplomat, is approached in the passenger lounge at Frankfurt airport by a woman
whose life is in danger; to help her, he agrees to lend her his passport and boarding ticket. In this way, he
unwittingly gets caught up in an international intrigue from which the only escape is to outwit the power-crazed
Countess von Waldsausen, who wants to achieve world domination by manipulating and arming the planet’s youth.
This terrible worldwide conspiracy has something to do with Richard Wagner and ‘The Young Siegfried’. We learn
that, towards the end of the Second World War, Hitler went to a mental institution, met with a group of people who
thought they were Hitler, and exchanged places with one of them, thus surviving the war. He then escaped to
Argentina, where he married and had a son who was branded with a swastika on his heel: ‘The Young Siegfried’.
Meanwhile, in the present, drugs, promiscuity and student protests are all secretly caused by Nazi agitators who
want to bring about anarchy so that they can restore Nazi domination on a global scale.
This ‘terrible worldwide conspiracy’ is, of course, ideological fantasy at its purest: a weird condensation of the
fear of extreme Right and extreme Left. The least we can say in Christie’s favour is that she locates the heart of the
conspiracy in the extreme Right (neo-Nazis), not any of the other usual suspects (Communists, Jews, Muslims). The
idea that neo-Nazis were behind the ’68 student protests and the struggle for sexual liberation, with its obvious
madness, nonetheless bears witness to the disintegration of a consistent cognitive mapping of our predicament; the
fact that Christie is compelled to take refuge in such a crazy paranoiac construct indicates the utter confusion and
panic in which she found herself. The picture of our society she paints is simply confused, out of touch with reality
(incidentally, although to a much lesser extent, the same goes for the strangest of John le Carré’s novels, A Small
Town in Germany, which is set in a similar situation). But is her vision really too crazy to be taken seriously? Is our
era, with ‘leaders’ like Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, not as crazy as her vision? Are we today not all like a
bunch of passengers to Frankfurt? Our situation is messy in a way that is very similar to the one described by
Christie: we have a Rightist government enforcing workers’ rights (in Poland), a Leftist government pursuing the
strictest austerity politics (in Greece). No wonder that, in order to regain a minimal cognitive mapping, Christie
resorts to the Second World War, ‘the last good war’, retranslating our mess into its coordinates.
One should nonetheless note how the very form of Christie’s denouement (one big Nazi plot behind it all)
strangely mirrors the fascist idea of the Jewish conspiracy. Today, the extreme populist Right proposes a similar
explanation of the Muslim immigrant ‘threat’. In the anti-Semitic imagination, the ‘Jew’ is the invisible Master who
secretly pulls the strings – which is precisely why Muslim immigrants are not today’s Jews: they are all too visible,
not invisible, they are clearly not integrated into our society, and nobody claims they secretly pull any strings. If one
sees in their ‘invasion of Europe’ a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it – as was suggested in an article that
recently appeared in one of the main Slovene Rightist weekly journals, which read: ‘George Soros is one of the most
depraved and dangerous people of our time,’ responsible for ‘the invasion of the negroid and Semitic hordes and
thereby for the twilight of the EU … as a typical talmudo-Zionist, he is a deadly enemy of Western civilization,
nation state and white, European man.’ His goal is to build a ‘rainbow coalition composed of social marginals like
faggots, feminists, Muslims and work-hating cultural Marxists’, which would then perform ‘a deconstruction of the
nation state, and transform the EU into a multicultural dystopia of the United States of Europe’. Furthermore, Soros
is inconsistent in his promotion of multiculturalism:
He promotes it exclusively in Europe and the USA, while in the case of Israel, he, in a way which is for me totally justified, agrees with its
monoculturalism, latent racism and building of a wall. In contrast to EU and USA, he also does not demand that Israel open its borders and
accept ‘refugees’. A hypocrisy proper to Talmudo-Zionism.2
Is this disgusting fantasy, which brings together anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so different from that contrived
by Christie? Are they both not a desperate attempt to orient oneself in confused times? The extreme oscillations in
public perception of the Korean crisis are significant as such. One week we are told that we are on the brink of
nuclear war, then there is seven days’ respite, then the war threat explodes again. When I visited Seoul in August
2017, my friends there told me there was no serious threat of a war since the North Korean regime knows it could
not survive it, now that the South Korean authorities are preparing the population for a nuclear war. Not long ago
our media was reporting on the increasingly ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim Jong-un and Donald
Trump. The irony was that, in a situation where two apparently immature men are getting angry and hurling insults
at each other, our only hope is for some anonymous and invisible institutional constraint to prevent their rage from
exploding into full war. Usually we tend to complain that in today’s alienated and bureaucratized politics,
institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians from expressing their real point of view; now we hope that
such constraints will prevent the expression of all-too-crazy personal visions. How did we reach this point?

L I K E   A   T H I E F   I N     B R O A D    D AY L I G H T, Slavoj Žižek

 

The way to break the spell of power is thus not to succumb to the fantasy of a transparent power; one should
rather hollow out the edifice of power from within by separating the edifice from its agent (the bearer of power). As
developed decades ago by Claude Lefort, therein resides the core of ‘democratic invention’, in the empty place of
power, the gap between the place of power and the contingent agents who, for a limited period, can occupy that
place. Paradoxically, the underlying premise of democracy is thus not only that there is no political agent that has a
‘natural’ right to power, but, much more radically, that ‘the people’ itself, the ultimate source of the sovereign power
in democracy, doesn’t exist as a substantial entity. In the Kantian sense, the democratic notion of ‘people’ is a
negative one, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit: it prohibits any determinate agent from
ruling with full sovereignty. (The only moment when ‘the people’ exists is at democratic elections, which is
precisely that of the disintegration of the entire social edifice – in elections, ‘people’ are reduced to a mechanical
collection of individuals.) The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of ‘totalitarianism’, and the
mistake of ‘totalitarianism’ is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse (‘paralogism’) of political reason: ‘the
people exists’ through a determinate political agent which acts as if it embodies (not only re-presents) the people, its
true will (the totalitarian party and its leader) – i.e. in terms of a transcendental critique, as a phenomenal
embodiment of the noumenal people.
Critics of representative democracy endlessly vary the motif of how, for a priori formal reasons and not just on
account of accidental distortions, multi-party elections betray true democracy – but, while accepting this critical
point as the price to be paid for any functioning democracy, one should add that it is because of such minimal
‘alienation’ signalled by the term ‘representative’ that a democracy functions. That is to say, what this ‘alienation’
points towards is the ‘performative’ character of democratic choice: people do not vote for what they want (they
know that in advance) – it is through such choice that they discover what they want. A true leader does not just
follow the wishes of the majority; she or he makes the people aware of what they want.

L I K E   A   T H I E F   I N     B R O A D    D AY L I G H T, Slavoj Žižek

So even
though the capacity to not act is the quintessence of human resistance, and even
though one of the greatest threats to the consistency of any human form of life
comes from those who think that they “can do anything,” a wholly inoperative
life of pure potentiality is reserved, perhaps, only to God.

David Kishik, The power of life : Agamben and the coming politics

Not unlike the life of God, the life of man is a zone of indetermination that
is “said in many ways.” A human being is therefore conceived in Agamben’s
philosophy as “the living being that has no specific nature and vocation,” as
the form of life that no particular work or destiny can exhaust. If humans
learn to lead their lives as present-absent whatever singularities, it will become
very difficult, if not impossible, to subsume them under a predetermined class,
group, concept, or identity. The problem, however, is that in our culture it is
still difficult for some to realize that “whateverness” is a blessing and not a
curse, that this condition can empower rather than weaken our way of being.
Consider, for example, the Heideggerian orthodoxy, which considers life to
be “hazy,” as “constantly being re-enshrouded in fog.” This view is crucial
to the argument of Being and Time, in which the concept of life is systematically
disregarded as “undetermined.” Unbestimmtheit is usually translated as
“indetermination,” though it is also possible to render it as “indecision” or
“uncertainty.” But what is most interesting about this word is its connection
to such crucial Heideggerian notions as stimmung (mood), stimmen (tuned),
and stimme (voice). From this perspective, the strategy of Heidegger’s book
is to find a way to determine human life in an ontological manner by means
of the new term “Dasein” in order to give this life a decisive voice, to put it
in a certain mood, to ensure that it will no longer be out of tune with Being.
Nevertheless, it is important to note, as Jean-Luc Marion does, that the key sections
in the book dedicated to anxiety, death, and the call are precisely the moments
when Dasein finds itself in an indecisive state of being. Without those
three uncertain terrains, Dasein’s eventual and overall ontological determination
would simply be inconceivable. It is therefore not so surprising to hear
the young Heidegger, five years before the publication of his magnum opus,
telling his students that the “indeterminateness of the object, ‘my life,’ is not
a defect”; that “this indeterminateness points out the object and yet does not
predetermine it”; that regarding the notion of life, “we merely play with the
term – or, rather, it is this term that plays with the philosopher.” He therefore
gives an ominous warning about the day when the intention to grasp the concept
of life will be “abandoned, and this abandonment [will be] justified on the
grounds that life is ambiguous and therefore impossible to understand clearly
and precisely. Yet the height of indolence, and the bankruptcy of philosophy,
consists in the plea that the term is not to be used at all. We thereby avoid a
troublesome admonition – and write a system.” Though Heidegger seems to
be criticizing here the mature Hegel for betraying his youthful philosophy of
life, the development of Heidegger’s own work shows that he could not help
making this same dubious move.

David Kishik, The power of life : Agamben and the coming politics

 

Нека да свалим картите. Такива като мен винаги са консумирали немотивираната враждебност на своята общност, наричана преди тоталитарна, а сега демократична. Това е само усещане, сигнатура на набор от случайности, и не може да се репрезентира.
Очевидно някои са по-различни от другите различни, които само си дават вид, че са сингуляризирани, но не са. Да изглеждаш винаги е било-по-важно от това да бъдеш.
Оттам и ролята ми на неприятния свидетел. Защото аз добре помня смазващия конформизъм някога, равносилен на смазващата разпасаност сега, като последната не е нито дори либертенство, нихилизъм, суверенна претенция или каквото и да било там.
А какво е тогава? Симулираната свобода на неолибералния субект, окичен с титли, грантове, награди или просто обикновена мерзост – нещо, което съм виждал и преди.
Няма тук приятели на свободата, има господинов-ци на новата неолиберална самопринуда да отиграват човешкия си капитал по все същия капиталистически ценоразпис.
Портата на справедливостта за тях маркира отходното място на безогледна копрофилска консумация.
Един от тях се казва Рожкев, който редовно ме препикава и нямаше как да не го забележа.
Сбъркал си, миличък. Знам как да те ударя. Както един от твоето поколение крие, че е бил най-младия син на партията, а сега се подвизава като европейски писател, така и ти ще трябва да си признаеш каква е била класацията ти за 20-те ти любими романа преди време. Ако не го направиш, ще ти опресня паметта. И тогава ще видиш как се сервират пияни рожкови за закуска.

 

Five years later, when he was twenty-eight, Nijinsky stopped dancing and
choreographing. He began his last recital, which he declared to be about the
horrors of the First World War, by telling his audience, “I will show you how
we live, how we suffer, how we artists create.” He then sat on a chair onstage
for half an hour without moving. When he was encouraged by the spectators
to begin his dance, he retorted angrily: “How dare you disturb me! I am
not a machine. I will dance when I feel like it.” At that time, he had already
been diagnosed with schizophrenia, from which he suffered for the remaining
thirty years of his life. He was treated by the existential psychologist Ludwig
Binswanger, to whom he once reported that his body was not his, that someone
else moved his body. Whenever anyone tried to approach him during
his last years, in which he was essentially an invalid, he still managed to say,
very clearly and coherently, “Ne me touchez pas” (Do not touch me), the same
words used by the resurrected Christ when approached by Mary Magdalene.
“I am the untouchable,” perhaps Nijinsky was trying to say, “because
my dancing body, which was sacrificed so that others could live, is no longer
merely a physical body, just as the glorious body of the dancer onstage is no
longer a bare life but a life that cannot be separated from its form.”

David Kishik, The power of life : Agamben and the coming politics