Милнер will advance that sexuality, inasmuch as psychoanalysis speaks of it, is nothing other than this: the place of infinite contingency in the body.
That there is sexuation, rather than not, is contingent. That there are two
sexes rather than one or many is contingent. That one is on one side or
the other is contingent. That such somatic characteristics are attached to
a sexuation is contingent. That such cultural characteristics are attached
to it is contingent. Because it is contingent, it touches infinity.

It is curious that if one looks at the world’s biggest corporations these days, a lot of their power and property is in vectoral form. Many of them don’t actually make the things they sell. They control the production process by owning and controlling the information. Even when they do still make the stuff, a quite remarkable amount of the valuation of the company comes from portfolios of intellectual property, or proprietary data about their customers, and so on. Capital was subsumed under a more abstract form of technical power.
When considering the vectoralist class, then, three further points suggest themselves. First, it seems to be able to extract value not just from labor but from what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor. Even when you just stroll down the street, the phone in your purse or pocket is reporting data back to some vectoralist entity. The vectoralist class seems to be able to extract revenue out of qualitative information in much the same way as banks extract it out of quantitative information. Perhaps the exercise of power through control of quantitative and qualitative information is characteristic of the same ruling class.
Second, the vectoralist class subordinates the old kind of ruling class, a capitalist class, in the same way that capitalists subordinated the old landlord class that subjected rural production to commodification through ground rent. In that sense, the rise of a vectoralist class is a similar and subsequent development within intra-ruling class dynamics. The vectoralist class still sits atop a pyramid of exploited labor, but it depends also on extracting a surplus out of another, fairly privileged but still subordinate class.
I call it the hacker class. Bernal already had an inkling of this development when he tried to articulate the interests of scientific workers in and against capitalism, but this was not quite the hacker class yet. That had to wait for the development of sophisticated forms of intellectual property, which are in turn embedded in the design of the interface for the creative process. This transforms the qualitative work of producing new forms of information in the world into property that can be rendered equivalent in the market. In short, a new class dynamic, between vectoralist and hacker, was added to an already complex pattern of relations between dominant and subordinate classes.
Third, the political economy of the former West rather than the former East was the one that was able to develop the implications of the scientific and technical revolution, in the form of the rise of the vectoralist class. But it was the state form of the former East that has prevailed in the former West. The vector is not just a means of transforming production. It is also a way of transforming state power. Data can be collected for the purposes of a logistics of economic control; data can also be collected to run the surveillance and security apparatus of the state. The western states too had their surveillance apparatus, but it was never as total as those of the East. The new model worldwide uses the vector to realize the dreams of the KGB of old, an information state. This is what Guy Debord called the stage of the integrated spectacle, combining the worst of the former East and West.
The West is now the former West. Its economy became something else. It isn’t capitalism any more—it’s worse. It takes even more control away from work life and everyday life. It expands the exploitation of nature to possible extinction. It is certainly not the wonderful dream of a “postindustrial society,” still less Bernal and Richta’s accelerationist socialism. It is a relatively new and more elaborate form of class domination, one in more or less “peaceful coexistence” with the Russian former East, whose global significance is reduced to that of predatory oligarchy monopolizing a resource export economy. The Soviet Union paid a high price for not figuring out the role of information and reaching a modus vivendi with its scientific workers.

capital-is-dead-is-this-something-worse
mckenzie-wark

 

Понятие «гувернаментальность» (Governmentality ) предполагает концептуальный сдвиг по отношению к распространенным в политической философии концепциям власти, понимающим «власть» через «государство» (власть как результат договора, власть как институционализированное насилие—с опорой на понятия суверенитета, легальности/легитимности власти и т. д.). Даже когда речь идет о нововременных формах гувернаментальности (нововременных гувернаментальностях), связанных с современным государством, их нельзя понимать как формы «государственного управления» (или «правительственного управления»)—государство не является субъектом гувернаментальности. «Правительство» как субъект государственной воли, «правительственная ментальность», «государственное управление» и т.п.—использование в переводе таких понятий и фигур мысли для передачи gouvernementalité полностью уничтожает фукианскую аналитическую перспективу
Понятие «гувернаментальность» отсылает к общей фукианской концепции власти, предлагающей понимать «власть» как отношения, в которых индивиды (или группы) воздействуют на поле возможных действий друг друга, одновременно управляя самими собой. Таким образом, оно предлагает понимать отношения власти в максимально широком смысле слова (выходящем далеко за пределы сферы «политического» или, если угодно, расширяющем сферу «политического» далеко за пределы того, что было принято считать таковой в нововременной традиции политической мысли). Анализ гувернаментальности(ей) представляет собой анализ способов руководства поведением внутри самого разного типа институтов и/или социальных связей (где руководство поведением может осуществляться как с помощью, так и без помощи инструментов государства): в отношениях между супругами и членами семьи в рамках института брака разного типа, между врачами и пациентами, между учителями и учениками, между психиатрами и душевнобольными и т. д. Речь может идти в том числе о культурах, где институт государства просто отсутствует.

Виктор Каплун
http://www.logosjournal.ru

Думаю, последний автор, которого я довольно внимательно читал,—это Богданов; после него я вряд ли кого-то знаю хорошо. Но я знаю Сталина, я читал его—и даже книжку написал. Мне кажется, что и у Сталина, и у многих марксистов были такие формулировки: западный марксизм отличается от русского марксизма тем, что в западном марксизме диалектический материализм подчинен и продолжает подчиняться историческому материализму. А в советском марксизме исторический материализм подчинен и продолжает подчиняться диалектическому материализму. Иначе говоря, интересным аспектом для меня здесь являются космизм и материализм. Я не знаю, читали ли вы Квентина Мейясу, но это в чистом виде Сталин. Ленинская критика Богданова, которую я помню очень хорошо, и ранний Сталин—начало у него примерно такое же, когда он пишет, что, если следовать Канту, выходит, что динозавры получились после людей. Но мы же этому не верим: динозавры появились раньше. И это означает, что материалистический диалектический процесс протекает до возникновения сознания. Мне кажется, что если говорить о моде, то моден не акселерационизм, но комбинация Бруно Латура и спекулятивного реализма. Имя Мейясу все знают, но никто его не читает, потому что он пишет довольно сложно. Хармана—читают, Деланду—читают. Комбинация американского извода спекулятивного реализма с Бруно Латуром—то, что тотально интересует молодежь. Если вы послушаете, что они говорят, то будет очень похоже на русский диалектический материализм 1930-х годов. Это интеграция или реинтеграция исторических процессов в движение материальных сил, в движение космических энергий, даже просто в хаотические процессы. Люди точно в это верят. Мне достаточно посмотреть на своих студентов или на коллег, чтобы понять, как произошел переход к «Краткому курсу ВКП(б)». Когда я приехал туда, я знал слово «деконструкция»—и больше ни одного. Единственное слово, которое теперь все знают, — это «антропоцен». То есть существование человека как фактор материального развития земли и космоса, почвы. Это совершенно доминирует; это везде, куда ни плюнь. И только на это можно получить финансирование. Если вы хотите получить деньги—а мы всегда хотим получить деньги, — то, когда пишете заявку на грант (а это, собственно говоря, единственный философский текст и есть), вы должны сослаться на Бруно Латура, Мейясу и Хармана и сказать, что вы будете изучать тот или иной аспект антропоцена. Тогда вы их получите. А если не напишете—ничего не получится.

БОРИС ГРОЙС
http://www.logosjournal.ru

 

Что вообще значит «художник»? Лучшее определение художника дал Ницше, когда у него спросили, для кого он пишет. Он сказал: «Для всех и ни для кого». И так пишет каждый человек сегодня: любой, который пишет в твиттере или фейсбуке, не имеет адресата. Он пишет для всех и ни для кого. Он заранее согласен на то, чтобы его прочли все—и никто. Это характерная черта нашего времени—безадресность существования, безадресность любой формы деятельности. Мы не знаем, кому и зачем нужно то, что мы делаем. Это как-то все выбрасывается в пустоту в надежде на то, что кто-нибудь когда-нибудь поймает. Это словно сигналы радиотелескопов, посылаемые в расчете на то, что где-то там есть внеземные цивилизации. На самом деле это модель существования человечества самого по себе, в пределах Земли. Я же много преподаю в разных местах: в Нью-Йорке, даже на Тайване, в Аргентине, в Буэнос-Айресе. И что меня поразило? Когда спрашиваешь студентов, принадлежащих к одному поколению, чего они хотят, — они хотят вирусных видео. Разместить одно такое видео, которое увидели бы все. Мои студенты в Нью-Йорке выяснили, какие видео вирусные. На первом месте —видео о кошках, на втором—о собаках. А дальше идут все остальные. Как было сказано, что с кошками и собаками никакой актер состязаться не может, так эта истина и осталась непоколебимой для интернета.
БОРИС ГРОЙС
http://www.logosjournal.ru

Relying on Marx’s notion of the imbalance in the
contract between worker and capitalist where the two are formally
equal, Jean-Claude Milner recently outlined the objective and structural weakness.
Even if, in the labor contract, the
worker is paid its full value, the exchange between worker and capitalist
is not equal, there is exploitation since the worker is a commodity which
produces surplus- value, i.e., more value than its own value. In this
sense, the contract is unjust, the worker is in a weaker structural
position even if it is “objectively” stronger, with more empirical social
power.
According to Milner, the MeToo movement implicitly transposes
the same logic on the sexual exchange between a man and a woman:
even if they formally agree to make love as equal partners, i.e., even if
the appearance is that of an equal exchange of sexual favours, there is
a structural equality and the woman is in the weaker position. As with
the contract between worker and capitalist, one should emphasize the
structural (formal) character of this weakness: even if the woman
initiated sexual exchange, even if she is socially or financially much
stronger, she is structurally weaker.
Therein resides the lesson of the
Harvey Weinstein scandal: if by “rape” we understand an enforced
sexual exchange, then every (hetero)sexual act is ultimately a case of
rape. It goes without saying that very few actual MeToo members are
ready to spell out this radical implication (which was already theorized
years ago by some radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine
McKinnon): the large majority are not ready to claim that a sexual act
is as such an act of masculine violence, and they proclaim as their
goal only the struggle for sexuality which does not rely on a male
position of power and brings true joy to both partners. However, the
implication that the sexual act is ultimately as such an act of rape, of
violent imposition and coercion, clearly functions as the unspoken
presupposition of the MeToo movement with its focus on cases of male
coercion and violence—its partisans treat men exclusively as potential
rapists, and women as potential victims of male power.
Milner further deploys how Donald Trump is the exact opposite
of MeToo: MeToo privileges structural weakness at the expense of
objective weakness, Trump ignores structural weakness and focuses
exclusively on objective weakness and power—for him, politics is
basically an immoral game of power in which all principles can be (and
should be) ignored or turned against themselves when circumstances
(e.g., “America first” interests) demand it. One demonizes Kim Yong- un
as a threat to humanity, then one treats him as a friend, etc. etc., up to
the ultimate example of separating children of illegal immigrants from
their parents—in Trump’s immoral universe, it is totally logical to attack
the weak opponent at its weakest point (children). As Milner concludes,
Trump is the Weinstein of the US politics.
However, this symmetry also signals the fateful limitation and
even ethically problematic implications of the MeToo movement. Its
exclusive focus on structural weakness enables it to play its own power
game, ruthlessly using structural weakness as a means of its own
empowerment. When a person in the structural position of power is
accused of mistreating a person in the weak structural position, all the
facts which clearly prove that the structurally “weak” person has strong
institutional positions, that her accusations are very problematic if not
outright false, etc., are dismissed as ultimately irrelevant. This doesn’t
happen only in the sexual domain—to give an example that happened
to me: if, in an academic debate, I make some critical remarks about,
say, a black lesbian, replying to her critical remarks about me, I am more
or less automatically suspected at least of acting as a white homophobic
supremacist and am at least guilty of racial and sexual insensitivity. Her
position of structural weakness gives her the power and my structural
position as a white male effectively makes me powerless.
We thus enter a cruel world of brutal power games masked as a
noble struggle of victims against oppression. One should recall here
Oscar Wilde’s saying: “Everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is
about power.” Some partisans of MeToo talk about sex, but their
position of enunciation is that of power (and of those who don’t have it,
of course)—following Wilde, they reduce sex to a power game, and
what they exclude (from their position of enunciation) is precisely and
simply sex. Their goal is to keep men, independently of their qualities
formally reduced to oppressors, constantly under threat: be careful
what you do, we can destroy you at any moment even if you think you
did nothing wrong . . . The spirit is here that of revenge, not of healing.
In this cruel world, there is no space for love—no wonder love is rarely
mentioned when MeToo partisans talk about sex.
This formal guilt of a masculine subject, independent of any of his
acts in reality, is the only way to account for the fact that, when a man
is accused of sexual violence by radical feminists, his defence is as a
rule dismissed as hypocritical or outright irrelevant—the old judicial rule
“innocent until proven guilty” is here suspended or, rather, replaced by
its opposite, “guilty until proven innocent.” One is a priori considered
guilty, so that one is obliged to work hard to introduce some doubt into
the accusation. The message is: “Don’t bother with facts, you are a
priori guilty, so repent and maybe you have a chance, since we can
easily destroy you if we want!”

 

Sex and the Failed Absolute
Slavoj Žižek

The social relations of contemporary capitalism are perceived, as in pre-capitalist social formations, as relations of personal dependence, subordination and domination; the social causes of these relations appear masked in the phantasies of personal values, personal excellence or deficiency, personal merits or faults, and so on. Social tensions that necessarily arise from these same relations are ultimately experienced as interpersonal conflicts. In short, Močnik writes, ‘The class struggle assumes in the eyes of those involved the fantastic form of personal intrigues.’ The more these individuals perceive their social position in terms of their personal biography, or the success or failure of their ‘career’, and experience their relations to their fellow men and women through competition struggles and mutual exclusions, the more they blindly support and reproduce the structure of capitalist domination.
This is, according to Močnik, the mechanism behind the processes that we perceive today, in their existential immediacy, as a re-feudalization of social relations. It comes to light in the entire sphere of civil society, where any element of the individual lifeworld, from lifestyle or entertainment to family relations – elements that were originally of no interest to the state – now might turn into an ideological apparatus of the capitalist state, having huge impact on the political life of society.

In fact, the overall social, historical and cultural ground on which this new interest in Marx occurs is increasingly narrowing. It is shrinking together with the light of the central sun of freedom, the figure of the free and equal individual that has been for the last two centuries illuminating the worlds revolving around it. The more the sun cools down, ever-larger parts of its system are swallowed by the new vernacular darkness. And while here, around the dimming light of an old, tired and ever-weaker freedom, Capital is well preserved, lovingly taken care of and seriously discussed and studied – as is right and proper for such a valuable and long-canonized piece of the world’s cultural heritage – there in the darkness people don’t give a damn about the book. Rather, they get buried again with their holy Bibles, Qurans or Torahs, with their reconsecrated national myths, or the masterpieces of post-truth trash. But if it is true that they have abandoned Marx, it is even more true that Marx has abandoned them. He no longer talks to them in their new vernaculars – the languages of the decaying post-translational societies that have become slow to catch up with the acceleration of technological development, global trade, finance and politics; that increasingly lose the capacity to convey the complexity of the contemporary world and to critically reflect upon its contradictions, dangers and chances; that have scrapped the ideas of enlightenment – which once raised them into the spheres of secular universality, natural and human sciences, culture, the rule of law and political freedoms – to replace them with the neo-medieval ‘values’ of servitude, ignorance and superstition; that have sunk into their own ahistorical temporalities, without any relation to a common history, the languages of those who were liberated from Marx only to be left behind by global capitalism. They have accumulated an enormous capacity for political mobilization, but it is today increasingly activated for the interests of domination and exploitation. It is from this ever broadening and deepening vernacular darkness that contemporary capitalism draws today the ideological energy for its ongoing reproduction. At stake is a metabolism between the neoliberal economy and neo-medieval social relations, a kind of ideological accumulation of the capitalism of our age.

Boris Buden

 

In one of his most discussed pensées, Pascal writes: ‘Men are so inevitably
mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.’ This
is what Foucault recalls in his preface to the first edition of History of
Madness in 1961. He also quotes Dostoyevsky: ‘It is not by locking up
one’s neighbour that one convinces oneself of one’s own good sense.’
As we shall see, Sloterdijk, too, refers to Dostoyevsky, whom he presents
as being the great thinker of, precisely, disinhibition.
It is starting from these references to Pascal and Dostoyevsky that,
at the beginning of his preface, Foucault presents reason in the classical
age in its relation to madness as a ‘trick that madness plays […]
through which men, in the gesture of sovereign reason that locks up
their neighbour, communicate and recognise each other in the merciless
language of non-madness’. Let us measure the scope of this statement:
at the origin of reason in the classical age, there would lie a ‘trick played
by madness’ [tour de folie]. The history of madness in the classical age
would not just be, therefore, that history during which reason enclosed
madness, locked it up, and treated it as unreason: it would also be the
history of this classical reason as a kind of madness, as a new form
of madness – and it could be seen as preliminary to a ‘new form of
barbarism’ that will not occur until three centuries later, eventually
unfurling itself fully after yet another century, that is, after 11 September
2001, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which will also be the
latest period of the Anthropocene, and as the age of disruption, that is,
as absence of epoch.
This perspective, however, opened by Foucault in the preface to the
first edition, is not explored any further in the body of the text.
My own thesis is that this ‘trick of madness’ that would be reason
must now be rethought as that which leads to the Anthropocene, to
disruption, to transhumanism and to the various forms of barbarism
in which all this consists – including with the ‘neo-barbarians’, as
the radicalization of this new form of madness that ‘classical reason’
would have borne within it, and as its ὕβρις. It is in this way – that is,
otherwise than Foucault himself – that, today, we should read History
of Madness.
What leads to this kind of questioning is that ‘man’, who today is
certainly no longer ‘modern’ (which does not mean that he would be
‘postmodern’, or that what is covered by the latter would adequately
describe his present situation), ‘man today’, who is obviously no longer
at all classical (but the classical age is in Foucault an epoch of the
‘modern age’, so that the latter, in this regard, would instead constitute
an era – inclusive of the first two epochs of industrial capitalism), this
man becomes mad, even in his everyday life,25 and he does so through
the unfolding of an ‘ordinary madness’ that is quite extra-ordinary
with respect to the history of madness, especially as Foucault conceives
it.
Contemporary everydayness becomes crazy and even requires madness
while at the same time denying it – we all feel it, outside ourselves and
within ourselves. This exigency stems, in particular, from disruption, if
it is true that madness is an expression of the absence of epoch, that is,
the impossibility of producing collective protentions.
We know that ὕβρις, which is thus carried to a point that is truly incandescent,
could become fatal to the great adventure of hominization, that
is, to this technical form of life that appeared some two or three million
years ago. We also know that the technical form of life, having become,
as globalization, generalized and uniform anthropization, ultimately
constitutes the geological era referred to as the Anthropocene. But we
know it in a mode that does not recognize it, by abandoning ourselves
to denial.

The Age of Disruption
Technology and Madness in
Computational Capitalism

Bernard Stiegler

 

In creating a new global liberation movement – one that would work across borders and beyond national identities, which would go beyond the false dichotomy of the choice presented to us between neoliberalism and fascism – we have myriad inspiring examples, historical and contemporary, on which to draw. But if we want to build such a transnational liberation movement for our times, with a new name and new language, one that, while remembering the past also avoids its mistakes, then the inspiration has to come from the future. This chronological paradox was best summed up by Karl Marx in the opening pages of his 1852 work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. There, he contrasts the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and the proletarian revolutions of his own time:
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.
What did Marx mean by ‘poetry’? In fact, he wasn’t talking about poetry as we commonly understand the term, but poiesis, from the ancient Greek verb poiein, which means ‘to produce’ in the sense of bringing something into being. In this sense, Marx himself had already invented the poetry of the future revolutions four years previously in his Communist Manifesto. And, as the French philosopher Étienne Balibar shows, Marx did something else as well. He removed one of philosophy’s most ancient taboos, namely, the radical distinction between praxis (from prattein, ‘to do’ in the sense of acting) and poiesis established by Aristotle. Marx’s formulation is what Balibar calls a ‘revolutionary thesis’, because there is neither praxis nor poiesis any longer taking primacy over the other. Rather praxis constantly passes over into poiesis and vice versa. In other words, if the new social revolution has to draw its poetry from the future, the content of the future revolution can be made only out of the poetry which is at the same time poiesis and praxis. The action (praxis) has to bring into being (poiesis) something that is a new creation of life and society by the very acts which happen in the present and come from the future. The problem with the poetry from the past is precisely this: it borrows from the past. Luther’s Protestant revolution had referenced the apostle Paul; the French bourgeois revolution, Roman antiquity (the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity); the Haitian revolution, the French Revolution; and last but not least many new left parties today draw inspiration from the social-democracy of the twentieth century (wealth redistribution, progressive taxation and so on), instead of offering something much more radical and responding to the future. Instead of breaking into the future with eyes turned to the past, a truly new social revolution must draw its content from the future. This is why, as Benjamin recalls in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, the people on the first evening of fighting in Paris in July 1789 were simultaneously and independently firing at clock towers across the city. The new revolution had – literally – to create its own time. And it is here that we must return to Benjamin’s notion of time:
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; a historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
While the members of the French Revolution were never contemporaries of their own actions, because they were breaking into the future in the ‘costume’ provided by past moments of emancipation (such as the Roman ‘republican’ or ‘spartacist’ phraseology, or citing the mythic Roman accomplishments of liberty, equality and fraternity), the new revolutionaries have to inhabit the now of history, what Benjamin calls in his thesis XIV die Jetztzeit (‘now-time’ or ‘here-and-now’). In order to draw our inspiration from the future, we must escape from the blandishments of the past: we must shoot the clocks of the present in order to break out into the future. No wonder Benjamin uses the same example as Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, referring to the French Revolution as one that ‘viewed itself as Rome reincarnate’ and ‘evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past’. While this sort of revolution was, as Benjamin beautifully describes it, ‘a tiger’s leap into the past’ (because ‘the jump takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands’), the new revolution has to make a leap into ‘the open air of history’, imposing its own rules of the game. In this way, the Jetztzeit is time at a standstill, a kind of ‘zero hour’.
Today, as we witness a reincarnation of fascism in different costumes all over the world, we find ourselves in an analogous situation. We can’t be breaking into the future with our eyes turned to the past, for the overwhelming reason that the solution to the world’s problems doesn’t lie in modest proposals for wealth redistribution, social democracy or traditional protests or party politics. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t learn from the past. On the contrary, it is the past and its unfulfilled potentials which point towards the potentiality of the future. But in order to make this crucial leap into ‘the open air of history’ we have to be acting and living in the now-time. It means breaking once and for all with the historicist notion of history understood as kronos: the purely linear and chronological vision of events usually perceived as a succession of dates in the columns of a calendar. What Benjamin teaches us, on the contrary, is an understanding of history as kairos: time as an open and unfinished process.
When a movement shatters or a comrade dies – someone with whom you were connected through struggle and conviction, going beyond mere friendship – nothing is lost so long as the struggle continues and conviction grows. Yet everything might be lost, if at that devastating moment we are not able to continue, even stronger, as if our comrades and their struggles were still with us. Even if they are not physically among us any more, to carry the spark of conviction and resistance into the future entails a chance of resurrection. The point is not just to remember, but to live as if the comrades and their struggles are here, in the now-time, to debate with them here and now, to quarrel if needed, to think and rethink, to have fun, to laugh and play and dream together, by deconstructing time itself and the prevailing notion that what has passed has passed for ever We have to understand the temporality of struggle as something which is not kronos, a mere succession of events (the Paris Commune, the French Revolution, the October Revolution, the anti-slavery movement, Occupy, the Greek Spring, Tahrir, the Partisans), but another space, another time, another reality which is not past but is here and now. The potentials of the past can only be reactivated by changing the present. And it is in this newly shaped present that the future can be created.
But ‘Time is over!’ We are constantly reminded not only that the utopias of the past century have disappeared, but that we live in an age without any big narratives – except that of ‘there is no alternative’, a negative narrative par excellence. Instead of inhabiting the now-time, we inhabit a vicious ‘presentism’, defined pithily by Enzo Traverso as a ‘suspended time between an unmasterable past and a denied future, between a “past that won’t go away” and a future that cannot be invented or predicted (except in terms of catastrophe)’.
If ‘Time is over’, aren’t we inevitably approaching a deadlock similar to Franz Kafka’s ‘Little Fable’, or what Walter Benjamin would call Einbahnstrasse, a one-way street? If Jean-Jacques Rousseau could proclaim in the prophetic passage from his 1762 Emile that ‘we are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions’, shouldn’t we today accept that we live in an age in which the opposite seems to be the case: ‘Not the imminent return of revolutions, but the exhaustion of the idea, or – which is not exactly the same – the accumulation of factors which make the failure of revolutions their only possible outcome, therefore depriving them of their historical meaning and their political effectivity’? In other words, if the future is cancelled, if time is literally over, how can we draw our inspiration from the poetry from the future? How can we read or write the poetry from the future?
The answer is simultaneously simple and complex: we can do it only in the present, only in the now. Yet this now can’t be confused with the capitalist presentism in which either past or future no longer have any meaning; where ‘fake news’ and historical revisionism have already erased almost all distinctions between reality and fiction. It is this particular moment (Jetztzeit) in which the potentials of the past re-emerge (the first sound from occupied Europe, the Arab Spring and the Greek Spring, all the protests and occupations from Black Lives Matter to Gilets jaunes and so on) not as something gewesene (‘what has been’), but as kairos, an open and unfinished project.
But here it comes again: ‘Time is over!’ We are reminded by the galloping steps of fascism (from the United States to Europe and beyond) and capitalist destruction (from the brutal extraction of natural and human resources to the realistic possibility of a nuclear war or ecological armageddon). And here again, the only seemingly paradoxical answer to the cancellation of the future is now. It is, as counterintuitive as it might seem at first glance, precisely the inevitable collapse of civilization which – today more than ever – makes revolution inevitable. If there is no revolution, it is surely the end of the world.
An obscure text by the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, ‘The apocalypse is disappointing’, published in 1964, during the height of the Cold War, provides a surprising answer. The significance of Blanchot’s text – similar to Kubrick’s exactly contemporary Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – was recently rediscovered by the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič. Blanchot’s main argument is that the threat of the ‘Bomb’ (the master signifier) and its potential of total annihilation led to the birth of the idea of a whole (of the world), as the whole, precisely, that can be lost, or disappear for ever.
You might ask, why does this shed any light on our current crisis? Because without this sense of the whole, there is no way out. The apocalypse is disappointing in that there is no discernible whole, which is devoid of any concrete content and form. While people bond together in the face of a common threat (lethal hurricanes, wars, terrorist attacks, refugee crises, ecological disasters, or the total annihilation of humanity) there is not yet the sense of a global community. This very whole (totality) of which some of us born after the Bomb became aware for the first time at the beginning of the twenty-first century is about to disappear, but it is not yet a totality in the sense of a human community. The ingenuity of Blanchot, says Zupančič, resides in the following Hegelian twist. Instead of accepting or denying the idea of the apocalypse, it is precisely its inevitability that lays the foundations for a predictable revolution (in the sense that only revolution can prevent the apocalypse, turning it from an unavoidable future event into something that is no longer inevitable). The global threats to humanity that we are now encountering represent an opportunity to build this coming global community. The apocalypse is disappointing because we will lose something (the whole) that we didn’t succeed in building. But it is precisely by creating what we are about to lose that we could eventually prevent the end.
What does the problematic event teach us? This: that insofar as it puts into question the human species in its totality, it is also because of this event that the idea of totality arises visibly and for the first time on our horizon – a sun, though we know not whether it is rising or setting; also, that this totality is in our possession, but as a negative power. This singularly confirms the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: the power of understanding is an absolute power of negation; understanding knows only through the force of separation, that is, of destruction – analysis, fission – and at the same time knows only the destructible and is certain only of what could be destroyed. Through understanding, we know very precisely what must be done in order for the final annihilation to occur, but we do not know which resources to solicit to prevent it from occurring. What understanding gives us is the knowledge of catastrophe, and what it predicts, foresees, and grasps, by means of decisive anticipation, is the possibility of the end. Thus man is held to the whole first of all by the force of understanding, and understanding is held to the whole by negation. Whence insecurity of all knowledge – of knowledge that bears on the whole.
What this Hegelian reading of the apocalypse enables us to become aware of is that the future is now. This is the dark future of disastrous hurricanes which leave whole islands and countries devastated, in response to which Trump throws paper towels into Puerto Rican crowds. Yes, it is the totalitarian future in which people gather to demand their basic democratic rights, and are the victims of a brutal crackdown by the security services. What if this dystopian future which is our daily present can give rise to a collective, global awareness about the whole: an awareness that might allow us to shape the future? What if the coming apocalypse opens up a chance, maybe for the first time (since the threat is not only the Bomb any more but a multiplicity of global threats), not only to understand humanity as the whole, as a totality, but to create a totality in the sense of a global community that would be structured in a radically different way from the one we are inhabiting now? And this ‘avatar of totality’, which necessarily comes from the future (aus der Zukunft), is actually our only chance to avoid the apocalypse?
As paradoxical as it might sound, when the Caribbean was pummelled by destructive hurricanes in September 2017, this was our chance; when, that same month, Mexico was hit by a massive earthquake this was our chance; and when, halfway across the world, the people of Catalonia, demanding their democratic right to vote over independence, were slapped down by the police and special forces: this, too, was our chance. The same goes for all the fascist movements, walls and detention centres rising like mushrooms around the globe; for the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica revelations, for the war in Syria or in Yemen, for the refugee crisis, for the record heatwaves in Europe and microplastic-filled oceans. Each of these events represented an alarm call from a catastrophic future that is inevitable – inevitable only if we are not able to create a global community which would perceive and treat each of these tragic events (from Puerto Rico to Florida, from police brutality in Hamburg to Catalonia, from rising fascism in Budapest to Charlottesville) as part of a whole.
But, here again comes the devil’s advocate with his alarming ‘There is no time!’, ‘Everything is going to collapse if we don’t act right now!’ And this is exactly what we should be avoiding. We should always distinguish between the fake now and the now as Jetztzeit. If mere presentism (the fake now or the nowness of the fake) consists in the reproduction of the present by instant news, real-time politics, society of spectacle, then the Jetztzeit, the here-andnow, consists in a deconstruction and destruction of the temporal totalitarianism which imposes and enforces a notion of time that necessarily narrows possibilities and potentialities. To act now means to create the conditions for our own future, not to follow the already written script from the past: it means to produce a crack in the present, a disruption in the imposition of capitalist temporality, the rhythm of power.
This sort of temporal subversion is nicely encapsulated in an event that happened in May 1995 during the Zapatista negotiations with the Mexican government. The government officials put forth a proposal and demanded a quick response from the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas, however, replied that a response would take some time as they needed to consult with their communities: ‘We as Indians, have rhythms, forms of understanding, of deciding, of reaching agreements.’ The government negotiators started making fun of the Zapatistas. ‘We don’t understand why you say that because we see you have Japanese watches, so how do you say you are wearing indigenous watches, that’s from Japan.’ To which the Zapatistas said, ‘You haven’t learned. You understand us backwards. We use time, not the clock.
This is another enactment of Benjamin’s struggle against kronos or, more precisely, a deconstruction of the notion of time as a set of chronological and linear events, a struggle against the most powerful of all powers (time). Of course, you could claim that the rapid technological and ontological acceleration of capitalism and its total colonization of time will inevitably affect also those, from Mexico’s Zapatistas to the island of Vis and its philosophy of pomalo, who live on the fringes of capitalist temporality. The Zapatistas have an answer to this as well. In April 2017 Subcomandante Galeano (formerly known as Subcomandante Marcos) delivered a lecture in San Cristobal de las Casas, a town in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, entitled ‘Prelude: Timepieces, the Apocalypse, and the Hour of the Small’. In contrast to the predominant capitalist concept of time according to which the Zapatistas and all other groups and societies that are not living in the capitalist temporality are usually perceived as ‘anachronistic’ (literally, in ancient Greek, ‘against time’), ‘backward’ or ‘lazy’ (stereotypically the Greeks), Subcomandante Galeano compares the Zapatistas to the hourglass:
An hourglass that, although it doesn’t request an update every 15 minutes and doesn’t require you to have credit on your phone to work, does have to renew its limited countdown over and over again. Although not very practical and somewhat uncomfortable, just like us Zapatistas, the hourglass has its advantages. For example, in it we can see the time that has gone by, the past, and try to understand it. And we can see, too, the time that is coming. Zapatista time cannot be understood without understanding the gaze that keeps track of time with an hourglass. That’s why, on this one and only occasion, we’ve brought here for you, madam, sir, other, little girl, little boy, this hourglass which we’ve baptized the ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow’ model.
It is difficult to not be affected by Subcomandante Galeano’s subtle irony and his gentle way of translating something from Zapatista philosophy into our Western language through the culture of Hollywood. Here we have someone who has devoted his life to the fight against the capitalist colonization of time, but instead of taking refuge in anachronistic explanations, he uses a quote from Game of Thrones. He chose it with care: it comes from a scene of utter misunderstanding, in which the wildling girl Ygritte tells Jon Snow – who asked why she was crying because of a song about ‘the last of the giants’ when he had just seen hundreds of them – how little he knows about the real world. Why did the Subcomandante call the hourglass the ‘Jon Snow model’? The answer is that Zapatista time cannot be understood without understanding the gaze that keeps track of time with an hourglass. The Western, capitalist notion of time demands that we pay attention to that brief instant in which a tiny grain of sand arrives in the narrow passage, to fall and join the other moments that have accumulated in what we call the ‘past’. This is the prevailing presentism which commands us to live in the moment: don’t look back, because ‘a second ago’ is the same as ‘a century ago’ – and above all, don’t look at what’s coming.
In opposition to this prevailing presentism, the Zapatistas, as Subcomandante Galeano says,
… stubbornly, against the grain, just to be contrary (without insulting anybody in particular, to each his own), are analyzing and questioning the tiny grain of sand that exists anonymously in the middle of all the others, waiting its turn to get in line in the narrow tunnel, and at the same time looking at the grains that lie below and to the left in what we call the ‘past’, asking each other what the heck they have to do with this presentation about the walls of Capital and the cracks below. And we have one eye on the cat and the other on the meat hook, or rather the dog, with which the ‘cat-dog’ fn1 becomes a tool of analysis in critical thought and ceases to be the constant company of a little girl who imagines herself without fear, free, a compañera.
What the subcomandante unfolds here is nothing less than a philosophy of struggle, in which Zapatismo – for the Zapatistas themselves – is one struggle among many, perhaps a small grain of sand that exists in the middle of all the others: it is the poetry from the future in which many worlds fit: all of them, those that existed, those that exist and those yet to be born. The struggle, says Subcomandante Galeano, is something ‘that requires you to pay attention to the whole and to the parts, and to be ready because that last grain of sand isn’t the last, but rather, the first, and that the hourglass must be turned over because it contains not today, but yesterday, and yes, you’re right, tomorrow too’. In other words, the Zapatista understanding of time is that of kairos. It means that all our emancipatory struggles, the ones of the past and the ones to come, with all their differences and outcomes, have to be perceived as one and the same struggle. And even if some of these struggles, with all their dreams, hopes and achievements, might appear as nothing more than a tiny grain of sand in an hourglass, we always have to remember that even this tiny grain of sand can at the same time already be a mountain. It just depends on the gaze. And from where we draw our poetry.
Srećko Horvat, POETRY FROM THE FUTURE

If, before 2017, we were all living in what in psychoanalytical terms could be described as ‘fetishist denial’, then from Trump’s election onwards we are living in something that could best be described as ‘apocalyptic fetishism’. The notion of fetishist denial was coined by the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni in his famous essay ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’ (‘I know perfectly well, but …’) where he puts forward a theory all too apposite to our current apocalyptic zeitgeist. According to Mannoni, in fetishist denial the subject is able at the same time to believe in his fantasy and to recognize that it is nothing but a fantasy. If Marx’s definition of ideology was ‘they do not know what they’re doing but they do it’, fetishist denial might be described as ‘they know what they’re doing and they’re still doing it’. The problem, from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, is of course that the individual’s acknowledgement of the fantasy in no way reduces the power that fantasy has over the individual. Before Trump, faced with the prospect of terrible natural disasters and radical climate change, nuclear wars and even our planet’s destruction, we would usually answer this fear with ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’. In other words, it was as though the majority of the world’s population was suffering from a global fetishist denial: we knew it but we were still doing it. ‘We know very well that we might be living in the end of times, that a natural disaster could wipe out whole countries or that a nuclear war might wipe out the whole planet, but …’ Then follows a variety of denials: ‘the world is always on the brink of destruction, yet it continues to survive; there’s no such thing as climate change; there’s nothing we can do about it anyhow’, etc. As if out of the blue (as if, that is, decades of scientific research, indicating overwhelmingly that human-made climate change is a fact, didn’t meananything), summer 2017 arrived. The world was hit by once-in-1,000-years storms and powerful hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate) and ecological disasters (from Greenland to California), as if giving material shape to the worst apocalyptic fears of recent years. Then came summer 2018, with lethal wildfires in Greece and record heatwaves and droughts across Europe (from London to Berlin), prompting CNN to claim ‘Deadly heat waves have become more common due to climate change’, while the Guardian predicted that ‘Unsurvivable heatwaves could strike heart of China by end of century’. Here was, once again, the perfect moment for a collective awakening from the global slumber of fetishist denial. What happened instead is something that can be best described as ‘fetishist apocalypticism’. What we can see in these visions of the future and Donald Trump’s apocalyptic geopolitics is an evolution of fetishist denialism. No longer is it a case of ‘we know the end of the world is nigh, and do nothing’. Now it’s a case of knowing the end of the world is nigh – so, we prepare for it. And it is not so difficult to reveal the real ideological core behind this fetishist apocalypticism. The main question seems to be not so much what will happen to the global poor if climate change leads to a post-apocalyptic Waterworld or The Day After Tomorrow, but how the rich will be able to escape. There’s no public interest here, only private. Fetishist apocalypticism doesn’t bother to ask what we can change now in order to avoid the apocalypse. Rather, it’s how can we – or, more precisely, the mega-rich – survive the apocalypse when it happens?

Srećko Horvat, POETRY FROM THE FUTURE