the grave (Sheol) is naked before Him, and destruction (Abaddon) has no covering
Job 26:6
It is very easy to become a courageous thinker in times of corona. The apparent courage of attacking an old thinker, G. Agamben, which has become a “sport” in Italy, as a good friend told me, has shown itself as ungracious. To attack the subtility of reason is stupid, just as stupid as the coronavirus, and any kind of virus. As Zizek and Zupančič announced in 2017, talking about apocalyptical events, such as the cold war and the threat of the “Bomb”, the apocalypse is always disappointing, because its mere cause, its agent, can be any stupid agent, anyone with a finger can press the destroying bottom, anything, in today´s termini, even without fingers, can present itself as the angel of destruction (meaning the stupid corona).
The agambian turn is very similar to the “perspective shift” performed by Blanchot (1964, The Apocalypse is disappointing), where he does not mean to eliminate the gravity of a global menace in itself, but to eliminate the hysteria, as if something radically new was coming toward us, as the planet Melancholia in the homonymous movie by Von Trier. According to Blanchot, in said incredibly updated work, every end, understood as a total destruction, is disappointing. It is as when a mother is constantly threatening her child with the worst punishment imaginable, the child lives then in perpetual terror… until the punishment is perpetrated, and so he thinks for himself “Is that all there is?” As P.J. Harvey sings about Liebeskummer: after all, after all these sufferings, this painful and patient submission to a sadistic lover, after everything it appeared to mean, after all meaningfulness, “Is that all there is to love?”
This is exactly the “perspective shift” of Blanchot regarding bombs, and that is exactly what Agamben is trying to express in a very simple language though too subtle to mean just what it means. The world is not at the gateway of an apocalypse, that is justly the point: it is within it, as Zupančič asserts brilliantly in her article: The apocalypse is (still) disappointing, published just three eternal years ago. Agamben is making the same point in his claims about the state of exception. The state of exception is not a state, that is the point. Language is always misleading. Exception, as the suffix -tion entertains, is a process of, paradoxically, normalization. “First of all, there is once again the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government” (Agamben, L´invenzione di un´epidemia) Exception is that which confirms the rule, that is the clue which Agamben is trying to convey. The key to understand apocalyptical matters is not to think as if… as if there were something to lose. What is there to lose? Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Amazon and H&M?
Is that all there is to this shit world? Of course not. Blanchot argues by way of provoking. According to his reading of a total potential destruction, that which is allegedly going to disappear does not yet exist as such. The world as a round globe, as a total entity, is just appearing before us through negativity, through the threat of its very destruction. The world as a whole does not exist in a pre-apocaliptical state, it is rather building up within the apocalyptical scenario. We are the ones actually responsible of its completion, of the construction of its earthly surface. To believe in a pre-apocalitical state and its consequent overcoming, or alternative, is a gesture of intellectual cowardice, as Zupančič through Zizek and Zizek through Agamben argue:
“the dream of an alternative is a sign of cowardice, functioning as a fetich that prevents us from thinking through through the end of the deadlock of our predicament.” (quoted by Zupančič, 2017, from Zizek, 2017)
The alternative is the fetich of the “brave new world” ,of the capitalist thinkers, or of the brave intellectuals imagining that this is an “opportunity” to become a better community, a common-community, a society built into solidarity, even as a new form of communism. And I believe that even Zizek, after writing this decisive lines, felt into the same trap he just defined three years away from now: he took on the fetich of the pseudo-alternative, he chose to be a hipster alternative guy, as I got it from his last words on corona.
Seeing disaster as opportunity: there upon lies exactly the fetich, the “Hölderlin-danger”: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, da wächst das Rettende auch”. This old way of saving the day is not saving anything today. Das ist Schnee von gestern. Why? Because as Agamben and Zupančič put it, the danger is not to come, the danger was always there. It is not “an event” that will appear as a Shakira-J.LO-Superbowl-show. We are so used to bad shows, we think those are the real events. The event of destruction or of exception is not coming as in the goodnight stories, as a monster ready to attack if you don’t close your eyes and fall asleep. The event is coming disguised as the common flu. As Dostoyevsky imagines the devil in the hallucination of Ivan Karamasov: the devil is a well-dressed bourgeois gentleman, with a cane and a hat, including the typical tummy of an entrepreneur. The exception appears in the normality or normalization of the everyday-apocalypse. But the moment the stupid corona or the stupid guy presses the bottom, then it seems as if we were before the end and rushing towards it. “Another thing, no less disturbing than the first, which appears in the midst of the epidemia , is that the state of exception, to which governments have accustomed us for some time, has truly become the normal condition.” (Agamben, Chiarimenti)
There is nothing novel in the apocalypse, is just the routine, at least, since the beginning of this damned century. And don´t misunderstand my humble words, I am not trying to downplay the dangers and be disrespectful towards the lost during this pandemic moment. But yes, I am downplaying the alarms which rang too late, the delayed tolling bells of an already begun Requiem-mass.
The state of exception is not exactly seizing the moment: carpe diem, rather it is just making manifest that very same Thing, which was lying in the very same place and form in a non-manifest way. There´s a very classical-psychoanalytical and thus ludic way of expressing this idea: the manifest and the non-manifest content of a dream or a nightmare. The manifest content is as when you dream of somebody you hate and this somebody appears manifestly in the dream. The non-manifest is a sort of symbolic layer within the dream which does not wish to be present in its real figure but disguises itself in the most pervert and diverse costumes. The manifest content of today´s (or tonight´s?) nightmare is the propagation of an unknown stupid angel of destruction called corona. What is then the non-manifest element? That is exactly the question to which Agamben offers a novel answer: the normalization of the state of exception. “Fear is a bad counselor, but it brings up many things that she pretended not to see.” (Agamben, Chiarimenti)
As Zupančič argues, “The fact that normalization works so smoothly is precisely the proof that we are already inside the apocalypse”. As she in 2017 and Blanchot in 1964, and today Agamben believes: thinking is demystifying: demystifying the apocalypse.
Ein Unglück kommt selten allein.
- Reseña poetizada de “Le Pont du Nord”, Jacques Rivette - June 8, 2021
- Poesía a mano - March 28, 2021
- Ocio líquido - October 3, 2020
Now, this is a really fascinating, albeit provocative and at times even outrageous article, congrats and thanks for sharing!
I have quite a few things to say about it, controversial good stuff. But before what is uncontroversial: I really like your writing style, non-nonsense, to the point, vivid and unapologetic, really refreshing when one is most used to the typical, rather bloodless academic philosophical writing…
What I find controversial, are different statements, say, that nothing radically new is happening right now and that we basically live in the apocalypse already, if you really think about it. And the child who is threatened by his mother, then she acts on it confirming his fears and then it’s just, uh yeah abuse, now I know how she meant that, now I know how it’s like when the worst actually comes to pass.
I think this example showcases my biggest problem with, what I observe not just in your text but in Lacanian (post?)structuralism: There is a tendency to trivialize and downplay real trauma and reality in the face of an intellectualized idea of trauma or reality. To say that ultimately there is the same gap or emptiness or void wating on the bottom of any event, that there is “no metalanguge”, is for me not going anywhere.
And specifically in this position regarding the Coronoa-Virus, it seems to me that it overstates repetition to a point where the actuality of people and experiences and crisis is overlooked and just fit into a specific kind of understanding. This is robbing the other of its strangeness! This is making infinity finite!
Well anyway, dear Federica, if I were to write a response, could I post it on this forum somewhere? I think that would make for an even more interesting debate than if we just went from here. And I wonder whether we can even satisfyingly discuss this here, but I am certainly glad you started the ball rolling!