Natality with Hannah

 

The close to Hannah Arendt’s “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise,” from The Human Condition (1958, p. 246-7):

“If left to themselves, human affairs can only follow the law of mortality, which is the most certain and the only reliable law of a life spent between birth and death. It is the faculty of action that interferes with this law because it interrupts the inexorable automatic course of daily life, which in its turn, as we [see], interrupt[s] and interfere[s] with the cycle of the biological life process. The life span of man [sic] running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin. Yet just as from the standpoint of nature, the rectilinear movement of man’s life-span between birth and death looks like a peculiar deviation from the common natural rule of cyclical movement, thus action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle. In the language of natural science, it is the ‘infinite improbability which occurs regularly.’ […]

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is in, in other words, the birth of new [humans] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope […].”

Some chemical and biological implications of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster

Ngo Van, “Saigon Insurrection” (1945)

The .pdf below is a copy of the presentation I delivered on 14 December regarding the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill-disaster.

Deepwater Horizon Macondo.pdf

Creation and Revolution with Camus

The close to the section “Creation and Revolution” from Albert Camus’ L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel)–the end to Camus’ chapter “Rebellion and Art”–as translated by Anthony Bower in 1956 (the emphasis is mine):

“Meanwhile, the triumphant revolution, in the aberrations of its nihilism, menaces those who, in defiance of it, claim to maintain the existence of unity in totality. One of the implications of history today, and still more of the history of tomorrow, is the struggle between the artists and the new conquerors, between the witnesses to the creative revolution and the founders of the nihilist revolution. As to the outcome of the struggle, it is only possible to make inspired guesses. At least we know that it must henceforth be carried on to the bitter end. Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run, therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its allocated span. Each time that the revolution kills in a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair. Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone. And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man [sic] cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to creat ein history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolution. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in….”

Tariq Ali’s address to Occupy Oakland

Pakistani-born Marxist and New Left Review editor Tariq Ali speaks to those assembled at Occupy Oakland on the afternoon of 29 October 2011.

For a free nature

The following is this writer’s address to the 2011 Marcuse Society Critical Refusals Conference, which was presented at the panel “Erotic Struggle” on the morning of 28 October.  It is an exegesis of and set of reflections on the paper “Critical Theory, Social Ecology, and Post-Developmentalism: Towards a ‘Free Nature,’” written in 2008.

Cornel West on Attica, oligarchy, and love for humanity

A Democracy Now! segment featuring philosopher and race theorist Cornel West speaking on the present socio-political crisis in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Attica prison uprising of New York state–and the subsequent massacre of prisoners by police.  In a radical take on the material impoverishment of U.S. society and the falsity of the political class, West cites Adorno by insisting that “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.”  His proffered maxim of love for humanity is reminiscent of that advanced by Ernst Bloch, as by others.

The beyond with Górecki

The third and last movement to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”), written in 1976.  Górecki, a renowned Polish composer who died last year, composed his Symphony No. 3 in part as a response to and commemoration of the Shoah in particular and war in general; all three movements revolve around the anguish impelled by barbaric politics.

Despair and color in Negative Dialectics

An excerpt from the close to Theodor W. Adorno’s 1966 work Negative Dialectics, as translated by E.B. Ashton in 1973 (p. 403-5).

“As in Kafka’s writings, the disturbed and damaged course of the world is incommensurable also with the sense of its senselessness and blindness; we cannot stringently construe it according to their principle. It resists all attempts of a desperate consciousness to posit despair as an absolute. The world’s course is not absolutely conclusive, nor is absolute despair; rather, despair is its conclusiveness. However void every trace of otherness in it, however much all happiness is marred by irrevocability: in the breaks that belie identity, entity is still pervaded by the everbroken pledges of that otherness. All happiness is but a fragment of the entire happiness men [sic] are denied, and are denied by themselves. [...]

And yet philosophy cannot abdicate if stupidity is not to triumph in realized unreason. Aux sots je préfère les fous. Folly is truth in the form which [humans] are struck with as amid untruth they will not let truth go. Art is semblance even at its highest peaks; but its semblance, the irresistible part of it, is given to it by what is not semblance. What art, notably the art decried as nihilistic, says in refraining from judgments is that everything is not just nothing. If it were, whatever is would be pale, colorless, indifferent. No light falls on [humans] and things without reflecting transcendence. Indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of barter is the resistance of the eye that does not want the colors of the world to fade.”

Reflections by Chomsky on the present world-situation

Anarchist linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky speaking in June 2011 at the University of Cologne on “The Evolving Global Order: Prospects and Opportunities.”  Chomsky discusses historical and contemporary U.S. imperialism, the Mua’sher doctrine, Iran, Iraq, capitalism, the Arab Spring, and the specters of nuclear war and environmental collapse.  As with much else produced by this foremost intellectual, his comments here (just over an hour in length) are highly recommendable.

For exit

@ Justseeds

With regard to ongoing federal budget-negotiations, the criminal Obama administration has professed its commitment to “to do something big.” As the head of state has it, “We have a chance to stabilize America’s finances for a decade, for 15 years, or 20 years, if we’re willing to seize the moment.” Articulating precisely what he means by this, Obama envisioned the following: “I am willing to take down domestic spending to the lowest percentage of our overall economy since Dwight Eisenhower.”

Obama means, then, to enact a reactionary social overhaul about which the likes of Ronald Reagan would fantasize—a return to the past before the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s. This means precisely cuts in funding for public-programs for highly indigent and elderly U.S. citizens, one of the few decent realities of U.S. society. The president has reportedly endorsed raising the age of eligibility for Medicare to 67 years, up from its present 65, and advocates a “chaining” of the totality of Social Security benefits to the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—a move that could well imply reductions in benefits amounting to some $110 billion in the next ten years. Obama is additionally said to have discussed $353 billion in cuts to Medicare as well as committed himself to $100 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the coming decade.

This brutally overt exercise in class power and social exclusion comes a month after the publication in the American Journal of Public Health of a Columbia University study entitled “Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United States,” which concludes the following:

“approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty.”

In eastern Africa as well, social catastrophe continues. An estimated 1500 individuals fleeing famine and hunger are reaching the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya each day; Dadaab’s resident population-size is now 440,000. The Kenyan government is reportedly opening a fourth camp at Dadaab so as to accommodate the starving. According to Guardian journalist Mike Tran, “[l]arge areas of south east Ethiopia, southern Somalia and north east Kenya are already in phase four” of the classification-criteria used by the World Food Programme (WFP) to judge food emergencies, with five being “catastrophe/famine” and four the “emergency” phase. In the words of a medical doctor interviewed by Democracy Now:

“In the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing increasing cases of children with severe malnutrition. Of these children, most of them come with complications resulting from acute malnutrition. The children that we have seen in the wards, most of them are very sick, and most of them come here with an inability to feed, and we have to feed them through the nasal-gastric tube.”

The U.S. government has committed itself to providing $68 million in food aid and relief. It is to be imagined that demotic control of governance could yield a far more humane commitment, one less radically dismissive of generalized human suffering.