What in the hell …

Long Sunday is a group blog who are kindly hosting a symposium on Benjamin’s critique of violence (which Craig at Theoria was kind enough to make electronically available).

Long Sunday have a number of nice quotes about where the name comes from. I had a bit of a long sunday myself recently, spending several days in limbo due to illness - I withdrew from other commitments in order to recuperate and so had lots of time on my hands. But I had no motivation to do anything, and so just sort of lingered.

The Long Sunday quotes reminded me of a quote I like a great deal, which is a little less melancholic than some of those over there. It’s from “Waking Up”, one of the monologues included in the collection Orgasmo Adulto Escapes From The Zoo, by Franca Rame and Dario Fo. A woman worker at an auto plant wakes up, and is talking to her baby while she prepares for her day. She tells the baby how she is always working for Fiat, even when she’s outside the plant, because her husband is an autoworker so when he goes back to the plan Fiat makes use of anything she’s done for her husband, and her baby will grow up to work for Fiat too so even parenting is working for Fiat. Then she realizes it’s not a workday at all, but it’s Sunday. The monologue ends with this lovely utopic gem, which strikes me as not completely irrelevant to the Benjamin symposium: “No more weekdays, they hanged Monday, shot Thursday, sliced up Friday! Every day is Sunday.” A quotidian craving for the violent jetz-zeit against dead times, perhaps, as the temporality of divine/revolutionary violence?

The symposium proposal reminded me of a phrase I liked that il mio compagno Alberto used in an email, describing Mario Tronti has having “violent erudition”. It’s apt and applies, albeit differently, to Adorno as well (John Holloway, for one, has tried to develop a - negative? - synthesis of the two), who is a (petit?) bourgeois analog to Tronti’s Leninist violent erudition. They’re both capable of striking passages that manage to both be stately and dignified while also nearly vibrating with anger.

This may be mere wordplay, but Benjamin on the other hand strikes me as the inverse, eruditely violent. The Critique of Violence is a beautiful and jagged piece of writing, like broken glass. I don’t quite know what to make of it, but I do find it poetic and resonant. Along those lines, I’ve been reading just a bit about the declaration of New Jerusalem in Munster in the 1530s (a topic that I got interested in from reading Luther Blissett’s excellent novel Q and Silvia Federici’s fine Caliban and the Witch.) The figures of these religious millenarians and the Cultural Revolutions’ Red Guards were on my mind as I read Benjamin. I’m not sure what to make of any of this, but in any case I’m quite looking forward to the symposium.

With that in mind, three more bits:
a link to a lecture by Agamben on Benjamin and Schmitt (from the fine folks at Generation-Online) corresponding to a chunk of The State Of Exception; thesis eight from Benjamin’s On The Concept Of History; and a letter from Benjamin to Schmitt (via):

Thesis eight
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”

letter of December 9, 1930
“Esteemed Professor Schmitt,
You will receive any day now from the publisher my book, The Origin of the German Mourning Play. With these lines I would like not merely to announce its arrival, but also to express my joy at being able to send it to you, at the suggestion of Mr. Albert Salomon. You will very quickly recognize how much my book is indebted to you for its presentation of the doctrine of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Perhaps I may also say, in addition, that I have also derived from your later works, especially the “Diktatur,” a confirmation of my modes of research in the philosophy of art from yours in the philosophy of the state. If the reading of my book allows this feeling to emerge in an intelligible fashion, then the purpose of my sending it to you will be achieved.
With my expression of special admiration,
Your very humble
Walter Benjamin.”