You can’t trust freedom if it’s not in your hand. For everybody is fighting for the promised land. Guns ‘n Roses, Civil War
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Walter Benjamin wrote this text about the Angelus Novus which Paul Klee painted in 1920. The world had just been shaken by the catastrophic rubbles of the Great War: 10 million people died, twice as many were wounded. Benjamin bought the picture in Berlin in 1920. Even after the end of the war the country hardly found peace: the Weimarer Republic was being continuously shaken by revolutionary violence and state counter-violence. As the Nazi’s fascism rose, Walter Benjamin fled to Paris with the Angelus Novus. Yet the next catastrophy was about to happen: the intended annihilation of an entire people was and still is the catastrophic peak of modern state violence. Benjamin had to leave Paris to avoid being caught by the steadily extending arms of Nazi Germany: the Wehrmacht was approaching Paris. Benjamin made his way to Hannah Arendt in Marseille, where he did not only pick up a visa for the United States which Theodor Adorno had organised, but also left the manuscript of his Theses on the Philosophy of History containing the above sentences on the Angelus Novus. The plan to reach New York City failed in the small Spanish border town of Portbou. To avoid the deportation to a concentration camp, Walter Benjamin commited suicide in 1940.
The Angelus Novus had been hidden by the French intellectual Georges Bataille who sent it via Adorno in New York to Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. The philosopher and mystic Scholem escaped growing Anti-Semitism in Germany on the path of Zionism to Palestine already in the 1920s. And again the next disaster was coming up: The Palestinians call the creation of the state of Israel an-Nakba, the catastrophy. It initiated a conflict lasting for incredible 65 years now.
The Second World War ended with the atomic bomb, which characterizes the following decades of the Cold War. Finally, in the 1990s, a new world order and the end of history was being proclaimed. However, the eyes of the Angelus Novus already spot another rubble: 9/11 and the War on Terror question basic human rights, even in modern states. How can it be that even a U.S. President awarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace is not able to close a prison camp situated beyond any legal framework in Guantanamo? Or, how come that another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the European Union, causes several deaths just in front of its borders? How can it be that a German Chancellor declares the concept of multiculturalism as a complete failure – more than two centuries after the Aufklärung? At the same time we are speaking of the European Unions as a power for peace. How can it be that fascism in Europe returns in the 21st century once again? With Hungary the fascists rule an entire EU member state, Greece’s fascist party became a major player in domestic politics.
Walter Benjamin writes: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to the. […] The astonishment that the things that we see, are still ‘possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not at beginning of knowledge, unless the effect that the idea of history from which it is derived, is not to keep. “
What if what is perceived as a violent exception from a peaceful normality actually is normality? What if these acts of violence are crucially linked with the foundations of our political community? For Thomas Hobbes, the sovereign combines the power and the right to use violence against its citizens. For Walter Benjamin, violence is the basis of any legal system which veils a fundamentally unjust system with legitimacy. Giorgio Agamben argues in a quite similar way. He describes the sovereign as enclosing not only an area of law but also a space lawlessness. The citizen’s rule of law and the excluded peoples’ area where law is absent lie side by side: the asylum facility is located in the city center, the camp for crowding refugees is next to the holiday beach, the Roma settlement next to the French countryside idyll, the chic clubs of Tel Aviv are scarcely one hundred kilometers from the blockaded Gaza Strip away. Nevertheless, we tend to ignore these acts and situations of injustice and violence as a random exception of a basically just and peaceful state.
A major obstacle for an appropriate interpretation of daily events is the symbolic constitution of our reality. With the “end of the grand narratives”, as Jean-François Lyotard puts it, there is no definitive interpretation of the world anymore. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “God is dead” puts people in a certain state of interpretative uncertainty: What does it mean, when I consider an event or a situation as unjust? When is criticism justified? Do I understand the interconnections of a certain situation correctly at all in order to raise justified concerns?
The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City of Occupy Wall Street states: “We gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice”. In a first document of the New York City General Assembly, the core of the Occupy movement says: “[I] t is from these reclaimed grounds that we say to all Americans and to the world, Enough! How many crises does it take? We are the 99% and we have moved to reclaim our mortgaged future.” Like the massive protests in Spain and Greece the same year, critique towards the political situation justifies itself due to its manifestation as spontaneous mass protest – manifestations of indignation. As permanent occupations of public spaces they permanently justify the feeling of injustice as being legitimate. Slavoj Zizek says: “The taboo has been broken. We are allowed to think about alternatives.”
This indignation is nurtured by a very basic concern: the world does not meet the expectations of those who live in it. In other words, and in its most general way: the world sucks. And as inhabitants of the world it is our role to shape and build it according to our demands: to unfuck the world, like Occupy appeals. A better world can never be the realization of a specific concept or an ideology as it will never be the better world for everyone in that world. A better world simply is a world which is more the way we want it to be. Alain Badiou interprets the phenomenon of occupation as an event: “People, who are present in the world but absent from its meaning and Decisions about its future, the non-existent of the world. We shall then say did a change of world is real When to non-existent of the world starts to exist in the same world with maximum intensity.”
Occupy is occupying the world in two ways: a symbolic and a political way. The political occupation means to actively shape the world and the political community, as Hannah Arendt writes. Yet, it’s more than just an option: This political engagement is the fulfillment of man’s disposition. Thus political legitimacy can never be without the citizen’s participation. Arendt states that any constraint hindering people to carry out their disposition of constituting the world decreases the sovereign’s power and its legitimacy. Where violence is, power is not, says Arendt. Consequently, the sovereign of a political order which has to use force against its citizens can never exercise legitimate power. Finally, a world that is set up according to its inhabitants’ ideas and demands is a world with a legitimate political order. It is most legitimate, because it is completely inclusive: the symbolic occupation of the world is being carried forward beyond particularistic political or capitalist logics and structures – exclusion is impossible.
The act of collective indignation unveils truth directly and beyond any mediation by symbols and discourses. Walter Benjamin describes the constitution of a kind of political truth as divine violence. This kind of violence is not destructive as it does not follow any particularistic intentions. Divine violence manifests itself beyond any intention as pure manifestation of indignation – it does not want anything; it simply is an expression of indignation. Thus, divine violence constitutes a world beyond any logic of exclusion and destruction in the moment of collective indignation. Occupy’s symbolic and political occupation of the world can be seen as a model of revelation of truth and the constitution of political normativity which is able to serve as core of a just political community – a real utopia of state.
Occupy Wall Street and the various sister movements all around the world which are still present in public spaces every day serve as a source of a certain messianic energy. They permanently remind us, that events and situations of violence and injustice do not have to be tolerated: indignation is legitimate. Žižek calls at Occupy Wall Street: “Do not be afraid to really want what you desire!”
Literatur:
- Arendt, Hannah (1989): The Human Condition, Chicago.
- Arendt, Hannah (1970): On Violence, New York.
- Badiou, Alain (2012): The Rebirth of History. Times of Riots and Uprisings, London, New York.
- Benjamin, Walter (1969): Theses on the Philosophy of History, in: Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York, pp. 253-264.
