‘If you can’t move a mountain, go around it’ - On Public Relations, Media & Truth

‘If you can’t move a mountain, go around it’

This felicitous phrase contained in the mottos of an American PR firm tells us all we need to know about the state of affairs of the world today and the ‘arsenal of follies’ that far from being dormant, have for long taken to the main stage of the world and politics. Public relations is a rather old concept whose story goes back Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and her private efforts on behalf of English politician Charles James Fox in 18^th century Britain; however it was officially inaugurated as a profession by Edward Bernays – a nephew and student of Freud – and Basil Clarke in the course of the 20^th century. What had been once only a by-product of the salon society in Imperial Europe entered the world of politics during World War I with the creation of the Committee on Public Information in 1917 created with the sole intent to influence US public opinion regarding American participation in World War I. The CPI, though an innovation at the time, had little to do with modern tactics in ‘crisis communication’ and while divorced from commercial strategies of publicity and advertising, its main emphasis was to positively influence public opinion about the war from ‘independent agencies’ based in different cities and countries and working independently of the government as well. A number of incidents however made manifest the danger of embroidered truths and ultimately led to the disestablishment of the organization by the Congress.

One must distinguish here between public relations and propaganda – the use of mass media to repetitively enforce the information selected by the propaganda organism, shunning off all other sources information, as it was the case in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; the use of public relations as strategic policy became established thereafter and has been instrumental in the modern history of the United States and then later spread all over the globe in both authoritarian and open democratic states. It wasn’t however until the Vietnam War that it became not only instrumental in policy-making but an absolutely central and key aspect of politics when public relations does not only serve the interests of ‘crisis communication’ but of ‘communication’ in general between governments, corporations and peoples. Public relations from that time on included indeed an ‘arsenal’ of tools beyond press relations, lobbying and campaigning, to include mass persuasion through manifold channels in order not to promote but to fabricate truth instead of merely enforcing lies – advertising took the place of communication. In the words of Hannah Arendt (‘Home to Roost’, in ‘Responsibility & Judgment’, Schocken, 2005 pp. 257-277) ‘Image-making as global policy is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history […] These lies hid no secrets from friend or enemy; nor were they intended to. They were meant to manipulate Congress and to persuade the people of the United States’. Lying in politics is not new or unprecedented and it has been justified ever since Plato; the novelty here is the use of public relations not to fence truth off from enemies but to articulate truth to one’s own people.

In more recent times, image-making and fabrication of truth has no longer been – as in the case of Vietnam – a reparative effort to manipulate facts already evident but rather to present them from the start as in the case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the most recent intervention in Libya. These manipulations masterfully carried through do not benefit only governments but also corporations and institutions whose shaping of public opinion is imperative in the success of their political and economic enterprises. Public relations involve not only communications between governments and peoples and cover a vast array of endeavors such as the information provided by financial corporations to reporters, gaining publicity for a product or service, handling communication crises and establishing alternative means of communication between industries, public bodies and the general public. They do not only act in the form of PR firms but also lobbying groups and fronts; these fronts can include anything from human rights organizations, institutions of higher education, magazines and newspapers, propaganda spins, breaches of IT security, industrial espionage, social engineering, smear campaigns, information gathering, talk shows and active intelligence. The great potential of the Internet to drive information en masse has always been featured and used extensively as a preferred locus for the fabrication of truths through social media, blogs, newsletters and sponsored-content. There has not been one single niche of human activity that has been left untouched by public relations; the case of social media is particularly alarming when they use what is apparently user-generated content (either paid or done voluntarily) in order to shape public opinion not from institutional powerhouses but in the names and faces of web users, real and otherwise.

Their ultimate aim is not only to promote interests but to create them as well, that is, to drive people to express alleged support for specific policies, products, services, corporations and to actively engage in certain causes. A recent case in point is that of the Kingdom of Bahrain as reported by Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, ‘reputation management’ has been extensively provided by Western PR firms to the government of Bahrain to rehabilitate its reputation in spite of the widely publicized crackdown on protesters. These efforts, carefully engineered from within offices in Britain and the United States include discrediting of human rights activists, infecting reliable sources such as Wikipedia and white-washing the tarnished reputation of tyrannical governments by means of repetition of state-fueled propaganda by supposedly private concerned citizens and replacing the ugly language of human rights with the production and re-production of endless reports about economic development, stability and struggles against poverty. This has not been only the case with Bahrain, but also with other authoritarian governments such as Tunisia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea and Yemen. Their intent, sheltered upon neutrality of business, has been to divert attention from the real issues by either exposing their achievements en masse or exposing and demonizing opposition groups publicly. Their neutrality of course is paid dearly in the form of multimillion dollar contracts that allows them to negotiate privately with many different local and international interests, stealing from the peoples the opportunity to be engaged in legitimate political processes. It seems that they have achieved to go around the mountains instead of moving them, for those mountains, that include unprecedented crimes, lies, devious tactics and infringement of people’s rights to transparency of information, those mountains are just too humongous to remain unseen and yet in spite of everything, their efforts are often successful because of the awareness even among education people of the great reach of their tools that is by no means limited to the news.

The consequence of manipulating the truth in such a way is not necessarily a lie but the final disappearance of the line that divides truth from lie in people’s minds and the eventual apathy of the confused public that surrenders to this overbearing domination. When there’s no truth and no lie, the self-effacement before the nature and demands of freedom is identical with the abandonment of political freedom. Truth is the most political of all forces, even above the law and the capital. In the sense that communication has been hijacked by private interests, the nature of communication has been destroyed and therefore, free speech is no longer of any use, for it has become nothing but a private matter. Hannah Arendt finished an interview with French writer Roger Errera in 1974 with the following remarks: ‘The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.’ Whoever thinks that what Arendt alludes to in positing the disappearance of both lie and truth is not what has taken hold of the political stage of the world in recent decades, perhaps he is not completely mistaken, for the destruction effected by public relations on the texture of the public space has run so deep, that we are no longer able to judge even our own condition.

"Textile Production of Space" by Oona Lochner [translation]

On Thursday, 24.02.11, my belovedmost friend, the painter Katherina Olschbaur, presented her painting catalog, published by Basis Wien (Vienna), at Musa- Startgalerie, in Vienna, for which I was the translator of the texts included, from German into English, for this beautiful bilingual edition. Find here my English translation and immediately below the original German text. Here under the catalog cover, the work on cover is "Eier oder Zitronen?", 2009, 130 X 160 cm., oil on canvas.

Edition Basis Wien 

Ausgabe No 6 : 

Katherina Olschbaur

englisch/deutsch, 32 Seiten 

mit Texten von Oona Lochner und Brigitte Felderer

Übersetzung: Arie Amaya - Akkermans

Idee: Lioba Reddeker

Graphische Gestaltung: Toledo i Dertschei, Carlos Toledo

Lektorat: Helene Baur, Verena Lindner

Fotografien: Martin Bilinovac

ISBN: 978-3-9503027-0-7

Textile Production of Space


Oona Lochner

How are our notions of space developed? Traces of this question are visible in Katherina Olschbaur’s painting up to her series „Hülsen“ [Hulls] (2005-2007), through which, based on the human figure, she experiments with the concurrence between fullness and void. Pieces of clothing act as a substitute for the actual actors, yet the textile symbols are always bereft of head and hands, henceforth, the quintessential elements of the portrait, such as mimicry, gesture and the clay colours of human flesh are absent too. The textiles instead, release themselves from their role as accesoires and become an instrument of their own, through which the bodies emerge out of the empty space. The idea of textile materials serving to shape forms, as Olschbaur had already formulated here, is intensified in her more recent work.

In her display windows series, the vertically draped cloth width acts as an anthropomorphic symbol. As they are coming to life, the displayed consumer goods are suddenly turned into a theatrical embodiment of themselves and the display window becomes then the floor for nightly dancers and the perfect arena for the orchestration of a conspiracy. Enveloping the empty space in their broad pleats, the cloths billow into human bodies, while at the same time remaining unmistakably in the forms of the textile material that provides concise information about the style of their mounting and draping. Olschbaur also recreates this so lively tension of identities between representation and textile material in a series of paper works titled „Grossmutter Gespenst“ [Grandmother Spectre]. A floral patterned cloth is shaping itself out of the repeatedly empty space into an ever so new form; yet, the position of its bearer remains empty, as the abbozzatura of the composition is fading out into the white flatness of the sketchpaper. While we may surmise that the cloth lies now here over a tripod, now there over a chair, the place that marks the draping of the pleats still remains unclear.
Architectural elements also come into play to enact Olschbaur’s rather vague innuendo of space. The rear wall of the display windows is more often than not, designed as an ornamental lattice, but the frames and the salient ridges frequently consist of only a few lines or a narrow strip of colour. The margins of this raree show repeatedly come to an end already inside the canvas, so that only a strip of colour remains around the moulded space, abstract and without a close-up effect. The illusory space of the painting encounters here unmediatedly its own material bearings and thus becomes fully recognizable as something constructed and arbitrary; hardly a reliable point of reference for the viewer.

In the same fashion, Olschbaur’s „Interieurs“ also wander in uncertainty, for here too the boundaries of the inner space are only ambiguously delineated. Alignments, doors or windows are mismatched pieces that refuse a definite interpretation of their actual location. All too often the volume of the furniture appears to be the only spatially defined element, placed haphazardly into a formless environment. The topographical ambiguity, however, is carried over into the objects as well, when sofas and lamps rise out of the floor, or when, framed by scenery-like architecture, a hole turns into the central piece of an interior. On the one hand, the hole captures a certain moment of total loss and free fall, so that, on the other hand, along with the sidewalls, the floor recedes too. As a place of absence, it is above all a negative dimension that, like the „Hülsen“ [Hulls] or the bodies of textile, it possesses volume only as a shrouded form.

The shrouding into empty space will reach at long last into the walls, as they fold on and on within another interior and move backwards into the depth of the pictorial space. The architectures, by all means fragmented, meet now the textile vocabulary of pleats, loops and crumples and, once again, take up the issue of the relationship between pictorial space and the material surface of the image. While the pleating of the textile material still takes place inside the image; a creeping suspicion affects the viewer with in that it could reach out of the canvas, so that it becomes constrained and brings out the spatial dimension less than it is closing it up and shaping it. It is precisely this overlapping cut through the layers of what is real, that forms the basis of the series „Schreine“ [Shrines]. Here space is dissolved into abstract fields of color that resemble the swelling of drapery, yet the symbols remain constantly flat. Beginning with richly adorned altar cloth, sharp creases spread over the whole length of the canvas, which appears suddenly itself creased, pouting and opening up. Katherina Olschbaur brings together and at the same time transforms the material nature of her medium and its power for illusion at the very limit between space and textile, and while at that, she questions anew the possibility of the production of space in painting.

Original text here: http://katherina-olschbaur.blogspot.com/2011/02/textile-production-of-space-oona.html

For more information on the works of Katherina Olschbaur, visit http://katherina-olschbaur.blogspot.com/search/label/Malerei

Without Quotations: Impossible Writing

Without Quotations: Impossible Writing[1]

"On keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it."

"Writing. It's corrupting to write with the intent to moralize, to elevate people's moral standards."

"Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little-ego building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall with through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said. My "I" is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane men, critics, correct them - but their sanity is parasitic on the creative fatuity of genius.[2]"

-Susan Sontag, Diaries, entries from 1958

Writing, to begin with, I must add, is not something that I really wanted to do anyway, not because one would not feel the immediate attraction to the written word, after all, that’s all where Judaism –whether one has accepted it or condemned it, has derived all its strength from, after the manner of that morning prayer: “The world is sustained by three things, the Torah, the worship and the acts of charity[3]”, however the study of the Torah, of the written law, precedes them all. It is there, in the written word where faith has started to begin with. The fact of writing had become already too early, into a surrogate for geography and why not, for love, love is always associated with places where we have been happy – “Talland House in Sussex became in Virginia’s imagination more than just a large square building new the sea in Cornwall. It is where she sites, for the whole of her life, her idea of happiness… Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house[4]” –Or unhappy. “This time, unhappy love, sempiternal, has an additional declension[5]”. And unless we are speaking of Christian agape, love as passion is never abstract or disassociated from the vast vaults of locatedness in memory and time. “However satisfying writing is – that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control – it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving[6]”. This presumptuous activity, in which labor and action and production are virtually indistinguishable from each other, is certainly one great replacement for love and of particular importance when such love is beginning to pick up flight or going up in flames. One doesn’t choose to write, it just happens when the resources to cope with the world as it was, run out, and then it was absolutely necessary to resist reality after its own fashion, to remake the world: “None of the following essays was, I hope, written without awareness of the facts of our time and without awareness of the Jewish fate in our century. But I believe and hope that I have not in any of them taken up a position on the basis of those facts alone, that I have not accepted the world created by those facts as necessary and indestructible[7]”. It is impossible here to ‘technically’ decide whether the resource kept at bay here is anywhere in between transformation and avoidance. This writing of course is well different from transcription, the tireless labor of historiography and journalism in recording the heroic deeds of man as in Homer or simply decoding the rough bundle of events that the way we live now, is made of. “The harrowing effect of Schulz’ prose is to construct the world anew, as from fragments that exist after some unnamable disaster[8]”.

People often point a finger and not unreasonably so, that if one’s going to write anyway – and this is point, this is no longer the journals one used to jot down in cafeterias at the age of thirteen while he was learning how to smoke and even worse, how to love without embodiment in the flesh, how to love without defying the metaphysics of the worlds below and above, it is no longer anything in the category of “Memories of a Catholic girlhood” – a commeasurable degree of understanding and hence of comprehensibility is demand, a simple relatedness to the world around oneself is more important perhaps than the aesthetic appeal which only oneself might have access to. “Focus on the forces around you more than the books in front of you[9]”. What has become of ourselves? It is the question that first gets asked during labor and pangs of birth of anyone who write, at whichever age it happens, rather and who are we becoming, for we cannot find out who are for as long as we are alive. The introspection however, albeit it always hints at a certain style of auto-biography at work (and each and every work of literature and philosophy is self-revealing and involuntarily disclosing in this respect) is not located in the endless contemplation of oneself in a mirror but reveals itself more as the innocent child staring into his image in the stream of water but more occupied with the vertical blueprints of the skies passing rapidly and hanging him from the feet into this bifocal suspension in which time flows much more rapidly than it was thought but yet not enough to interrupt the slow physicality of the world. For many, it is a recipient against death and there are many kinds of death, far more enormous than the mere exhaling of the soul out of its own breath, when the composition of reality is indistinguishable from the mere facts of sharing in the natural cycles of the earth. At the same time, writing and literature, though instrumental in freedom, cannot achieve any of the ultimate political ends of the Polis, that is, to deter death. “There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time. Health is on good terms with Death. It knows that when the Grim Reaper comes he will remove his stone mask and catch the flickering torch from the anxious and weary and disappointed hands of Brother Life; it knows that he will dash it on the ground and extinguish it, but it also knows that only then the full brilliance of the nocturnal sky will brightly glow. It knows that it will be accepted into the open arms of Death. Life’s eloquent lips are put to silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: “Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother.[10]”

There’s no such a thing as not fearing death whilst one writes, or not fearing altogether – at the possibility of self-effacement. Throughout the idle hours, it becomes impossible to be content at the contemplation of the deity, and all the hours before and after something is consummated as writing – the ultimate alternatively solipsistic and yet concrete possibility, are dead vacuity, all the philosophical terminology must be avoided, it is an ululation, a close-up on buzzing bees, unnecessary background noise while the pears and the mangos at a standstill remain locked in the canvas waiting for a yet richer frame that will describe them in their namelessness. All the names for all things are nothing but invented mindless gaps between one inert titillation and the next. The guilt becomes unbearable, the more elaborately he happens to exist, all the more increasingly devious and unavoidable the guilt. It is a protracted and exaggerated by the common fatuity in which the lines between the imagined and the desirable are juxtaposed and replace the world with all its treasures, with the willingness to live within, from without, externally constrained, such as olives pressed against puremost oil that was already sifted. Yet everything mortally bearable and incomplete: “Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks[11]”. It has to do with this re-affirmation, for, giving in to the abandonment, to the curious and cruel logic of what is not understood would be equivalent of resignation and therefore of the mindless acceptance of the fact of death; this violent will, to be raptured, to be destroyed, to live in such a criminal reckless way, it is a poor surrogate for secular sanctity, the abeyance of aberrant destinies, owned up to and otherwise, it is a parsimonious replacement for freedom, for the kind of freedom that doesn’t accept the boundaries of politics, that doesn’t see itself as a birth right, there’s something absolutely exclusive and solitary in this. He writes because he wants to live, but he’s unable to find out a way that is either right or wrong. A dwelling in the lower places, the Midrash would say, a fixed situatedness free from the geography from which in turn one has been excluded by simple observation. “Let me then be destroyed. For that is the only way I may have a chance of surviving. Let those feelings uniquely call forth sexual love, my life’s passion and pain, my learnt desirability figured out of primeval undesirability, let them prevail… This time I want to do it differently. You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what is it that I wanted and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I might desire again. I would be the Lover, and barely the Beloved. I have not yet told the whole of this story. This time, unhappy love, sempiternal, has an additional declension.[12]”

There is no permission to do any of this, it cannot be achieved, the transgression itself is an alphabet of murder, it must violate some rules, certainly those of life and death, increasingly those of order, there will be a lot of undialectical damage, inflicted upon too many directions, returning, flying overhead, landing stealthily, leaving him in possession of nothing but himself at a point in time when he cannot be and have at the same time. Dreams come in handy: “A hundred and thirty-five years ago Rahel Varnhagen jotted down the following dream: she had died and gone to heaven, together with her friends Bettina von Arnim and Caroline von Humboldt. To relieve themselves of the burdens they had acquired in their lives, the three friends assigned themselves the task of inquiring into the worst thing they had experienced. Rahel thus asked: Did you know disappointed love? The other two women broke into tears, and all three thus relieved this burden from their hearts. Rahel asked further: Did you know disloyalty? Sickness? Worry? Anxiousness? Each time the women said yes, they cried, and again all three were relieved of their burdens. Finally Rahel asked: Did you know disgrace? As soon as this word had been spoken, there was a hushed silence, and the two friends took their distance from Rahel and looked at her in a disturbed and strange manner. Then did Rahel know that she was entirely alone and that this burden could not be taken away from her heart. And then she awoke[13]”.

The personal confessions, those of the epistolary and sentimental kind become rather useless, for every confession is a betrayal[14] that is why so many bonds become fatuous and break before a language has been achieved. This sort of freedom, emancipation if you want, cannot be achieved by charity, cannot be achieved by sympathy, cannot be achieved by condescending love or by forgiveness even, either by the world or people once one loved; it has to be endured on one’s own, and it is not an endurance more than the passage of time is. One has to resort to the rigor of a discipline, the voices of the street are too loud and philosophy in turn is too blind. Discipline in writing is a dangerous perspective in which the personal Protestantism amalgamates with the public Judaism of fathers and of promises broken in unsafe rhythms of faith. “He found no way – not even Nietzsche’s example – of bringing his inner emotional turmoil into his philosophy, his discipline, his art. Philosophy remained cleverness, a game, but not a stage on life’s way, it remained aesthetic without an oeuvre, as did everything and everyone else for him[15]”. Writing, both resourceful and a recourse, though spiteful, remains a way of life, a sort of living as if without music and resorts endlessly to the ideal silence of the modern aesthetician that finds the ultimately pleasure in finding his oeuvre dismembered, severed from the world, ripped into shreds and vanish into oblivion, a kind of smug even more intolerable and arrogant than writing for the sake of imparting moral instruction in a Socratic manner. The path should be otherwise, always prioritizing freedom over beauty. Intimate is not always necessarily the nearest or the most credible, as much as it is a departure from the genius into the abyss of the visionary, the prophet. This interior labyrinth, free from the eternal dullness of confession and sincere enough to live in the first persona, being narrator, narrated and story-teller simultaneously. The fear can never be completely dispelled lest truth be annulated and deprived of its magic powers that be, and this fear is not necessarily the Victorian inability to live and the author that perished from love more than it is the certainty of the presumptionlessness of history and thinking for life. Life, such a horrible and pretentious ridiculous word when used in literature and philosophy. The suffering writer must die, he is of no use for truth, and he might as well teach Bible in Sunday school, the real ailing is not personal suffering that stands in radical opposition to universality and to human communication, for, the suffering subject is always ever so absent, it has become an object. It is but the complete lack of foundations in the edifice of knowledge, from where all anger and thus egregious potential of living and reality is derived. “Philosophers who blame philosophy for the ills of civilization have themselves lost the ability to perceive the difference between thought and being, thought and action. It is they who expunge the difference between fantasy and actuality, between the megalomania projected on to reason and the irreverent forces which determine the outcome of actual conflicts. They have inflated the power of philosophical reason, conferring on it a suppositious dangerous potency. It is the philosophers, not reason, who thereby degrade the independence of political realities and contingencies. Terrified of their own inner insecurity at the border between rationality and conflict, between the new academic political Protestantism and politics as the art of the possible, they proceed as if to terminate philosophy would be to dissolve the difficulty of acknowledging conflict and of staking oneself within it. To destroy philosophy, to abolish or to supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resource-less to know the difference between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realization. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience. This ill-will towards philosophy misunderstands the authority of reason, which is not the mirror of the dogma of superstition, but risk. Reason, the critical criterion, is forever without ground.[16]”   

“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not[17]”.

---

[1] Dedicated to my lifetime friend and inspiration, Katherina Olschbaur

[2] Susan Sontag, “Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963”, Penguin, 2009

[3] Jewish liturgy prayer

[4] Hermione Lee, “Virginia Woolf”, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, pp.22, in Janine Burke, “Source: Nature’s Healing Role in Art & Writing”, Allen & Unwin, 2009, pp.186

[5] Gillian Rose, “Love’s Work”, Vintage, 1997, pp.69

[6] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.54

[7] Hannah Arendt, “Widmung an Karl Jaspers”, in “Sechs Essays”, Heidelberg, 1948

[8] John Updike, “Introduction” in Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass”, Penguin, 1979  

[9] Wayne Cristaudo, Letter, 2011

[10] Franz Rosenzweig, “Understanding the Sick and the Healthy”, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp.103

[11] Michael Cunningham, “The Hours”, Picador, 2000,  pp.15

[12] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.66&69

[13] Hannah Arendt, “Juden in der Welt von Gestern: Anlaesslich Stefan Zweig”, in “Sechs Essays”, Heidelberg, 1948. Paraphrased from the letters of Rahel.

[14] Rahel Varnhagen

[15] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.103

[16] Gillian Rose, Ibid. pp.118-119

[17] Silouan The Athonite 

Discussing Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam"

Ian Buruma

"Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance"

288 pages

Penguin, August 2007

"There could be no better timing for a book like this" is the first thing that comes to mind when reading this book for the first time and leafing through its bulk of information, scholarship, criticism and opinions; the book is not only interesting but extremely well-written and appealing to the widest possible readership. It would be fairly easy to agree with almost every word on this book precisely because unlike most contemporary books dealing with Islam in Europe, he doesn't seem to uphold any particular opinions, therefore no one (that is, unless you're a radical Muslim) should take much offense in it if at all; to the foreigner (a term most felicitous for Europeans today) a book as such might be as informative as anything, but slightly harmless and innocuous as well, within this certain aura of disinterested sobriety typical of the textbooks that we studied in high school and during the first years of college. At the end of the book we might well be left untouched by higher forces and with rather incomplete information; in these times, when we are surrounded by such a passionate interest in dispassionate narratives, the purpose of a book such as this might be manifold. A Dutch reader might have found the book a little more interesting, had it been written in Dutch, for this would recreate some of the humour inherent to the rather theatrical situations with which we are confronted; Mr. Buruma plays a delightful devil's advocate in that he is both the Dutchman and the disinterested observator, perhaps a by-product of his rather long absence from the country as a professor of humanities at Bard College.

One could not say, though, that he is dispassionate about his topic, for clean from nationalist innuendoes that would appeal to the coffee tables of the ludicrous liberal Amsterdam intelligentsia, he is speaking with personal knowledge of the matters at hand, his lifelong friendship with Theo van Gogh, with whom he happened to grow up in privilegedmost Wassenaar at the prestigious Nederlandsch Lyceum. But it is not only van Gogh, but also long standing friendships with personalities from the realm of Dutch politics and culture, long discussions with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and interviews run with Muslim and Christian people from all walks of life in the Netherlands. He is not in the slightest, ignorant about history and the weakness of his opinions is compensated by a warm interest in understanding the situation.

I wouldn't want to gloss over his wonderfully written book as if trying to dissect a frog and exposing the ill organs, but I would like to refer to his rather consistent thoughts on the legacy of the Enlightenment and how they relate to the position of now famous speaker and writer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. There's a general opinion even among philosophers that the Enlightenment as such is indebted to the French and German versions of rationalism and the new configuration of metaphysics and scholasticism that people like Kant and Descartes shaped; thus the Enlightenment is generally understood as an intellectual and humanist force vying against the likes of the Christian religion and that would provide a human(istic), secular and non-soteriological understand of the world which would be necessary for the development of modern science and for the liberal project of politics in the modern European state.

Few people today would argue for the case that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was shaped by the cosmopolitan milieu afforded by the city of Amsterdam to the Jew Benedictus Spinoza, and a number of interrelated phenomena made possible by the particular circumstances of the Dutch Republic that would be unheard of in countries such as France and Germany, where the project of the Enlightenment was realized to its ultimate consequences. But religion, theology and Christianity were part and parcel of the project of Enlightenment politics in its original vision, unlike that for example of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. The Enlightenment belongs in the heritage of Christian theology as a revolution, and in general lines, there could be perhaps no such a thing as an authentic secular revolution in the sense that every revolution has a built-in Messianic power unfolding therewith, in the most humble and urgent attempt to radically change everyday life; there's no revolutionary instinct without a certain salvific intuition.

The Enlightenment was a project born and brestfed by Christianity and it was by no means atheistic. What was really atheistic in the conundrum of European intellectual history was the theology that arose as a consequence of the Enlightenment and the philosophy of Kant (far more than Hegel) under the rubric of rational and historical theology, with its greatest proponents coming from within German protestantism, in which the age-old Christian mysteries that natural theology had grappled with, were replaced with a concern with both ethics and history as the receptories and fullfilments of the Christian truth. Much more Christian were in turn the deliberately godless philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that in turn were working so forcefully in denying the power of God that were ultimately its most passionate romantic searchers. Without the historical and intellectual background this is precisely the point in which Mr. Buruma has completely failed in understand the current debate over Islam in Europe and where Mrs. Hirsi Ali has demonstrated not only an acute understanding but also a practical approach to the problem.

In its original setting (certainly this was the case in Spinoza's Amsterdam and in Kant's Koenigsberg) the Enlightenment was seen a break in the European traditions and frown upon with suspicion by the preacher and noble alike, thus it could have formed what today we would call, a "Green Party" full of ecclectic advocates of freedom from serfhood and ecclesiastic politics. But soon enough Christianity was unsurprisingly receptive to the same very ideals and a certain paradox took over: France had a revolution without a reformation (a new social order without a new faith order) and Germany in turn, a reformation but not a revolution (a new faith order without a new social order); the overlap became disastrous for both as soon as it became apparent that the technical possibilities afforded by the Industrial Revolution didn't match in anyway the monolithic structure of the French polity or the feudal social structure of Prussia. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, however, appeared to have solved that problem. The struggle between the House of Orange (backed by the Dutch Calvinist Church) and the Regenten, the powerful aristocrats, many of their enterprises financed by the wealthy Amsterdam Jewry, seemed apparently resolved on the ground of their mutual economic interests, molded and melded into the activities of the world-famous Company of the West Indies that traveled the whole world as a freelance mercenary colonial power.

The cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam had erected the "pillars" of "our society" based on difference rather than on the imposition of a certain hegemony and this turned out to be convenient for all. The history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands however, was nowhere as stable (at least in the course of the 18th and 19th century) as let's say that of France or Prussia, let alone Austro-Hungary. The liberality in the management of public and political affairs turned out to be a gain in moments when the Dutch had to defend themselves from occupying powers or had to vye with them in order to establish sovereignity. The basic problem with the Enlightenment (this time not of the Spinozian but of the Cartesian fashion) as has been pointed out by many victims and victimizers of the Enlightenment process itself, better worded nowhere than in the political philosophy of Hegel, is that it made the assumption that thinking was pressumptionless and that the critique of religion and philosophy, would be subject to criticism itself, both by religion and by criticism itself. The aporias inherent to this model of tradition, continuity and history are nowhere else seen than in the current debate about the Enlightenment in the Netherlands.

After having surrendered to la critique pour la critique, the colonial past of European nations, blended in together with the memory (or rather of lack of memory) of the Holocaust and the socialist inclinations of the political movements in the Postwar. The 20th century was welcome with less thrill than frill, and the peaceful armonious order of Imperial Europe was shattered by the World Wars and topped by the Nazi occupation and murderous plans. In Postwar politics, tolerance became the rule over Europe, precisely because we should not allow this to happen ever again, no more Totalitarianism, executions, anti-Semitism, forced labor. The foundation of a European community of states (no longer national) seemed to reflect the overtly optimism of that generation which as of today, we see, turned out to be no optimism at all, but rather the inability to cope with the realities unvealed by the horrible past. It seemed however that Europe was on the way to prosperity again and that it would be possible to wait until less exasperating times, in order to have some pending talks about Jews and the like. At the time the European states began to disengage from each and every one of their collonial bastions and were forced to receive the new immigrants with smiley faces and happiest prospects about the multicultural future.

But today the lie has been spotted and the dream no longer seems true. But tolerance continues, we are unable to defend ourselves, and as much as Europeans are not willing to let go of the nations, which are still definitely the major factor in shaping identities within the independent states, on the other hand, the new immigrants, particularly from the Arab world, have failed to live up to the expectations of their host countries. But because we had colonies and we sent the Jews to their deaths and no longer believe in God, we have to tolerate it all, because human rationality overtime will persuade these angry immigrants about the wonders of our enlightened societies. You, Mr. Buruma, understood this very well, but the solutions you propose, or rather, the non-solutions you point out to, are oblivious of a fact that Mrs. Hirsi Ali has got right, precisely because she belongs to what could be called, the first generation of Enlightened Muslims. She knows that Europe was defined by Christianity in the middle ages as a political-cultural continuum and that this God, which the Enlightenment apparently beheaded, is more alive today than ever and is a living reality for millions of Muslims, Jews and Christians.

It is not a matter of turning the Enlightenment into the household name for a new conservative world order, for these terms, such as conservative and liberal, are today as ineffectual as they were in the end of the 19th century; what is being dealt with here is that Europe stands a millenium ahead of Islam in terms of revolutions and enlightenments, therefore it is not merely a paradox but the most obvious symptom of the Enlightenment's Christian legacy and the cultural tiredness derived from the nihilistic sources of this tolerance and lack of prejudice that has never really existed but that functioned more like an invention of the non-remembrance of the crucial chapters of the European past. Nowadays things seem a little more complicated because it is not only that the great majority of non-white Dutch citizens do not feel at home here but that we haven't been able to make them feel at home and that is certainly our problem.

Further than that, if we don't want to define Dutchness on the basis of blood alone, then we have to rely on the rule of the law, which applies to us all, and whenever a Dutchman breaks the law, he has to be punished for it without the emotional and paternalistic and cultural relativistic considerations of our intoxicatingly dull times. This is the only way in which we will survive as an organized society; whoever is not willing to accept the law of this country and who believes he can surrender to his own divine decrees at the expense of the Dutch, should not be allowed to remain in this land, and when a citizen already, he must sit in prison for as long as it is necessary and without the motherly care of a system he is bent on destroying. This is not a matter of nationalism, but of the most basic common sense, constitutional common sense, and if this is not so, then we need a new constitution. This is what Mrs. Hirsi Ali understood so well, and which people like Fortyun and Wilders are not helping further, for they appeal only to the masses which are politically passive and rather lazy and ignorant. The masses however, can define history, and this is the legacy of Totalitarianism. We have to take them seriously, otherwise it will be us who will be soon going to the sand dunes to mourn over the lost constitution.

Note on Gillian Rose from February 2007

Since I've been tweeting much about Gillian Rose today, I found this research note from 2007 that I liked very much and that is related to my reading of Gillian Rose then, clearly at the time I knew much more about philosophy than now, it hadn't been in general so tainted by murderous history. It is incisive and somewhat beautiful. Please do not post this in Twitter, it is of no one's interest there.

"Central to the theorizing of Gillian Rose is the actuality of protest. In her work, protest is not only a speaking against, a contra-diction, it is also a recognition that to speak against is already to be part of that which is opposed. This logic is Hegelian but what Gillian found in this logic was passion, faith and failure"-Nigel Tubbs on Gillian Rose

To contradict onelself is not a matter of logical argumentation, it is not the edging roaring of being more interesting than wrong or of being more wrong than interesting, it is "to mind the gap" of being in itself, it is to speak to oneself by speaking contra-himself - the only form of communication available that embraces the reality of freedom not in its real essence but in its actuality.

A contra-diction is not a rhaetoric play, it is merely play and therefore the only source for humanity available from within the ruins of dark times when the whole set of banisters has been lifted in order to reveal the purest content of existence - an empty canvas both in terms of the form and of the content; the source of this delicious madness that leads from logic to folly and from folly to thinking.

But the philosophers were certainly right in arguing that this "negativity" that is the very essence of thinking is not available anywhere in nature and therefore not "permissible" to man under the aegis of the natural sciences and technology - the dominant world view of the modern world. Only in technology there's progress, and if society and morals would find their workings bound with the concept of the technological this should never constitute a human problem, but the case is strangely otherwise.

Because of its progressive nature, technology or the "technologicum" can hardly grasp the principle of contingency because there's a goal that has turned technological imagination into a form of consciousness and perhaps no one better to describe this than Foucault. The success of this misunderstanding is its very failure, the only reason why it actually remains at the core of what is meaningful in humanity, namely the telos that is never reached but the process by which the contingency is endlessly being transformed into this telos by the Will, lest it be too strong to become an "spherical" aspect of worldly life such as philosophy, economy or education.

Activism on Human Rights?

Activism on “Human Rights

“Ad passions: Passion is the exact opposite of action. As courage is the virtue of action, so endurance is the virtue of passion. Passion is always connected with love; the man of action – Achilles – knows love only as desire, and it then plays a minor role. Ulysses, the much enduring one, knows love as passion; the gods play on him.” – Hannah Arendt (Notebooks, April 1955, 31)

The nature of armed conflict, though wars have existed for as long as human history is recorded, doubtless has been transformed in the course of the past century more than it did in the hundreds of years that antedated the modern era. One would like to think that this has to do indirectly with the technical possibilities that modern science afforded warfare and the development of state-of-the-art weaponry that enabled parties engaged in conflict to launch an attack on the enemy battlefield from a distant point in space, eliminating by proxy the need and risk of engaging in what is now considered old-fashioned body battles. It does not mean that the damage typical of warfare might decrease in any way nor that body battles will no longer take place – they still account for a vast overwhelming majority of the casualties in armed conflicts in the developing world. While it is true that technical possibilities afforded are part of the answer, they do not constitute the whole truth on what truly distinguishes contemporary warfare from its predecessors, for to a greater or lesser degree, advance in the development of weaponry has been a constant since the age of stone – unfathomable as its modern proportions might be.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence – “If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view[1]”. It is precisely this, the fact that wars are now public spectacles providing for living room sights and sounds, what most assuredly distinguishes the contemporary warfare scene from any previous scenarios. The invention of the daguerreotype, cheered as the greatest invention of all by painters and reporters alike, and the subsequent evolution into the modern journalist camera transformed the realities of war for the public space more than the realities of war were in themselves transformed. The first important wars that the lens of the reporters captured were the Crimean War and the American Civil War but it wasn’t until the First and Second World War that the camera’s ken reached out for actual combat. Needless to explain, photography and reporting became a constitutive element of the practice of warfare from within, as we know from the horrors committed by the Nazis that they themselves recorded without a bit of ludicrousness and that thus have reached our secondary school textbooks and prime time documentaries. Photography, from the simple accounting of day to day training exercises to the more technologically advanced air and satellite photography, has become an indispensable element in strategy. Photography however related to, is already distant from the true nature of the phenomena that come hand in hand with armed conflict today. “The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to new tele-intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and re-diffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.[2]”

There has been ever since an endless number of wars and conflicts ripe with murder and brutality that we have witnessed from the comfort of our screens, interrupted by prime-time adds in the middle of the evening news featuring a complex conundrum of sexual, commercial and envy-rich images that make up for the texture of the rather impoverished modern imagination. Before or after the images of war and destruction we have watched the sports sections or the elongated and smile-ridden plotlines of gossip and entertainment for which we have so long waited and on account of which we have born the mortally dreadful graphic spans of mutilated corpses, ailing children and screaming women. At this point it would be worthwhile noting that the only war in the academic definition thereof we have been witness to since Vietnam, has been the decade long armed conflict in the Balkan countries; but weapons have been hardly put down and though the general status quo of the world, beautiful as it is, has been quietly maintained, a certain halo of uncertainty has visited vast regions of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America in which the number of bullets worthy of being called war have run free through the streets and have visited at home through our satellite dishes and sometimes helped us fall sleep or caused our take-away meals to burn in the stove.

Next to the journalist, that new international traveler of cameras and shorts often indistinguishable from a tourist, a new creature begot in the 19^th century with the creation of the Red Cross but only matured and fully fashioned in the course of the 20^th, caught our attention throughout the photographs, the news and the reports from war zones, and that creature is the human rights activist. We saw them first marginally strolling around the photographs in the guises of nurses after the fashion of a Florence Nightingale and Simone Weil of sorts, carrying the wounded into improvised tents and caring for the dying, translating letters and smiling prudently without deference to the intruder lens. In the first metamorphosis of the human rights activist, at the height of the 1960’s and particularly during the Vietnam War, we saw them closer to the lenses than before and becoming richer in prominence, voice and color until we also heard them speak and then scream out loud for the unaccountable number of lives that might have been lost here and elsewhere. The Romantic picture of the activist permeated with grandeur the psyche of TV and radio across Western Europe and North America portraying them as young idealists fighting for the cause of a better world and more often than not putting their lives at risk in the battlefield, serving as human shields and giving their time and resources for those less privileged, whom in many cases they never saw as equals but rather as the infinitely inferior savage in dire need to be protected. Ideology non-withstanding, many of these men and women made a difference in the world and contributed greatly to the re-establishment of peace and order beyond the national boundaries of armies and even the international boundaries of relief organizations that turned help into a full-fledged profession with hierarchies of career, domain and power intimately associated with the armies and the higher circles of power, domestic or otherwise, when existing.

Unlike the different professions employed in the cause of war as much as in the deterrence thereof and final establishment of peace and order, there has never been a clear voice for what a human rights activist is actually ought to do or think even. In our days, after the internet, when the images of armed conflict, repression, violence and strife do not only reach us through the printed press or TV screens but bombard us from much closer, in our mobile phones as we ride in crowded trains, drink cocktails after lunch or make love at night, we are both more aware and less sensitive to the spectacle of human suffering. The increasingly advantageous situation of the information age that make every bit of information available for everyone at any time or the day or the night had graduated in every city of the world a new breed of activists that send letters of members of the parliament, post pictures in their local college boards, print t-shirts with the cause of Nepal or Timor, organize live forums with participants speaking simultaneously from five different hour zones and crowd in front of embassies and international missions. The era of social media has made this even more dramatic but less straining, for now it is not only that it is not necessary to save money from one’s own pocket or stand in the cold in front of an embassy in a far away capital district, but it is also not necessary to leave the living room where the sights and sounds of war have contacted us first and it is possible to be an activist while listening to our favorite music, with a cozy blanket over our legs and a sleeping hat from childhood days.

Facebook and Twitter have made these phenomena possible. So that the person who shares a few hours of the day, preferably after work, can be an activist for every possible cause and this is not necessarily a bad thing. What is then the purpose of activism for human rights, if any? My criticism to the current wave of online activism is not that it shouldn’t be done but that as long-time activists who were in the field once know so well, activism is a matter of principle more than it is a matter of opinions. People can become sensitive to distress happening elsewhere, in a part of the world he has probably not visited and never will and with which he bears no historical or emotional attachment whatsoever, accordingly, the graphic and massive nature of media nowadays make this uncannily possible. What I mean to say by giving preference to principle over opinions is that opinions are often passionate and passion like Hannah Arendt championed in the course of her life and in her philosophical work, is the number one enemy of action. Many people, opinionated and passionate as they are about causes, are impaired for political action and action as such is different in nature from protest and revolution but identical with power; these passionate believers in causes for one people or another are moved by sentiments such as love, love for the world, for peoples and causes, and love as the most worldless of all feelings builds bridges in between private peoples that destroy the public spaces between them and annihilates the virtuousness of political action as the discursive arena of truth – truth not as Thomistic pre-condition for thinking but as the attitude that precedes and results from thinking. Thinking here being identical with being and with opinions and non-identical with acting, appearing in the world and engaging in truth with others, politically or otherwise.

People, who are passionate about causes and have opinions, are generally not engaged in action and are not political activists but rather fulfill the positions of priests giving the ailments to a mortally ill nation or people as a whole. They will clench their firsts easily; online and perhaps even in the real world against those many that disagree with their opinions or might as well not care or even bother to locate Bahrain in a map of the world. Activism as a form of political action is something equivalent to power and should never even remotely be confused with violence, because once political action is violent is no longer political or action but violence alone – be this violence physical or emotional, close or distant, and alas, any form of incivility, is a breach of power and the subtle conversion to violence. “The difference between power and violence lies in that 1. Violence is measurable and calculable and, on the other hand, power is imponderable and incalculable. This is what makes power such a “terrible” force, but it is there precisely where its eminently human character lies. 2. Power always grows in between men, whereas violence can be possessed by one man alone. If “power is seized” power itself is destroyed and only violence is left. 3. From the above follows that violence is always objective; it is identical with the means that it utilizes –forces – whereas power comes to life only through action itself and is constituted by action. It can vanish in any moment, it is pure unmediated action. A modern example of how power helped to destroy violence is Ghandi. He never advocated for an impotence of the Christian kind. He rather thought that the power of the masses in India is the only thing that could bring British violence to an end.[3]” This power does not belong to the opinions but to the people that have detected the collapsing structures of power timely enough to replace them with action and therefore as in the case of Egypt and Tunisia, throwing themselves overboard to the most reckless uncertainty out of which political institutions consequent with political acts can eventually emerge but this is not necessarily granted.

An activist for human rights is not necessarily a politician as much as he is not a journalist who blindly obeys the command of spreading information about every possible heinous crime on earth or in that specific part of the world towards which his love is targeted and awaits the human race to agree with him unabatedly at the risk of severing the channels of communication whenever consensus is absent. It is not about opinions as much as it is about a principle and that principle is not even necessarily the universal demands of equality and fairness and justice that have failed to deliver for most of mankind. It is but a principle of civility in which rather than harboring opinions the person is capable of acting in such a way that violence is not the result of his provocation toward power and therefore he remains committed to empowering peoples rather than furthering the destruction of the already severed channels between them. An activist who is incapable of acting out within the boundaries of civility, regardless of his personal private thoughts, in times of conflict and war when the altruistic examples of humanity are most needed and occur most naturally between people because of the crowded space of opinion and truth and why not, suffering, generated between them, will be all the less able to commit to civility in times of peace and will continue in the search for strong opinions whitewashed as truth in the name of the weak powers that break easily as the wind turns elsewhere and unavoidably will support outbursts of violence of any kind that will emerge as the consequence of hold opinions and not principles as revolutionary ideals.

Opinions are fundamental items in the market of truth and they consolidate truth in a way other than self-servingly but they should not be upheld as truths themselves; for it is no surprise that truth and politics have never been the best friends or necessarily partners at all and politics stems from incontrollable actions of men held together rather than from a founding principle other than the simple fact of being born into the world in a community of men and the desire to transform this togetherness into the civic separation that allows for a world to emerge. Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor during the 16^th century is said to have coined the expression “fiat iustitia et pereat mundus” (let justice be done, though the world shall perish) that was mocked by Arendt into “fiat veritas et pereat mundus” (let truth prevail, though the world shall perish) that can be easily applied to the comfortable truth seekers of the internet age but the world, as far as I know, is bigger than the news. “What is called in news parlance “the world” – “You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world,” one radio networks intones several times an hour – is (unlike the world) a very small place, both geographically and thematically, and what is thought worth knowing about it is expected to be transmitted tersely and emphatically. Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view.[4]” The pursuit of information as truth has replaced the complex and serendipitous process of learning history and human thought, of reflecting behind the shade of images and voices and thus condemning truth as mere verifiable fact and stripping the pursuit of truth from its aspect of compassion and understanding of oneself and others.

Human Rights though indisputably universal today in our minds, have never constituted a fixed or even stable concept, accordingly, their pursuit and defense are not viable without a guiding principle of civility that overrides opinions for which we may or may not fall – they’re not one another aspect of faith in mankind such as the many lachrymose documentaries on murdered activists would like to make us think. This is not a conservative exhortation to abdicate the labor of human rights and the transmission of their very important message, rather it is a reflection about the fact that in today’s world more than ever, being a conscious reader and hearer of the news does not immediately empower us with holier-than-thou vests and battle shields to fight against violence and oppression without concise reflection on the information we receive and why. Human Rights activism is not a contest about who is more passionate than whom and therefore has the largest number of friends in social media and interviews with radio stations in far away countries. Being a citizen journalist and a human rights activist are very different occupations, because a defender of human rights is a full time job from which there are no possible bank holidays and it is also a process of intervention which is never neutral, for evil can never be condoned but that places well-being, safety, security, peace and legality over opinions of himself or others. It is all too very easy to tweet from the comfort of the living room sights and sounds of war, but more difficult is to develop a sense of empathy that is not a mindless addiction to mere images of violence and death without deference to the people behind them. Remember: “We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others[5]”.

[1] Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, pp 17, Picador, 2003

[2] Ibid, pp 19

[3] Hannah Arendt, “Notebooks”, November 1952, 5

[4] Susan Sontag, ibid, pp 18

[5] Francois de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 116

The Book of the Heathen (in process)

What is the fascination, and dread, of Judaism with Christianity? Though the question has little troubled the Jews, forever anchored in the rather painful and often deadly reality of the Christian history in which they have participated, the question terrorized the Christian, common believer and saint alike, through the ages, like an Ocean of hesitations that surfaced more like supplications at the shrine of an unknown and well-masked deity. The path trodden by those whose faith has been safely insured in the sword of Moses' law, seems rather obscure and bizarre either in the case they mean to uphold this law or to destroy it, replace it, improve it, dispel it, and the like; the equation or formulas implicit in the relationship are far less than important than the crude fact of the relationship as such. People would be little surprised if told that these are ancient times no more, and that the discussion over the nature of religion has moved away from the soteriological cycles of anxiety far more rooted in geography and anatomy than in the argumentative absolutes of science, not necessarily Cartesian science but not altogether too distant, for it is the logical argument over the nature of religion - just like one discusses the nature of stones, the origin of water and the physical chemistry of the universe, what distinguishes that brand of modern knowledge known as "the religion of reason", a form of religion contained within another form thereof. This particular mode of argumentation, that pays extreme and careful attention to detail in the most sophisticated scholarly fashion, known as "the critique of religion" is ultimately more scientific in the contemporary cats-and-mice sense of "catch the fallacy" than any venture endeavored by the science that supposedly brought to life such principles; this is only because the questions of science - and where it topologically coincides with classical theology - ultimately are aimed at the discovery of the "stuff life is made of", and in working out the principles behind it all, cannot pay enough attention to detail without the "last things", here meant otherwise than in the timely meditations of the saints: hereby the last things are nothing but the first things, how life began at all. The enterprise is less inimical to a comprehensive world view than it is the case with the critique of religion that is ever so pretending that one can chemically separate the constitutive elements of an scrambled egg into carefully labelled atomic and sub-atomic particles inside petri boxes and yet keep the scrambled egg intact with a self-serving pride of contemplation.

That "the stuff life is made of" is the one and only pretense of science and theology is no surprise, until the men of faith ultimately advance the beheading of God with the help of hyper-Christian heresies whilst science continues unmolested in the pursuit of "that stuff life is made of". The pre-modern overlap between scientific and theological forms of story-telling was less obvious than natural, at a time when the word "life" had not been trivialized to the extent of becoming a scientific premise for every form of early modern fringe science - sociology, anthropology, ethnology, philosophy of history - so that a certain philosopher was not entirely mistaken when he said that the philosophy of life was a tautology as embedded in fantasy as the botany of plants. Descartes and Leibniz had been both deeply pious and it was said of Newton that it was strange how the greatest theologian of the 17th century had found time to write about science; the piety here is not meant as a compliment but rather as circumstantial evidence in a secular trial against the philosophers and the theologians that expropriated the domain of science from rather harmless critical observations in order to apply them forcefully to a science of life that shattered to pieces "the stuff life is made of" with "scientific precision" and argued in the name of science that the "science of life" had been found at the same time that they delved deeper and deeper into the fringe science of rational thought - a system of absolute values that kept all the particular details and believed in infinitude whilst recollecting finite pieces thereof.

Thus Descartes turned out to be more of a Biblical man than the simplest science teacher in a school far inside the provinces - irrespective of the confession, even at the expense of having subverted the order of reality that circumscribed his piety in an earthly existence. Descartes, together with Pascal and Wolff, concerned himself about the relationship of Christian life (that is, dogmatic theology) with Biblical teaching (that is, with the Hebrew and Northwest-Semitic background of Holy Scripture). Because the history of the Jewish people (by both self-imagined and critical versions thereof) was spared the conflict between "the stuff life is made of" and the "sciences of life", no critical versions of Judaism or of any system of beliefs emerged until modern times, as everything from literature to history to science was filed under the same rubric: Holy Scripture. However the critique of religion was subjected in modern times to a religious critique of the critique of religion just like the critique of reason was subject to a rational critique of the critique of reason, the vicious disease of the Renaissance and Enlightenment: insofar as every principle is due to be "critiqued", the principles of the critique and thus the whole apparatus of truth is subject to any possible critical critique of principle. The result of this is that those encroached in the supreme worship of methodological truth ultimately accept the failure of all truth to deliver any promises at all and yet proceed to build a systematic science of life thereupon. The careful cross-examination derived from this process resulted in a growing interest in the "Origins", a favorite abstract referential in the "philosophy of life" which helplessly it tried to derive from its own principles slowly boiling down to a masterful blend of biology and fairy tale; but whenever the "Origin" as a referential category for surveying the nature of religion comes up, the modern scholar (no longer fluent in the medieval quadrivium, but within its more circumscribed specialism, a mixture of part-time tinman and self-taught alchemist) had to pay attention to a vision of himself and the other that want back further than the ideal of equality and humanity that unfathomably coincided with the golden age of discoveries of ancient cultures known as "Oriental Studies" that shed even more unfathomable information on the childish world of the Hebrew Bible that critical studies until then, now seen as paradoxically primitive, rejected as folk tales. There occurred a resurrection of manuscripts and treaties of Christian apologetics, pamphlets, obscure mystical commentaries and personal correspondence from very fine men of letters that dealt with the troubled relationship between Christians and Jews; the interest in this parental and fraternal relationship that today would have troubled any social welfare agency, wouldn't have grown to its current dimension of reversing the order of the critique of religion, weren't it for the fact that it matched with surgical precision the timing of the decline in organized religion that surprisingly came hand in hand with an unprecedented wave of institutional, criminal and intellectual antisemitism that was no longer confined to the pulpit of the churches on a beautiful Sunday morning but had reached the desk of government officials and very reputable writers from Monday through Friday as well - It seemed as if the Death-of-God theology in progress (with all due respect to Harvey Cox and Gabriel Vahanian who had something else completely in mind as they toyed with the concept with more American naive than apocalyptic seduction) included also in its road-map the death of the Jews.

While the extant Christian literature on Jews that spanned all the way from the late ancient world through yesterday's newspaper was more than abundant and by no means all antisemitic in the modern sense - medieval literature provided a vast array of dialogical literature, fiction and chronic, of exchanges between learned Jews, Christians and Muslims - the discovery of Judaism as a fertile field of theological and scientific study (and here we are not dealing with the professors of Hebrew and Jewish controversies in European universities since the Middle Ages that did nothing but giving a substantiated claim and face to popular antisemitism and were more often than not political appointments) revealed extra and post-Biblical sources for the study of Christianity; the realities of antisemitism

All

It has been so long since not a single word had been written, perhaps with a certain sense of attrition, sometimes writing and the broader context of intellectual exercises is constituted into a risky venture into the darkest bottom of fear than it is an exercise in freedom. There's just so much that we wouldn't like to acknowledge that we know in full, and a practice as public as that of writing and debating isn't particularly helpful in enhancing our self-confidence about not knowing, and the matter turns slightly more complicated at the prospect of this knowledge not concerning facts of science as much as the interpretation of what one could not without a certain pressumption, call but an interpretation of basic truths of the world. One is always inclined to think that writing is so much more entertaining than actual learning and that the practice of meaning and expression is far more valuable than that of scientific learning. There exists undoubtedly an acute chasm between science and dream, between scholarship and flight.

The flight is the ALL and yet nothing, whereas scholarship is nothing and yet the ALL. We know the reluctance with which philosophy and science, infested with a certain theological caution, handle the ALL. The world in the old metaphysical systems was construed, brick by brick, from the pressumption of the ALL, however there's no such a thing as one brick or another when the ALL is the underlying pressumption.

Fragment

"...Ma poi allimprovviso sento i tuoi gesti nei miei, ti riconosco nelle mie parole. Tutti colore che se ne vanno, ti lasciano sempre addosso un po di se? E questo il segreto della memoria? Se e cosi, allora, mi sento piu sicura perche so che non saro mai sola..."

I thought suddenly about Lorenzo, about all the faces that vanished one day and receded into something that I'm yet unable to describe, sometimes a line comes up, in a journal or in something that you believe comes out of the purest imagination but that then suddenly you realize, you had learnt somewhere, about the colours and the gestures, that no matter how hard you try, are never leaving you. There's something both helpless and innocent about this, and then when suddenly, you recognize it, the recognition doesn't come from the past but rather from somewhere even deeper down, the transformation of the smell that once intoxicated you, of the hand once earthbound fleeing toward the river, escaping from the ill sensation of the empty bank, of the blank page, of the fear of an old age. How many Lorenzos are there in the world? Perhaps a moment too early, an hour too late, impossible altogether and hence powerless, embedded in a nest of dead flowers, with a soft breeze leaking abovewards and causing it to rain contrariwise, onto the carpeted floors of the vacuum from which our lives hang down serendipitously but yet in the immensity of a certain silence, interrupted only by those pieces of dead matter that, just like in the physics of particles, only when put together, come alive and overpower you at the moment when you've just forgotten the source of the power itself, as if the memory itself would be to no more avail than a postcard hand-written with blank letters.

All the more, however, my anxiety increases and especially at night, my fear of death grows immensely; in each mosquito bite I begin to detect what could be the beginning of a lethal disease, feeling the mortal pulsation growing and ascending from my toes into the dryness of the lower lip and the tremor in the hand. Perhaps the feeling is not altogether real any more than the confirmation of life contained within, that melody of mighty waters slowly overturning the sky and turning it into a waterfall running the opposite direction of the ocean, at standstill, but yet in spite of the immensity, so fragile that it seems as if it is going to break anytime and dissolve into nothingness, and yet it doesn't; the surface of everything, the tissue and the texture, of life even, remains stretched and shaking, but yet it cannot be cut into pieces lest the whole world disappear with the vessels of truth in it and the ponds of lies around it. The eyes become acquiescent before the delicate lines of the light and unfold into later hours, such small hours! So small that nothing is left but yourself without them afterwards, bruised and frightened, but all the more undead. The limbs are still intact and they reach out for the warmth of the blood beneath bruises and scars, foreign to the sterile perfection of peace, of deceased time, preferring the transcription of a symphony over the free fall and loss found in the formlessness of the litany - the words are undistinguishable from the sounds of the worlds, madness ensues.