Department of Political Science and Public Administration

Adorno’s use of the term “barbarism” has probably been most often referred to in the context of his much- cited dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1983: 34). While, nowadays, the term is usually and fortunately presented within the broader context of his works, his intended meaning was frequently misunderstood particularly after Adorno had articulated it for the first time. For clarity, the aforementioned dictum was not a verdict intended to silence poets or artists. It was rearticulated a few times by Adorno — specifically in response to Celan’s poetry — who calls for arts and culture to respond from within and in the face of an inescapable aporetic condition. Namely, to write poetry after Auschwitz means to write from within a differend—a radical chasm between the signifier and the signified that one neither ought nor could overcome via writing or aesthetic means in general. Yet, poetry (and also art and thinking, per se) as a form of active engagement with sociopolitical realities, has to respond to the ungraspable (i.e., the Holocaust); it cannot simply avoid doing so. It permanently has to speak whilst knowing that it will never reach the addressee; that it must fail in speaking.

This essay explores the works of German artist Gustav Metzger as a potential response to Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). It argues that culture, as understood in the Adornian sense, is inextricably barbaric as a result of simply being after Auschwitz. Culture must acknowledge the finitude in its own ability to live up to an ethical demand in response to justice, whose arrival is infinitely deferred. In spite of this, culture, and art in particular, must not refrain from the very act of writing. Metzger’s works are discussed as aesthetic responses to the “new categorical imperative” of Adorno, who addresses art’s failure in light of Auschwitz by pointing to aporias that constitute the inescapable condition of “barbarism.” This essay suggests that Metzger’s aesthetic articulations are nonbarbaric ruptures, in that they challenge our living on irresponsibly within the condition of barbarism via a constant confrontation with complicity.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is certainly one of the most exciting and provocative European public intellectuals. Born in 1948, he became a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation at the age of 14. He was an active participant of the events of May 1968, at which time he joined the extra-parliamentary, radical left-wing Worker’s Power Group (Potere Operaio). Berardi had founded the Italian magazine A/traverso, before he started working with Gilles Deleuze’s influencial co-author and French psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari. Ever since, he has been a frequent contributor to Semiotexte, Chimerees, Metropoli, and e-flux journal, amongst others and has written over two dozen published books, mostly in the fields of autonomous activism, financial capitalism and linguistics.

In 2011, his editor Gary Genesko directed a teaser video in which Berardi discusses one of his books, “After the Future” (AK Press 2011). Many theses “Bifo” expands on in both the video and the book recur in his latest publication, “The Uprise. On Poetry and Finance” (published by semiotext(e) in 2012; fortunately, Kevin Vennemann has just made the effort to translate this latter volume into German, which is entitled “Der Aufstand. Über Poesie und Finanzwirtschaft”, Matthes & Seitz 2015).

In it, Berardi is mostly concerned with the linguistic, sociopolitical and material consequences caused by what he terms “financial dictatorship”, meaning the separation of labour and capital in the context of radical neoliberalism. Both “After the Future” and “The Uprising” expand on the devastating effects of financial deterritorialization, with a specific focus on labor precarity. Consequently, Berardi calls for the instauration of a radical imagination, an imagination being both poetic and timeless, and centered upon what he calls an “infinite present” as opposed to neoliberalism’s obsession with futurity and future-colonisation.

The paper starts with the conviction that a discussion of a politics of attachment is closely linked to questions of ethicopolitical responsibility and responsiveness. It intends to highlight certain facets of the silent standing protests in Turkey that occurred throughout summer 2013 during the Occupy Gezi movement and that appeared, at times, reminiscent of Levinasian concerns. Of particular interest for my paper will be Tahmasebi-Birgani’s (2014) recent exploration of Levinas, which provides a powerful account of how we might envision “Levinasian politics.” I contend that Levinas has much to say not only about the relation between ethics and politics but also about a dialectic between practices of detachment and
attachment. Such a dialectic can become illustrative in relation to the aforementioned phenomenon of silent standing protest. Feeling radically alienated from everyday politics and
its close alliance to an overall neoliberal agenda, the standing protesters engaged in a politics of attachment insofar as they passively resisted by standing together in silence. While
many scholars highlight the fact that silent protests usually depend on signs that explain a protest’s strategic aims, the actions of Gündüz (who initiated the silent standing protest)
revealed that a Levinasian saying could be understood and responded to without any verbal communication. This protest entailed an ethical stance expressed without speech, thereby
revealing a tacit, shared understanding of its ethical origin. Silence slowly emerged as a new language, whereby new symbols were created within a praxis of responding, attached to the other. As such, the silent standing protest and its succeeding forums were representative of reciprocity before an exchange, revealing a sense of Levinasian response-ability, i.e., the ability to respond, not only to an oppressive regime but also to the Other for the Other, as well as in the name of the absent Other. In this sense, I contend that the protest could
exemplify Levinasian response-ability as a concrete praxis of a microphysical politics of attachment that responds to macro-processes of detachment.

This is a short response paper presented at the ASCA Workshop (UvA) 2015 addressing the issues of neoliberalist future colonisation and the need for a radical, socioethical imaginary. It partly draws on Franco Berardi’s arguments, arguing that what is lost, above all, in neoliberalism is an open future, a form of the future that can neither be predicted nor possessed.  It argues that what is urgently needed, therefore, is a form of critique that is simultaneously a production of space and time—perhaps a transformation of the forms of space and time peculiar to neoliberalism—to enable forms of experiences heterogeneous to neoliberalism.

Die Struktur des zeitgenössischen Selbstverständnis ist vor allem von einem Begriff beherrscht – dem der „Krise”. Autoritär durchzieht er die Diskurse der Gegenwart, taucht einmal als Finanz-, Schulden-, Ukraine-, oder zuletzt als Flüchtlings-„krise” auf. Dabei ähneln politische und gesellschaftliche Reaktionen auf eine nun siebenjährige Finanzmisere, das vertagte Schuldenproblem Griechenlands, den anhaltenden Ukrainekonflikt oder die bis weit in die Zukunft reichende
Flüchtlings-„krise” einem Zustand aktiver Lethargie, einer
ruhelosen Verschränkung von Politiken des Stillstands mit medialen Ökonomien der Erregung. Obgleich die „Krise” nicht nur Theorie und Praxis, sondern auch das soziale Imaginäre schockstrategisch formt, bleibt der Begriff selbst schemenhaft – oder, nach Reinhart Koselleck, so „unklar wie die Emotionen, die sich an ihn hängen“. Deutlichere Konturen erhält insbesondere die gegenwärtige Form der Krisis im Relief andersartiger Begriffe: Stásis und Ék-stasis. Ihre konzeptuelle Verschränkung lässt aktuelle Krisenszenarien aus ihrer diffusen Statik heraustreten.

This essay re-explores the tie between ethics and politics in the thought of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and is specifically concerned with the political consequences that might be drawn from his unique account of ethics. In response to Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani's recent reading of Levinasian politics as ethicoliberatory praxis, this essay attempts to exemplify such politics in relation to the silent standing protest that occurred throughout Occupy Gezi. As will be illustrated, this particular form of protest was symbolic of a struggle that was not tied to a classical notion of autonomous agency, but partially arose from ‘radical passivity’. It will be suggested that the protester's tacit participation in a shared endeavour to create responsive idioms for the Other can exemplify Levinasian ‘response-ability’ as a concrete praxis. Relying on Levinasian terminology, I suggest that Occupy Gezi's forms of silent protest created an ‘un-said Saying’ that disturbed the realm of politics from an ethical stance. Alongside a Levinasian reading, the protester's performed standstill will be explored in relation to what Butler and Athanasiou term ‘two senses of dispossession’ together with the concept implied by the Greek στα´σις [stasis]. As I contend, stasis manages to escape from the principle of non-contradiction in Being through integrating Being's Other in implicating both movement and stillness, activity and passivity. Hereby, stasis potentially points to an-other peace before politics, thereby offering a prolific alternative to the classic Hobbesian account of a dichotomy between war and peace.

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Gior- gio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading to Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With re- gard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism.