NMBR corrects itself [from yesterday's post] and poses the question:
Is an American Velvet Revolution possible without the broad cultural development of a tragic conscience?
It is the question that existentially corrects the political.
What rises in the question of the existential attitude are questions of love, responsibility, forgiveness, vocation, commitment. When we ask these questions, we engage in the existential attitude, transforming the child-like experience of the idyllic into a profoundly honest accounting of the exilic: From the idyllic to the exilic, though, does not open despair; rather, it opens an indirect proof of love—that we have already been, as Kierkegaard and Levinas will aver, absent from ourselves. From the exilic—which is to say, from a non-possessive ownership of our violences—we approach each other as a living out of our supplications for forgiveness.
MM points out that Vaclav Havel transforms these questions politically, so that just as every post-Nazi German must ask “what kind of German am I?” so every American, in light of our history of empire, oppression, genocide, must ask the same: “What shall I be?” and “How shall I be a self?” become the questions of self-choice.
The difficulty of this question, however, is that America still experiences nothing of a tragic conscience: We still pretend to be innocent, like children. Nothing in American history challenges the persistence of this experience of innocence; there is no sense of sin and finitude. We are like the island of children in Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as our erotic play turns violent sexual transgressions. Is it any wonder that as we suffer the disappearance of the historical, a hyper-commidified eroticism without intimacy occupies and mesmerizes the cultural attention—like anonymous sex devoid of love or memory.
It will require pedagogy—a giving of oneself to the pedagogical.
We must all be Jan Palach's set afire with love.
It is the question that existentially corrects the political.
What rises in the question of the existential attitude are questions of love, responsibility, forgiveness, vocation, commitment. When we ask these questions, we engage in the existential attitude, transforming the child-like experience of the idyllic into a profoundly honest accounting of the exilic: From the idyllic to the exilic, though, does not open despair; rather, it opens an indirect proof of love—that we have already been, as Kierkegaard and Levinas will aver, absent from ourselves. From the exilic—which is to say, from a non-possessive ownership of our violences—we approach each other as a living out of our supplications for forgiveness.
MM points out that Vaclav Havel transforms these questions politically, so that just as every post-Nazi German must ask “what kind of German am I?” so every American, in light of our history of empire, oppression, genocide, must ask the same: “What shall I be?” and “How shall I be a self?” become the questions of self-choice.
The difficulty of this question, however, is that America still experiences nothing of a tragic conscience: We still pretend to be innocent, like children. Nothing in American history challenges the persistence of this experience of innocence; there is no sense of sin and finitude. We are like the island of children in Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as our erotic play turns violent sexual transgressions. Is it any wonder that as we suffer the disappearance of the historical, a hyper-commidified eroticism without intimacy occupies and mesmerizes the cultural attention—like anonymous sex devoid of love or memory.It will require pedagogy—a giving of oneself to the pedagogical.
We must all be Jan Palach's set afire with love.
6 comments:
I agree with most everything you say here, but as we've discussed before I loathe Palach's self-martyrdom. In fact, I loathe all martyrdom. In my opinion his life would have been better served engaging in true pedagogical exchange. Suicide is a selfish act and self-immolation is an act of violence perpetuated on others I find highly problematic. More often than not, it only serves as a temporary shock and creates no real lasting change.
While I agree with Palach's idealogical opposition to the Warsaw Pact, I can't in good conscience agree with his actions.
Thanks for the comment, DSW!
I offer here some comments as rebuttals to yours:
DSW writes: “my opinion his life would have been better served engaging in true pedagogical exchange. Suicide is a selfish act and self-immolation is an act of violence perpetuated on others I find highly problematic.”
First, from what position do you make such assessments and judgments on how Jan Palach might have better offered his life? If you judge from an historical position that can read the Soviet occupation and oppression as an epoch in the global organization of the Cold War, then your assessment bears with it a post-Soviet comfort that Palach never had. At the time Palach immolated himself, there was plenty of discourse circulating the Czech underground resistance movement that spoke of self-sacrifice—of laying your life on the line as a political-ethical transformative gesture
Second, then, why is it that you distinguish the self-sacrifice of immolation from any possible pedagogical gesture? I think Palach’s act was pedagogical if nothing else—mainly, that life under the oppressive conditions of Soviet occupation, under the tyrannical and ubiquitous administration that ontologized bureaucracy and organized culture (even the relations between neighbors) under a heavily militarized state paranoia, was no kind of human existence.
DSW writes: “More often than not, it only serves as a temporary shock and creates no real lasting change.”
Palach’s self-sacrifice—which must be different from suicide, because there were plenty of suicides under Soviet occupation—served precisely the pedagogical gesture that helped usher in the Velvet Revolution. Self-sacrifice is a requisite for Velvet Revolution, of pulling out of the whole economy of violence that has us kill in order to go on living (or worse, to be indifferent to the suffering of others as a condition for living). You can read self-sacrifice as either suicide or as martyrdom, but these are values one brings the event of self-sacrifice.
DSW writes: “While I agree with Palach's idealogical opposition to the Warsaw Pact, I can't in good conscience agree with his actions.”
The gesture of self-sacrifice is more than mere ideological opposition; often times, ideology can be countered Socratically with pedagogy, as you suggest. However, if the gesture of self-sacrifice confronts a more brutal oppression that draws in one’s very own facticity, then the pedagogical modality of resistance must also bear one’s very own facticity.
Is the Tiananmen Square student who stands before the Chinese tank a martyr or suicide if the tanks rolls him over?
I think this is what existentially confermed post-secular resistance means—risking one’s own life, one’s own facticity in the struggle to free Others.
Subcomandante Marcos warns us not to sit in the comfort of our armchairs and judge the resistance movements of the oppressed:
“Producing theory from within a social or political movement is not the same as producing it from within academia. And I am not speaking of "academia" in the sense of sterility or (nonexistent) scientific "objectivity," but only in order to note the place of reflection and intellectual production as being "outside" of a movement. And "outside" does not mean that there are no "sympathies" or "antipathies," but that that intellectual production does not take place within the movement, rather above it. And so the academic analyst assesses and judges good and bad points, wise moves and errors, of past and present movements, and, in addition, ventures prophecies concerning directions and fates.”
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=3783
anarkissed apologizes on behalf of NMBR for the misspellings, typos, and organizational problems that mark his writings.
This was a minor point in your original post so I don't want your larger argument to get lost in the debate of a relatively insignificant point. That said, please allow me to respond.
The historical perspective is the only one from which we can view Palach's suicide. Additionally, my understanding of the Velvet Revolution is that it took place in 1989 - some 21 years AFTER Palach's suicide, so it didn't exactly usher in the Velvet Revolution as you claim.
I guess my biggest sticking point with Palach is that self-immolation is not a gesture of hope, in fact its the exact opposite. You bring up the Tienanmen Square student as analogous to Palach, but I don't see it that way. That student in China displayed hope in the face of ultimate oppression, self-immolation offers no hope. And I don't see it as genuine self-sacrifice precisely because of that.
To make a larger point, in opposing the occupation of Iraq would the movement be better served if I - or anyone for that matter - were to douse myself in gasoline and light a match on the White House lawn or by engaging in discussion, debate, education, and voting?
Would Cindy Sheehan's message of Peace to Power be better served if she were to self-immolate outside of Bush's Crawford Ranch or continue to hold vigils there and speak publicly about the atrocities of the Iraq War?
In advocating for stricter gun control laws would I be better served by self-immolating on the steps of the NRA's National HQ or by education, exposing the role of the gun-lobby in American politics, and advocating policy change?
Not matter how much one wants to romanticize self-immolation as an effective form of political protest - it still remains an act of suicide and suicide is a desperate act ... a hopeless act. And to borrow a quote from Cornell West you so frequently use, "... I am a slave to hope."
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