Sami Khatib :  A Positive Concept of Barbarism. Benjamin and the Consequences
Channel: pmilat
Date: 2015-03-01

** talk at MaMa, Zagreb [February 27,2015] **

In this talk I will revisit Benjamin’s famous diagnosis of a modern poverty of experience (1933) and his corresponding plea for an impoverishment of thought. If in our post-postmodern age of “capitalist realism” capitalism “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (Mark Fisher), we have to supplement Kant’s famous three questions (“what can I know?, what ought I to do?, what may I hope?”) with another one: what is imaginable? If psychoanalysis and post-Kantian epistemology agree that our experience of objective reality is fundamentally structured by fantasies and our subjective faculty of imagination, how can the imaginably impoverished reality of the capitalist everyday be experienced?
 
Tarrying with this question, I am particularly interested in politico-nihilist operations of impoverishment, destruction, and “barbaric” reduction. How are we to dismantle the reverse side of the modern poverty of experience, the plethora of ideological doxa, that is, the oppressive wealth of privately owned opinions and ideas? The destructive side of Benjamin’s Socratic battle against doxa it echoed by its constructive flipside, that is, a new post-humanist concept of technology in the age of technological reproducibility.

 
This new concept of technology, however, is not envisioned in humanist-utopian manner; rather, in ultra-modernist fashion it radicalizes the experience of capitalist alienation and impoverishment. For Benjamin, hence, the technological medium of the post-humanist constellation of nature and humankind cannot be achieved through progress and intensification of the productive forces of capitalism. His paradoxical strategy of an accelerationist decelerationism – a lightning-fast pulling of the emergency break of the racing train of capitalist modernity – exceeds the horizon of bourgeois humanism.

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Sami Khatib is a critical theory and Walter Benjamin scholar and former researcher at the Theory Dept. of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. He is author of the book Teleologie ohne Endzweck. Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen (‘Teleology without End’. Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic).

http://mi2.hr/en/2015/01/english-sami-khatib-a-positive-concept-of-barbarism-benjamin-and-the-consequences/