[-empyre-] re/claiming and unsettling / continuing artistic practices

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Ana, i can empathize with you enjoying the arrival of Benjamin's Passagenwerk, 
hmm, but i hope you share his saddened sense of irony ("we always have nostalgia of what is left behind")
it's of course best not to indulge in sentimental nostalgia, wouldn't you agree, especially in this conversation?

i still owe you a critical synopsis of Zizek's thoughts on the failure of resistance and resilience and recalcitrance
vis à vis totality of capitalism;  i also am finding it hard to translate the "Sparta" metaphor, but will try later;

first I wish to ask how others reacted to Aristide's evocation of Athens (Greece) , considering "it the contemporary city 
that comes first in a series of cities that cannot anymore be included in a homogeneous European community. 
The city changed violently during the last years......The violent changes in the city divided a homogeneous territory 
in gated communities and ghettoes...    "a war field... indicative of the future."

You may find my reaction insulting, or as patronizing as I assume Alain Badiou et al to be ("Save the Greeks...")...
but i do find what you write overly dramatically in tone, and you speak of what one might find a completely imaginary 
"homogeneous European community" that I doubt existed in any way you wish to state or propose  here.
"Europe" or the Euro-Zone never existed as a homogenous community.

respectfully
Johannes Birringer

PS:  and the messianic side of Benjamin was probably destroyed for good in 1939-40.