[-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly

[Johannes Birringer]

thank you Christina for offering a clear and sober approach to the conflagrations and to absolute violence which have been discussed, and you counsel making, naming, small acts, conversation,
small acts. I agree with you, and that is direct, for me, and not, perhaps, paraphrasable. 


[Christina schreibt]

<<I have been writing about education in the arts/humanities as critical in resisting technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity.
So I see cultural production. and not just education about it,  as a form of resistance. ....So while it is hard to match advanced weaponry, it is easy for 
people who feel powerless to address it through violent performance. And so we watch it all unfolding. So what can mere mortals do? For starters,
name what is going on which I have experienced this conversation as doing. Be makers. Protect what we can. Small acts make ripples.>>


What does happen, and of course i am included in this when i reference the readings i have done or the listening to fellow artists/cultural workers and their plays or performances, is that sometimes the analysis or
the philosophy of just war or unjust war, and the naming of all the horros, the speaking about trauma, the speaking of "technocratic culture's limited interest in human capacity",  take on a different dress. Our extended theorizing
shrouds too. 

I am glad Aneta has arrived and just posted her long and intricate prose, which of course was partly a sketching of the critical landscape for this new book on endangered bodies...... And now that I reflect,
as I did when Monika first mentioned the metaphor of the garden, I am trying to understand what you mentioned, this "necropolitics", this war machine, this pop-up body [?} [and Ana just thought we needed to see this photo [!],]
this gendered constellation, this "new ethical aesthetic .. developed with regard to performing protest and activism."   Never mind the diplomat idea. Or, well, okay, has someone here felt they acted as a diplomat
and dissensus-maker?  You may well have.  (> they desire, as a performer-diplomat, to leave “the question of the number of the collective open, a question that, without him, everyone would have a tendency to simplify somewhat”<)
Hmm, I don't understand this paraphrase from Latour/Rancière.. 

Well, Aneta, now you have thrown out a number of ideas! We have to grapple.  
And I had also invited your co-editor Marina Gržinić to the table, as I had heard about her writings ("Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism --
Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life"), but unfortunately Marina declined.  In fact a number of people declined. 

The other day I cited from Hamed's play ("Home is in Our Past") and when I remember it, the "no" actually was the most reverberant single word I heard next to the unbelievable vocal performance 
by the woman singer which cut to the bone and was untranslatable.  The man/soldier/immgrant in the mud, the one submerged in the dirt and the grey mass of vile liquid, he probably could not hear her.


Johannes Birringer