Clearing away the slime of righteousness (WR)

Hi Danny

thank you for your letter of 31^st May. What you write poses some very difficult questions about emotional pain and politics. I find it important to say that, for myself, trying to reflect on them involves pretty much everything else. That, in part, is why it’s taken me a long time to respond. the other part is to do with what has seemed like reduced capacity for thinking these recent weeks—it would have been good to be at the recent MDR meeting.

I can bring the understanding of class to some particular kinds of psychic damage shared among the family I grew up in. But there’s a part of that which persists in present time. It’s not unalterable but it is very difficult to penetrate despite always having been there in a certain layer of memory. Nothing special about that, obviously. If I had lost a finger in a factory accident, I think I would—in spite of understanding the political context of the event—still imagine complete restitution, something which I guess is portrayed in the miracles that occur in the New testament but which is more meaningfully conceived as a final afterwardsness in which justice is brought about.

But do these thoughts get us anywhere if there’s a market for victims and wounds which has been expanding in the last 20 years or so. It’s tempting to say that the idea of justice overcomes the effects of exchangeability. But does saying that actually mean anything, right now? What would justice look like in the face of irreversible destructions of environment, not to mention wars that create the cover of a difference emergency. I can’t imagine a Last Judgment as Benjamin did. Nor is there any figure of revolution hovering over present grinding antagonisms.

I am not making an argument for melancholia but a call to cite the writing of non-redemption. I think of César Vallejo and Paul Celan, both of whom set in motion a dismantling of melancholy, of its temporality in Vallejo and in the case of Celan of the adjustment to loss that it seeks to produce. Vallejo presents the pain that is outside of and prior to individuation, pain as belonging to the commons; class in this case comes after. Is that approach useful for political decisions? I don’t know, since I’ve not been in a situation where it’s been put to the test, but I ask myself whether it takes us outside politics as it currently exists. In Celan there’s a deep desire for redemption, but inside the texture of the poems—their weaving of present time and space—there are almost no images of redemption, only larval stares of light and materials riven by historical disaster: ‘grass, written asunder’, ‘The world is gone’ (141 & 275of the 1995 edition). I can’t join the two things, political analysis and a terrain divested of hope, except to say that the naked earth and pain stripped of image seem necessary forms of thought and writing. Rather than find a compromise, e.g. in the limited gesture of saying that damage caused by work calls for the abolition of class society, I prefer to hold to class analysis and understanding of damage to mind and body at their maximum non-conjuncture, without abandoning either of them. Maybe I’m saying this to try to clear away the slime of righteousness. But that would still be a start.