It was nice to have you and Hannah
around for a moment in Vilnius. I didn’t manage to jot down any notes after our
conversations so what follows might need some refreshing, but here we go.
Well I’m gonna try to triangulate a
few conversations I’ve been involved with lately. It's one of those periods
where there a lot of concepts and newish points of emphasis and priority
appearing and I struggle to place them all as words—it will definitely take
some time.
Alongside our gathering on militancy
and mourning, I’ve been talking with some friends in Armenia, the
Anti-Denialist Coalition, about the idea of sacrifice as a framework by
which the community of the living, variously, justifies and disavows death and
dying. For the ADC, the Zionist avowal of the Holocaust as a practice of
sacrifice of millions of lives deemed threatening or unworthy for the European
community of the living, was approached as an opportunity. The dead were
sublated as a groundwork for the building of a new subject: the Israeli Jew. As
they ask: “Who and what have been and are being Holocausted,
after all, at the hands of European Nazis, fascists, national capitalists,
avowed anti-communists and white supremacists? For what superior motive? In
order to maintain or preserve what?” This
sacrifice, for the pure community, and its resistance by a forms of life who
refuse to be ‘one’, continues by way of the Palestinian today. The holocaust as
‘sacrifice’ disavows the life taken in order to maximally avow the life to
come—it turns death into a project, a means, for the fulfilment of community as
a dealienated communion. As Nancy will nicely put it:
Generations
of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the States have imagined
their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community, yet to come, that would
attain immanence.* […] The modern age has conceived the justification of death
only in the guise of salvation or the dialectical sublation of history.
Against this fascist logic of
sacrifice and salvation, Nancy notes another justification of death. The death
of those who revolt from the intolerable conditions of life under oppression.
Yet these deaths are not sublated as projects: “no dialectic, no salvation
leads these deaths to any other immanence than that of… death (cessation, or
decomposition, which forms only the parody or reverse of immanence).”
*Nancy uses immanence in a peculiar
way here to express the non-mediated, a kind of social organicism, an
ontological purity that only a subject transfigured into the deathly oblivion
of a pure symbol of life can effectively perform but never achieve.
What I take this passage to mean is:
the death of those that rebel against oppression does not resolve
incompleteness, the ceaseless movement and contradiction of
being-in-a-finite-world. These deaths rather stay with us as the unresolved
struggles and co-extensive potentials of the living. We live together with the
dead but only within the parameters of the affects they imparted and what the
imparted impart. There is no sublation of the comrade as immortal symbol, only
interminable loss and its inheritance. Such deaths also surmount the liberal
order's paradigm of the individual whom, in negating tradition’s temporal
continuum, turns death and dying into an unbearable task and insignificant
burden—the privatization of time.
Yet within the fascist logic of
sacrifice and salvation, we also find a left-wing tendency. The horizonal,
futuritive, vitalist politics that makes death into a project for the yet to
come. Once again disavowing the sacrificed in light of an avowed community of
the living/dead. The needs of the sacrificed are disavowed and their
inheritances only acknowledged to the extent they can be put to use in some
instrumental, future-building, project.
A
scene: The Soviet planners in post-war Vilna’s decision to build the Palace of
Cultural Workers on top of a graveyard and use the graves, many of which were
Jewish, as the stones for the steps leading up the big hill. The dead as
defaced stepping stones and foundations for the wellbeing of the living and the
yet to come. You could imagine a short story by Platonov detailing this scene.
Here the dead are not immortalized
symbols but crudely materialized tools: stripped of context, culture, hopes,
and finite needs and turned into a cement-like mixture, put to use by socialism
whose needs are freed of the burden of the past as tradition. We could add to
Hannah’s comments on the death denying slogan of the left: “don’t mourn
organize” / don’t organize build.
And this is where mourning and
militancy, or as you formulate ‘the militant death-drive’ come in, as a
necessary corrective. You begin by nicely conceptualizing Freudian mourning in
your letter to Will, so let's start there: “To withdraw your ‘libido’ from the
world of the living, according to Freud, is what it means to be ‘in’ mourning;
but it also means prioritising the claims of the dead over those of the
living.” And while mourning is seen to be a necessary step in retreating the
object of loss—its eventual overcoming through a reinvestment of libidinal
attachment—melancholy as the stubborn endurance of this attachment and
attendance to the demands of the dead is found to be pathological.
The death-drive, as you note,
interrupts this vitalism in its avowal of the irreversibility of loss. For
Crimp, the struggles of the living continue after this recognition of our
finitude, but “the claims of the living are necessarily attenuated, diminished,
or interrupted by the ‘canalizing’ of feeling towards those that are no longer
‘there’, and who cannot benefit from any victories that we might win.” The
militancy of the death drive, as this intransigent bearing of loss within the
community of life, goes further than simply allocating a distributed space for
mourning, it demands the vitalism of the healthy be rethought.
Death-drive-militancy interrupts vitalism, with its denial and erasure of death
and dying; neither instrumentalizing nor immortalizing the dead. It is a demand
the dying and dead be avowed in their own right in the conversation instead of
simply used as its resource or horizon.
Returning to the Coalition's thesis, if
the avowed and disavowed holocausts of modernity are two modes of justifying
death as a project and means of the living and of those to come, we need to ask
what it would mean to rencounter death as this non-sublated, co-extensive, Mitsein
with the living and what concepts could be introduced to re-articulate our
notions of life in the aftermath of this event?
