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Mark Bahnisch

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The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what ... got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Mark Bahnisch


1
Mark Bahnisch
  • Heidegger, Strauss and Schmitt
  • Apocalypticism, Neoconservatism or Politics
    Understanding the 21st century eclipse of
    globalisation with 20th century philosophers
  • Seminar paper, School of AMC, 15 March 2006

2
Walter Benjamin
  • The story is told of an automaton constructed in
    such a way that it could play a winning game of
    chess, answering each move of an opponent with a
    countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with
    a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard
    placed on a large table. A system of mirrors
    created the illusion that this table was
    transparent from all sides. Actually, a little
    hunchback who was an expert chess player sat
    inside and guided the puppets hand by means of
    strings. One can imagine a philosophical
    counterpart to this device. The puppet called
    historical materialism is to win all the time.
    It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists
    the services of theology, which today, as we
    know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

3
Context
  • Research programme
  • Political theory/sociology
  • Historical macrosociology
  • Interest in the relationship between hope, social
    change and political possibility
  • The longue duree (Braudel, Wallerstein)
  • The political as a sociology of secularised
    theological concepts (Schmitt)
  • Ideas and action (The philosophers)

4
Methodology
  • Weber ideal types
  • Against causal reductivism
  • Value free analytics
  • The work of destruction/deconstruction
  • clearing a (political path)
  • Poststructuralist phenomenology

5
The problem I
  • Memorably, Marx (1977 begins The Eighteenth
    Brumaire of Louis Napoleon with some sardonic
    observations about history and its repetitions
  •  
  • Men make their own history, but they do not make
    it as they please they do not make it under
    self-selected circumstances, but under
    circumstances existing already, given and
    transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
    dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
    brains of the living. And just as they seem to be
    occupied with revolutionizing themselves and
    things, creating something that did not exist
    before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
    crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
    the past to their service, borrowing from them
    names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to
    present this new scene in world history in
    time-honored disguise and borrowed language
  •  

6
The problem II
  • What is the status of globalisation? What are
    we talking about?
  • Where did globalisation go? Are we living in
    apocalyptic times? What happened to liberalism
    (as a system of rule)?
  • Under the sign of Marx and Mill
  • Has history ended?

7
Meaning and/in history
  • Post-traditionalism and identity
  • Narratives of historical meaning
  • Dante
  • Shift post-Reformation to a different
    (teleological) theology
  • What about postmodernity?
  • Utopia, apocalypse or something else?

8
Against globalisation
  • Distinguishing cultural and economic
    interconnectivity from political discourse
  • Periodisation
  • Inadequate as a social-scientific concept
  • A utopic political discourse problems of
    legitimacy

9
The eclipse of globalisation
  • It was always already contaminated from within
  • Power and the state
  • When did liberalism disappear?
  • What is left of liberalism? (or right of
    liberalism?)

10
Wars of Empire
  • Contradictions at the beginning of the 21st
    century
  • Perry Anderson (2005) philosophers of perpetual
    peace justify perpetual war
  • From liberal humanitarism to what?

11
The philosophers
  • Strauss
  • Exoteric writing and the arcanii imperii

12
The philosopher king?
  • Thymos
  • The end of history
  • OR
  • The last man?
  • Apocalyptic politics

13
The philosophers
  • Heidegger
  • Dasein and being towards death
  • and theology
  • the Latinisation of the world

14
Carl Schmitt
  • This thought and work repeatedly presaged the
    fearsome world that was announcing itself from as
    early as the 1920s. As though the fear of seeing
    that which comes to pass take place, in effect
    had honed the gaze of this besieged watchman.
    Following our hypothesis, the scene would be
    thus lucidity and fear not only drove this
    terrified and insomniac watcher to anticipate the
    storms and seismic movements that would work
    havoc with the historical field, the political
    space, the borders of concepts and countries, the
    axiomatics of European law etc. Such a watcher
    would therefore have been more attuned than so
    many others to the fragility and
    deconstructible precariousness of structures,
    borders and axioms that he wished to protect,
    restore and conserve at all costs.
  • Derrida (1997 107)

15
Carl Schmitt
  • Friends and enemies
  • Left and right Schmittians
  • With Schmitt but not Schmittian

16
For a phenomenological political analytic
  • Agonism not antagonism
  • Phenomenology, sociology and the political
  • Understanding the 21st century otherwise

17
In place of a conclusion Benjamin
  • Paul Klees Angelus Novus

18
In provisional place of a conclusion
  • My wing is ready for flight,
  • I would like to turn back.
  • If I stayed timeless time,
  • I would have little luck.
  • Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
  • ich kehrte gern zurück,
  • denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
  • ich hätte wenig Glück.
  • Gerherd Scholem,
  • Gruss vom Angelus

19
In provisional place of a conclusion
  • A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an
    angel looking as though he is about to move away
    from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
    eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
    are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
    history. His face is turned toward the past.
    Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
    single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
    and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
    would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
    whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
    blowing in from Paradise it has got caught in
    his wings with such a violence that the angel can
    no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
    propels him into the future to which his back is
    turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
    skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

20
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