Skip to main content

The peace of the polemos

Been thinking a lot about peace - result of being in Beirut, crossing middle east borders, watching the last interview with Edward Said (by ICA) and having experiences like stepping on a giant Israeli flag placed in the floor of a crowded street in Damascus (official and compulsory hatred, of course). Peace not as an absence of conflict but rather as a mode of the polemos, a style for conflict (in the beautiful phrase suggested yesterday to me by my friend Monica Udler). Peace as something that is constantly weaved, not the peace of heavens or that of cementaries (those two often seem the same).

Any conflict can be unproductive or merely destructive. In this case, of the conflicting part at most one will have the chance to survive or come to light. Peace could be thought not as the opposite of violence, but as the opposite of prevailing. Like being in line with the productive character of the polemos, the disruptive capacities of conflict. Yes, it is there to disrupt, not to make any fixed thing prevail. It is not about imposing, it is about proposing. A love for piece as a love for many paths as opposed to just the single strongest.

This is what I like in the secular state solution championed, for example, by Said. No national property of the land - let the microconflict expose their micropolitics. Less nations, less states, less army wars. Peace comes easier when the conflict is spread throughout and new ways around emerge in different instances of it, instead of a single macropolitical solution coming up from a bunch of corporate-driven statemen and generals that are used to think that conflicts are opportunities to prevail.

I can't resist adding some lines of my favorite Amichai piece in a very free translation - I once thought I wanted to get married to this poem:

In the place where we are right
Flowers don' t grow in spring
The place where we prevail
is barren and useless

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I
Post a Comment
Read more