[cc-community] OT: Benjamin and Democracy - was: CC cosolidating property rights?

mp m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk
Mon Apr 6 08:05:01 EDT 2009



Ulrike Elteste (Mahlmann) wrote:
> Dear Martin,
> 
> 
> 
>> ahem, whaaad?
>>
> Thank you for taking the time to explain your views. I’m sorry; I did not intend to upset you (quite so much). I confess that I do believe in liberal "democracy as an end in itself" and even more in democracy as a way to attaining freedom and, yes, wealth. 
> 
> Walter Benjamin, whatever his philosophical theories were, knew very well the difference between democracy and tyranny. He experienced it.

I wasn't really upset, just surprised about a pecualiar comment.

I do not, however, think that you understand Benjamin: he was a very
outspoken anti-democrat, as various of his famous friends and
contemporaries clearly have said and as can be read straight out of his
writings, which takes a great deal of inspiration from Nietzsche and
Georges Sorel, two of the great midwives of non-teleological and
anti-democratic thought. Benjamin saw in "liberal democracy" exactly the
tyrrany - and that tyranny was in great deal exacted through the, as
Sorel also saw it, entirely illusionary relation between law and
justice. Famously stated in Zur Kritik der Gewalt:

“Damit würde ein Licht auf die seltsame und zunächst entmutigende
Erfahrung von der letzlichen Unentscheidbarkeit aller Rechtsprobleme
fallen (welche vielleicht in ihrer Aussichtlosigkeit nut mit der
Unmöglichkeit bündiger Entscheidungen über “richtig” and “falsch” in
werdenden Sprachen zu vergleichen ist)”

Later brought to light in the English language by Derrida:

“Zur Kritik der Gewalt is a critique of representation not only as
perversion and fall of language, but as a political system of formal
parliamentary democracy. From that point of view, this revolutionary
essay (revolutionary in a style that is at once marxist and messianic)
belongs, in 1921, to the great anti-parliamentary an anti-Aufklärung
wave on which Nazism so to peak surfaced and even surfed in the '20s and
the beginning of the '30s.” (1990: 975)

Giorgio Agamben has collected an interesting history of "liberal
democracy" here:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html - which apart
from severely indicting liberal democracy says something really
interesting about the German Constitution that might be worth reading to
contextualise your belief in democracy - and at any rate, Benjamin
clearly expressed where he saw democracy going in his last essay before
he committed suicide:

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency”
in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Benjamin
(1940/1982: 259).

At the end of the day, most belief in democracy is exactly that: belief,
Reason substituted for Religion, -  essentially mainly rhetoric and no
investigation or even willingness to investigate the actual history,
politics and philosophy since the French Revolution. Only from this
perspective can I understand your last comment, which seems to suggest
that it is either democracy or tyrrany, which is one of those great,
simplistic lies that sustain blind Belief in Democracy and which seems
to have taken hold in the public imagination (after hundreds of years of
orchestrated violence to impose it).

-martin

> 
>  Ulrike
> 
> 

-- 
--The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is
worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble-- - Walter
Benjamin, The Destructive Character, November 1931.


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