Abstract:
What ethical stance would be appropriate in today’s messy situation of health crisis, global warming, social and economic antagonisms, etc.? The first one is that of an expert who deals with the specific task imposed on him by those in power, blissfully ignoring the wider social context of his activity. The second one is that of pseudo-radical intellectuals who criticize the existing order from a comfortable morally superior position, well aware that their criticism will have no actual effects. How, then, are we to go on living after we get rid of the illusions of a false critical stance? Not just by accepting our reality: the fascination with the end of our civilization make us spectators who morbidly enjoy the disintegration of normality. A way out of this deadlock is signalled by a line from a song by the German rock band Rammstein: “we have to live till we die”. We have to fight against the pandemic and other crises not by way of withdrawing from life but as a way to live with utmost intensity. Is there anyone more ALIVE today than millions of healthcare workers who with full awareness risk their lives on a daily base? Many of them died, but till they died they were alive
Machine summary:
A neighborhood woman invites him to a civil defense class where he sees a model of a futuristic underground military factory – Gumm has the unshakeable feeling he's been inside that building many times before… Confusion gradually mounts for Gumm, and the deception surrounding him (erected to protect and exploit him) begins to unravel: he learns that his idyllic town is a constructed reality designed to protect him from the frightening fact that he really lives in 1998 when the Earth is at war against lunar colonists who are fighting for a permanent lunar settlement, politically independent from Earth.
Let’s take a recent example from another part of the world of how “you contradict all of your famous protest / with your complicated and beautiful melodies” In January 2020, Jerusalem mayor Moshe Leon invited participants of the World Holocaust Forum to a one-of-a-kind cocktail party with a DJ in a cave underneath the Old City4 - in our topsy-turvy world where obscenities are more and more a part of our daily public life, such an event is obviously considered an appropriate conclusion to the commemoration of holocaust… No wonder that only days separated this event from the unveiling of Trump’s Middle East peace plan, another obscenity – a proposal for peace between the two parties of which only one was consulted and the other was ignored.
But perhaps it is only starting from this destruction that something else may one day slowly or suddenly appear — not a god, of course, but not even another man — a new animal, perhaps, an otherwise living soul” (Agamben, 5 October, 2020).