Monday, July 11, 2005
(10:41 AM) | Dave Belcher:
Hiding in the Shadows
I have found myself every day looking into what's new with the London attacks. Whether this is due to sympathy, guilt, fantasy, or solidarity, I can't say. Anthony, in a recent post, described his delayed empathy for the Londoners involved. He wonders why it is that we have grown so cold when faced with such great violence. I can't say that this is the case for me. Sure, I am detached; but that seems different from the kind of indifference, or at least deferred and archival sympathy, he describes. Rather, I feel something pulling me toward "the news" that cannot be described as either "sympathy, guilt, fantasy, or solidarity." I feel myself being drawn to something strange, even contrary to, being itself when faced with this kind of violence. Well...let me put it this way: Something is revealed there, or even comes into existence there, which was not. Maybe it was always lurking in the shadows, a phenomenon invisible to my perception, not yet real, and yet dwelling in the darkest places, in the wet, dank places of our world.W. Bush reminded us, once again, of the "difference" between us--the G8 officials who are pursuing "the good"--and "the they" [das Man]--"the terrorists"--who love only evil. Every time I hear the word, "terrorist," I am reminded of how empty that word has become; Bush, Blair, and their cronies search now only for a ghost, a specter which haunts us all, and which always seems to escape circumscription. Yet, again, after the London attacks, officials told us that this was the work of "terrorists"; but no one witnessed a body commit what we would call a "violent" act. Instead, we see only bloodied faces, confused commuters running through the streets...only the aftermath. It is there, to that absence, where I am drawn. The remainder of a violent act in fact is the violent act, the evil which invades our world, and captures me with its gaze, saying, "I am legion...I am here." We are faced with the raw fact that those who perpetrated this act of such grand and dramatic violence are not the evil ones. Of course, we are told that this kind of violence has become the norm--it is inscribed into the fabric of being. This is the story that Empire's biopower tells: we are all captive to the productive regime of global civil war. What I am reminded of, when faced with this sort of violence, however, is that this story is a fucking lie. This sort of violence which intrudes into our world is not in fact the norm; humans are not merely vicious animals by nature, as Hobbes believed. Rather, we have been captured by something wholly contrary to this world; we have somehow been convinced that this is what our world really is, or is supposed to be.
For me, this is not because we have become "stuck in this present-tense" and resigned to a hope that is devoid of joy. No, it is because our hope does not have eyes; it is blind to that Path described by Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption, which is walked on by God from creation, to reveleation, to redemption; it is blind to the piercing of this created world with redemption from the evil which has attached itself to the good; our joy has become detached from our hope, not vice versa.
