Sami Khatib
Sami Khatib’s research spans the fields of Aesthetic Theory, Critical Theory, Visual Arts, Art Theory, Media Theory, and Cultural Studies with a special focus on the thought of Walter Benjamin. He holds an MA degree in Media Studies and Philosophy (2004) and a PhD degree in Media Studies (2013) from Freie Universität Berlin. Prior appointments include guest and interim professorships at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design HfG (2021-23), Leuphana University Lüneburg (2020/21), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017), American University of Beirut (2016/17), a professorship at the American University in Cairo (2019/20), a DFG funded postdoctoral fellowship at Leuphana University Lüneburg (2017/18), and a Mellon funded postdoctoral fellowship at the American University of Beirut (2015/16).
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2. Geschichte und Klassenkampf
3. Revolution, rückwärts oder vorwärts?
4. Phantasmagorie, Ideologie und Fetischcharakter
5. Begriff des Kapitals: Leerstelle oder Symptom?
2. Geschichte und Klassenkampf
3. Revolution, rückwärts oder vorwärts?
4. Phantasmagorie, Ideologie und Fetischcharakter
5. Begriff des Kapitals: Leerstelle oder Symptom?
By negativity I do not mean specific attitudes, i.e. reluctance, refusal, or resistance, but a certain negative activity/passivity that cannot be sublated into something positive. In 1937 Bataille asked: “If action is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has 'nothing more to do' disappears or remains in a state of 'unemployed negativity'.” – Unemployed negativity, that is a non-symmetrical negativity, cannot be employed within the dialectic of position and negation.
The one who has nothing to do, nothing more than doing nothing, is the Benjaminian destructive character. His/her ‘activity’ neither designates active creativity nor passive inertia, but the inoperative operation of de-creation. The unemployable surplus of this peculiar sort of non-productive negativity is not excessive or ferociously violent since the "destructive character" is fully self-content, immersed into its own activity. Destruction as a “pure means” (Benjamin) introduces a site beyond the binary opposition of negativity and positivity; it renders visible a nothingness of creation that is less than zero without being simply negative.
The Lumpen, the unemployed, the useless – these contemporary life forms of capitalism’s deprived superfluity are not merely “negative elements” as today’s neo-fascist ideology has it. On the other hand, the unemployed is also not the revolutionary subject in spe that simply lacks a representative organization as social-democratic activism insists. Rather, the subtractive power of these Lumpen life forms consist precisely in the fact that their negativity (activity) can never be fully employed as productive labour force: it remains in a state of unemployed negativity.
En el primer tomo, intitulado Teoría crítica de la violencia y prácticas de memoria y resistencia, el lector podrá encontrar las bases de una teoría crítica de la violencia y diferentes estudios referidos a las prácticas de memoria y resistencia. En este sentido, con la pluma de quienes aquí escriben, la teoría política, el derecho, las ciencias sociales y humanas traban un maridaje basado en la complementariedad de perspectivas, con lo cual se encuentra garantizado el presupuesto básico para aproximarse al estudio de cualquier fenómeno: el reconocimiento de su complejidad.
My reading of this inner deviation as messianic adjustment suggests that in Benjamin contradictory trends of messianic thinking intersect. Short-circuiting the theological polarity of either a mystical understanding of the messianic (the messianic as the eternal coming of messianic time) or an apocalyptic end-time vision (the coming of the messianic world as unmediated rupture, break and transcendent, counter-worldly intrusion), Benjamin introduces a complication into the relation of the messianic and the profane: the messianic is itself the relation of a non-relation – a relation that relates, connects through separation. Referring to Giorgio Agamben’s reading of messianic time as a remaining time that lies and insists within the “cut of the cut” of the realm of the profane and the messianic, I conceive of the messianic as a relation that “cuts” itself. In this way, the messianic is purely differential, it has no substance, no ground, no extensive reality. The only intensive “media” in which the messianic is operative are historical time and language.
As a systematic framework capable of grasping the messianic as both a dislocated articulation and purely differential relation, I chose the Freudian term of dislocation in its German double meaning of dislocation, Entstellung: physiognomic deformation, distortion and topological displacement, shift to a different (symbolic) scene. I combined the Freudian meaning with Benjamin’s use of the term as introduced in his essay on Kafka (1934). Benjamin characterizes Kafka’s universe as entstellt, deformed and dislocated, marked by an enigmatic guilt. Benjamin’s deeply modernist point, however, is that it is precisely this modern Ent-stellung that bears witness to an inverse messianicity. Reading Benjamin with Freud, the messianic Zurecht-stellung, adjustment, “repairing” (tikkun) would not be the return to some primordial state without symbolic guilt but the slightest Ver-stellung, torsion, twist of the dislocated world itself.
According to Benjamin’s early Theological-Political-Fragment (ca. 1921), the messianic tikkun (or restitutio in integrum) cannot be aimed directly. The eternal coming of the messianic can only be augmented by striving into its opposite profane direction – by affirming the driving force of the profane, that is, the striving for happiness. If the messianic Kingdom is not the telos of profane history, in a homological way happiness is not the fulfillment of our teleologically organized strivings but literally a happen-stance –“a lucky break” (Jonathan Lear). It is in this sense that happiness is one of Benjamin’s key concepts alluding to an anarcho-communist politics of “pure means” that de-poses the teleological “guilt nexus” of “mythic violence” and its juridical application to “bare life.” A messianic “teleology without end” calls for a truly profane politics the method of which is nihilism – an affirmation of the messianic dissolution, the “eternal transience” of the profane. Benjamin’s answer to Nietzsche consists in this sort of methodological nihilism derailing and, ultimately, de-posing the teleological logic of state violence and domination from within.
The structure of a messianic “teleology without end” also recurs in Benjamin’s later Marxist writings. His historical materialist figure of the messianic culminates in the idea of a “world of universal and integral actuality.” It is only in this messianic world where universal history based on a universal language exists. Reading Benjamin with Marx and Werner Hamacher, I decipher Benjamin’s rejection of a falsely universal language (“esperanto”) as an implicit criticism of the universal language of capitalist commodity exchange, that is, money. The task of Benjamin’s historical materialism thus is both redemptive (esoteric) and destructive (exoteric). The profane restitutio in integrum of history’s potentiality to mere actuality is the redemptive flipside of the destructive “blasting off” of “homogeneous, empty time” (Benjamin) of capital-history – the derailment, suspension of the false universality of “commodity language” (Marx). Ultimately, the messianic universal language is not the fulfillment of a mystic promise but an a-teleological caesura, a crack within the promise of commodity language itself.
Article is published online : http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org/1810
played out its mediating role (for example, the construction of bourgeois
identity through the 19th-century realist novel, or the construction of a
communist society through socialism), or does it still hold hope for
contemporary society or for the future? We are very grateful
to Dave Beech, Christoph Cox, Sami Khatib, John Roberts, and
Marina Vishmidt for agreeing to participate in this roundtable held
over electronic mail.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
https://www.foreignobjekt.com/sami-khatib
Topics:
Real Abstraction
Economic and Linguistic Value
The Spectral Materiality of Wertgegenständlichkeit
The Form of the Commodity (real abstraction in Marx)
From Abstraction to Concretion (reading Marx’s Grundrisse with/against Hegel)
Real Abstraction, or the Unconscious of the Commodity Form (reading Zizek’s take on Sohn-Rethel and real abstraction with Marx)