A Response to Sara
Hilary
My dearest Sara, I thank you for obliging the request in so agile a manner. The request and its assumption were that, because the founders of Polis have always been personally and intellectually invested in the USA and her politics, a shattering of her capitol on the 6th of January, 2021, should have curled ripples better quieted with words than stared at in confused anger. I suppose you have already done enough of the latter when you subjected yourself to eight hours of banality watching on CNN (why?). And while you could not be more articulate about the frustrating recurrences of history, of incomprehensible, destructive mob behaviour, we request this into our journal [editor’s note: Polis recently launched a new collective journal!]. Because your unhappiness is for us to share. It seems only Polis to convert your fears into words, chain them into sentences, into a problem (an ~1000 word article) capable of collaboration: a “challenge” from our friend that we cannot meet is better than her sadness not listened to. As there are those who stand behind a collective to act out with hatred, community and friendship is also the antidote to monodic excuses of violence. It is the metaphors and descriptors, melodious or not, that enable a response in solidarity.
When one’s country is attacked by its own terrorists, there is no response to be made by a small polis. The closest “act” we can take is perhaps Martin’s effort to call up a greater stir or push for political response. Only on the scale of the personal can we perhaps do work. You put us to a challenge, Sara, to surprise you when the next heinous act occurs. I can half-rise to this in the usual subverted way: what do you mean? Define the challenge. There are heinous acts occurring every moment, occurring now as I type this word and at the next: babies are murdered, children are raped, men and women are ground by war. If we counted every individual case of inhumanity, the world, always at war somewhere, is impossible to be angry at (you would be drained of emotion). The world of perversion is an entire industry of creativity. I think you had in mind something more specific in the structural coordination of individual, heinous acts. And that was truly involved here. Is that what you meant? What was most unbearable in the storming of the Capitol? Was it the breaking of the law? The shattering of windows belonging to taxpayers? Or was it the confederate flag, the blunt parade of an inhumane ideology? Was it the death of the policeman, the ranting woman, the man who died from the excitement?
A future that “isn’t merely reaction”: if you are talking about the lack of freedom in personal, everyday existential, there is the notion of freedom and authenticity from Heidegger (who conveniently, was a Nazi, whether he feigned it or not) that places the solution behind a paradoxical awareness of our helplessness (“thrownness”). This is the kind of “reaction”, in a metaphysical turn of the merely psychological, behind a MAGA teen climbing through the shattered window of the Capitol; a man shouting racist slurs; a soldier raping a toddler before blasting her head off. If you are thinking on a more collective level, (again, there are modern psychological strands of explanation, but if we want to talk philosophy) there is Hegel and his version of the state, which is guided by its dialectical trajectory, and it requires the end of history (“the world’s history is the world’s court of judgement”) for us to come out to the open. I don’t know if any of this is a response, it depends on what your challenge was. I am sorry about your country.
