zero hour

On Mel’s prompting, that post about Benjamin’s whorehouse is now going to turn into a paper at the Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity conference in a few months, soon after I get back from Hong Kong:

Zero-Hour at the “Whorehouse”:
Making and unmaking Benjamin’s state of emergency

What would it mean to truly act — to intervene in the seemingly endless parade of depressing incidents we call “history”? What kind of subjectivity is required to push events out of their temporal linearity? Against the tendency to simply aestheticise Walter Benjamin’s thought, these kinds of questions serve as a stubborn reminder that Benajmin’s approach to history is predicated on social transgression. In this paper, I consider Benjamin’s model of the historical materialist subject against the grain of his own declarations. For Benjamin, the historical materialist “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history,” resisting the metaphorical “whore” in historicism’s “bordello” — a distressing model for intervention. How, then, can protagonists of history intervene in terms other than masculinist prowess?

I argue that Benjamin’s phallocentric investment in instrumentalism can be undone, or inverted, by grappling with what he describes as the radical void of thought’s Stillstellung (a Benjaminian neologism translated as an “arrest”, or more provocatively, as a “zero-hour”) — a suspended interval of interruption that suggests an altogether different relationship to instrumentality. For Benjamin, the world is revealed in this zero hour, and this revalatory moment can usefully provide an opening into an ethics of trauma, instead of the discourse of mastery. I reread Benjamin’s account of historical-materialist subjecthood in terms of recent traumatic events, such as 2005’s racist, anti-Arab mob violence in Sydney’s Cronulla: what does it mean, in ethical and political terms, to experience or respond to racist violence? I consider the negotiation of such events as an affective, ethico-political communication with “the world” that can ambivalently lead to desubjectification, or what Slavoj Zizek partially re-instrumentalises as Lacanian “subjective destititution”.

[ tags: conference, racism, trauma, sexism, cronulla, politics, walter-benjamin ]