Angelus Novus: Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin

[Wikipedia]

Paul Klee

Angelus Novus, 1920

Walter Benjamin

Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

IX 

Mein Flugel ist zum Schwung bereit,

ich kehrte gern zuruck,

denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,

ich hatte wenig Gluck.

- Gerhard Scholem, "Gruss vom Angelus" 

My wing is ready for flight,

1 would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time,

I would have little luck. 

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Excerpt from "Theses on the Philosophy of History," transl. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hanna Arendt (ed.), New York: Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 257-258

Against fascism: Walter Benjamin, #2

[Red Wedge]

Walter Benjamin

Theses on the Philosophy of History

VIII

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge-unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

Excerpt from "Theses on the Philosophy of History", transl. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hanna Arendt (ed.), New York: Schocken Books, 2007, p. 257

Against fascism: Walter Benjamin

[Monthly Review]

Walter Benjamin

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses-but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. [...] 

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations. That is how the situation presents itself in political terms. 

[...] 

[The] self-alienation [of humankind] has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.

Excerpt from 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducability: Second Version,' transl. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohl, in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducability and Other Writings on Media, Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 41-42

Remembering Audre Lorde

[Vileine]

Audre Lorde

Excerpt from The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house 

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Sepultura's Roots: a politicized, electrified and polyrhythmic counterethnography

[Metalship encyclopedia]

Sepultura | Roots

Idelber Avelar, 2003, Heavy Metal Music in Postdictatorial Brazil: Sepultura and the Coding of Nationality in Sound, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 12:3, p. 343 

[I]t is to Sepultura’s credit that their journey into their nation’s sounds was never phrased in the tired vocabulary of authenticity. After the collaboration with the Xavante tribe on Roots, Igor Cavalera stated that ‘we did not do a world music record’. His insistence that ‘everything is mixed and distorted’ was not only an attempt to highlight the album’s heaviness but most importantly to set their collaboration with the Xavante tribe in terms irreducible to the Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel style ‘recoveries’ of indigenous musics, marked by an exoticizing that in practice denies those musics any coevalness with the artist doing the gathering. Stressing upfront the work of mixing, Igor removes the discussion from the terrain of preservation, authenticity, recovery, that is to say he removes it from the language of world music. Implicitly asked to become ‘boys’ of a ‘jungle’ they had never known, Sepultura indeed goes Amazonian but brings back not an ‘anthropological document’ but a politicized, electrified and polyrhythmic counterethnography.

Against the marketization of the university

Picture by Hossein Zare [Colossal]

Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit (excerpt)

David Graeber | Salvos, The Baffler

The growth of administrative work [in the university] has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on. 

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. 

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

Michel Foucault on polemics

[Paul Michel Foucault]

Politics, polemics and problematizations | Foucault, Info

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It's true that I don't like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. 

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

Guarded Conditions, by Lorna Simpson

Click on the image to enlarge  [Jeu de Paume]

Lorna Simpson | Guarded Conditions, 1989 

With great economy and force, Simpson conveys the conditions of many black women as double targets of racism and sexism. [...] [T]he poses can be read as defensive or defiant or both, and the markings of 'skin' and 'sex' are underscored in a way that seems to strengthen rather than to debilitate the woman picture.

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh (2004) Art since 1990, New York: Thames & Hudson, p. 641

Neoliberalism, Greece and a half-erased 'No'

"The poor vote no," Photograph: Petros Karadjias/AP  [The Charlotte Observer]

                                                           No one will be spared
                                                          And this mayhem will not have
                                                          Even half of a half-erased No.

Katerina Gogou 

[Idionymon, Athens: Kastaniotis, 1980, p. 29, my translation]

He is very old and his survival depends upon his pension, which has already been cut by 35%. His political insight has always been acute, just as his ethical code has been consistent, and this is how he managed to vote 'No' in the referendum. With the banks closed and limits to cash withdrawals enforced amidst an unprecedented climate of fearmongering that evoked an imminent financial meltdown, he firmly went ahead and voted 'No' without ever expressing any doubt - that is, until last night. As the news on the EU Summit was unfolding, he wondered what was the point of voting 'No'. He was hurt and sad, and of course he is not the only one. As far as I am concerned, this is the most disturbing outcome of last night's developments. 

To put it bluntly, neoliberalism has prevailed at the expense of democracy: another memorandum agreement will be imposed on Greek society, enforcing more austerity measures and rapid privatizations. The message is crystal-clear: it doesn't matter if the citizens elect a government on an anti-austerity platform, or if a deal involving austerity measures is rejected through a referendum. Austerity will be imposed regardless; such is the starkness of the incompatibility between neoliberalism and democracy.

Against this grim background, there are two significant tasks. Firstly, it is obviously imperative to criticise the current power holders in the EU, including the German leadership and their allies, as well as the democratic deficit of the EU institutional architecture. But this is hardly possible through largely populist and emotionally charged practices, such as posting cartoons displaying the EU stars as a swastika, which get many likes and retweets in the absence of any critical engagement either with the neoliberal orientation of the EU or with the alarming rise of fascist parties in Europe. On the other hand, neither does the composure of a conventional neo-Keynesian rhetoric provide a clear picture, as it hardly touches upon the key word capitalism. In other words, the problem with the current German leadership is not that they are German, but that they are aggressive neoliberal militants; likewise, the problem with the EU institutions is that they are unaccountable to the peoples of Europe exactly because of their function as a means of implementing fierce neoliberal policies.

Secondly, one cannot avoid addressing the elephant in the room: the left-wing government in Greece proclaimed that it would end austerity within the Eurozone and failed; it is yet unclear how this may affect the political field and the future of the left in it. I do not of course see any political value either in the unfortunate attempts of government officials and supporters to white-wash the outcome, or in the predictably sectarian and partisan stand of their opponents in the left. And naturally I cannot take seriously the patronising 'I-told-you-so' style of commentary of those who supported the austerity policies that destroyed Greek society; at best, it amounts to nothing more than another verification of Menander's classic saying; on the fall of an oak, every man gathers wood. 

What seems to me important is to address the ways in which the government endorsed a consensual political framework, and put forward a rhetoric of 'national unity'; it is in such a respect that it also sustained the preceding conservative government's shift towards the state of exception, principally exemplified in the continuing plight of migrants in detention. The move of the government towards the centre of the political system in effect averted the potential of a serious critique of neoliberalism, and apparently did not enable the development of a strategy to defend the weaker and already impoverished segments of the population either from the austerity mince-machine of the bail-out agreements or the threat of a Grexit, which I am afraid is uncritically seen in some left-wing circles as a kind of panaceia.  

Sadly, these are dark times for both Greek society and the EU, as well as for democracy and the left. And unless we are able to address capitalism, in the neoliberal form it takes in our times, place it at the centre of our discussion, and inform our analysis and practices by its critiques, I don't see much hope. And dangerously less so without a clear anti-capitalist stand cutting through the emerging nationalist narratives of the crisis, and the concomitant discourse of national 'defeat' and 'humiliation,' which is the very source of political nightmares. There is a Nazi party currently in the Greek parliament, an actual, criminal Nazi organization; and it is best to address and confront it as such, rather than cultivate the toxic nationalism it feeds on.  

Last but not least, I don't see any hope without the obviously painful realization that it is far from enough to invest politically in easy solutions and passively anticipate their coming from 'above', be that a leader, a party, a national government or an international structure one may expect to be saved by. It is us who have to do the saving of ourselves, in collective and participatory terms. And it is from 'below', through the multiple forms of self-organization of all those ravaged by neoliberalism, and the actual relationships of co-operation and solidarity potentially formed in this context, in other words through the autonomous spaces George Kaffentzis and Silvia Federici address as anticapitalist commons, that hope may be found, now more than ever. 

I am not suggesting this is easy, neither that it is a key that opens all doors. I am merely suggesting that the old pensioner's question requires an answer. The result of the referendum, for example, may have been erased in practice, but the forms of negation in the minds of the people may be more than 'half of a half-erased No'. Or they may not. Either way, let's find out. 

See also: 

• Neoliberalism against democracy: the Greek case | 13.07.2015
• Nikos Romanos, neoliberalism, and death | 09.12.2014
• Michael Löwy: 10 theses on the far right in Europe | 01.11.2014
• Capitalism, crisis, and the politics of austerity | 26.11.2013
• David Harvey: production, consumption, crisis | 15.11.2013
• Abusive crackdown on migrants in Greece | 25.08.2013
• Neoliberalism and the politics of the crisis | 14.06.2013
• Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #14 | 18.05.2013
• Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #10 | 23.03.2013
• Protecting the banks and destroying the people: the politics of capitalist consolidation | 03.03.2013
• Policing the (Greek) crisis: austerity meets police brutality | 11.02.2013
• Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #3 | 07.12.2012
• Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #2 | 02.12.2012
• Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #1 | 28.10.2012
• A systemically dark and stormy night: The Crises of Capitalism, by David Harvey | 24.10.2012
• Actual fascists: on the far-right in Greece | 15.09.2012
• With, rather than without, hope | 22.10.2011

Neoliberalism against democracy: the Greek case

[RT en Français]

#ThisIsACoup | The Guardian 1 | 2 | The New York Times

Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neoliberal political governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy’s basic institutions or values—from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed to modest power-sharing or even more substantive political participation—that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis. 

Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy, Edgework: critical essays on knowledge and politics, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 46 

The first experiment with neoliberal state formation, it is worth recalling, occurred in Chile after Pinochet's coup [...] against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. 

David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 7 

The erosion of democracy is a direct product of neoliberalism where it is hegemonic, and it contaminates the alternatives currently in existence. [...] [S]truggles against neoliberalism can be supported by mobilizations around democracy. In turn, success depends on the extent to which these democratic movements become anti-capitalist. The expansion of democracy operates, then, as a synthesis of many determinations in the mobilization against neoliberalism. 

Alison J. Ayers and Alfredo Saad-Filho, Democracy against neoliberalism: paradoxes, limitations, transcendence, Critical Sociology, 2014, pp. 16-17

Charles M. Schulz: Peanuts in the rain

[Pinterest]

Charles M. Schulz | Peanuts

[I]f 'poetry' means the capacity of carrying tenderness, pity, wickedness to moments of extreme transparence, as if things passed through a light and there were no telling any more what substance they are made of, then Schulz is a poet. If poetry means fixing typical characters in typical circumstances, Schulz is a poet. If poetry means producing from everyday events, which we are accustomed to identify with the surface of things, a revelation that causes us to touch the depth of things, then, every so often, Schulz is a poet. And if poetry were merely finding a particular rhythm and improvising on it in a ceaseless adventure of infinitesimal variations, making a constantly new universe from the otherwise mechanical encounter of two or three elements, well, in this case, too, Schulz is a poet. More so than many others.

Umberto Eco (1963/1994) The world of Charlie Brown, in Umberto Eco, Apocalypse postponed, ed. Robert Lumley, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute, p. 36

[Pinterest]

[Peanuts]

[Biblioklept]

Marx's ghost in the London Underground

London Bridge Station, Jubilee line, 24.02.2015

No, London Underground hasn't decided to rise up against capitalism - there is another explanation, I am afraid, and it is quite pedestrian: advertising. 

I was in a terrible rush that day, just like any other day on my way to work. It takes me four hours to get to the university and back again. As I walked by the poster, I could almost hear the marketing executives pitching the idea of promoting a new series of books through unreferenced quotes - poor people, they must have been thinking they are geniuses.

At the end of my lecture that day I wrote the phrase on the board and asked the students if they can identify it. One of them said 'it's from Marxism'; another one simply said 'Marx'. We talked about it, and I explained that the Communist Manifesto was written by both Marx and Engels. Then I asked them what they think the phrase means. There was silence in the auditorium. What about the word 'chains', I encouraged them; are the proletarians literally chained, or does it mean something else? 

The students looked perplexed, all thirty-four of them.  

I like to think that there are people with whom it would be soothing to share this experience. Some would surely want to bring up Gramsci's concept of hegemony in the light of Stuart Hall's early work; after all, it is not coincidental that cultural studies developed in part as a critique of British consensual politics. Others, perhaps a little bit more radical-minded, would probably prefer Debord's concept of the spectacle; after all, isn't this poster a characteristic example of the true becoming a moment of the false? But I imagine there would also be those turning to the Frankfurt School; after all, what could illustrate the disturbing reign of instrumental reason clearer than such a case? 

And so on, and so forth, all the way to the classics and back again; someone will then bring up Hardt and Negri's work on the multitude, and someone else Harvey's critique of neoliberalism, while others will discuss the views of Butler or Graeber on the politics of Occupy. Because it is not that difficult really; after all, fiercely neoliberal and consumerist London does its best to confirm the strength of such perspectives on a daily basis - and more often than not, it seems to be cynically proud of doing so.

But rather than seeking such a discussion, I simply decided to bear the silence of the auditorium. 

Which is why next time I passed by the poster, I stood on the side. The endless flow of commuters kept on rushing. I don't know if any of them could be thought of as proletarian, but none were paying any attention to the poster anyway. That is, until I started taking pictures; suddenly, most were turning around to see what on earth it was that I found so interesting. None, however, slowed down, stopped, or asked me anything. 

But they all looked perplexed. 

When I went through the pictures, they all looked like ghosts as well. And then it hit me; they only looked like that because they were moving.

But me, as a migrant, a precarious worker and an intellectual proletarian, I have currently nowhere to move to. In all of fiercely neoliberal and consumerist London, there is no other place for me to stand than in front of this poster. At least here I can bear the silence better than in the auditorium. And most certainly better than in West End's tourist sights, or South Bank's artistic endeavours, or Shoreditch's hipster joints.

It could be that I am gradually becoming a ghost of myself, as I was afraid I would; but maybe that is not so bad after all. At least if someone asks me thirty years later what I was doing while neoliberalism was in crisis, austerity ravaged the poor, and racism, islamophobia and neo-Nazism were on the rise, I will not look perplexed.  

I don't of course suppose this is something that those marketing executives were concerned with, but what can you do - poor people, they must have been thinking they are geniuses.

The last thought of resisting that reality

 Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1985 [Visual Art Source] 

[T]he original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society's apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process, making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality. The liberation which amusement promises is from thinking as negation.  

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Dialectic of Enlightenment, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 115-116)  

Commodity fetishism: buy me, I'll change your life

Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1984 [Skarstedt]

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

[...]

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves […] It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Excerpt from K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, transl. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, pp. 163-165 (also available on the Marxists Internet Archive)

Nikos Romanos, neoliberalism, and death

[Dromographos]

 

21-year-old Greek anarchist Nikos Romanos is on hunger strike since 10 November, because the authorities deny him his legal right to be granted educational leaves of absence from prison to follow his university courses. He is currently held in hospital in a critical condition, while a thriving solidarity movement is holding protests and demonstrations throughout Greece and in many European cities. Romanos' legitimate demand is significant as such, but at the same time the fact that his life is at risk highlights that what is at stake in this case has wider consequences: succinctly put, Romanos' incarcerated body is inscribed in the order of power which has emerged in crisis-ridden Greece.

The Greek case has been viewed by Panayota Gounari as a neoliberal experiment resonating with social necrophilia; the latter is related to austerity policies resulting in "the physical, material, social and financial destruction of human beings: policies that promote death, whether physical or symbolic. The goal of the ongoing capitalist offensive in the form of a neoliberal doctrine is to destroy symbolically and physically the most vulnerable strata of the population". This condition has a two-fold manifestation. On the one hand, it is expressed in physical terms through the degeneration of the human body in a context of increased impoverishment, unemployment and homelessness that involves malnutrition, illness, and suicide.  

On the other hand, it also finds a political expression in forms that Gounari understands as proto-fascist, such as urgent legislative decrees that violate the constitution; institutionalized instability relating to laws that keep on changing or are applied with retroactive effect; the degradation and devaluation of all things public; the restriction of the right to protest, such as prohibiting demonstrations in the centre of Athens during official visits; the increased exponential violence employed by the police, including the torture of arrested protesters; and the connection between the police and the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, which is responsible for violent paramilitary attacks, including the murders of the Pakistani immigrant Shehzad Luqman and the antifascist musician Pavlos Fyssas.

The pivotal political implication of such an account is perhaps reflected best through Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception; a politically and legally ambiguous condition primarily signified by the suspension of the rule of ordinary law (State of Exception, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). And perhaps there is no better illustration of such a condition in contemporary Greece than the treatment of the migrant population and the human rights violations that are associated with it. Migrants have been scapegoated as 'invaders' of the country, as a 'bomb' in the foundations of society, and as a 'hygiene bomb' as well, by government officials; vast numbers of migrants have been rounded up in massive police 'sweep' operations based on racial profiling; undocumented migrants are being held in police stations and newly found detention centres under inhuman conditions; and most importantly, their irregular but constantly prolonged and unspecified period of incarceration has led to the materialisation of indefinite detention.

Hunger strikes, suicide attempts, desperate uprisings that are violently suppressed by the police, and deaths of detainees because of illnesses left untreated, are far from rare in the detention centres. Simultaneously, the Aegean Sea is becoming the grave of countless migrants and refugees fleeing war; and the illegal push back operations of the Greek authorities are another manifestation of how expendable migrant lives have become. Agamben has put forward the term homo sacer to address the human subject who has been stripped of their rights, whose life may be taken away with impunity, and whose position is structurally symmetrical to that of the sovereign: "the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns" (Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 53). And migrant bodies in Greece have indeed been drowned, killed, tortured, stabbed, shot at, or beaten; violence has been inflicted on them by ordinary people, such as their employers; in many cases by organised fascist gangs; and often by law enforcement agents, in the vast majority of cases with impunity.

In other words, the era of the crisis has given rise to an economic, political, legal and institutional context in which sovereignty is defined by its ability to determine life or death and produce expendable and disposable bodies, as exemplified by the subjugation of migrant lives to the power of death. Achille Mbembe has addressed this form of subjugation as necropolitics; and he has commented that "under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred" (Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15.1, 2003).

  

These are the particularly demanding, and dangerous in their blurriness, terms under which Nikos Romanos has gone on hunger strike; to use the body as a "barricade", as his exact words are, is to reclaim it from the sphere of sovereignty and redefine it as a site of resistance. And this is the reason why this case requires urgent and substantial support; not only because the demand is justified, but also because the body is the very site of struggle between the power of death and, hopefully, the powers of life. And that struggle may begin on an individual basis, but it can only be fought, and hopefully won, on a collective basis. So as to literally avert death.

International coverage:

• Hunger strike in Greece: for a breath of freedom | ROAR Magazine

• Jailed Greek student Nikos Romanos’s family fear son will be ‘martyr’ | The Guardian

• The anarchist and the refugees: two hunger strikes in Athens | The Nation

• Prisoners in Greece on hunger strike to demand the right to education | Omnia TV

• Time is running out for young anarchist on hunger strike | The Press Project   

• From New York to Greece, we revolt ‘cus we can’t breathe | ROAR Magazine

Statements by Nikos Romanos:

• Greek prisons: Anarchist comrade Nikos Romanos declares hunger strike from November 10th, 2014 | Contra Info

• Public announcement by Nikos Romanos: Dancing with death for 24 days | Omnia TV

Twitter hashtag:

#NRomanos

Online petitions:

 Avaaz   | Éditions Lignes

International solidarity:

Copenhagen |  Stockholm | London | Barcelona | Istanbul | Madrid 

Puerto Montt | Nicosia | Paris | Rome | Berlin | Hamburg | Ankara