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Chapter 5: A New Use: On the Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Politics
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Chapter 5 A New Use On the Society of the Spectacle and the Coming Politics Heaven and Hell, however, hang together. —Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Among the voluminous speculations on the “world to come” that have accompanied messianic prophecies, one stands out, not for the extravagance of its predictions, but for the very banality of its account of redemption. In the Coming Community, Agamben recounts the following tale, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”1 There is no doubt something disappointing about such an image of redemption, particularly when placed alongside Christian promises of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), in which “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying” (Rev. 21:4). Nonetheless , in offering a vision of the world to come that is intimately connected to our world, it seems to foreshadow the possibility of changing our world, even if only a little. And yet, as this tale was passed down by tradition, and ultimately passed from Scholem to Benjamin to Bloch, the question of the nature of the change that would be required, and the agency that could accomplish it, received different, and often contradictory, emphases. In Bloch’s recounting of the tale—which introduces a slight, yet decisive, alteration into the version previously told by Benjamin—if the world to 123 124 / CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION come will be just like this world, this does not mean that the little difference that would constitute it is easy to accomplish. All that is necessary to establish this new world, Bloch suggests, is the slight displacement of a stone, a cup, or a brush. “But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come.”2 What would it mean for us today to imagine a redeemed world in which everything “will be as it is now, just a little different”? In what would this difference consist, and how would it be possible to achieve it? And what inflection would it give to the very idea of “redemption”? In the second of his theses on history, Benjamin offers a vision of redemption that seems to owe something to the Hassidic tale: in contrast to a utopia whose inspiration lies outside this world, he suggests that our own times thoroughly color our image of happiness. “The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us,” he writes, “exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.”3 Here we hear echoes of the redemptive relation to the past outlined in the previous chapter, and indeed, Benjamin makes clear that “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”4 More importantly, his suggestion that we derive our vision of happiness from the world in which we find ourselves makes it possible (whether or not this was his intention) to eschew a model of redemption premised on divine intervention and to imagine a form of immanent social transformation, indeed, a form of politics. In treating Agamben’s work, however, such an approach is complicated by his unrelentingly bleak diagnosis of this world. What does it mean to take our vision of happiness from a world whose paradigmatic instance is the concentration camp? What does it mean to suggest that the new form of life and completely new politics necessary to save us from catastrophe resemble nothing so much as the life we live today—a life typified by the biopolitical collapse of the border that purported to separate it from politics, by the normalization of the state of exception, and by the rule of the economy over social life? Despite the bleakness of this depiction, it is precisely within such a world that Agamben locates the possibility of what he terms a “happy life.” To demonstrate this, I began at the beginning—that...