Flagrant violation

“It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declarations of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation (and is, therefore, urgently called for), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a crime…thus even in the period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a means, who’s end is the life of civil society.  It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.”

-Karl Marx, 1843.  (“On the Jewish Question”.  In The Marx-Engles Reader.  1978. Robert Tucker (ed).  New York: WW Norton.  Pg. 43-4.)

Generics

“If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided.  Actually the opposite is the case.  It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”

-Hannah Arendt, 1951.  (The Origins of Totalitarianism.  San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace.  Pg. 300)

This opinion is a mistake…

“Anthropology is often considered a collection of curious facts, telling about the peculiar appearance of exotic people and describing their strange customs and beliefs.  It is looked upon as an entertaining diversion, apparently without any bearing upon the conduct of life of civilized communities”

-Franz Boas, 1928 (Anthropology and Modern Life.  New York: Dover Publications Inc.  Pg 11)

The Trinity: Order-Savage-Utopia

“In defense of a particular vision of order, the Savage became evidence for a particular type of utopia.  That the same ethnographic source could be used to make the opposite point did not matter beyond a minimal requirement for verisimilitude…But now, as before, the Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence.

Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous illusion, the Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim, or aggressor, depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocutors.  The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position…a critique of anthropology cannot skirt around this slot.  The direction of the discipline now depends upon an explicit attack on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon which it is premised.  As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence – in short, an argument about foundational thought”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pg. 22-3.)

These Old Wars

“[W]e are not faced with a peace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civilizations,” …a war of the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the so-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis. Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and nothing proves either that this war cannot be won. What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly and not covertly. The worst course would be to act as if there were no war at all, only the peaceful extension of Western natural Reason using its police forces to combat, contain, and convert the many Empires of Evil. That is the mistake those who still believe they are moderns are in danger of making. On the other hand, if we are going to bring the wars of modernization to an end, we cannot afford to declare that all bets are off, that premodern savagery will be met with premodern savagery, that senseless violence will answer senseless violence. No, what is needed is a new recognition of the old war we have been fighting all along—in order to bring about new kinds of negotiation, and a new kind of peace.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 3-4)

Rupture Ready

“What if we accepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco da Gama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us? Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vasco da Gama ever were? I’m not arguing that nothing important has changed over the last five hundred years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant. In one sense everyone, every community, every individual for that matter, lives in their own unique universe….

By “blowing up walls,” I mean most of all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assumptions which tell us we have nothing in common with 98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really have to think about them. Since, after all, if you assume the fundamental break, the only theoretical question you can ask is some variation on “what makes us so special?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decide to at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite so special as we might like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.”

-David Graeber, 2004 (Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 47)

Critical Pens

“The echo is heard immediately: but always as a ‘critique’…The work never produces an effect but only another’ critique ; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique…At bottom, however, everything remains as it was…The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action…But their critical pens never cease to flow, for the have lost control of them, and instead of directing them are directed by them.  It is precisely in this immoderation of its critical outpourings…that the modern personality betrays its weakness”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Untimely Meditations.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 1983)
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