Walter Benjamin: Anatomy of Present Horror

The writings of the German thinker provide ammunition to combat the fascism of Bolsonaro and Trump. Understanding him is key to sensitizing brutalized subjects—and to finding words that become hammers

A Brechtian maxim:

do not start from the old good, but from the new bad.

Walter Benjamin, Conversations with Brecht, Svendborg Notes

As we have pointed out in recent interventions, rescuing Benjamin's contribution to the study of fascism – symptomatically uncommon in most Brazilian works that examine his theory – seems urgent at a time of advancing Brazilian-style fascistization, with historical fingerprints imprinted on our institutions, durations, classes, and sentiments. In the present time, updating anti-fascist critique is as crucial as combating the catastrophe of this phenomenon, which does not cease because it is a condition of the historical attempts at hegemony by the bourgeoisie.

By weaving together three still-astonishing writings by Walter Benjamin , like compass roses of an era and what it would still bring, we aim to strengthen anti-fascist perspectives of this moment by rescuing three paths from them. The eighth of the theses, "On the Concept of History," "Experience and Poverty," and " Theories of German Fascism." In the first (1940), we have the fascist state of exception as temporality, conception of history, and hegemony; in the second (1933), there is the sterilization of shareable experience under capitalism in the most diverse territories of culture; and finally, the last work (1930) focuses on the war-decadence relationship, anticipating Hiroshima and warning against the irrationalism capable of separating technique and morality, barbarity and humanity.

This recent attempt at fascistization, marked by the election of Bolsonaro – the global far-right leader with the most evident fascist traits – as a new and more dramatic stage, cannot be understood, as we pointed out at the beginning, if we exclude from our reflections the (neo)colonial, slave-owning, ultraliberal matrices, structural violence, bourgeois autocracy, and fascisms in new guises. However, maintaining the focus of these considerations, we suggest that reading Benjamin in the highlighted works allows us to inventory historical fascist traits – in order, the state of exception, the corrosion of experience, and the generalization of war as a condition – but also offers a path to antifascism, not rules that together present a mold, but ontological critiques of fascism at a time when many people turn to Mussolini to understand the anatomy of present horror, and not to Bolsonaros (and the collective desires for more violence that he embodies) to shed light on the Reichstag fire in 1933 or the ghettoization of minorities in Germany. In Thesis VIII, he writes:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this idea. Only then will the need to provoke a true state of exception become clear to us as our task; and thus our position in the struggle against fascism will improve. The possibility of its assertion largely lies in the fact that its opponents see it as a historical norm, in the name of progress. The astonishment that the things we are witnessing can “still” be this way in the 20th century is not a philosophical astonishment. It is not at the beginning of a process of knowledge, other than the knowledge that the idea of history from which it comes is unsustainable.

Thesis VIII is the most explicit moment in which Benjamin addresses the state of exception, which finds its most lethal model in Nazism and Fascism. A concrete element of contemporary democracy, the state of exception materializes the indistinction between order and disorder, legitimizing violence without logos and the indeterminacy between logic and praxis. With the exception being the rule, we have the experience of democracy always as an impossibility in capitalism, which operates precisely on the fragile and uncertain demarcation between law and exception, democracy and absolutism.

His eighth sentence simultaneously announces (i) an anti-fascist stance, identifying this historical phenomenon as a permanence in ways of feeling and as a hecatomb that moves through time, and (ii) a plan of action against fascism that demands not underestimating it, understanding it as temporality and the construction of a thought/language, erecting a subaltern state of exception, of the vanquished, that can remember and continue the battles still unburied, identifying this still and making it a GPS for the defeated who remain fighting.

In Experience and Poverty, we see the dissolution of experience linked to learning, to otherness, to the horizons of solidarity as a result of the barbarization of war, the withering of intimacy through architecture, and the cultural poverty expressed in the decline of narrative and the taxidermy of critical senses. This brief text focuses on capitalism, published a few months after the events that made Adolf Hitler the leader of the German nation. It is not about the end of *Erfahrung*, the full and sensitive experience, but a compulsory confinement that, keeping it connected to machines, prevents movements capable of identifying bourgeois domination and its pathological dynamics of subjectivation.

Theories of German Fascism, which addresses themes such as nationalism, imperialism, chemical warfare, idealism and, of course, fascism, is also a reflection on capitalism in its warlike dimension and on the dehumanization that transmutes the combatant into a bureaucrat of necropower and transforms language and reason into "mortar belch," obscurantism.

Being a critique of the work War and Warriors , a collection by Ernst Jünger bringing together writings by ex-combatants of the First World War, Benjamin's work powerfully opposes the fetishization of war – stimulated by nationalism – the cult of technology, and the ideology of warrior virility as an ethos. Furthermore, it is a warning about the endless nature of imperialist war. In opposition to any and all naturalization of genocide, the Marxist intellectual allows us to read the organic link between the decadence of the spirit and the increase in barbarity, of which fascism is the emblem.

Bolsonaro and the collective impulse he embodies is Brecht's new evil. Starting from him requires us first to acknowledge fascism among us. As a decadent experience and as the decadence of experience. The second step, with Benjamin's drawing board (brought here in the highlighted writings), is to seek to understand as much as possible the existing hinges between the bourgeois state of exception and the perception of time, experience and culture, violence through war and irrationality. Elevating these stages to a new level can occur precisely with the third and most decisive movement, which is the weaving of antifascist resistance, more dramatic in these late colonial-slaveholding southern lands, yet necessarily more inventive because it demands the most defeated of the vanquished, the most forgotten memories, but also syntheses more like mosaics that shift than immobile totems.

“Finding words for what we have before our eyes can be very difficult. But when they arrive, they strike with small hammers against reality until they tear the image from it, as from a copper plate.” Benjamin’s observation in San Gimignano paints a dialectical picture that here takes on the form of a tie to what we have been elaborating. To identify fascism as duration, to find in the class struggle the border zones between decaying experience and potential Erfahrung, to position oneself frontally, under the cultural and political spectrum of antifascism, against the epidemic brutality and incivility that finds its dynamo in cynicism. From the defeated we have the hammers. It is up to armed intelligence to know where words can metamorphose into more of them.

By Eduardo Rebuá, in Cult Magazine. 

Published 09/27/2019