Veso

“Peter Sloterdijk, in his 2005 book Im Weltinnenraum (In the World Interior of Capital), agreed with Benjamin that capitalism functions, in part, by creating exclusive spaces to keep out the undesirable and unmoneyed – be they gated estates, malls with security guards, or fortress Europe – but denied that such grand interiors of capital contained any hope for a better world. Indeed, Sloterdijk argued that another, grander capitalist temple of glass and steel, namely Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, was a better, but less hopeful, metaphor for capitalism. ‘The arcades formed a canopied intermezzo between streets or squares’, wrote Sloterdijk, ‘the crystal palace, on the other hand invoked the idea of an enclosure so spacious that one might never have to leave it.’18 Inside the Palace, the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products were displayed under climate controlled, obligingly sanitary conditions under one roof, thus precluding the necessity for travel, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases) dwindled into irrelevance. In that respect, Crystal Palace rather than the Parisian arcade was the blueprint for how capitalism has functioned since. ‘Who can deny’, Sloterdijk wrote, ‘that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the European Union – embodies such a great interior today?’19 In The Arcades Project, Benjamin took the bourgeois drawing room to be emblematic of private space under early capitalism, one in which the private citizen could hole up from the irksome world; under late capitalism, for Sloterdijk, the exclusion zone had expanded from drawing room to the size of a continent.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

“If just or justified violence is enacted by states, and if unjustifiable violence is enacted by non-state actors or actors opposed to existing states, then we have a way of explaining why we react to certain forms of violence with horror and to other forms with a sense of acceptance, possibly even with righteousness and triumphalism. The affective responses seem to be primary, in need of no explanation, prior to the work of understanding and interpretation. We are, as it were, against interpretation in those moments in which we react with moral horror in the face of violence. But as long as we remain against interpretation in such moments, we will not be able to give an account of why the affect of horror is differentially experienced. We will then not only proceed on the basis of this unreason, but will take it as the sign of our commendable native moral sentiment, perhaps even of our “fundamental humanity.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

“There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“But the opening ceremonies of the Third Reich also heralded its death. In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written in American exile, Adorno, that virtuoso of immanent critique, wrote: ‘No one who observed the first months of National Socialism could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication, the torchlight processions and the drum-beating.’7 This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German, and it had an historic parallel. In 1870, he notes, as the German Empire was born in victorious military campaign, Wagner wrote Götterdämmerung, ‘that inflamed spirit of the nation’s own doom … In the same spirit, two years before the Second World War, the German people were shown on film the crash of their Zeppelin at Lakehurst. Calmly, unerringly, the ship went on its way, then suddenly dropped like a stone.’8 Like Benjamin, Adorno reimagined history as breaking through what the former called empty, homogeneous time, establishing resonant constellations of disasters or hopes, assembling them into allegories of their own demise.”
― Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School