Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fallada

19 et 20 avril 22

469. L’espace-temps de l’écriture est fait de traversées : celles du silence, celles des autres, des lectures, des empêchements, des fatigues, des bonnes et des mauvaises nouvelles, des malaises. Des combien-de-fois-je-ne-suis-plus-moi, ou bien encore, de ces déséquilibres mêmes. Le manuscrit s’écrit souterrainement, de manière cryptique (tout ce qui en moi fait soudain masse et devient mot). Je…

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#Döblin #Fallada #Metropolis #Philip Kerr

When Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? was published during the last days of the Weimar Republic, his tale of economic depression and sha

“Little Man is a literary analogue to Antonio Gramsci’s reflection on interregnum, written from within a Fascist prison around the same time: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”1 Interregnum was the term used in ancient Rome to refer to the moment of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of the sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his successor. The declaration of interregnum was accompanied by the proclamation of justitium, for it was not only sovereignty but also legality that was suspended. Gramsci brilliantly played with these terms, extending them as he grappled with the generalized crisis of authority in his own time. Old hegemonies were crumbling. The ruling order had lost its capacity to lead through consent. The masses had drifted away from traditional ideologies and toward a structure of feeling that awaited full articulation. The horizon was open.

The rest, as we know, is history.

(…)

This is a time of monsters. What unites them (in contrast to, say, the blatant irrationalities of a Donald Trump) is their reliance on an Enlightenment rationality that rails against the unreason of liberal humanitarian empathy. In early 2016, when thousands of refugees were arriving daily at Germany’s borders, Petry said that police might have to shoot them. Petry likes to flaunt the fact that she has a PhD in chemistry, particularly when humiliating critics by pointing out that their hypotheses are wrong. A monster speaking with the voice of reason, not the heart; science, not pathos; realism, not faith or idealism. Just across the border in Austria, the right-wing presidential hopeful Norbert Hofer is similarly campaigning with the slogan Stimme der Vernunft (Voice of Reason).

Like the monstrous Enlightenment described by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002, 89) so long ago, we see reason rising like a “chemical agent” that “absorbs the individual substance of things and volatilizes them in the mere autonomy of reason.” This is a fascism inhabiting the lexicon of practical reason: an illiberal politics ventriloquizing the liberal language of Vernunft—“We can’t let everyone in!” It is destroying the very infrastructures of compassion that Europe and the world built after World War II: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and so on. This return of reason as chemical agent means corroding—and possibly undoing—what no one ever dreamed would become so volatile, so fast.”

#gramsci #antonio gramsci #fallada #hans fallada #little man