Flight and Expulsion

[via Information Aesthetics]

Every year, the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees (UNHCR) issues a report concerning the number of approximately 21,000,000 people worldwide falling under its mandate: as refugees who were forced to leave their countries due to war, political, racial or religious persecution, as internally displaced persons, or as repatriates on their way back home.

This interactive visualization attempst to give an insight into the phenomenon of global flight and expulsion, based on the annual UNHCR statistics between the years of 1995 and 2004.

From Agamben's "We Refugees":

...the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face us, we will have to abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in which we have represented political subjects up to now (man and citizen with their rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, etc.) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning with this unique figure.

[...]

This is not the place to review the history of the various international commissions through which the states, the League of Nations, and later, the United Nations stempted to deal with the problem of refugees - from the Nansen Bureau for Russian and Armenian refugees (1921), to the High Commission for Refugees from Germany (1936), the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees (1938), and the International Refugee Organization of the United Nations (1946), up to the present High Commission for Refugees (1951) - whose activity, according to its statute, has only a "humanitarian and social," not political, character. The basic point is that every time refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon (as happened between the two wars, and has happened again now), both these organizations and the single states have proven, despite the solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of man, to be absolutely incapable not only of resolving the problem but also simply of dealing with it adequately. In this way the entire ques- tion was transferred into the hands of the police and of humanitarian organizations.

Dark Deletion

The following is an excerpt from Italo Calvino's short story "Implosion". The new blog design carries a quote from this in the title, which may not stay, but, having recently re-read this story I felt compelled. Calvino can be terribly grim, though his writing is not without humor:

No, I'm not deaf to your reasons; I could even join you. Go on! Explode! Burst! Let the new world begin again, repeat its ever renewed beginnings in a thunder of cannonfire, as in Napoleon's times...Wasn't it that age, by the way, with its elation at the revolutionary might of artillery fire that made us think of the explosion not just as harmful to people and property, but as a sign of birth, of genesis? Isn't it since then that passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so is its opposite; ever since that August when the mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbol only of absolute negation. But that was something we already knew anyway, from the moment when, rising above the calendar of terrestrial chronicle, we enquired of the destiny of the universe, and the oracles of thermodynamics answered us; every existing form will break up in a blaze of heat; there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Only a few old stars know how to get out of time; they are the open door to jump from a train headed for annihilation. At the limit of their decrepitude, shrunk to the size of red dwarfs or white dwarfs, panting out the last glimmering gasp of the pulsar, compressed into neutron stars, here they are at last, light lost to the waste of the firmament, no more than the dark deletion of themselves, ready for the unstoppable collapse when everything, even light itself, falls inwards never to emerge again.

Corruptible Matter

Books are a corruptible matter. Books are made of wood: biblos, liber, codex, buch, it's always bark or tree. It burns, it rots, it decomposes, it can be erased, it falls to the gnawing criticism of mice. Bibliophilia is, just as much as philosophy, an impossible love, its objects discolored, faded, worn-out, cut-up, full of holes. Books are miserable, hateful. Descartes hates the job of making books. There is nothing for the Subject - the other, the same; who says 'I'(think)- in the tomes, nothing but loss of time, a life uselessly consumed in reading the scraps of knowledge that I myself can found. There should be some legal restraint aimed against inept and useless writers, as there is against vagabonds and idlers. Both I and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. This is no jest. Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age. When did we write so much as since our dissensions began? Since our writing has been troubled.

J.L.Nancy, "Exscription"

Page 123

I've been tagged by Fido with the 123 meme. Rules are as follows (though I am not exactly following them):

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five bloggers.

Since I have been lagging for about three days, I will have to add a variation on the meme (in the hopes that it might survive, of course) by using the three books that were nearest me over the last three days.

The most refined technico-cultural specialisation required the greatest possible extension of primary education and the greatest care to encourage secondary education for the largest number. Naturally, this need for creating the broadest possible basis for the selection and training of people with the highest technical qualification - of giving, that is, a democratic structure to high culture and advanced technique - has its inconveniences: the possibility is created of large unemployment crises among the middle intellectual strata, as in fact happens in all modern societies.

It should be noted that in reality the elaboration of intellectual groups does not take place on an abstract democratic basis, but according to very concrete traditional historical processes.

Antonio Gramsci, "The Formation of Intellectuals", in The Modern Prince & Other Writings (International Publishers, 2007)

Hmm...The next one comes from Hallward's monograph on Badiou - where I will be counting the first truncated sentence as the first sentence on the page, and not counting Hallward's cite of Badiou as any of the sentences but including them anyway so that I might arrive at the following passage, which is rather lengthy, but quite nice:

Considering the example of May 1968, Badiou acknowledges that

yes we were the genuine actors, but actors asolutely seized by what was happening to them, as by something extraordinary, something properly incalculable....Of course, if we add up the anecdotes one by one, we can always say that at any given moment there were certain actors, certain people who provoked this or that result. but the crystallisation of all these moments, their generalisation, and then the way in which everyone was caught up in it, well beyond what any one person might have thought possible - that's what I call an evental dimension.None of the little processes that led to the event was equal to what actually took place...; there was an extraordinary change of scale, as there always is in every significant event....Lin Piao - someone rarely mentioned these days - once said, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, that the essential thing was to be, at a revolutionary conjunction, both its actor and its target. I quite like this formula. Yes we are actors, but in such a way that we are targeted by, carried away by, and struck by the event. In this sense there can undoubtedly be collective events.

An event is the hinge in this transition from calculation to the incalculable, and every crisis of calculation means precisely that an answer to the question "What is to be done?" can be not discerned but only decided, as Lenin well knew. An event cannot dictate its own consequences. To fall in love does not determine the ensuing relationship as loving.

Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minnesota, 2003)

And finally:

What is utterly unthinkable in this universe is that someone who does not doubt the existence of God should live his life in complete disregard of Him.

Yet this is the very split that Don Juan embodies. This is why his attitude becomes completely unbearable (for the community) only at the moment when he - despite all the substantial evidence and grace offered to him - utters his final 'No and no!'

Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (Verso, 2000)

I will skip commentary on these, and tag Larval Subjects, Jodi, Infinite, Savonarola, and Nate.