Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
A while ago it was a Saturday afternoon. We wanted to go reading in a café. It got late, like 6 or 7, and we ordered some food and beers. We were three people, J, M and I. J was commenting a paper and writing in the margin. M was reading a book she had gotten from another M. I was reading Nelly Richard, a masterpiece; Margenes e Instituciones. As the local families left the café the younger generation of cph hipsters started entering. M and I invented a reading/writing exercise where we took notes of each our books in the same notebook mixing minds and sudden reflections. As the night came closer and the café turned into a going out place I felt increasingly uncomfortable. As if reading, writing and thinking were not appreciated in this party-collective-social-happy setting. I told M, who got a bit offended and claimed that it was because I was not absorbed enough in what I was doing and that first of all she would not operate with a distinction between the intellectual and society. That was what I had done, I had questioned the role of the intellectual in public space. Because the feeling of not being wanted there resonated with the lack of intellectuals in public opinion, the lack of time to listen to reflections and the lack of people reading books in public space in Denmark. Experts investigating specialized areas are not that hot.
A couple of days later we met again and something had happened, she gave me some texts about the role of the intellectual and we continued the discussion. Somehow we decided to think more about it. Do readings in different places and reflect about the text, the place it was being read out loud and the relation between them.
We didn’t have the time to carry out the experiment. But some weeks later we met up in Beirut and wanted to do yet another project, a summer exorcism, a ghost dance on a platform in a wasteland in-between highways, rubbish and houses. We didn’t have the time to that either, but had nevertheless decided to do something there the following Saturday at twilight. It ended up being a reading/sleeping interaction, just for us and the passersby. M tried to fall asleep and I tried to make her do so while reading a sort of random collage of fragments of texts. We sat there for and hour and a bit more. She never really fell asleep, it was full of nature, mosquitos, bats and bushes. Only guys passed by us, I could hear their steps as they climbed the stairs, crossed the platform and walked down. They didn’t approach us or gave us comments. Not until afterwards, when we had finished and were leaving through a nearby street. A guy whose steps we recognized made the classic coquette noises and interpellated us into heterosexual women in the street. Apparently, before that we had been something else and had had a situation that was not to be entered. Both our Saturday night intellectual-interventions were in that sense exclusive, which I cannot clearly identify as a problem, a consequence or just a mere fact that does not mean that the intervention did not resonate with its surrounding.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“19-07-11 Met M and we went to a bookshop, she said she had a writers block and it meant that she kept buying notebooks as a symptom of her inability to write. She is pregnant with her second child and motherhood and life is very present. She is a clever and beautiful person who should be writing. Not only for the poetry I think her writings contain, but also for the viewpoints – they simply have to be out there, circulating. Well, her crisis resonated with my situation, the confusion of fragments, where she’s more lucky than I am, since she has all notebooks in one box. I have notebooks and text fragments at least in 5 places; Elbagade, Viollier, Vesterbrogade, my old laptop and the new one – perhaps also in the PhD-laptop and in the archive.
With someone like M I feel that I resonate. We have never talked much and I’ve never seen her writings, but her presence tells me something. It has been almost 4 years since I got to know her and since, we’ve met 3 or 4 times, always when I was in Beirut. She has been reading my blog and asked if I were still writing, because she enjoyed it. One day we should just exist and write, be in the world and write.
The notebook format requires more reflection before writing than the laptop text format.
Today M travels to Jordan for a week, she says she writes well in foreign countries. I wish that for her.”
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Film: Terror’s Advocate
When: 04.08.2011
Where: Vesterbro, Copenhagen
Who: Marianne, Honey’s friend, Joachim, Agus, Cathrine, Iben, Arendse, Oscar, Tina, Frauke, Peter, Karina, Marie, Honey and I
Why: In one week two incidents marked me one way or another. Tuesday July 19 I went to a meeting in the reading group “After Evil. A Politics of Transitional Justice” in Beirut and Friday Jule 22 a bomb exploded in the centre of Oslo and the brutal massacre took place in the nearby island, Utøya.
For the reading group we had to watch the documentary Terror’s Advocate and read chapter two in Robert Meister’s book After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. The film adresses the complexity of terrorism through the controversial character of the lawyer Jacques Verges, who since the 1960′s has defended, among others, terrorists/freedom fighters, Second World War nazi war criminals and African dictators. On the one hand, we see Verges act against European consensus in an anti-colonial gesture (the documentary focuses especially on his strong ties with the resistance in Algeria and the Palestinian cause), but on the other hand he never succumbs to one discourse; the cases he defends simply do not add up to one homogeneous ideology.
A third point that came up in the reading group was how Verges aestheticizes law. This becomes visible when he openly talks about how he used the court room as a stage, as his stage. Two things that he himself underlines is that every person has the right to be defended and that he does not like individuals to be humiliated by a group in majority. If that were the case with his enemy, he would probably even defend him/her.
The chapter of Meister discusses the concept of winning in justice-as-reconciliation processes, the role of pain in human rights discourses, the (revolutionary) before and (the human rights) after 1989, and the relationship between victim, perpetrator and beneficiaries, among many other things. One point that is particularly interesting in this context is the uneasiness the unreconciled victim creates; the victim, who does not accept the reconciliation process and continues to struggle, maybe violently, and thus becomes a thread to the surrounding reconciliation consensus. On the one side there is the global and institutional discourse of human rights and on the other side there is the thread of the possible agency of one person or a group when acting on their own means and not through established political channels.
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There do not seem to be many links between the incidents in Oslo and Utøya and the film + the chapter discussed above. However, there are some affinities in precisely the act of reacting with violence to a political situation you do not agree with. That is probably why we are so disgusted by the Norwegian case, because it shows the uncontrollable rage that exists impersonated in our society by some extremist persons and groups.
When I wanted to screen Terror’s Advocate in my house in the light of what happened in Norway it was because I missed a historical and reflexive level in the media coverage and debate. And thus I felt a need, within the momentum, to exchange with friends and colleagues about what had happened. But not directly, because that seemed to close the discussion in disgusted wonder of how one can show such detachment as to cold-bloodedly kill young people face to face. The discussion we had was quietly reflexive, probably weighted down by the ungraspable nature of the Norwegian case and history of repression, resistance and political/diplomatic relations between Europe and the Middle East that the film reminded us about. We didn’t by far reach a conclusion, apart from sharing the desire to discuss and reflect. This may be the pacifist agency we can show right now. And in the context of Denmark something we ought to show having elections coming soon.
