Related to the work of Bašić and Van Roy (see previous post) the next issue of AWEL will revolve around ‘insects’. Following general consensus: the most numerous animal life form roaming the planet, and object of human fascination, investigation, fear, projection…
Send contributions to – amaivzw@gmail.com – before the 15th of June!

AMAI members S. Bašić and T. Van Roy are currently appropriating the swarm intelligence of termite colonies to construct a multimedial dance performance. Or how life and language of this species of social insects can be translated to movement, image and sound… by and for humans.

AWEL # 2 is done! This issue tackles understandings of ‘leisure’ in word and image. More then merely juxtaposing both fields of representation, AWEL seeks dialogue and interdisciplinary relatedness. Have a look under the AWEL section.

Text by Jeroen Hoeck.

Apology of the Redundant

Why don’t we desire darkness during the longest days? Because we are good and light and scared in the dark? The Ancients said that someone who is strong does not desire to be strong. This person is it already. How can you desire something you already have? Or become what you already are? This way it is because we love light and lack the dark, that darkness is amongst us. Nevertheless this dark angel is fire.

Everyone talks about injustice, the violation of human rights, immoral and unethical deeds, but we seldom seriously reflect about radical evil. The previous century had within 30 years two world wars, totalitarian regimes of Left and Right, Hitlerism, Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, the genocides of Auschwitz and so on. Why aren’t there a million thinkers who put that ghastly part of the century of science under the microscope? Nilhil obstat.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has written exhaustively about this dark subject. In 1945, she said that the problem of evil would be the fundamental issue of post-war European intellectual life. She understood that in the last stage of a totalitarian system evil appears absolute. Absolutely because it can be no longer deduced from understandable human aims such as a lust for power, self-love or selfishness. According to Hannah we witnessed the radical nature of evil via these regimes in the 20th century. In a letter to Karl Jaspers she writes: “Now we know that radical evil has nothing to do with human, sinful goals which we can understand. What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it seems to have something to do with the next phenomenon: make humans as humans redundant.“

Radical evil according to Hannah

1. The dominant theme: make people as humans redundant.

2. The elimination of the human unpredictability and spontaneousness.

3. The idea that the delusion of omnipotence (do not confuse with lust for power) of an individual is not compatible with the existence of people in plural. Plurality, as the conditio per quem of all political life disappears.

4. Traditional standards (like the Decalogue) are no longer adequate to characterise modern crimes.

5. The most evil actions do not come from selfishness. Radical evil has nothing to do with understandable sinful goals.

The calamity of the redundant is not that they are stripped of freedom, the pursuit of happiness or freedom of speech (formulas developed to solve problems within a community), but because they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their bad situation is not that they are unequal for the law, but that absolutely no law for them exists; not that they are oppressed by someone, but that nobody wants to oppress them. Just at in last stage of a long process, their right to live will be in serious danger. Only when they are perfectly redundant, when nobody “claims” them, their life will be in danger. For this reason only is the most fundamental right: the right to have rights. To be continued….