Civil war up, humanism down: Pepe Escobar

[bemildred]

“…the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror”

T.S.Eliot, The Dry Salvages

These are sorrowful – and dangerous – times. We’re powerless facing the perennial Middle Eastern agonies or the build up towards Cold War 2.0; the myriad ramifications of the Pentagon’s Long War or the pauperization of the Western world’s middle classes. The feeling of a global civil war is unmistakable. At least, in a few obscure corners of NATOstan, some of the best and the brightest, in silence, are thinking.

In a short volume – Stasis. La Guerra Civile come Paradigma Politico – based on two seminaries at Princeton and available in Italian and French but not yet in English, master philosopher Giorgio Agamben identifies civil war as the West’s fundamental sign of politicization. The key question is whether this proposition has been altered by our civilizational plunge into the dimension of global civil war.

Stasis is the civil war that provoked trouble inside the ancient Greek polis. Hannah Arendt was already conceptualizing global civil war in 1963. Agamben argues that in global historical terms, civil war now is represented by terrorism.

http://atimes.com/2015/04/civil-war-up-humanism-down-pepe-escobar/