“Only revolution can end war,” stated Leo Trotsky on the eve of the Second World War. Was he wrong, as the subsequent development of events suggest? Or has his message never arrived at its destination? Can we make any sense of it today?
The talk will try to translate Trotsky’s mutual conditioning of “war” and “revolution” into the language of the contemporary politics and its corresponding historical consciousness. The main focus will be on the fundamental paradox of our historical moment, the ontological imbalance between an increasing existentialization of the ongoing warfare – the opposing side is perceived in terms of “existential enemy” (C. Schmitt’s seinsmäßiger Feind) – and a nihilistic “desublimation of the will to power” (W. Brown) that characterizes most of today’s politics dealing with the global warming – its depletion to the trivial Realpolitik: endless “democratic” negotiations of particular interests, pragmatic compromises, non-binding agreements etc. Shouldn’t it actually be the other way around: war and global warming being dealt with as what they really are – the former as a continuation of politics with other means and the latter as the existential threat to humanity; war as a matter of politics: negotiations of conflicting interests, pragmatic compromises and agreements; global warming as a matter of the political: the experience of the finitude of humanity, of its “being-towards-death” that faces us with the “possibility of impossibility” (M. Heidegger), which has the capacity to mobilize both, free thinking – “to philosophise is to learn how to die” – and free action that opens the horizon of radical change, once called revolution.
Moderated by: Ante Andabak
Boris Buden is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s Buden publishes essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics and contemporary art in Croatian, German and English. He is permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna, and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989, Berlin 2020.
