When confronted with the question of how much killing is enough the answer is always more (c.f. Blair’s calls for the west to enter the Syrian civil war). If a strategic sufficiency of death were realisable, killing would not stop. It would not even stop if one side exterminated the other.
If it did not sound too eccentric or polemical, then, I would go as far as singing the praises of a politics of anxiety, i.e. a politics preserving the limits and enigmatic essence of social life.
I am still filled with wonder and admiration by how many good documentary films are being made around the world today, often very hard to find.
The attempts to escape the nightmare of Stalinism provoke false fantasy alternatives, of vacuous democratic participation or individual freedom. NSK works through elements of the revolution betrayed, and in the process, instills anxiety about what is real, and about what must be given up.
What makes a person a rebel? What drove millions in the Arab World to defy their oppressive states and face death, time and time again? And can this sense of rebellion ever be replaced by a sense of normality, in which one accepts the new status quo?
Brazil is indeed stuck in the past. However, this temporal disjunction is less the outcome of being economically or institutionally backward, but more of an insistence on resorting to violence as a mean of managing political anxiety.
Europeans, like most other inhabitants of the planet, are currently facing the crisis of ’politics as we know it’ – a state of “interregnum”, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci described a time in which the old is already dead or dying, but the new has not yet been born.
