Care Comes in the Wake of Retreat

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, quoted by Jean-Luc Nancy, in “L’être abandonné,” Argile (1981):193.

Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’être abandonné,” 194.

Paul Valéry, “The Crisis of the Mind,” in Paul Valéry: An Anthology, ed. James R. Lawler (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 94.

See Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 77.

See André Breton, “Surrealist Situation of the Object,” Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); and Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

This language and conception of crisis is qualitatively different than that to be found in the well-established discourse of Naomi Klein or more recently Janet Roitman on the 2008-2010 economic crisis. See Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

The work of a liberal political theorist like Paul Kahn is especially valuable on the crisis of modernity as a crisis of the role of theological and political violence embodied in fundamentally incompatible notions of sovereignty and law with a post-Enlightenment democratic framework. See Paul W. Kahn, “Violence and the Architecture of the Political Imagination,” Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

Though the question of decisionism is most commonly discussed in relation to the radical Right (for example, Carl Schmitt), it is also a feature of the radical Left. I have discussed this extensively in relation to Frantz Fanon. See Michael Stone-Richards, “Frantz Fanon in Question,” Logics of Separation: Exile and Transcendence in Aesthetic Modernity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 303-403.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in Detroit in 1970 will address this same problematic of technology/automation as niggermation in terms remarkably consonant with the language of Rilke and the interwar years, particularly where workers come to see themselves as interchangeable parts for the machine. This is the historical context (Futurism, Stalin, Ford) for Diego Rivera’s views on technology and sacrifice and the LRBW’s views on the murderousness attached to the Detroit Industry Murals of 1932-33. See Michael Stone-Richards, “Rilke in Detroit: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Politics of Care,” Care of the City: Ruination, Abandonment, and Hospitality in Contemporary Practice (forthcoming), and Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin, “Niggermation at Eldon,” Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998).

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, in The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 153.

The conception of the archive as developed by Foucault in the Archéologie du savoir (1969) is not primarily a collection of things, or even a collection of items marked or marginalized by power, but a new logic of places marked by a near law of inevitability, an inevitability that Foucault will come to conceptualize as a feature of the biopolitical form of modernity and its spatialized logics dominated by a technology of power centered on life.

See João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le Peuple juif ne rêve pas,” La Panique politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013), 72.

For the sense of uncanniness as the unhomelike, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 233.

Simone Weil, quoted in Joan Tronto, “An Ethic of Care,” Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 128.

Simone Weil, “L’Attention,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1:392.

Heidegger, Being and Time, 231.

Heidegger, Being and Time, 232.

Heidegger, Being and Time, 231.

See Heidegger, Being and Time, 370-380.

See Lisa D. Campolo, “Derrida and Heidegger: The Critique of Technology and the Call to Care,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 3 (September 1985): 431–448.

Heidegger, Being and Time, 378.

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On the epistemological problems accompanying attention and “the absence of attentiveness [as

See Tronto, “Elements of an Ethic of Care,” Moral Boundaries, 127-137.

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 103. The modern tradition of the ethic of care begins with the work of Carol Gilligan, extending to Joan Tronto. The ethic of care approach rejects abstract, criteriological approaches to questions of justice—principles—in favor of practices. Its approach is embodied, gendered, situational, and narratively based. Above all, in Tronto’s words, it affirms the central role of caring in human life. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

On the ethics of attention, See Simone Weil, “Réflexion sur le bon usage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 4:2, 255–262, and also Tronto, “An Ethic of Care,” Moral Boundaries, 126-132.

Robert Hayden, “Words in the Mourning Time, III” (1970).

W.H. Auden, “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys” (May 1933).

W. H Auden, “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,” On this Island (New York: Random House, 1937), 22–23.

Tronto, “Care and Political Theory,” Moral Boundaries, 168–169.

I believe this montage sequence from Finally Got the News to be the inspiration for the much noticed (and otherwise odd?) animated sequence opening Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (Annapurna Pictures), 2017.

Song composed and recorded by Joe L. Carter, 1965, quoted in Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin, “Finally Got the News,” Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 107.

John Watson, To The Point of Production (Detroit: Radical Education Project, 1969).

Authors emphasis. Georgakis and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 88.

On Rivera’s use of the language of sacrifice, see Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (Detroit and New York: DIA and Norton, 1999), 165–171.

See Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health, eds. Andrea Phillips and Markus Miessen (Amsterdam: SKOR, and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), and Art + Care: A Future, ed. Janna Graham (London: Serpentine Gallery and Koenig Books, 2013).