Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs

Abstract

To show how the metaphysics of fragile realties, trying to gather and make sense of the dust upon which we dance unknowingly, can defy all such divinations and begin to form an enabling force, in this chapter I will turn to Walter Benjamin and other theorists, poets, and philosophers of fragments, dust, and debris to navigate the manner in which a liberating politics is rooted in a poetics of ruins. This marks the moment when no metanarrative of salvation can any longer hold and we must teach ourselves how to see a cohesive image in a broken mirror, where the intuition of transcendence is no longer predicated on any absolutist or absolute metaphor. Here I intend to articulate an even larger cosmopolitan context of understanding nations and the living organicity of their worldliness against ethnic nationalism and religious sectarianism. In other words, I am going to invite and lead you in the opposite direction of the politics of despair we live and learn today. The undaunted worldliness we see and celebrate in film, fiction, and history prepares the theoretical foregrounding of a revival of critical thinking toward the articulation of an intuition of transcendence. The rise of a new cosmopolitan worldliness, based on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “debris” and other thinkers will enable us to think through the rise a critical thinking that turns despair into ingredients of responsibility.

I delivered the first draft of this chapter as a keynote at a conference on ‘Social Justice” in Victoria, Canada, organized in June 2015 by my friend and colleague Peyman Vahabzadeh.