Origins, Chapter 3: The Time of Specters

In the second chapter of this series of texts on the grand sweep of History and the story of my son, Raphael, The Time of Repetition, the Time of Acceleration, I explored the return of the discourse of civilizational supremacy inherited from the sixteenth century, and its embrace by the advocates of a new civilization in which technologies such as artificial intelligence are destined to matter more than human beings.

Yet in its cautiously optimistic conclusion, the text returned to Lav Diaz’s film Magellan and to the director’s decision to portray the figure of the Filipinos’ victorious resistance against the conquistadors, Lapu-Lapu, as though he were a specter rather than a historical figure who had truly existed.

The power of such specters in the face of domination inevitably brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s celebrated Specters of Marx, published after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviet bloc. Far from defending communist regimes, Derrida argued that, despite defeat, the demand for justice carried by the spirit of Marx would continue to haunt us.

If Derrida’s text returns to me today, it is also because, as Lebanese, we are living through a moment in which we must confront two potential defeats and discover how to resist them.

The first concerns the highly probable advent of a civilization in which human beings are progressively erased in favor of machines. The second is more local: our own defeat in the face of yet another Israeli invasion of our territory.

I realize that speaking of “defeat” may seem counterintuitive at a time when the framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel is being presented by some as the path to peace and prosperity. Personally, however, as Israel continues to bomb southern Lebanon, I find it difficult to share such optimism, particularly when the outlines of a future conflict among us, the Lebanese themselves, are already beginning to emerge.

How can we resist these two defeats, both born of the same movement of erasure: the erasure of humanity on a global scale, and the erasure of part of Lebanon on a local one?

Being neither a Redshirt, nor a Brownshirt, and certainly not a Yellowshirt, the color associated with Hezbollah, I feel orphaned, without narratives or specters to help me resist these twin threats of erasure.

It is precisely to feel a little less orphaned that, in the pages that follow, I would like to evoke six specters that serve as my manuals of resistance against the risk of erasure.

1. The Specter of Walter Benjamin: The Angel of History

If Walter Benjamin’s specter is the first to come to mind, it is because, in a sense, it was he who gave me the confidence to undertake the writing of this series of texts. It was an attempt to return to History, something that did not seem obvious to me at a time when, beneath the bombs, denouncing the horrors of the present appeared far more urgent.

Yet amid my doubts, Benjamin’s final essay, On the Concept of History, came back to mind.

Written in 1940, at the very heart of the turmoil of the Second World War, it was composed shortly before Benjamin himself became one of its victims because of his Jewish identity. Personally, I cannot help seeing a profound significance in the fact that his final act of resistance against Nazi barbarism was to turn his attention to the very notion of History.

Without entering into a detailed reading of the essay, I will simply mention his famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, through which Benjamin projects his own vision of History.

It is a vision that stands in stark contrast to the optimistic belief in History as a continuous march toward progress. In Klee’s painting, Benjamin sees an angel facing the past while being relentlessly driven toward the future by the storm of progress, longing to remain where he is, longing to linger over the catastrophe before him and repair what has been shattered.

Even if this is Benjamin’s own interpretation of the painting, he projects onto it his understanding of the resistant historian’s task: to rescue from oblivion the unfinished struggle of the defeated, whose significance is so often erased by official History, the History written by the victors and by the worshippers of progress.

Needless to say, such attentiveness to the meaning of the defeated’s struggle resonates with particular force at a time when our collective History is increasingly filtered through algorithms and when, in Lebanon, we are already witnessing attempts by our occupiers to rewrite it. I am thinking, among other things, of Netanyahu’s recent claim that Christian Lebanese villages wished to be annexed to Israel.

Yet such attentiveness to the memory of the defeated is only possible if one has first refused to remain indifferent.

2. The Specter of Antonio Gramsci: Indifference

I know it has become something of a commonplace to say so, but the question of indifference strikes me as essential because, in an age like ours, dominated by the endless proliferation of images, no one is immune to becoming indifferent. I am referring, of course, to the new form of behavioral standardization embodied by compulsive scrolling, where every image is flattened into equivalence. Within a fraction of a second, we move from images of destruction in southern Lebanon to photographs of a friend’s vacation, or to AI-generated fabrications.

If the second specter I summon is Antonio Gramsci, whose life oscillated between defeat and resistance, with much of his work written in prison, it is precisely because of his reflections on the idea of indifference.

A reflection developed in the short essay I Hate the Indifferent, published in 1917, shortly before Gramsci founded the Italian Communist Party.

Here again, rather than offering a detailed commentary on the text, I will simply highlight one of its central ideas: for Gramsci, indifference is not a passive attitude but a silent form of complicity in the tragedies that have unfolded throughout History, such as the rise of fascism in his own time.

It is this conviction that leads him to write, at the very beginning of the essay: “Indifference is parasitism, cowardice; it is not life.” He concludes by affirming that, if he is truly alive, it is because he takes sides.

Although I would not go so far as to say that I “hate” the indifferent, since I distrust definitive judgments about people, Gramsci’s reflection speaks to me because it makes me understand that, in my stubborn refusal to remain indifferent to the follies of Netanyahu and the gurus of Big Tech, there lies a determination to remain alive. A determination not to allow my mind to be colonized by this standardization that seeks to place every image on the same plane.

3. The Specter of Pasolini: The Fireflies

If the third specter that haunts me is Pier Paolo Pasolini, it is not only because he paid tribute to Gramsci in his collection The Ashes of Gramsci, but above all because he devoted a large part of his work to denouncing the colonization of the human mind by the standardization imposed by the emerging consumer society of his time.

It is a denunciation that runs throughout his work, culminating in his famous Article of the Fireflies, published in 1975, shortly before his assassination.

In that essay, Pasolini observes the gradual disappearance of fireflies from the Italian countryside, decimated by industrial pollution, before turning them into a metaphor for an authentic humanity that is slowly fading away, replaced by the artificial lights of television, consumerism, and spectacle, those very same artificial lights that, in another guise, now shine through the screens of our smartphones.

If Pasolini showed such deep affection for society’s outcasts and losers, it was precisely because he saw them illuminated by that same fragile light, the light of the fireflies that Dante places in the depths of darkness, in contrast to the great radiance of Paradise.

The way he poeticized the defeated, transforming them into figures of resistance, resonates deeply with me because, with the repeated ordeals we have endured as Lebanese, I cannot help seeing us as fireflies wandering through the darkness.

Yet in his essay, Pasolini announced, in a tone of resignation, the likely disappearance of those fireflies. And so I cannot help asking myself how we, who resemble them so closely, can still find the strength to survive under the threat of erasure posed both by the Israeli invasion and by this new phase of the society of the spectacle, which playfully invites us to embrace a world where weapons will soon be controlled by artificial intelligence.

4. The Specter of Nietzsche: The Convalescent

Without denying that Nietzsche’s thought can, with some justification, be appropriated by the far right, I invoke his specter because the central question running through his work could, in the language of this essay, be formulated as follows: How can one continue to affirm life when everything seems to lead toward defeat?

If this question occupies such a central place in his philosophy, it is first for a biographical reason. Nietzsche was a man of frail health, frequently crippled by debilitating migraines and severe visual disorders that at times left him nearly blind.

Yet his illness became far more than a biographical detail. It shaped both the form of his work, whose aphoristic style was largely dictated by his physical condition, and its substance. One need only consider the many references to illness in works such as Human, All Too Human or Ecce Homo, where he writes: “It was illness that brought me back to reason.”

This idea of illness as the starting point for self-transformation also appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the celebrated chapter entitled The Convalescent. There, Zarathustra, overwhelmed by the thought of the eternal recurrence and by the idea that everything that has been will return again, collapses into illness for seven days. Yet he eventually rises transformed, capable of saying yes to existence.

If this figure of the convalescent speaks to me so powerfully, it is because, alongside the image of the fireflies, I have always perceived Lebanon as a country of the living dead. Or, more precisely, as a country where one passes from life to death, and from death back to life, in the space of a heartbeat. Hence the image that clings to us: a country where celebration can resume almost immediately after a period of devastation.

Some call this Lebanese resilience. For my part, whenever I emerge from the darkness of our great History into the semblance of an ordinary life, it is less resilience than convalescence in which I recognize myself.

This is undoubtedly why I have always felt a special affection for Nietzsche’s famous words, “Without music, life would be a mistake,” because more than once, and this is true for my generation as well, music has enabled me to transform anger into an affirmation of life.

5. The Specter of Kurt Cobain: The Music of Anger

Although Kurt Cobain’s life might seem to contradict Nietzsche’s figure of the convalescent, since he took his own life in 1994, I invoke his specter first because his farewell letter can, paradoxically, be read as a manifesto against erasure. In it, he quotes the famous line from Neil Young’s song: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Yet I also invoke him, and above all, because in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War, officially brought to an end in 1990, the anger expressed in his music became the anthem of my own anger, as well as that of an entire generation of young Lebanese.

Of course, Kurt Cobain’s anger was not born from the end of a war. It sprang instead from what, borrowing one of Nietzsche’s recurring themes, could be described as the latest form of nihilism, one born out of the American victory over the Soviet bloc. A victory that seemed to seal the end of every form of utopia and impose a single value upon the world, one perfectly embodied by the iconic cover of Nevermind: the relentless pursuit of the dollar.

Yet despite these different historical circumstances, songs such as Smells Like Teen Spirit were embraced by my generation because they functioned as a form of catharsis, transforming our childhood spent beneath the bombs into an energy capable of setting us back in motion.

It is an energy we need once again today. It was this same energy that led me, along with several young Beirutis, to form bands inspired by Nirvana. And, curious as it may seem, our concerts, organized by a collective called Generation X, took place in the basement of a church in downtown Beirut that still bore the scars of the war that had only recently ended.

How did the rock musicians of that collective persuade the church’s priest to lend them the basement, so that a generation of young people could gather there and give voice to its anger? One day, I would like to devote a project to that period, both to uncover the answer and to reconnect with that territory called time. Because yes, time itself can be a territory.

6. The Specter of Frederick II Hohenstaufen: The Court of Palermo

More than the notions of defeat or resistance, it is a utopia that I wish to evoke through this final specter. A utopia for Lebanon embodied in a place: the Court of Palermo in the thirteenth century, during the reign of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen.

Known as Stupor Mundi (“Wonder of the World”), he was also branded the Antichrist after being excommunicated twice by the pope of his time. Within the context of this essay, I cannot help seeing a certain irony in the fact that a sovereign so passionately devoted to knowledge and to the encounter of cultures should have been given such a name, while Peter Thiel, one of the foremost advocates of a technological future, now labels as “Antichrists” all those individuals and institutions that slow the advent of such a civilization.

As for the Court of Palermo, I see it as a utopia worth pursuing for Lebanon because, reflecting Frederick II’s own intellectual curiosity, it embodied a civilization of exchange rather than erasure, where Western thought, Arab philosophy, and Greek culture flourished side by side.

If Lebanon is to emerge from the ordeal we are living through, I can only hope that, in the future, its many communities will be able to engage in harmonious exchange, just as they once did at the Court of Palermo.

Meanwhile, there are other territories that continue to haunt me. More personal territories. But they will be the subject of the next chapter.