Raphael's Story

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.

In the first chapter of this series of texts on the grand sweep of History and that of my son, Raphaël — "The Time of the South, the Time of the North" — the subject was the difference between the countries of the South, where History is still on the march, and those of the North which, according to Fukuyama, are living through "the end of History." But in its conclusion, the text returned to an intuition of the poet Etel Adnan, according to whom Lebanon — where the past resurfaces permanently in the present — is becoming "the prototype" of the world of tomorrow. Of course, this relationship to time may seem counter-intuitive to defenders of the historiographical tradition according to which History has a direction. A tradition that finds its origin in the biblical history of David, as related in the Books of Samuel, and which has since been taken up by the many philosophies of History that proliferated in the nineteenth century. But anyone with an interest in historiography knows that, alongside this vision, there exists another tradition in which historical time is described as cyclical. This was the case with the precursor of the philosophy of History, Ibn Khaldun, in his Book of Lessons published in the fourteenth century, and, in the twentieth century, with the great philosopher of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, who defended a vision of History in which fragments of the past can surge into the present. And anyone who follows current events knows that today, on a global scale, we are witnessing the return of many such fragments. 1 – What historical era are we reliving? One of the most frequently evoked returns, particularly in the West, is of course that of the 1930s of the last century, when Europe was contaminated by fascism. With the raised arms of certain American politicians, the demonisation of the far left, and a definite rise in antisemitism accompanied by hate speech targeting Muslims, one can readily understand why this analogy recurs so often in public debate. Even though I subscribe to this reading, for my part I have the impression that we are witnessing above all the return of a more distant era — one that goes back to the sixteenth century, when, after the discovery of the Americas, Europe began to produce a discourse on its own civilisational superiority. One of the founding episodes of this turning point was the Valladolid Controversy, where, in 1551, theologians and jurists debated the nature of the Amerindian peoples in order to determine whether they were the legitimate owners of their lands or whether, according to Aristotle's criteria, they could be identified as "natural slaves." Even though this debate "officially" concluded with a recognition of the humanity of the Amerindians, this discourse subsequently only grew stronger, culminating in the nineteenth century with theories on race and discourses on the civilising mission, so as to justify an imperial logic and the expansion of colonial territories. 2 – The return of the discourse on civilisational superiority If it is precisely this language that seems to me to be resurfacing today, it is first of all because Netanyahu uses it to sell his many massacres in the Middle East as a "clash of civilisations," presenting his country as the one defending the values of the Judeo-Christian West. But when one sees the many acts of desecration committed by the Israeli army against Christian religious symbols — as is the case in Lebanon — one is justified in relativising the clash of civilisations theory. For this reason, more than Samuel Huntington's theory, it seems more accurate to speak of a return of the civilisational discourse. A discourse that also appeared recently from the lips of Marco Rubio at a conference where he referred to the era of Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors as a symbolic period of Western greatness. Delivered before an audience of European leaders, the aim of this conference was to invite them to ally themselves with the United States in order to reconnect with that past which, as we know, was above all made up of territorial expansion, the subjugation of peoples, and the erasure of civilisations. Of course, as a Lebanese person, I cannot but be alarmed to hear a minister of the world's foremost power referring with pride to this historical era. But what is even more alarming is that recourse to this "archaic" discourse is also being made by the pioneers of future technologies. 3 – Accelerationism Such is the case, for example, of Alex Karp, the controversial head of Palantir, who, in his manifesto for "the future of the West," recently published on X, makes explicit reference to discourses on civilisational superiority: "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive." And when one considers that Palantir sells surveillance software to the CIA and to Israel, and that he makes no secret of his admiration for Netanyahu's policies, there is reason to worry for the inhabitants of the Middle East — and, I believe, for the world at large. In any case, it is a strange irony that Alex Karp should have wished to write a doctoral thesis in Frankfurt in order to associate his name with that philosophical tradition. A strange irony, because if that school was once the home of luminous thought — such as Walter Benjamin's concept of the "aura" — it now finds itself associated with an entrepreneur close to a current of thought, the "Dark Enlightenment," that seeks to accelerate the advent of a new civilisation freed from the slowness of democracy and governed by the efficiency of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. All of this gives the impression that it is as if the debate initiated in the sixteenth century were returning, but with a civilisational hierarchy based on the mastery of algorithms and artificial intelligence, and that the question once posed at the Valladolid Controversy — on the humanity of the Amerindians — is now mutating into the question of what use humans will be in such a civilisation. What is to be done in the face of the probable arrival of this civilisation? I do not know, but chance had it that at the moment of the publication of Alex Karp's manifesto, I was discovering at the cinema a film whose action unfolds in the sixteenth century: Magellan , by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. 4 – “Magellan” and the Ghosts A pictorially splendid film which, as its title suggests, traces the journey of this Portuguese navigator who, in the sixteenth century, completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, and who, upon reaching the Philippine islands, encountered the resistance of "indigenous" chiefs who, out of fidelity to their ancestral culture, refused forced Christianisation. Despite some factual errors, what is striking about this film is not only its resonance with current events, but also its way of depicting every character as an anti-hero. No glorification of anyone whatsoever — only exhausted, vulnerable, and viscous bodies. To put it another way, this is far removed from the Hollywood biopic aimed at glorifying a historical figure, and further still from the very enthusiastic description that Marco Rubio gave of that era in his speech. And where this anti-heroic approach hits its mark is that it condemns no one in particular, but reveals how a system — in this case colonialism — enslaves everyone without distinction between colonised and colonisers, and casts them all into violence. And one can well sense how, in the future, even those who today sell us the civilisation of "techno-colonialism" with broad smiles will themselves be enslaved by the technology they are championing. But so as not to end on a sombre note, I will evoke the end of the film, which relates the Battle of Mactan, where Magellan was killed by warriors led by Lapu-Lapu. This victory made Lapu-Lapu a legendary figure in the Philippines, where a city bears his name today. But by choosing to depict Lapu-Lapu as a spectral figure, Lav Diaz lends credence to the thesis that this character may never have existed — perhaps his way of saying that the victories of supposedly superior civilisations will never be definitive, since they will be haunted by the spectre of those they tried to subjugate. And it is of this importance of spectres that the next chapter will speak.

1 – Facing erasure In a prologue to this series of texts — “From Eternal Darkness to Histoire… de Raphaël” — I explained why, in these dark times for Lebanon, I decided to turn toward History with a capital “H,” as well as toward small-h history: namely, the story of my son, Raphaël. To summarize, it is first of all to salvage from oblivion what can still be saved, at a moment when Lebanon as we know it is threatened with disappearance. Then, because at the global level, we are living in a time that gives full meaning to a quotation from George Orwell, taken from 1984 : “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And examples that bear out this quotation are plentiful these days. To cite just a few: Éric Zemmour’s book, La messe n’est pas dite , in which he revisits the History of France in order to defend the highly political idea of a Judeo-Christian identity for that country; the decision by the British Museum to remove the word “Palestine” from one of its exhibitions; and Donald Trump’s own rewriting of the History of American presidents as presented in the White House’s “Presidential Walk of Fame.” In short, it is safe to say that in the digital age — long thought to be dominated by selfies — the notion of History seems to be making a forceful comeback. 2 – Living between two relationships to History Personally, I cannot say that this return of History feels unfamiliar to me, since, unlike Europe — which long lived in “The End of History,” at least according to Fukuyama — History never stopped in Lebanon. And having lived for years in Europe — first France, then Italy — my predicament, passed on to my son and probably shared by many Lebanese emigrants, has always been this: how can a person caught up in grand History adapt to the continent of “The End of History”? But despite this difference, the time of the South and the time of the North are today touched by a shared problematic, foregrounded by the historian François Hartog: namely, the collapse of belief in historians’ capacity to produce grand narratives capable of uniting people and giving them hope for the future. Those interested in historiography know that the great moment of the “prophet” historian was the nineteenth century, when — like Michelet in France — History furnished national novels for nascent nations, and when — like philosophers such as Marx and Hegel — it became the narrative of a progressive march toward an ideal. Why does History no longer occupy the same place in our societies today? The answer is of course vast. But chance recently placed two works in my path — a Lebanese film and a book by François Hartog — that provide some elements of a response. 3 – “Do You Love Me” and History “on repeat” The Lebanese film in question is Lana Daher’s beautiful Do You Love Me . Composed entirely of archival material — ranging from photographs to film excerpts — the film retraces the History of Lebanon from the civil war of the 1970s to the present day. If it moved me particularly, it was first of all for a narcissistic reason: excerpts from my own feature film, One of These Days , are among the archives selected. But also, and above all, because I watched it in Beirut at a moment when, outside the cinema, Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon. Needless to say, watching this film under such circumstances gave the screening the character of a funeral mass, with all the emotion associated with that ritual. But beyond my own reception of the film, what draws my attention here is that it has the merit — and this is indicated at the film’s outset — of transcribing historical time as it is lived in Lebanon: that of an eternal repetition. No national novel, then, no progressive march toward an ideal, but rather the feeling, as one watches, of a territory abandoned by any notion of chronological progression and condemned, like Sisyphus, to relive the same gestures, the same emotions and the same events — and in this case, a great many wars. To convey this relationship to time, the great idea governing the editing was to classify the archival materials not in chronological order but by motifs: the relationship to the sea, to the city, to dance, to ruins, and so on. And watching the same motifs repeat themselves across time gives the strange impression that everything about to be filmed in the current conflict has already been filmed. In this sense, the film calls to mind the idea put forward by Jacques Derrida, in his reflections on the figure of circumcision, that the archives of our lives may predate our very existence. And beyond this notion of prior traces, the editing also calls to mind Aby Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne Atlas , in which the history of art is classified not chronologically but by motifs, in order to show how ancient forms can “survive” in ghostly fashion within a more modern iconography. And more than repetition, it is the permanent “survival” of the past within the present that best defines the Lebanese relationship to historical time — whereas further north, in Europe, the end of faith in History as a generator of grand narratives materializes as the feeling of living in an unending present. 4 – François Hartog and presentism This is, in any case, the intuition defended by François Hartog in his work on the notion of History, notably in his essay Regimes of Historicity . A major essay on the notion of History, it describes the way in which a society articulates the relationship between past, present and future. Concerning Europe, Hartog identifies three broad periods. An ancient regime, that of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, characterized by myths and a cyclical relationship to time, in which the past is erected as a model. A modern regime, beginning in the eighteenth century — with the Enlightenment, among other currents — in which belief in progress makes the future the ultimate horizon. And the contemporary period, which begins roughly in the 1970s — marked by the oil shock, the end of utopias, and the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future” — in which the present becomes the ultimate horizon. Of course, like all theories, the notion of presentism could be qualified in several respects, especially since in this particular case it is in no way a description of the end of all relationship to the past. But what Hartog makes visible is that History as generator of grand narratives has receded behind the notions of memory, heritage, and contested claims, giving the impression that all of the past must be placed in the service of the present. As for the future: in Lebanon’s time, its complete absence is linked to a state of permanent existential crisis; in the North, between crisis management and political discourse focused on reversing the growth curve, it suffices to say how thoroughly the relationship to the future has been reduced to what Annie Ernaux describes in her beautiful book The Years — planning the All Saints’ holiday and the year-end break from the September back-to-school. 5 – The contamination of the North by the Apocalypse of the South Here too, this “No Future” relationship to the future must be qualified, since before entering “the world according to Trump,” various discourses on the future — such as the ecological discourse — were beginning to emerge. But it is nonetheless clear that at present, aside from the discourse on a “radiant future” for machines promoted by the mad scientists of Silicon Valley, there is, on the human side, more of a sense of reliving some of History’s darkest hours. This produces the strange feeling that the Lebanese relationship to History — as the permanent survival of the past in the present — is beginning to contaminate the rest of the world. This was, in any case, the intuition of the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan who, in her Arab Apocalypse , written in the midst of the civil war, announced that “History is dead,” and who declared in an interview: “Lebanon is becoming the prototype of the world that awaits us.” And it is of this survival, on a global scale, that the next article of this series will speak.