Philosophy Today

Volume 59, Issue 4, Fall 2015

The Emergency of Philosophy

Poverty's Emergency

This article deals with the afterlife of Walter Benjamin’s comments on the state of exception—specifically, his distinction between the state of exception and what he calls a “real” state of exception that would dismantle the former—in Susan Sontag and Hito Steyerl’s theories of the image. It argues, first, that Sontag’s theory of the image, while conceived in Benjamin’s wake, insists on the reality of an outside-image that always risks creating new states of exception. While Steyerl, also working after Benjamin, goes a long way to dismantling this risk, she too ultimately recreates it in her casting of the unreal people in spam images as those who will do the dirty work of imaging for us so that we, the real people, can withdraw from representation. This logic of substitution, which does not change what Steyerl in her work diagnoses as the “exceptional” conditions of contemporary imaging, does not succeed in bringing about the real state of exception that Benjamin called for. For this, the logic of substitution would need to be abandoned. Benjamin himself suggested this in his discussion of strike in his essay “Critique of Violence.” After the strike, Benjamin argues, it is we—i.e., not someone else—who instead go back to a “wholly transformed” work.