Sami Khatib Read Bio Collapse
Sami Khatib is a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). Publications include co-editorship of the volume Critique: The Stakes of Form (Diaphanes, 2020) and authorship of the book Teleologie ohne Endzweck: Walter Benjamins Ent-stellung des Messianischen (Teleology without End: Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic).
# 141
Benjamin’s concept of experience, Erfahrung, remains speculative in the best non-positivist sense of the word. Its speculative ground, however, exceeds the speculations of theory. But what is left for the materialist intellectual who is to theorize the political, economic, social, and aesthetic conditions of poverty, deprivation, and precarity in the age of “very-late” capitalism? Eventually, Benjamin’s materialist argument comes down to a simple insight: the combination of poor experience and rich thought is poor in social consequences. Instead of gradually enriching thought through inclusive multidirectionality, radical thought must insert reductive shortcuts, one-sided interruptions.