Introduction: From Crisis to Critique

Deus Ex Machina, LLHAA, QUT Brisbane, 2023

We are told we live in a time of crisis: climate, health, housing, cost of living. Crisis discourse pervades the media, politics and social theory: ‘Crisis sells well’, Umberto Eco wrote in 1980. According to some accounts we have been living in a state of crisis since the seventeenth century: ‘Modernity itself is defined by crisis’ (Hardt & Negri). And yet a ubiquitous or permanent crisis is an oxymoron: it is no crisis at all. What constitutes a ‘real’ crisis? The question has political, social and legal implications. A climate crisis demands specific action: a state of emergency, recovery response, or exemption from criminal liability in extraordinary protest action. Originally the word ‘crisis’, in medicine, law and theology, signifies a turning point: death or recovery; judgment; the last judgment. The paper draws on these origins to distinguish between crisis discourse and the experience of crisis. Disasters and catastrophe give a glimpse of that experience. Deaths from flooding, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events operate at a different level from debates over whether to declare a climate emergency. I will show and read the work of artists whose work illustrates their own lived experience of crisis. We see that in a crisis time flows differently, shifting from the predictable temporal flow of discursive narrative into an apocalyptic present. Time stops. It can, from here, run both ways. The trauma is lived forward as well as backward: in trauma relived, in redemption and damnation. My conclusion returns to the question of protest, not as a question of criminal defence, but as a world-affirming performance of hope that bears witness to crisis and honours the dead. I draw on Walter Benjamin’s apocalyptic impulse to make history explode (Thesis XV).

The goal of this essay is threefold: to provide an outline for crisis theory (1), to clarify the concept of critique, and especially of social critique(2) and to reflect on the mutual relation of these concepts and on their significance for the problem of deliberative social change (3). This is part of the theoretical foundation of a bigger work titled: On the crisis of the liberal world. Most of the problems and themes are handled abstractly here and are further elaborated and applied in the main text. Although the text itself is a fragment, and furthermore it may be viewed as excessively fragmented, I still hope that it has unity, consistency, and value.

Unipapress, Collana del Dipartimento Culture e Società, 2021

The Mediterranean Sea is today a crucial space for the contemporary globalised world. This essay aims to explore the Mediterranean Sea as a geopolitical space of conflict and dominion through the lens of border and diasporic studies, and to look for those voices coming from “the colonial” as a process that put in crisis the Western hegemonic narration. In this postcolonial and diasporic sea, different powers, interests, dominions, but also voices, dissonances, trajectories, coexist and intersect. Following Paul Gilroy’s argument in The Black Atlantic, today the Mediterranean is both a reduced Middle Passage with the migrant’s routes, and a counter-archive of the contemporaneity. Indeed, the old mare nostrum, as it has always been thought by the Western eye, is a geopolitical laboratory where the contemporary capitalism experiments his necropower in the name of the Nation-State, and where the Fortress Europe exercises its killability extended through borders, walls, confinement, racial devices. The image of a black man left for days floating dead in July 2020 represents the all Mediterranean left-to-die boats; it speaks for the comeback of the removal: the colonial past. In this crossing, the Black Mediterranean let emerge the deep relationship always existed between Africa and Europe. “The sea is history” wrote Derek Walcott. The Mediterranean Sea is indeed also an open and fluid archive of migrants’ stories, lives and narratives, too long dehumanized and turned into mere numbers, deprived of their identities and their names. This counter-archive can interrupt the dominant and hegemonic narration of that part of world that let “the colonial” drawing on the Mediterranean Sea. The right to narrate means the right to be: literature is in this sense the key to have access to the narratives of today’s migration, a pris-de-mot to deconstruct “the danger of the single story”. In this scenario, a new Afroitalian awareness is raising with the aim to subvert the Italian gaze about its colonial history. Some of these writers, mostly women, through their narratives, their arts, their activism, let emerge those Black Italy voices which are silenced and removed.

2017

Many thanks also to Francesca Martello for the editing of the manuscript. 2 It is the same basic issue investigated in the previous volume produced within the research project IPC: Meccarelli Massimo (a cura di) (2016), Diversità e discorso giuridico. Temi per un dialogo interdisciplinare su diritti e giustizia in tempo di transizione,

2021

Connections: The Quarterly Journal, 2004

EtnoAntropologia, 2021

In this introductory discussion, we argue that uncertainty can be seen as a common feature of Mediterranean countries beyond their varying histories and social realities. Such sense of uncertainty regarding the present and the future-strongly linked to economic instability and political turbulences-is analysed in this special issue through examples from the South and the North of the Mediterranean. A particular focus is laid on innovative forms of resilience, understood as actors' capacities to adapt or deal successfully with change, or with challenging circumstances. However, we also discuss the limitations and potential misuses of the concept when applied uncritically. Equally important in the case studies presented here, in Greece as in Portugal, in Morocco and Tunisia as in the Italian case is the investigation of social actors' perception of the future. Times of crisis and the capacity to aspire, anticipation and the individual or collective imagination: these are topics also investigated by the articles of this special issue, which are not only contributions to Mediterranean anthropology but also to the anthropology of the future. Altogether, the articles scrutinise how powerful imaginations of potential futures and orientations to the yet-to-come are in structuring individual and collective experience in times of political and economic uncertainty.

This Forum aims to uncover the socio-politics of the ‘migration crisis’ in the Mediterranean. The contributions explore the idea of the ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean from the starting point that as scholars of the Mediterranean we can do two things: one, we can look at the way crisis introduces processes of bordering to our analysis, limiting our gaze and analytical curiosity to a specific space and a specific time; or two, we can take these limits as an opportunity to explore the wider socio-politics, geographies and economies that contribute to producing this so-called ‘crisis’ and in turn what socio-politics, geographies and economies are produced and their implications.

2019

Thinking about crises is generally part of today's understanding of the social and political present. But while the crisis stands in contrast to the developments of modernization and globalization, in the image of the Mediterranean it is part of its authenticity. It is striking that the binarity of political, social, and cultural features encountered when speaking of the Mediterranean constitutes a certain "grammar." It is not necessarily characteristic of Mediterranean patterns, but rather dictates the order of images and the linearity of discourses. The article asks about these very figures that are considered valid in international politics related to the "identity" of the Mediterranean.

M. Meccarelli (Ed.), Reading the crisis: legal, philosophical and literary perspectives, madrid, 2017, 2017

Almost a decade has passed since the outbreak of the economic crisis; from its original nucleus, its effects have quickly affected the social and geopolitical fields. Such wide impact and its complex implications make the crisis an object susceptible of multiple readings. The particular aim of the studies collected in this volume is to explore the impact of the crisis on law, culture and society, in order to test the depth of the problem, by comparing the analytical perspectives obtainable from legal and human sciences. The book focuses on three main issues: the crisis as a social object, in order to consider the crisis in terms of its attributing force; the problem of democracy, which is becoming an increasingly central question now, as the changes imposed by the crisis have begun to settle down; the interdisciplinary challenge that, in time of crisis, questions paradigms of knowledge, competences and methods, in order to enable an heuristic dialogue between human, social and legal sciences.