What does a blood-red sky today signify and how does it relate to a distorted human face, cramped together in fear, despair, and anguish? What sort of trouble is this human face caught up in, what is the reason behind his pain? What sort of connection to the world has left him with wrecked in exhaustion and anxiety, with no other possibility than resorting to the most intense and animalistic of all emotive actions – that of the scream^[1]?   

MOŻLIWOŚĆ

Miej to za sobą w kolejnym mieście kolejnego
kraju, którego język znasz w połowie, to znaczy
do osiemdziesiątej ósmej strony biografii Gottfrieda
Benna, który widział głodne zwierzę wojny penetrujące
berlińskie ulice, po których chodziła Käthe Kollwitz
z domu do pracowni, z pracowni do domu, głaszcząc
kamień tak długo, aż zamienił się w ciało
jej zmarłego syna.

The existence of what do you doubt most?

This is a question I pose before my students at Birzeit University in Palestine. Over the past few years, I have spent almost every summer in Palestine teaching a course on modern philosophy. Throughout this course, divisions between the philosophers we are reading and ourselves are steadily abandoned, as we turn to how each personal life is key to the instigation and development of thought. Ideas that arise from our lived experiences, our knowledges, our imaginations, and not least, from conversations between us inside and outside the classroom always lead us in unforeseen directions.

My question on doubt comes as we read Descartes’ The Meditations on First Philosophy, in response to his call in ‘First Meditation’ that we should doubt everything at least once in our lifetime. After some moments of silence the first answer emerges from the back of the classroom: ‘What I doubt most is the existence of good, and that we should act according to it. So far in my life, I have only witnessed those who are acting in an evil manner to be winning.’ Upon hearing that student, the rest of the students in the classroom crack out laughing. It is a laughter of relief, that someone finally dared to say what they feel, and subscribe to their own life experience and the world around them, rather than any moralistic principle they have been taught since childhood.

Vejen snoede sig gennem landskabet, som en å, som en orm. Nogle gange i bløde, fine buer, andre gange med kraftigere, mere markante sving. Tilsyneladende uendeligt. Hjem efter hjem, landsby efter landsby. Vugge, vugge, vugge. Flere steder flød den sammen med andre vuggende veje, deltes midt i en slyngning eller blev koblet på større, nyere og mere lige veje i rette vinkler. Nok typisk hvis landsbyer var vokset, og der blev brug for noget andet end uendelighed, brug for mere end at kunne bevæge sig mellem endeløse landsbyer på en evigt bugtende vej. Sådan var det i hvert fald her. Landsbyen havde allerede for mange år siden fået en vej der førte op til en hovedvej og ad denne videre til stadig større byer. Man kunne tegne det. Med kuglepen. Med blå streger der hang sammen. 

December 2022. It has been raining all night long in Algés, a town just to the west of Lisbon, Portugal. A gray morning dawns, and it seems to be an ordinary one. But something is not quite right. Although it is a weekday, everything is suspiciously quiet: no sounds of traffic, whether distant or far; no excited cacophony of teenage voices, of students hurrying to the nearby high school. Looking out the window, I no longer see the streets below. Instead, there are rivers with very fast currents, carrying cars as if they were feather-light paper boats. 

It is not “business as usual,” by any stretch of the imagination. A woman who had lived in a small basement apartment in the old center of Algés drowned at home when water rose all the way up to her bedroom’s ceiling in the course of the night, leaving her without the time and the chance to evacuate. Nearby stores lost their stock to the floods and the underground access to the train station was filled with five meters of water.