Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

196 — 197
Adam Budak
77 Julia Kristeva, This Incredible
Need to Believe, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009,
pp. 97-98.
78 Alain Badiou, The Century,
Polity Press 2007, p. 122.
79 Ibid., p. 147.
80 Ibid., p. 141.
this challenge in a most engaging way and defines it as a task of the future human
generations to come. Her manifesto is a call for action and togetherness: “This civilization
– from the Christ (…) to Mozart whose renown is worldwide – this civilization, ours,
today menaced from the outside and by our own inability to interpret and renew it,
bequeaths us thus its subtle triumph over human suffering, transformed, without losing
sight of the suffering to death of the divine itself. It is incumbent on us to take up
this heritage once again, to give it meaning, and to develop it in the face of the current
explosions of the death drive. Totalitarian regimes and, in a different, but symmetrical
way, the modern automation of species, claim to put an end to, eradicate, or ignore
suffering, the better to force it upon us as means of exploitation or manipulation. The
only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise
is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do. Differently,
and very often each against the others. Against or ‘right against’? Still, when
new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around
and in us; when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face
with extravagant accumulations of wealth, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and
sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political
action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give
itself the means to interpret and reinvent this ‘loving intelligence’ that comes and is
inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused
with the divine itself. Such is the challenge of the planetary era, which I receive as an
exciting and long-term vocation, and which we will not be able to take up unless we try
to think and act together (…).”77
Life, action, togetherness, and the essence of “we,” perceived not as an agreement or
fusion, but rather as “the maintenance of the inseparate”78 – these are the principles
that define the human conditon and orchestrate the equilibrium of empathy and
emancipation, driven by the experience of suffering. Alain Badiou concludes his chapter
on cruelty with an apotheosis of Action: “To produce an unknown intensity against a
backdrop of suffering, through the always improbable intersection of a formula and
an instant: this was the century’s desire. Which explains why, despite its multifaceted
cruelty, it managed – through its artists, scientists, militants and lovers – to be Action
itself,”79 and quotes Andre Breton’s praise of pain and suffering as an inseparable
and enriching experience of life: “It’s there, at that poignant moment when the weight
of endured suffering seems about to engulf everything, that the very excessiveness
of the test causes a change of sign, tending to bring the inaccessibly human over to
the side of the accessible and to imbue the latter with a grandeur which it couldn’t
have known without it (…) One must go to the depths of human suffering, discover its
strange capacities, in order to salute the similarly limitless gift that makes life worth
living.”80