Brassier - Refusal (Chapter from Bad Feelings)

REFUSAL RAY B R A SS I E R Since no art form generates action, the most appropriate art for a culture on the edge o f extinction is one that stimulates pain. - Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre Wisdom is always contemporary: it enjoins us to accept the way o f the world, whether through enthusiastic embrace or dejected resignation. Acceptance is the surrender o f thought. Thought is the refusal o f wisdom. Since no thought generates change, the only thinking response to a culture of authoritarian vacuity is one that begins with refusal. Refusal is not querulous. Querulousness is self-indulgent. Refusal is abstemious. It is the self-abnegating affirmation o f what has been deliberately excluded from the horizon o f possibility. | Refusal is not capricious. It follows from the assertion o f a principle that has been forcibly suppressed. Rejecting complicity, refusal prizes open unexpected horizons o f solidarity. The acceptance o f the present reduces the future to the manufacture o f novelty. No future is possible without the refusal o f the present and o f the hope that

remains circumscribed by the horizon o f the present. the thirst for change. H 0 P e ,S ~ itC0C00” SaC“ y m th e80S " 0fth e“ ' dU' 1" 8 D espair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge o f the intolerable against the whetstone o f actuality, sparking the will to change. W hoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake everything on the total transformation o f the present; a transformation in which every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness o f what will come. The only appropriate mode o f thinking for a culture on the edge o f extinction is the thinking that stimulates pain.