Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Uncertain Manifesto 3

with a highly sophisticated violence, without ever admitting its task of systematically abolishing the movement of History. It ’s a blinding technique, one that has proven successful. From now on, we apprehend the world blindly. We are living in a strange night, one that neither begins nor ends since there is no past and no future. And in this night we are suspended in the present. Better: we find refuge in it as in a cocoon. But in this suspended time, this frozen present, a tiny light blurs the well-ordered night. A gleam of uncertainty, contradiction, and paradox. It does not call on a kind of blissful hope in tomorrow, neither does it oppose tomorrow: tomorrow always holds a promise of uncertainty. We can only dream the future and dreaming the future leads to being better able to dream the past, a past that does not need to be magnified. It must be feared and criticized directly. It must be invoked tirelessly. And it is paradoxically the tragedies of the past, its darkest hours that illuminate the present. Benjamin observed as much: “Nothing that ever happened in the past is lost to History.” But History is not a succession of events. It is not a matter of knowing how things really happened. It is a matter of waking the dead, all the dead, without exception. We must hear the voices of those who were silenced, the voices of the wretched, the nameless, those excluded from

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