Agency and views beyond meta-narratives that privatise ethics and globalise indifference

In his influential 1940 essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1992 [1940]), Walter Benjamin argued that a ‘state of emergency’ marked contemporary social life, not in an exceptional sense, but as one of its principal rules. Contemporary lack of attention to the problem was not without precedents, but was nonetheless a radical manifestation of the extraordinary range of ways in which powerful meta-narratives render the barbarity of civility invisible (cf. Elias 1982; Hale 1993). Such insights, Benjamin said, might help us bring about a corresponding ‘state of emergency’ in relations between academia and human affairs, and a struggle with forms of knowledge and power that threaten the variability of human life-worlds.