Sami Khatib ~ A Positive Concept of Abstraction

Walter Benjamin famously claimed critique is a matter of correct distancing (1926). However, he also conceded that such a critical project has become precarious since “things” encroach too much on human society. What he theorized as the age of advertisement and the “mercantile gaze into the heart of things” has now become much more potent and totalizing. The ongoing celebration of immersion, lived experience and embodied practices of communal relationality promises a mode of unmediated “immediacy” (Anna Kornbluh 2023), attending to an “aesthetics of singularity” (Fredric Jameson 2015) presumably untouched by the (conceptual) grasp of abstraction, generalization and (political) mediation. In light of this conjuncture, my contribution is interested in forms of political mediation that resist both the indiscreet charm of false immediacy and the commodified logic of real abstraction, able to engage in an “organization of pessimism” (Benjamin) beyond binaries of institutional politics and community driven immediacy. More than ever, in our genocidal times the task of the organization of pessimism is a matter of urgency, not reducible to a gesture, slogan or sentiment. The case of Palestine as symptom and cause teaches us that the “state of emergency” has become the rule; capitalism as a world system tests out and redistributes the zones and limits of genocidal necropolitics. As a mode of disenchanted resistance, the political organisation of pessimism actualises a new meaning of (social) abstraction – it could provide a medium and mediation of international solidarity against the oppressive immediacy of colonial capitalism.

About: Sami Khatib 

A Positive Concept of Abstraction will be presented on the 3rd of October in the context of 

APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle