The reasons why Benjamin spent so much time analyzing the processes of suspension and cessation in Brechtian theater are inextricably linked to his vision of history and the function that art can assume within it. A large part of his thought appears to be a site for the construction of a knowledge both verbal and visual, which would function as a bridge between the image and life, the fixed image and the moving image. At the center of his research appears always a change in rhythm, whether due to shock, or to other types of interruption.

When, in epic theater, Brecht insists on the processes that produce a strange gaze on both the part of the public and the actors, suspension appears as the technical device employed to release that affect. In 1931 Benjamin described the procedure thus:

a family scene. Suddenly a stranger enters. The women was just about to roll up a pillow and smother her daughter; the father in the middle of opening the window to call the police. At that very moment a stranger appears in the doorway. A ‘tableau’ was what one called such a scene in 1900. This means that the stranger finds himself confronted with the situation: bed sheets all rumpled, the window open, furniture turned upside down. Now a type of regard exists before which the most habitual scenes of bourgeois life do not appear to be so different. Strictly speaking, the more the ravages of our social order increase (the more we are affected ourselves, as well as our ability to even notice this), the more the distance of the stranger will be marked.

The prism of the stranger in Benjamin’s thought allows us to grasp logical and political links that tend to remain hidden. One becomes strange by means of a halting, for, when the movement picks up again, it is as if the parataxic evidence of the sequence of things appears unbound, as if in that interruption an interstitial space gaped open, sapping both the instituted order and our belonging to it.

In a commentary on Brecht’s poems in 1939, Benjamin writes “whoever fights for the exploited class becomes an immigrant in his own country.” Becoming stranger, a process that operates via a successive halting of thought images as well as an abandonment of the self, is manifested by an interruption and its following counter-movement.

This process of salvatory defamiliarization, which allows us to gain lucidity, seems to have a close relation to art or, more precisely, to art as source and device of these newfound affects, rather than as a site of their realization. This may be explained by the status of art as a space for the de-functionalization of subjectivities: singularities emerge there emancipated from any utility. As a purely aesthetic space, the world of art harbors a potential critique of the general organization of society, and of the organization of work in particular.

The process of becoming stranger as a revolutionary act appears in Benjamin’s work much earlier, in a 1920 text, which has nothing to do with art, entitled “Critique of Violence.” Here one can read that “today organized labor is, apart from the state, probably the only subject entitled to exercise violence.” But can one term strikes “violence”? Can a simple suspension of activity, “a nonaction, which a strike really is,” be categorized as a violent gesture? In all, no, Benjamin responds, since it is equivalent to a simple “severing of relations.” He adds, “in the view of the State conception, or the law, the right to strike conceded to labor is certainly a right not to exercise violence but, rather, to escape from a violence indirectly exercises by the employer, strikes conforming to this may undoubtedly occur from time to time and involve only a ‘withdrawal’ or ‘estrangement’ from the employer.”

What happens in this singular moment of turning away that allows us to lose our familiarity with the misery of ordinary exploitation, suddenly rendering us capable of decreeing that for one day the boss is not the boss? It is an interruption of the normal routine, a mobilization following upon a de-mobilization. This occurs thanks to a halt that transforms us into astonished spectators, nevertheless ready to intervene. Foucault wrote that the implicit demand of any revolution is “we must change ourselves.”

The revolutionary process thus becomes both the means of this change and the goal, because this transformation must generate for itself a context of possible persistence. It is in this sense that Benjamin says a genuinely radical strike would be a means without end, a space in which the entirety of hierarchical organization tied to political bureaucracy would fall apart when faced with the power of events. Parataxis would be ruined by the irruption of discontinuity.

But does a means exist today for the practice of such a strike, neither union-based or corporatist, but larger and more ambitious? The question is complex, but perhaps because of our impoverished singularity we are the first citizens of history for whom the metaphysical affirmation of the human being as a being without professional or social destiny has a very concrete sense. Agamben writes; “there is definitely something humans should be, but this something is not an essence, nor is it even a thing: it is the simple fact of their own existence as possibility or power.”

Some Italian feminists in the 1970s already envisioned a strike that would be an interruption of all the relations that identify us and subjugate us more than could any professional activity. They knew how to engage in a politics that wasn’t considered as politics. During struggles over the penalization of rape, the legalization of abortion, and the application of a quota policy, they simply asked the law to remain silent about their bodies. In 1976 the Bolognian collective for a

domestic salary wrote, “If we strike, we won’t leave unfinished products or untransformed raw materials; by interrupting our work we won’t paralyze production, but rather the reproduction of the working class. And this would be a real strike even for those who normally go on strike without us.”

This type of strike that interrupts the total mobilization to which we are all submitted and that allows us to transform ourselves, might be called a human strike, for it is the most general of general strikes and its goal is the transformation of the informal social relations on which domination is founded. The radical character of this type of revolt lies in its ignorance of any kind of reformist result with which it might have to satisfy itself. By its light, the rationality of the behaviors we adopt in our everyday life would appear to be entirely dictated by the acceptance of the economic relationships that regulate them. Each gesture and each constructive activity in which we invest ourselves has a counterpart within the monetary economy or the libidinal economy. The human strike decrees the bankruptcy of these two principles and installs other affective and material fluxes.

Human strike proposes no brilliant solution to the problems produced by those who govern us if it is not Bartleby’s maxim: I would prefer not to.

Paris, November 2005

Translated by Olivier Feltham and Continuous Project