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March 2024The Strategy of Rescue
The past and present of a power-political concept
by Johannes F. Lehmann
"Rescue” has two fundamentally different “existential” dimensions. One is aimed at “saving” individual lives that are in danger. Firefighters, for instance, rescue people from fires, while the sea rescue services rescue shipwrecked people from the Mediterranean. The second dimension of “rescue”, on the other hand, concerns systems – think of the bailing out of banks, the euro or the climate disaster – and so points to a larger context that creates the conditions for “life” to even be possible, or at least to be preserved. The complex subject of this stringent essay is just to what extent politics enable or prevent “rescue attempts”, to what extent it understands its actions as “rescue actions”, and how decisively the “narrative”, i.e. the “talk of rescue”, ultimately dominates our entire understanding of politics.
