Eulogy delivered in Freedom and Neighborhood, Reflecting on the Example of Fred Dewey (June, 2022, Rathaus Schöneberg)
“Let’s read something together,” Fred said. We were on the phone, on the old-fashioned phone call – it was the beginning of the pandemic, and Fred was still estranged – voluntarily estranged – from Skype and the like. Three years before, when I had arrived with an iPad to my first session of the Portable Polis, Fred said: “no tablets, please. We’re going to read from paper.”
A few weeks after the phone call, there were we: on Skype, laptops, headphones, cameras, unstable Wi-Fi connection, between LA and Berlin, experiencing what one of his favorite authors would point to as gains and losses of our mediated “ways of seeing.” We saw and thought together about the decline of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in The Radetzky March, the outbreak of the First War (and the birds flying away from the gun powder in the air), Joseph Roth as a pariah, Brazil, modes of love, La Milonga del Moro Judío, The Yes Men, Southern California, Hannah Arendt, Berlin before, Berlin now.
We need each other to confirm our realities. Fred was there, every week, two, three, five hours, to listen, to see, to recognize my existence – actual and potential. And he did it in his unforgettable way, outside conventions, without pretense, no social opportunities, no deadlines, just an all-embracing relationship. It was friendship, mentorship, a small scale proto-polis of two, and, in an age of mass reactions, impersonal structures, distraction, messages to be read, it was a gift.
In one session, I praised his last article, Reflections on Existential Preliminaries to a Resistant Polity in Literature and Beyond, in which he talked about the “withering away of the people,” “upending,” in his own words, “Marx,” turning Marx’s prognosis on the “withering away of the state,” precondition for an administrative society, into an alert about the gradual disappearance of the people. “It’s brilliant, Fred.” He smiled modestly, nodded, sighed. “I don’t know how much time I still have, Raf” – it was one of the rare occasions when he talked about his illness. “In any case, make sure this is remembered.” I will remember it, and this deserves to be remembered not because he asked, but because he taught and embodied an exemplary resistance to it, through his care for existence, his personal and public attention, his commitment to people – “not concepts” –, and the political implications of this commitment. And I wish I could now reply, a last time, to him: “it will be remembered, my friend, and you will be missed.”
Rafael Kasper 