The Assistants of Defeat

 

In the essay “The Helpers,” included in the book Profanations, Giorgio Agamben turns his gaze to the strange creatures who parade through Kafka’s novels: the “helpers” (Gehilfen) who do not help, do not understand, have no gift, cause trouble—and yet remain there, stuck to our lives like a shadow. They are suspect, irritating, ridiculous, and at the same time perceptive: like messengers who are ignorant of the content of the message they carry. Someone—we do not know who—has entrusted them to us, and we do not easily rid ourselves of their presence.

 

From this “failed assistance” a political thought begins here as well: might there be a form of resistance that does not look like strength, plan, seriousness, but like something in-between—awkward, unfinished? Might the most valuable material of politics be found not at the peaks, but in the low, shamed, marginal forms of life?

 

There is a category of people history does not love. Politics does not love them either, as we have learned it: with great names, clean programs, straight lines that end in victories or in crushing defeats. They are the “helpers.”

 

I am not speaking of helpers as hierarchy sells them—the aides-de-camp, secretaries, staffers. I am speaking of the others: those who seem to help in nothing at all. The clumsy, the useless, the annoying—those who show up in the wrong places and at the wrong times, with a foolish persistence. Those who have no “gift,” who do not grasp the grand strategy, who cannot articulate the line, and yet—somehow, in a way no one can prove—their presence changes the scene.

 

The movement does not know what to do with them. The organization fears them. The collective tolerates them until the moment when “we have to get serious.” And then, usually, it betrays them: in the gentlest way, with a smile, with a final sentence that sounds practical and is violent: “you can’t get things done like this.”

 

Revolutionary imagination has been trained to worship the pyramid: where roles are clear, responsibility is concentrated, silence becomes discipline, and history can be written as a chronicle. But helpers are, by nature, anti-pyramidal. They do not occupy a fixed position. They have no clean outline. They can look like emissaries of the enemy or like angels who do not know the message they bear. And that is precisely what makes them dangerous: they do not obey the order of things. They obey something else—an unintelligible faith that “something is not finished.”

 

The most political scandal of the helpers is that they do not allow us to forget. They do not let us close the case. Where we would like to erase the “mistakes,” the weaknesses, the people who did not deliver, the dead who do not serve the narrative, the desires that were not vindicated, the helpers return like a small sting on the tongue: “what if what you threw away was exactly what was necessary?”

 

There is a vulgar form of political realism that worships seriousness: the seriousness of planning, numbers, results, “maturity.” But that seriousness is often a way of hiding that you are afraid. Afraid of the incomplete, the unmeasurable, the ridiculous, the childish—meaning you are afraid of freedom itself. Because freedom is not a program that gets implemented. It is a condition that opens and closes like a wound: it is not controlled, it does not “run” according to our needs.

 

The helpers are the noise of that wound.

 

In every real resistance there is an immense, silent labor that never receives a title: carrying things, cooking, translating, caregiving, hiding, repairing, sleepless nights, a phone call made “by chance,” someone who stayed last to stack the chairs, a “useless” presence that in the end kept someone alive. This labor is not merely supportive. It is the very substance of politics. And yet our gaze—trained by the pyramid—treats it as secondary. It wants to hide it, because care does not look like power. It looks like weakness.

 

The helpers reveal that the “power” of authority is built out of a fraud: that the serious is identical with the right. The helpers, in their clumsiness, show something else: that the right can be awkward, that the true can be ridiculous, that what will save us may appear in the form of shame.

 

The irony is that helpers do not promise salvation. Often they insist that “nothing can be done.” And yet this refusal is another form of hope—because it cuts off the blackmail of success. It frees us from the idea that politics is worthwhile only if it delivers results. It returns us to a more dangerous ethic: politics is worthwhile because it is a relation—a relation to the living, to the dead, to what was lost, to what was not heard.

 

The history of movements is full of “lost comrades.” Not only those who were sacrificed, but also those who were lost in splits, in exhaustion, in humiliations, in silences. Normal politics wants to write them off: they are not fit for the journey; let’s move on. But helpers are the form of the relation to what was lost. They are the refusal to turn your pain into accounting.

 

And here is the point where thought becomes practice: an organization that has no room for its helpers is an organization already building its own state. A movement that cannot bear the clumsy, the slow, the unfinished is a movement that has already chosen its enemy—not “outside,” but “inside.” It is a movement that prepares, without knowing it, its own betrayal.

 

I am not saying we should worship weakness. I am saying we should learn to recognize where real force hides: not at the top, but in the low, the shamed, the ridiculous, the “I don’t know.” There where the pyramid has no words. There where politics becomes human again: imperfect, trembling, yet alive.

 

Perhaps the helpers do not help us through deeds. Perhaps they help us with something rarer: by not letting us become perfectly rounded zeros. By holding us, stubbornly, in an in-between zone where defeat is not an end and victory is not an excuse.

 

And if, in the end, we betray them—as we almost always do—it will be because they told us the most unbearable truth: that our seriousness was fear. And that the Kingdom—what we called freedom, justice, community—appears first in suspect, unskilled, shamed forms. Like a helper.

 

Further reading (translated bibliography)

 

Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (orig. Profanazioni), trans. Panagiotis Tsiamouras, Agra, 2006 (in Greek).

 

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Ioanna Avramidou, Agra, 2005 (in Greek).

 

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics and What Is an Apparatus? (orig. Mezzi senza fine), trans. Athena Papapanagiotou & Thanos Zartaloudis, Nisos (in Greek).

 

Text: Aktaioros Samano_