1.

There is a secret rule—perhaps akin to those unspoken yet powerful ones that quietly shape our relations with others. A rule concealed in the way one responds to a certain question while walking through the narrow streets of Ramallah.
    The rule does not declare itself—it murmurs. It sidles into the everyday. When someone asks, How are you?—or, in the crumpled familiarity of Palestinian colloquial, Keefak—you are not meant to answer. Or rather, not beyond the sanctioned utterances: mneeh(fine), mashi al-hal (it's going), or the sanctified deferral—alhamdulillah (Thank God). Anything more would rupture the contract.
    There is a weight in the question—a gravity that resists articulation. What can one say of how we are, of how I am, when the massacres unfold with the rhythm of breath, and the world averts its gaze, entranced by the gaudy spectacle of chaos, by the orchestrated theater of shock and awe paraded under the banner of Trump’s rule?
    Is one to forsake the collective wound, the grief that binds us, and retreat into the fragments of a private life? To speak of a love lost, or another poised to declare itself in the sanctioned dialect of marriage? Should one speak of work, of health, of the quiet rituals by which we accumulate wealth and conceal despair? Or rather, should one confront the conditions that have made it possible to eat without tasting, to speak without the words rising skyward, to survive in a manner so passive it becomes a kind of complicity?
    The question is heavy. It slices through the dull rehearsals of daily life, through the small talk and the pleasantries, and lands somewhere deep—where the silence aches. And though we answer it, again and again, with the same tired scripts—"I'm fine," "We're managing"—I know, every time, that it’s a lie. A quiet betrayal.

Because the pariahs are not okay.

They are not, as some would have it, the keepers of some mystical clarity, not always burning with the eloquence of critique, not always radiant with love for mankind or thrilled by the music of collective resistance. No, sometimes they are simply tired. Sometimes they are broken. Sometimes they are silent.
    And so when the question comes—“How are you?”—it does not strike as care, but as obligation. It does not open, it closes. It demands an answer already shaped by the grammar of survival. One reaches, not for truth, but for something that can be said without undoing the fragile weave holding the self together. The reply becomes less about what is felt, and more about what can be endured aloud.
    In the wake of the question—and the answers that follow like lines in a well-worn script—there emerges something else: a liturgy, a liturgy of complaints. And each time a friend, a comrade, or a familiar face begins again, I whisper to myself, almost like prayer: Beware the nation that can no longer complain.
    Here, one does not speak to reveal, but to circulate—fragments of weariness, tokens of despair, tremors of anxiety, residues of a hope long abandoned. The conversation proceeds almost ritualistically, caught in a closed loop of dull repetition. It is less dialogue than a collective monologue, a murmuring chorus tethered to its core: shakwa—the complaint.
    The story goes something like this: work is dull, life unlivable, others intolerable. The world appears as an archive of offenses, of quiet betrayals and mounting disappointments, of the unbearable weight of being—especially within the cramped, inward-turning confines of that small, walled city called Ramallah. One speaks, and in speaking, performs a tired ontology. This is not the sharing of suffering, but its reverberation. The self does not emerge; it is cited, recited, reduced to a footnote in a conversation too weary to carry it further.
    Ramallah is too conservative—or far too liberal. Too familiar, or not familiar enough. Too small, or maybe too corrupt, bloated with its pursuit of wealth. Ramallah is not Jerusalem,my friend from Jerusalem says with quiet authority, as if that alone settles the matter. But what matters more is that Ramallah has become the stage upon which all complaints are performed. And yet, these complaints rarely reach the frontiers. We have grown so accustomed to our masters—so habituated to their presence—that we forget they are there. Until the screen flickers with their violence. Until the soldiers and settlers pierce the illusion and remind us, briefly, whose world this really is.
    It is perhaps this inflection, meaning this forgetfulness that, at times, renders the romanticization of the pariah troubling to me—the impulse to elevate the oppressed into a sanctified realm of “human togetherness,” of “fraternity” and shared solidarity.
    The difficulty lies not only in the abstraction—but in what happens when the pariah no longer inhabits their exclusion. What happens when the margins become a mirror, when those cast out turn inward, building a shrine around their wound, feeding it until the performance of pain eclipses the world itself? When the margin is no longer a vantage point, but a closed circuit. Is there, then, still room for love—for the conscious pariah Arendt once imagined? Room for a critique of the world as such, not merely a reaction to its wounds?
    And what of the masters—those who govern, dispossess, and divide? They remain, yes—but strangely. They are present, oppressively so, and yet somehow hidden. They are visible in their violence, and yet veiled in their legitimacy. They are there, always there, and yet they manage to remain just out of reach—obscured not by absence, but by excess. By being overtly hidden.
    In other words, there is a suffering that comes not from the inability to overcome oppression, but from the failure to inhabit any stable identity at all, even that of the marginal, the alienated, the deformed, the target, and the excluded. There is instead a slow implosion. A sense that the world is closing in—not only through the colonial machinery, not only through the soldier or settler haunting the horizon—but also through the other, the comrade, the companion, the one who mirrors your undoing.


To hate is another way to love—another mode of love distorted, yes, but never quite extinguished. It is love twisted by betrayal, scorched by history, made heavy by the refusal to forget. Hate does not rise from a void; it erupts from excess—too much memory, too much longing, too much proximity to what once shimmered with life, to what once promised meaning. The one who hates has not abandoned the world; he clings to it with a fevered grip, too close, too raw, unable to bear what it has become.
    Hate is not the posture of a melancholic, alienated soul—it is love gone feral, love that has crossed over. It is the cry of love when it can no longer recognize itself in the world that made it possible.
    One might say, then, that we must learn to grapple with the deformities that colonialism imposes—not just on bodies and borders, but on the interior life of a people. And perhaps the hatred that simmers among the pariahs of Palestine is not a hatred to be feared, but one to be understood—as a cry for coherence, as the residue of a love unfulfilled. It is a hatred that must not be banished, but overcome through acts of collective resistance, through the stubborn work of shared suffering and struggle, the agonizing beauty of those words starting with an S.
    What propels the fighter to fight, if not this: an ethic of enunciation, a word uttered not from secure ground, but from the tremor of what could be otherwise. It is not simply the inheritance of a task, but the emergence of a will—a will to deform the deformed, to twist the twisted back into the arc of dignity.
    Here we are already in a different mode of articulating the pariah—not as the exilic prophet, the one who speaks from the margins with mournful clarity, an insider who is simultaneously outside. No, this is a pariah who refuses the safety of symbolic distance, who will not dwell solely in the citadel of critical reflection. He does not content himself with the invention of new languages for understanding, nor with elegant diagnoses of failure. His consciousness spills beyond critique into contact, abrasion, confrontation. He is not the melancholic bearer of lost worlds, but the one who dares to deform the deformed to disturb the grammar of defeat. The pariah, in this modality, is not merely a witness to suffering, but a saboteur of the order that produces it. He bears not just memory, but rupture—a living crack through which the future seeps. No longer satisfied with interpretation, he intervenes.
    How does hatred recoil into love in his intervention? Not through reconciliation, nor forgiveness, nor the purification of affect, but through the act itself—the intervention—which cracks open the world and lets the future bleed in. The pariah's hatred, shaped by the scars of history, does not vanish in his action: it is recomposed. It is no longer the corrosive residue of betrayal, but a ferment, a pressure transfigured into contact. He does not love his enemy, but he loves the world enough to refuse its terms. This refusal is love as rupture, not harmony; love as sabotage, not peace.
    This is the pariah as militant caretaker—not the healer who soothes, but the one who ruptures so that healing becomes thinkable again. In his intervention, hatred folds back into love—not because it loses its edge, but because it finds direction, a form, a place to go. It becomes fidelity to the unfulfilled, not nostalgia for the past. It becomes allegiance to the possible, not mourning for the lost. This is not redemption; it is transformation. To sabotage the machinery of ruin is to insist, however violently, that life is still possible.


But here, I must pause and turn toward Hannah Arendt. You, who saw in the pariah a figure of reflective exile, a bearer of worldliness forged in statelessness, also feared what you called the “darkness of the heart” that hate brings. For you, hatred was a danger to politics—too intimate, too explosive, too close to totalitarianism. But what if hatred, in the colony, is not a temptation of violence but the trace of having been violated? What if hatred, in the mouths of the pariahs of Gaza, Jenin, Shu’fat, is not the negation of politics but its last possibility?
    You elevated forgiveness, action, natality. But what of those who were never allowed to begin? What of those who were born into rubble, not as a metaphor, but as a daily condition? Can they be asked to forgive before they have been permitted to speak? You wrote of the human condition, but what of the unconditioned,the ones to whom humanity is only ever extended in posthumous sympathy? They cannot afford your ethics of distance. Their proximity to death is too immediate, their wounds too legible.
    Your pariah walked the boulevards of Europe with a book under his arm. Ours walks the ruins with a rifle, or a memory, or a stone. Yours strove for dignity through visibility, ours is made invisible except when dying. But perhaps here too is the divergence: for you, politics was action in the space of appearance. For us, politics is the refusal to vanish. The refusal to let erasure have the final word.
    Yes, the militant pariah hates. But it is a hatred that binds, not isolates. A hatred that recognizes, even in its ferocity, the contours of love deformed by colonialism. He does not erupt blindly—he intervenes precisely because he still cares for the world that betrayed him. He is not the end of politics, but its irregular site of birth.
    So no, the pariah will not relinquish hatred—not yet. Not while the bombs fall. Not while the camps are razed. Hatred here is not fascism—it is fidelity. Not destruction for its own sake, but the violence of the broken world breaking back. You feared that hatred would devour the world. But have you not seen the problem with this perspective when you wrote your report on Eichmann? The world has already devoured us.


I have not slept these days—not really. The night does not fall so much as it lingers, heavy and alert. I am older now, and more attuned to the dissonances that once felt trivial—the way a car door slams like a threat, or the gathering of young boys near my window.
    I think often of that street—narrow, dusty, alive with the friction of play and reprimand. When we played football as children, there was always the risk of the ball going astray. And if it ever landed in the old neighbor’s garden, we’d flee—instinctively. The ball’s fall was like a border crossing. We knew her scream would come before the ball even settled. It wasn’t the scream that frightened us, exactly. It was the world it belonged to: a world of order, of the demand for silence, of walls that must not be touched, of gardens that were not for us.
    And perhaps that’s when I began to understand what borders really are. Not fences, not laws—but reactions. Screams. Reprimands. The visceral enforcement of space. Of quiet. Of control. Even now, years later, I hear that scream when the city grows too loud, or when I move too freely. And I think: perhaps she was the first settler I ever knew. It is strange, how the smallest memories can echo the largest violences. How the scream of an old neighbor in Ramallah can reverberate in the speech of generals, in the declarations of zones and closures, in the language of “permitted areas.” The child who flees from the ball learns something of flight, of unwelcomeness. And the adult who cannot sleep carries that unease like a scar turned inward, a chainsmoker living off the neurotic inducements of caffeine.
    I hated my neighbor, and she hated us back. There was no grand lesson in it. Only the quiet, reciprocal detestation born of proximity—of our noise in her silence, of her scream in our joy. At some point, we stopped playing football, and we started playing with her screams. We would dare each other to cross over, to ruin her garden. We would throw the ball and see who had the courage—or the foolishness—to retrieve it. It was a game, but not quite. We knew the scream would come, shrill and immediate, like a law being spoken. And still we did it. Again and again. Maybe out of boredom, maybe out of spite. Maybe just to hear the world respond to us.

And yet—today, I catch myself identifying with the old lady. A recognition I almost wish I hadn't seen.

I glimpse myself identifying with her—the old woman that used to sit at the wide balcony in silence. Not with her scream, but with the impulse behind it. The desire for quiet. The resistance to disruption. The yearning, however fleeting, for control over something, anything. A garden. A silence.  And some peace of mind.

I see her not as an enemy, but as a precursor. And I reprimand myself for it.

Because that is how it begins, isn’t it? Not with betrayal—but with fatigue. With the subtle shift from the one who runs to retrieve the ball to the one who flinches at its sound. From the one who crosses lines to the one who draws them.
    I was never satisfied with the notion of the nomadic exile—the elegant figure who traverses cultures, crossing boundaries with perpetual dislocation, inhabiting none. That archetype, so beloved in literary theory, fails me. It fails many of us. Because we do not drift—we are held in place by force. And if we do move, we are chased, checked, registered, deported and also denied return. We are not exilic in the abstract. We are trapped. Bodies made heavy when we enter the room, cutting through the laughter, and making everyone feel “uncomfortable”. We are pariah’s even when we become doctors, or find solutions to vexing questions and quandaries. We are students at Columbia, but also the first to be deported.
    Edward Said once described the exile as one perpetually out of place, a figure of ironic detachment, of refined estrangement. But what of the one who is not out of place, but in it—too much in it? What of the one for whom estrangement is not ironic, but suffocating?
    And so I cannot romanticize the exile. I cannot inherit the poise of the worldly intellectual, crossing borders with a book under his arm. Because every time I try to leave, I hesitate. Not out of choice, but because choice has been thickened to the realm of betrayal, and also thinned to the surface level of an illusion. I am not a wanderer. I am a wall-dweller.
    And yet—there is something that stirs even here. Something that cannot be named by movement or dislocation. A resistance that does not drift, but concentrates. A rage that does not scatter, but compacts. If I do not cross, it is not because I do not desire. It is because I know that even when I do, I remain marked.
    You can also be a pariah in the hate of the world. Not just hated—but forged in hatred, folded by it. Turned inward at times, perhaps most of the time. Into the bones. Into the breath. You become the container of the very violence that sought to expel you.
    To be pariah is not only to be cast out. It is also to be held in, immobilized, crushed by the impossibility of movement. Not wandering, but sinking. Not dislocated, but over-located—so pinned to a place that it begins to rot inside you. You do not leave the world; the world embeds itself in you, until every wall and checkpoint becomes internal, psychic, metabolic.
    You can inhabit a place too much—so much that it implodes within you. Not in the clarity of exile, but in the blur of estrangement that comes from overfamiliarity. You know the cracks in the wall, the scent of the soil, the tilt of the sun—and still it feels foreign. Not because it is no longer yours, but because it is so painfully, exhaustingly yours. Because you have had to defend it with every breath, until even the breath feels suspect.
    This is not the exile of elegance. This is the exile of overstay. Of being too long in a world that no longer recognizes you, nor one that you are able to truly recognize. A pariah not because you have wandered, but because you have stayed. And in staying, have refused the gift of anonymity, of disappearance, of the world out there.

A conscious, non-nomadic pariah.

Not one who wanders. Not one who flees. One who stays. Who lingers. Who rots, perhaps. Who sits in-between—the worn grooves of memory and the unbearable weight of the present. He is no longer the child who ran to retrieve the ball, nor the one who screamed from the garden. He identifies with both, yet also despises both. He is what remains when both figures collapse.
    A conscious, non-nomadic pariah who overstays—who inhabits the ruins and writes the implosion as slowly as possible, in the faint hope that some remnant—some fragment of what is remains in the wake of the implosion—might touch the exilic nomads.

2. 

This text is my attempt at understanding how vagrants—those without place—were incorporated and entrenched as characters in European folklore. Here I’m interested in how the inclusion of these figures of otherness in the European mental landscape served the project of establishing western man as the ‘universal’ norm and arbitrator of inclusion and exclusion. Western man, by contrast to this landscape of abjection, is no longer fallen, but is revalorized—he sees himself as one who defines. Through the figure of the other he solidifies control of the institutions of accumulation and profit, that parasitize on all that is outside: abundance, incommensurability and indefinability.




First, we will set the pace with a story popularized and canonized by Brothers Grimm, named Children of Hamelin.

In June 1284 The Mayor of Hamelin held a meeting with the city elite. They were racking their brains to find an end for the onslaught of rodents in their warehouses and granaries. An oddly dressed stranger walks into the meeting, and proclaims themselves capable of handling the city’s rat problem. This vagrant agrees to the Mayor’s offer of 1000 guilders, takes out their flute, and while walking in the streets, calls every single rat and mouse out of their hiding. To the tune of the flute, the Piper leads the rodents out of the city and drowns them in the Weser River.

   

The Mayor and elders, holding true to their gluttonous appetite and their wanton greed, that brought about the ‘rat problem’ in the first place, withhold the Piper’s reward. The betrayed stranger leaves furious, in itself a foreboding that the most precious things will soon be taken away from the city of Hamelin.

    The story’s brisk exposition of the era is surely a skewed glimpse into emerging capitalist urban life in the medieval period. The mythologist Norbertas Vėlius has observed that fairytales structurally simplify the historical events, legends, or regional epics they borrow from. Yet, the most archaic elements, the minor motifs and their surroundings, stay intact.¹
    In the period under question 950–1250 CE, Europe was exceptionally warm. This was due to a combination of factors, such as decreased volcanic activities, changes in oceanic patterns, and intensified solar activity. Throughout the Medieval Warm Period, the growing seasons were longer, the seed-to-yield ratio higher, the ice caps were shrinking on the northern seas and the higher-altitude mountain passages.
    The strangers sudden appearance in Europe is more than a formulaic fairytale solution for a deadlock problem. Piper is a figure unbound by civic life and its loyalty to authority. Through the Piper, let us consider the rudiments of western man: the metabolism of his community, the logic of cities with their perceived sacredness and settledness; the emergence of what we know as value, labor and exchange.
    The Piper gives testament to the collective psyche, rooted in the storytelling practices of the Hanseatic League’s merchant guilds–the looming political divisions, the angst, the accumulation of wealth, and the professionalization of particular crafts.
    On the facade of a building in Hamelin, we read from the inscription, and there is a stained-glass work in the Church too, that on June 26th, our stranger, playing a flute, led 130 children through the East gate directly into a hill formation outside the city, called Bergkuppe. The children were never to be seen again. The origin of the city itself came to begin exactly with this event. The reasons of his appearance/return in these early tales is masked. The previously mentioned episode with the rodents gets added in versions only after 1559. The Piper was an evocative figure for a feudal landscape—scarred by dispossession and exploitation—that desired to impart evilness to those outside of legally and religiously sanctioned community.


I want to return to the point where we lose all traces of the children and Piper: the Bergkuppe. In low German and late Latin cuppa means round object, head or hill, and Persian kaupha means hill. Lithuanian, Prussian, and Latvian languages also use kopa, and variations of kauk-meaning hillock, head, lump. A mound, a heap, is a dwelling space and a category of chthonic Baltic spirits: the Kaukas. They are peculiarly dressed demonic creatures, handlers of provisions, such as yields of grain, hay, or sometimes linen. Kaukai (plr.) emerge from lumps of raw earth, and dedicate themselves to managing the earth’s mythic, abundant, property. This abundance, or skalsa in Lithuanian, is the essence of unbound wealth, a fraction of which is enough to satiate the whole lot. 
    Lithuanian-French linguist and semiotician A. J. Greimas turns toward Kaukai as “mediators, acting within the structural frames of mutual exchange between the earth and the people.”²As untiring and inexhaustible as the Earth out of which the Kaukai have emerged, they dispense her abundant resources. The Kaukas are believed to show up and introduce themselves for a task that presents difficulties for the human. Upon arrival on the scene of hardship the Kaukas will test the moral integrity not only of the human who gets to interact with them, but of the whole household and even community. This chthonic creature would either effortlessly provide something incredibly scarce but necessary, or tease by bringing something completely unrelated and meager, like a handful of sawdust. If they feel mistrust or thievery, Kaukas will take anything (or everything) precious away.
    The Kaukas operates in an economy of abundance, they provide what is unattended, forgotten, and overlooked—their provisions have nothing to do with the concept of private property and therefore theft. As offsprings and messengers of the underworld, they represent sacral sovereignty and a deep sense of social justice. If the moral test is passed, abundance will be delivered. On the other hand, Kaukas trade against the interests of the greedy. For example, they bring what appears as rolls of fine wool broadcloth, but a moment after the deal, the desired object will transform into a hoard of toads and leap away. They are equipped with some sort of what Roman Jakobson describes as “all-seeing eye's embrace of the world”, and refuse to corroborate and become absorbed into the logic of accumulation and control. Kaukai expose the divisions that people themselves declare, present, and enforce as natural.
    I feel that the Piper and Kaukas pair up, and mirror the unaccountable and unaccounted constancy of the earth’s dynamic force. They have agency and power to threaten greed, adjust, and break the blind accumulation of wealth. They are completely alien to the peculiarities of the group, the elite, the city, and enact solutions that are non-normalizing and subversive. For Kaukas and Piper their environment and reality is finite but sufficient. This finitude is neither modern nor divine, but cyclical, containing fugitivity and fecundity. Everything unattended blooms and decays in defiance of value and entropy; obstinately uncountable, unproductive and immobile to the whims of a man.
    Hannah Arendt writes that “Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; they both are articles of superstition, not of faith.” In other words, only by dispelling the superstitions and myths of secularized political economy might we discover a faith that goes beyond it. And only through active struggle with our own complicity in its forms can we retain this faith that goes beyond its central superstition that the world offers little but scarcity and misery.³




To live fugitively is to reject the bio-economic optics of scarcity: the lie that survival requires complicity.⁴ The Piper and the Kaukas remind us that the earth is abundant—but only if we refuse to hoard, to enclose, and to settle. The Piper operates outside the sanctioned professionalism of the state, embodies what Sylvia Wynter might call the ceremony found: the moment when the constructed order of Man is exposed as arbitrary.⁵ The Piper’s disappearance of the children mirrors the Kaukas’ withdrawing of hoarded wealth when mistrusted. Both acts reveal the violence of settlement: the demand that everything—land, labor, life—be rendered legible, taxable, and controllable. To seek solutions beyond these confines is not an admission of failure, but an acknowledgment that true resolution often lies in being what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describes as "separate from settling."




1.See: Norbertas Vėlius, Chtoniškoji lietuvių mitologija (Cthonic Lithuanian Mythology), Aitvarai ir Kaukai, Echoes, 2011, p. 178.

2.A. J. Greimas, Of Gods and Men, Indiana University Press (US), 1992, p.21.

3.Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Random House (UK), 2017 p.X.

4.See on fugitivity: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, Minor Compositions (US), 2013.

5.Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”, in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Eds. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck. Liverpool University Press (UK), 2015, pp.184-252.


Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Random House (UK), 2017 p.X.

A. J. Greimas, Of Gods and Men, Indiana University Press (US), 1992, p.21.

Roman Jakobson, Roman Jakobson Selected Writings Volume VII: Contributions to comparative mythology. Studies in Linguistics and Philology, 1972-82, Mouton Publishers (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam), 1985, p. 25.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons, Minor Compositions (US), 2013.

Norbertas Vėlius, Chtoniškoji lietuvių mitologija (Cthonic Lithuanian Mythology), Aitvarai ir Kaukai, Echoes, 2011, p. 178.

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”, inBlack Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Eds. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck. Liverpool University Press (UK),  2015, pp.184-252.

3.

Community and language are elements to remain near the possibility of a theory for and of the proletariat.

The text is about recollecting notions such as “common ground” and community. Even when facing the inexorability of extermination, it seems as if thinking has only the intransigence of meaning and language left, at least for a while.


In early February 1971 there was a meeting at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, between the revolutionary leader Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) and psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994), which involved several other participants. It started a discussion, which continued in Oakland, California, two months later. The intervention of Newton went by the title “Intercommunalism” and it presented the ideological position of a militant group, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and most important perhaps, the development of the thinking of these militants from the “black nationalism” of their foundation in October 1966 to their actual internationalism built upon a combined theory and practice called “revolutionary intercommunalism”. This position was defined by the militant life of the members of the BPP, their solidarity with the “lumpen proletarians” of the world and an astonishing sympathy with some governments in Asia which represented peoples “who want to determine their own destiny”. These were the governments of China, North Korea and North Vietnam, i.e. States incarnating the ideology of socialism in one country as it was gradually constructed by Soviet Marxism (Bucharin, Rykov, Tomskij and Stalin) after 1926 to replace the intransigent internationalism of the first six years of the Communist International (1919-1925). Nevertheless, the politics of the aforementioned Asian countries was interpreted by Newton as anti-imperialistic and could in 1971 be inscribed in a more general post-colonial framework where post-slavery, neo-colonial, American imperialism played the pivotal role.
    Newton and the Panthers were trying to find a place for marginalized social categories within the American proletariat and give them a strong theoretical presence, which was lacking completely in the American Left from the Unions AFL-CIO to the Trotskyists and the Socialist Party of the Daniel De Leon tradition. In 1971 their statement was one of international solidarity and participation in Big Politics: “Imperialism has laid the foundation for world communism, and imperialism itself has grown to the point of reactionary intercommunalism because the world is now integrated into one community. The communications revolution, combined with the expansive domination of the American empire, has created the “global village”. The peoples of all cultures are under siege by the same forces and they all have access to the same technologies. There are only differences in degree between what’s happening to the blacks here and what’s happening to all of the people in the world, including Africans.”¹
    I think it is important to note, that the conditions illustrated for intercommunalism here are not simply historically determined. Newton’s argument is not built upon on an orthodox historical materialism that would ascribe the role of class-struggle to a scientifically periodizable mode of production, even if a sort of class-struggle is mentioned. The struggle is space based and not time based in Newton’s text, with neighborhood and solidarity overpowering the teleological expectations of a philosophy of history in the Hegelian sense.
    Now, some words about the possible combinations concerning theories of community: These theories were developed after the season of European uprisings and urban guerrilla movements, that roughly unfolded between May 1968 in France to the Italian Autonomia in 1977. As theoretical reflections of metropole movements in the ancient colonial center they were very different from the parallel black revolts in the US; even if some European revolutionary groups such as the Situationist International and the Italian Left around party-founder Amadeo Bordiga and the newspaper il programma comunista immediately defended a hypothesis of a common situation of exploitation and the possibility of a common understanding between the postcolonial sub-proletariatas defined by Newton and the revolutionary interpretations of capitalism by the ultra-gauche in Europe. And the latter embraced the riots in the American towns of the 1960s, defending them as part of an international uprising. In fact, the very idea of “revolutionary violence” in Western democracies became licit again for revolutionary thinking thanks to the American experiences.
    However, ten years after the meeting at Yale and ten years after Big Politics—‘anti-imperial’ wars and class-struggle in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East the era slowly came to an end. With the Iranian Revolution and the long war between Iraq and Iran, the whole phenomenon of revolutionary thinking was in need of new philosophical examinations and formulations. It was an eminently theoretical need and it went under different labels such as “the postmodern condition” or the “trans-avanguardia”. So, in November 1980 two French philosophers from the rather new “deconstruction” legacy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021), invited philosophers from their own generation and language to restate the role of politics in philosophy. Their introduction to the project was a serene and limpid one: “rejouer le politique”, return to the political, to play the political again. This meant a foundational restart, the idea was not to develop a new “political theory” but to reorganize conceptually the competences and the empirical material already at hand. Attention was therefore given to philosophy, because apart from anthropology, philosophy was the only way of thinking based upon “la co-appartenance essentielle”, the essential common belonging to a “reciprocal” determination between the two “parts”—i.e. philosophy and politics.² “Part” is my term here, because the whole effort of the invited thinkers was to formulate meaning within the “political institution of the (so-called) Western thinking”, while the problem of the part, partiality or party was not included in the work of the centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.³
    More or less after three years of contributions to this theme, the discussion stopped in 1982 with examinations of the well-known concept of “totalitarianism” and the rather new one “retrait du politique”, i.e. the retreat or withdrawal of the political. This influential concept closed a season of important reconstruction and critique of Marxist and Maoist (Stalinist) traditions, while obstinately resisting any apology for the concept of communism—the trajectory was not, as in other cases of the era, a capitulation to national, bourgeois, liberal democracy. Instead of analyzing the accomplishments or lack of accomplishment of institutional politics, the new notion of retrait du politique could link to the Heideggerian term Verwindung [overcoming], to deconstruction, to a “pas-en-arrière”, a step backwards, but not a retrograde one because the thinking should remain “à la hauteur”, at the level of … “destitution”. So this concept which gradually became a dominant framework for political thinking in the aftermaths of the Berlin Wall and the alter-globalization movement—with its theoretical crescendo in Negri and Hardt’s Empire. The end of this pivotal enjeu, the central problem, for the Invisible Committee and for the ninth and last volume of the Homo Sacer series (the Use of Bodies, Italian 2014), was, seen in retrospect, the starting point of the philosophical enterprise in the rue d’Ulm, Paris, November 1980.
    This re-thinking of philosophy in politics and politics in philosophy was opened with the question of community in a text by Nancy published in the Spring of 1983, “La communauté desœuvrée”.⁴ The first theoretical gesture of the text was to place the Christian preoccupations with historical expectations outside the conceptual context of thinking human community and replace these expectations with a radical immanency without programmatic proclamations. This effort to remain in a thinking able to reconstruct its internal differences was immediately greeted by Maurice Blanchot in a small book The Unavowable Community (French 1983), where a very contemplative text of literature, La maladie de la mort, by Marguerite Duras, would be a narrative instrument to reformulate the “desœuvrement” in Nancy’s thinking.⁵ Because, even if the inspiration to re-examine the notion of community for Nancy and Blanchot came from Georges Bataille’s work, the fundamental result remained the abandonment of any dialectical dynamics in and for the community.⁶ The community, now actively without a goal, meant the break with Hegelian and Christian thinking was nearly complete, even if the will, if not the intention, to maintain a radical critique remained intact.
    Nancy was compelled to produce a long series of books about the community question in the years to come, at the end of his life often in a dialogue with Mathilde Girard. Other contributions to the same question were written by Lyotard and Agamben during the 80s. But before we follow that line of thought, it is worth noting, that the most radical magazine of the May ‘68 uprising, Invariance, started and remained bound to the question of the Gemeinwesen, the common essence, as presented by Marx in his Parisian manuscripts from 1844. Invariance No.1 began with the text “Origin and Function of the Party Form” where the revolutionary party according to the teachings of the Italian Left (Amadeo Bordiga), was presented as an avant-garde able to anticipate the material fusion and intentional differentiation of humanity in a future society without money and without exploitation. So at the start, the discussion of a notion of community was also a discussion about anticipation and realization of potentialities. This changed with the notion of the desœuvrement (inoperative), where thinking and language replaced dependence on a universal projectas it can be said, that the project and perhaps even Big Politics are based upon the assumption of universalities. Newton, in the Yale-conversation, clearly holds onto to these assumptions:

“I think that whether we like it or not, dialectics would make it necessary to have a universal identity. If we do not have universal identity, then we will have cultural, racial and religious chauvinism, the kind of ethnocentrism we have now. So we say that even if in the future there will be some small differences in behavior patterns, different environments would all be a secondary thing. And we struggle for a future in which we will realize that we are all Homo sapiens and have more in common than not. We will be closer together than we are now.”⁷

This description of community and closeness is the contrary of Nancy’s desœuvrement, which is a sort of absence of any politically or economically gratifying result of the being together: the power involved is instead dissipative and deviant, manifesting its presence as an absence of any strong reciprocity. Nothing is returning to you because of your participation in the community without œuvre (operativity), Nancy explains. The only analogy to such an inoperative community is the “community of lovers”, according to Blanchot. And it reminds us clearly of the symbolic exchange and the notion of dépense (expenditure) in Georges Bataille. Descriptions and difference replace the dialectics used by the Panthers or, for that matter, by Invariance.
    But what happens to internationalism under such a communitarian condition? Maintaining the contiguity of an experience of the common should be the same, as contiguity still seems the most stable part of being together. Although, now the playing between singularity and plurality should become more intense, once the expectations for an ultimate fusion become less imperative. In fact, a lot of initiative and importance has passed from the project of universalism to spontaneity and what I will introduce as the sensus communis (the community of sensation). Instead of Marx, it is Kant that is at stake.
    Lyotard who came from the group Socialisme ou Barbarie and later in its splinter Pouvoir ouvrier made first a Freudian shift and after 1979 and the book about the postmodern condition a Kantian one. Sensus communis is the feeling in operation during aesthetic experiences, when these experiences are commented and communicated to a third party not participating in the same perception that has generated the aesthetic experience. So, it is evocative and spontaneous at the same time, following an impulse to transmit the feeling in some way. By means of words, but also sounds and image-making. That is why Lyotard can formulate the following theoretical somersault about what is at stake in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (Kant’s third Critique):

“There would be judgement before the concept, and even before the schema, before that operation of synthesis, which is however very elementary, which brings together the pure diversity of sense-data (their matter) into unities which are apprehensible, reproducible, recognizable and offers them as an experience to the grasp, to the Ergreifen, to the Begreifen
(understanding) of the categories of understanding.”⁸

So, the move or gesture is going from the extra-categorical to the category, i.e. from something without form to a form able to document how it is in the making but not why it is in the making. It is a testimony of a transformative faculty in thinking and the nearest we can come to a common intensity between theory and practice. But not an identity between them. Something remains as long as the impulse of the sensus communis is not incarnated or organized and in a position of presence among some of the potentialities at hand for instance of the proletariat.
    It is a tension in a position which may be created during artistic work or during a political mobilization; it is inherent to both and contains a promise of transcendence, which thought can suppose to be felt, but not realized. This is indeed the positive version of sensus communis. But there is also a negative one, i.e. when it is absolutely clear that an action of power is destroying the very possibility of a sensus communis by means of extermination, of the destruction of articulation long before any experience can be presented to an Ergreifen.

We can perhaps call it the “Hurbinek effect”…


In Nancy’s notion of desœuvrement there is an element of something happening in vain, not ethically humble but convinced about the difficulties ahead. The absolute contrary to the conceit of power, to the self-indulgence of any exterminator. So, some years after the dialogue between Nancy and Blanchot about the desœuvrement, Giorgio Agamben published the book La comunità che viene (The Coming Community, 1990) as a sort of continuation of what Nancy had been trying to explain. But the tone of his book was that of Tiananmen:

“Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.”⁹

In fact the 80s experienced a crescendo in political thinking, culminating 25 years later with the overwhelming scientific effort of the nine Homo Sacer volumes (1995-2014). The relation between history and politics was completely reorganized during those years, based upon an understanding of power and human potentialities, where all existing institutions were doomed to succumb to destitution after the radical hermeneutic analysis in the Homo Sacer work and in the three books of the Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends and Now).
    The third volume of Homo Sacer, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, is central to understanding the conditions and inherent limits of this reorganization.
    The book was based upon the narrative and the thinking of Primo Levi: “The new ethical material that he discovered at Auschwitz allowed for neither summary judgments nor distinctions and whether he liked it or not, lack of dignity had to interest him just as much as dignity.”¹⁰ So, according to Agamben, it was Primo Levi's work that had made possible the analysis of the human condition after extermination. Therefore, Remnants of Auschwitz also became a book about subjectivity and perhaps especially about the weakening of subjectivity and its possible “withering away”. There is even an example of destitution in the sense that the notion is used in English as utter or absolute need. That example is slightly different from the one elsewhere offered of the Muselmann. But it is an example that concerns what we can archive from reports, and why it is so fundamental to have fates recorded and exposed in the protocols of history when dealing with extermination. It is the anthropological depth in what the Auschwitz experience can bring along at the periphery of all that it must at the same time give up in respect to the mass human aspect of the extermination. I am thinking of Levi's account of the boy Hurbinek, who is perhaps three years old and on the verge of being able to speak, when he is liberated from his state in the camp, but soon after dies from his physical weakness. Levi is occupied by the words, the word, Hurbinek enunciates as he lies on his deathbed. It may be mass-klo, or perhaps matisklo, and in spite of the great number of languages represented among the prisoners in the camp, it doesn't correspond to the words of any identifiable language. Levi, who is aware that the camp can never be good for anything, and cannot therefore reveal some truth about, for instance, the origin of or basic conditions for language, tries to define what the little boy does with his tongue in his vulnerable situation with his crippled, enfeebled body. There is of course no prior meaning that is about to surface in this person—perhaps the weakest of all the camp's weakened bodies—in order to come to the expression in Hurbinek's mouth; nor is Levi able to collect any knowledge about what is going on inside that little head. But it does say something, then: there was a readiness to speak, which now becomes the last “word”. A readiness and a word that may be manifesting itself without some raw memory of the word's possible philological roots. The readiness resides in the mouth as this word, mass-klo, matisklo. Does it point back as some kind of explanation for Hurbinek, as a sentence might have been able to do in quite different circumstances if Hurbinek had had a childhood? What we sense in Agamben when reading Levi (pp.37-39) in Remnants of Auschwitz, is something that concerns a degree of independence in the possibility of the speech act, a linguistic embouchure, a first step towards utterance which should not be explained downwards towards fear, or outwards socially towards an indication of some communicative concern.¹¹ It is less than language and perhaps more immanent than any indexicality; for instance the intentionality in the utterance of a warning.
    Several years ago Michel Serres touched on this phenomenon in a conversation with the founder of semiotics in Denmark, Per Aage Brandt, a conversation the latter has published in the journal Semiotik under the title “Markov og Babel” (Markov and Babel).¹² From this it appeared that language cannot be driven by a promise of a synthesis, by for instance a unifying explanation: we must try from another place in the mouth, the repetition of the sound, the memory of a sound and perhaps the sense of reach when the sound is reproduced, a sense of recollection. Nor is it therefore in any way an aesthetic reflection in some raw, sense-borne version like “tasting the words”; Hurbinek’s distress is far too comprehensive for that, almost equal to a “pure” ontological exposure; “almost” because mass-klo or matisklo is not a powerless imploration bewailing its lot to a god. Rather it is tentative, exploratory: Hurbinek was dying; he probably didn’t “know” that just as he didn’t know that his life was a very small, short and biologically “weak” life. It did not live by virtue of anything but chance, just as it would die in the same way, just before and just after something. Hurbinek was no longer a prisoner, a deportee when life left his very small “frail” and vulnerable body. Instead there was a great non-consummation: even death took so little with it that it did not consummate very much.
    All this dark non-articulation does not live by virtue of a great birth of meaning that then crumbles and appears as absurd. Nor is it a beginning without consequences, a sort of negative creation, even though this concept may get a little closer to the heart of the matter. Hurbinek's testimony consisted of this: the little boy sensed a word; it might give a connection to something, something that lay as the seed of a memory or a sound-borne possibility of recollection in Hurbinek's brain (and heart); something that he could in any case feel and hear when his own, very young vocal chords and labial barrier were to steer the little puff, the little exhalation, that was felt now as the closure of the lips and now as a little sibilance in the insides of the cheeks, mass-klo, matisklo. Hurbinek was discovering the “discursive instance”, the utterance apparatus that was waiting in his mouth and ear.¹³ But when Hurbinek died, it was perhaps still far more mouth than speech and meaning—perhaps.
    In an old Danish text I discussed the negative potentiality that is also investigated in Remnants of Auschwitz. It is a determination of potentiality that is chiefly argued on moral-philosophical grounds: What “ought not” to have happened (Hannah Arendt), happened, and what that involves.¹⁴ Especially repression, Arendt's answer goes: “At no point, however, either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups—the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies—might be more than a crime against the Jewish, or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered.”¹⁵ Absolutely the same can be said of what is happening under the conditions in Gaza since October 2023.
    So we stay with Hannah Arendt and now with her famous answer to Günter Gaus when asked in October 1964 on German television about what remained in Germany after 1945: “Was ist geblieben? Geblieben ist die Sprache”, the language has remained.¹⁶
    Recently, in August 2024, Giorgio Agamben published the book La lingua che resta:Il tempo, la storia, il linguaggio, i.e. ‘The Language that Remains: Time, history, semiotic system’.¹⁷ ( The last chapter (chap. VII) is devoted to the subject matter of the book, ‘the language that remains’, and is introduced by the quotation of Hannah Arendt’s answer in 1964. The text tries bravely to avoid having to choose between reduction and retrospection: reduction to a causality or retrospection to a beginning, and instead it proposes a theory of an exceeding reality_a sort of super-now_a notion borrowed from Henri Bergson and a notion capable of elucidating the possible in actual reality, i.e. in the reality which is acting. It is a special awareness, a sharp consciousness, which includes the memory of the present situation. It can remind us of the archaeology of Michel Foucault, and that perspective is pertinent to our time, because it is inevitably preparing philosophy and politics to think what remains of Gaza and a little later to think what remains of Israel, i.e. what remains of an immolation of pure proletarians and what remains of the will to exterminate in a colonial state.




1) Newton in Kai T. Erikson ed., In Search of Common Ground. Conversations with Erik H. Erikson & Huey P. Newton, New York: Norton, 1973, pp. 31-32.
2) The role of an “anthropology” and the structure of the “exigence critique” is not developed very much in the introduction to the project of the Centre. The original goes:
La simple critique serait probablement trop courte et inopérante face à la domination quasiment sans partage de l’anthropologie. C’est pourquoi notre insistance sur la philosophie […] voudrait marquer avant tout ceci : ce qui nous paraît aujourd’hui nécessaire […] c’est de prendre en compte de façon rigoureuse ce que nous appellerons la co-appartenance essentielle […] du philosophique et du politique. [Simple criticism would probably be too short and ineffective in the face of the almost unchallenged domination of anthropology. This is why our insistence on philosophy […] would like to emphasize above all this: what seems necessary to us today […] is to take into account rigorously what we will call the essential co-belonging […] of the philosophical and the political.]
    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Rejouer le politique, Paris: Galilée, 1981, pp. 17-18. A slightly different English edition is: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ed: Simon Sparks, Retreating the Political, Routledge (UK), 1997.
    The anthropological question here may concern the fact, that community as a phenomenon can be analysed by both, anthropology and philosophy… Sociology could also have been included in these remarks.
3) The Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political was opened in 1980.
4) Jean-Luc Nancy, “La communauté désœuvrée”, in Aléa #4, Spring 1983. Expanded to the book: La communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986. English Translation: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Ed: Peter Connor, Trans:Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhny, University of Minnesota Press (US/UK), 1991. See also: Jean-Luc Nancy, Etre singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996, La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001.La communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014.
5) Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, Trans: Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press (US), 1988.
6) See: Georges Bataille, “La notion de dépense”, in La Critique sociale # 7, January 1933. English Translation: Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess, Ed. & Trans: Allan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press (US/UK), 1985, pp.116-30.
pp.251-254.
7) In Search of Common Ground, op. cit. p. 35. – An internationalist deduction from the on-going anti-imperialist wars of liberation was rather frequent among revolutionaries in the 60s and the 70s. In French it was called “la position tiers-mondiste”. The most important revolutionary leader in Europe at the time, Ulrike Meinhof, also deduced that sort of internationalism from her anti-imperialist views. Cf. her “Letzte texte“ published by the “Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener in Westeuropa“, June 1976.
    I have not commented upon the problem of revolutionary leadership during the 1970s: About the mentioned “position tiers-mondiste”, I think that typical formulations can be found in Partisans, Paris mai-juin 1968 #42, theme “Ouvriers étudiants un seul combat”, published by the editor François Maspero. But there was also a juridical discussion going on: In the Spring of 1978 a group of European lawyers published a special issue of the magazine Actes in Paris with the title “L’Europe de la repression ou L’insécurité de l’état” concerning the situation in Germany, Italy, Ireland and France.
    Concerning the German revolutionaries and the RAF, the real militant positions are Italian: Cf. the book “Un raggio di luce del regno delle tenebre – La guerriglia urbana nella Germania Federale”, written by a group of students and researchers from the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Genova, June 1976. And the following even more militant publication: “Onore alla compagna Ulrike Meinhof, Onore ai compagni caduti a Entebbe”, published by the Comitato internazionale di difesa dei detenuti politici in Europa”, September 1976. In 1977 the French daily Libération in Paris published a large “special edition” with a lot of important documents: “L’affaire allemande. De l’enlèvement de H.M. Schleyer à la mort de Andreas Baader”. Finally, 20 years later, in 1997, the TAZ Journal in Berlin published an updated collection of documents and analyses: “20 Jahre Deutscher Herbst”, also very important.
8) Jean-François Lyotard, “Sensus communis”, in Le cahier du collège international de philosophie, Paris: Osiris, #3, March 1987, pp.67-88. The text was republished in French in Cahiers Confrontation# 7, editions Aubier, 1989, with the title “Après le sujet qui vient“, after the coming subject. A third publication was in the posthumous collection of texts with the Marx-Proudhon title Misère de la philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 2000. In this edition the title was expanded to “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’état naissant”. English Translation: Jean Francois Lyotard, “Sensus communis”, Trans: Marian Hobson and Geoff Bennington, in: Andrew Benjamin ed., Judging Lyotard, Routledge (London and New York), 1992, p. 4.
9) Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans: Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press (US), 1993, p. 86.
10) Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Trans: Daniel Heller-Roazon, Zone Books (NY), 1999, p.47
11) Giorgio Agamben, ibid, pp. 37-39.
12) Per Aage Brandt (editing and translation from French into Danish), “Markov og Babel” [Markov and Babel] – Samtale med Michel Serres [Conversation with Michael Serres), in:Semiotik, Copenhagen, # 5-6, 1983, pp. 136-144.
13) Cf. Benveniste's theory of “instances de discours”, which Agamben comments on and expounds in the §§3.15-3.18 and §4.1 of Remnants of Auschwitz :The Witness and the Archive. It is Benveniste who has understood the uniqueness in a “locutor's” actualisation of language in words. Cf. his Problèmes de linguistique générale, pp.251-254.
14) Cf. my “Ondt værre: Et vidnesbyrd ud af arten”, in 2007, Passage Tidsskrift For Litteratur Og Kritik.
15) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Books, (London), 2006, pp.275-6.
16) Hannah Arendt, “Fernsehespräch mit Günter Gaus”, in: Ich will verstehen, Piper (München), 1996, pp. 44-70.
17) Giorgio Agamben, La lingua che resta: Il tempo, la storia, il linguaggio, Einaudi (Italy), 2024.


Giorgio Agamben
La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990. English 1993: The Coming Community.

Quel che resta di Auschwitz – L’archivio e il testimone(Homo sacer III), Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. English 1999:Remnants of Auschwitz – The Witness and the Archive.

La lingua che resta – Il tempo, la storia, il linguaggio,Torino: Einaudi, 2024.

Anonymous (in fact Jacques Camatte)

“Origine et fonction de la forme parti”, Invariance, Paris, # 1, année 1, Janvier-Mars 1968.

Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Books, London, 1994.

“Fernsehespräch mit Günter Gaus”, in: Ich will verstehen, München: Piper, 1996, pp. 44-70

Georges Bataille
“La notion de dépense”, in La Critique sociale # 7, January 1933.

Émile Benveniste
Problèmes de linguistique générale, Gallimard, Paris, 1966.

Maurice Blanchot
La communauté inavouable, Paris: Minuit, 1983. English 1988:The Unavowable Community.

Per Aage Brandt (editing and translation from French into Danish)

“Markov og Babel” [Markov and Babel] – Samtale med Michel Serres [Conversation with Michael Serres), in: Semiotik, Copenhagen, # 5-6, 1983, pp. 136-144.

Kai T. Erikson ed.,
In Search of Common Ground. Conversations with Erik H. Erikson & Huey P. Newton, New York: Norton, 1973.

Carsten Juhl
“Ondt værre: Et vidnesbyrd ud af arten” [Matters worse. A testimony out of the species], in: Passage, Aarhus, # 58, Winter 2007, pp. 53-56.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy ed.

Rejouer le politique, Paris: Galilée, 1981. Travaux du centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.

Le retrait du politique, Paris: Galilée, 1983. Travaux du centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.

Jean-François Lyotard
“Sensus communis”, in Le cahier du collège international de philosophie, Paris: Osiris, # 3, March 1987, pp.67-88. English: in Andrew Benjamin ed., Judging Lyotard, London and New York, 1992. The text was republished in French inCahiers Confrontation# 7, editions Aubier, 1989, with the title “Après le sujet qui vient“, after the coming subject. A third publication was in the posthumous collection of texts with the Marx-Proudhon title Misère de la philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 2000. In this edition the title was expanded to “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’état naissant”…

Jean-Luc Nancy
“La communauté désœuvrée”, in Aléa# 4, Spring 1983. Expanded to the book: La communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986.

Etre singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996

La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001.

La communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014.

4.

Peter Weiss wrote the journal entry below two months after a near fatal heart attack in Stockholm, the day after hearing of the death of one of his oldest friends. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!, the source of his central repeating refrain, already articulates a type of life that persists beyond or in spite of death, a life-in-death or death-in-life that disdains the reduction of life itself to the merely biological vitality of an isolated human organism. But that those who live on despite death in Weiss’s texts are not kings but alcholics, the forgotten, the prematurely killed, is an expression of more than just hostility to the hierarchical thinking within which conceptions of ‘immortality’ in Western thought have generally been confined. An articulation of his belief in the centrality of (expanded) class struggle to all forms of human social life, his long litany to the dead, his partisanship and praise for them, is also partisanship for the upsurge of living experience against the hegemony of denial. As an act of disinhibition, his text opposes the deadening of the social senses that turns progressive optimism into a necropolitics all of its own.

– Danny Hayward, June 2025

1.
Today we are tasked with building and rebuilding a world in common, not only in the ruins of European civilization—with its fateful employment of universality through the enterprises of Christianity and enlightenment—but also of the internationalist traditions of modernity.
    To further this task requires a fidelity to the maxim: كلشي مشترك بينا.."Everything is in common between us" a recent translation by a Palestinian comrade, of Omnia sunt communia “all things are to be held in common”. This, a popular communist slogan that originated in the latin translation of The Acts of the Apostles, marks for us a radical calling. Let us seize the now of this shared moment in time. Let us break the bonds asunder of the forces of annihilation today: let us cast away their yoke from us.
    In New Year Étrennes one will enjoy a certain charting of a way forward and a way back—“a return that is utterly new”. If time’s commensurations are now stripped bear as but an enterprise of the flag’s conquest, our friend asks: what could it mean to embrace a commonality in time that would affirm its “spinning, wobbling, abundant, aberrant” durations as the world’s shared, yet immeasurable, breath?

The Étrennes is available here


 
warmly,

The Children of Cain

2.
Dear friends,

In the recent Languages and Peoples discussion and launch at Mayday Rooms in London we took up the publications task of approaching the possibilities of an oppositional displacement of the nation-state and sovereignty by more diasporic and fugitive modalities of ‘hereness’. My intention is only to thread together some of my notes as well as other observations and questions that were raised during the meeting as a contribution to an ongoing conversation.
    London is simultaneously the ideal site for such a discussion and also a place where the efforts of embodying such displacements seem to dissipate. Ideal, since its heterogeneous mix of structurally racialised peoples and global languages, jargons and their constitutive palimpsest of (non)identities seem to make the post-Imperial metropolis a confirmation of the insubstantiality of languages and peoples. A point of dissipation, or disorientation, since in the midst of the potentially convivial babel of London the possibility of a non-national sense of belonging can evaporate into a neutralised placelessness. This placelessness, rather than offering a line of flight from national belonging at times seems to only better set up the uprooted socius for moulding into a nation.
    These two tendencies awkwardly reinforce one another. The moulded nation is both omnipresent in London, with its concentration of the traditional institutions of state power and vacuous Royal ritual, as well as being starkly absent and continuously uprooted by trans-national migration and capital flows. The proletarianised, service-based grind of day-to-day economy and the transnational forces of capital, the related intensive commodification of city-space and stark extremities of wealth and poverty, are the focal points around which the city and most of its inhabitants rotate. Yet, all of this is the capital (in both senses of the term) of the UK and its political economy. Still, a certain hollowness is attached to both operations—a sense pervades that both machines are running on empty.
  Languages and Peoples is useful here in advancing the notion that the contradictory interpellation of languages, peoples and nation-states could be approached as a kind of knot. Or, perhaps, given the intertwining of these entities in the shape of war, the genocide in Gaza, and the likelihood of a greater, global war, as an ever tightening noose around the present. A noose that is tightened through the bloody opposition of global forces; its vitality sourced in the atrocities of biopolitical, capitalist modernity.
    As we turned to the problematic of destroying this noose, an emphasis was placed upon Agamben’s ideas of a ‘break’ or ‘interruption’. It’s worth noting that this is how his theoretical exposition develops both in this essay and more widely in his work. Such ruptures serve to make visible what is taken for granted, what seems to simply provide the invisible framework for existence. This is done in Languages and Peoples through what Walter Benjamin termed a dialectical image, wherein the past comes into an explosive juxtaposition with the present and illuminates its conflicts and contradictions, as they ‘come to light for an instant’. Agamben juxtaposes the practice, unearthed by Alice Beck-Ho in the book The Princes of Jargon, of the usage of jargon or argot by the Roma and the associated ‘dangerous classes’ of the middle ages to delineate a people illegible to the nation-state. This usage of language embodies a certain kind of de-subjectification, an elision of the identity posited by political authority between the substantial identity of a people and language as a marker of this identity. Such argot is the fugitive use of language. In Agamben’s reading this lesson ‘of a class of outlaws’ reveals just what language is—a jargon that is put to use—and also reveals that a people is far less substantial than the grandeur of national language would suppose. That this is, ultimately, a fiction of the state. For Agamben, this strips the nation-state of the substantial identity of its language and People, the glorious shroud laid over more mundane elements such as territory, blood and soil, population, etc.
    It was noticeable how this discussion around the possibilities of anti-national communities occurred in a site that holds an incredible archive that bears witness to attempts by anarchists and communists to construct such a politics through the workers’ movement, the international working class. Whether or not this political subjectivity is completely emptied of significance for undoing the nation-state remains an open question, even if the prognosis of the decline of the ‘old’ workers’ movement seems to suggest this is the case. Dabartis’ focus on ‘hereness’—with part of the genealogy being that of the Labor Bund—seems in itself an intervention responding to the decline of the classic political identities of the working class. As such, the thought and practice of ‘hereness’ opens towards urgent speculations on what internationalism may look like in the here and now. A here and now where the majority of the global population are proletarianised without the positive accreditation of the workers’ movement. So, this remains one of the central questions for anti-capitalist politics today. A question made even more urgent by the crisis ridden persistence of capitalism and the catastrophic spiral of environmental destruction and war it is now in. Perhaps, the concept of a diasporic ‘hereness’ is a way of thinking this without indulging in the search for the new, hegemonic political subject that the left loves so much. What remains open is just what such non-national communities would hinge upon, what form they might take beyond the circles of radical politics.
    Questions were raised about the role of images and the spectacle. Is it possible to see in ‘hereness’ a refusal of the logic of the image as some kind of propaganda or a spectacular ideal to be lived by proxy on a screen, or as a national mythology? It is worth noting how the far right utilised the capacity of reticular internet based communication to manifest a certain kind of political diaspora that has circulated its own ‘truths’ in the form of lies such as ‘the great replacement’. The Pepe the Frog meme, for instance, became a global signifier of multinational—obviously, not non-national— fascism. Is there a use of images, in opposition to this, that might be anti-national?
    This relationship between images, and their imagined communities, as political ‘strategy’ raises certain questions for ‘hereness’, in turn, conceived as a politics against abstraction. Might this, as was raised in discussion, lead to attempts to distinguish between an authentic ‘hereness’ and imagined communities that fail such a test? Does Agamben’s slightly mischievous use of the history of a ‘class of outlaws’ risk succumbing to a kind of militancy that would dismiss the supposedly inauthentic? How do diasporic communities of people of colour fit into the problematic of hereness? Also, might a diasporic ‘hereness’ not be something more emergent through events, conflicts and chance as much as overtly anti-national militancy? Questions were also raised about the role of affectivity in both language and ‘hereness.’ Is the use of language, as a collective subversion, an expressivity that carries an affective charge that might not just reflect politics but also embody what is at stake? And what affects circulate around the question of the nation-state within capitalism and its alternatives? Might defeat, dread and depression combine with their passional opposites in what has been termed an ‘affective class’ in the articulation of ‘hereness’?

Best wishes,

Anacharsis Cloots Deputation.

PS.

We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s never far from us.

 - Ernst Bloch, ‘The Fall into the Now’, Traces.

I read a story, apparently of Eastern European Jewish origin, that seems to have some bearing on the questions raised by Languages and Peoples, both Giorgio Agamben’s essay and the afterword: In the prayer house of a village, a rabbi asks his friends what they would wish for if an angel appeared, since the angel can grant any wish. One wishes for a daughter and not a son, one wishes his toothache would go away, another wishes for a son and not a daughter and the rabbi wishes for the many coloured leaves of autumn to never fade. There is also a beggar, present only through the charity of the rabbi, who says: ‘I wish to be the ruler of a great, wealthy empire. As emperor I have many palaces and castles and am adored by my people. I have one particularly luxurious palace, adorned in flags and filled with treasure and in this I happily sit and pass just laws, day after day. Then, there is a war and disaster strikes. My armies are defeated, the people hate me, my enemies gather outside the palace. Stripping off my luxurious robes and crown, I escape and flee to another country where nobody knows me, free and unencumbered of my former role. Then, eventually, I find myself here.’ There is a shocked silence, then the rabbi laughs and says, ‘How curious, to wish all that again! And how empty your riches and power were. Is there anything you really wish for, now?’ And the beggar replies, ‘A shirt, this one is old and ragged’. And so, laughing, they give him a shirt.
    The philosopher Ernst Bloch, who tells a version of this story in his book Traces, describes the final twist in the tale as both a ‘bad joke’ and a sudden transition to the now, here in the present moment, in the prayer house. The shock of the beggar as ex-emperor is a transition to the messianic ‘Now as End’ in Bloch’s formulation. Perhaps, to elaborate on this in terms of hereness, a now wherein the riches, power and entitlements of a previous national identity—and nobody embodies this as much as a sovereign—are stripped away in the at times overwhelming actuality of here, where needs and desires have more immediacy. The beggar in the story is emblematic of such a relinquishing of the accoutrements of identity, sovereignty and by extension citizenship that such a shift entails. Almost an image of the stateless people Agamben discovers in the historical genesis of the Roma and their compatriots, the medieval ‘dangerous classes’, who undid national language with clandestine jargon and state identity with destituent ambiguity. The tale the beggar tells might in coded jargon be the tale of how to blur legibility as beggar, emperor or citizen of this or that nation. The story as a story—or parable, or even ‘bad joke’—suggests a use of language that opens out a perspective beyond that of it being used to affirm an identity, as national or otherwise. It also suggests the entanglement of living and thinking together, of the sheer materiality of hereness that might constitute a form-of-life. What is left for us is the question of just how such prosaic entanglements might also give rise to a hereness that challenges the nation-state. The forms these might take in the midst of the catastrophes of the present.

3.
Salut,

In Copenhagen, while planning a discussion at BCAB on the recent republication of Agamben's “Languages and Peoples”, with an afterword by Dabartis and Nieczytelne, I briefly raised the issue of the orientalist strands in the text. The core question was if the “Gypsies” as a stereotyped other, provide us only with a romanticized figure of salvation—especially when contrasted with the now collapsed figure of the international worker, as one comrade pointed out. Such concerns can be generalized to various figures and figurations of statelessness that we may seek when building foundations for a coming politics that is liberated from the nation-state, its People and Language, and the whole national order of things. Isn’t there a certain romanticism of the “outside” here that risks turning out both ethically and intellectually questionable?
    Thinking the matter through, I came across Carlo Salzani’s article “Agamben e gli zingari” (published in I filosofi e gli zingari by Leonardo Piasere & Gianluca Solla (eds.), 2018), in which he argues against those who accuse Agamben of romanticizing the oppressed by claiming that his treatment of Gypsies in “Languages and Peoples” is purely formal. Instead of a people or a figure, Salzani sees the Gypsies serving as a paradigm for Agamben, which—according to Agamben’s own definition—is purposed to “constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context” (“What Is a Paradigm?” in The Signature of All Things: On Method). As Salzani explains, the paradigm of Gypsies, combined with that of argot, is there simply to break the nexus Agamben recognizes “between the existence of language, grammar, people and state.” The point is in creating an interruption that could open a space for different experiences of language and political subjectivity. In other words, it is solely the otherness—and thereby not the essence(s)—of the Gypsies that constitutes the paradigm’s liberating potentiality. Salzani’s conclusion is that for Agamben the figure of the Gypsy only “appears in negative and remains hidden in the unknowability to which Western culture has condemned it.”
    “Languages and Peoples” was first published in 1990 in the magazine Luogo Comune under the title “Parole segrete del popolo senza luogo” (“Secret Words of People Without Place”). Its content is practically the same as in the version later published in the collection Means Without Ends—and now by Dabartis and Nieczytelne—with the exception of the last sentence that has been left out of those following . It goes: “The book of Alice Becker-Ho is not an essay on socio-linguistics, but a political manifesto.” At the first glimpse of her book this might not be especially manifest, but as Agamben explains early in his text: “Although Alice Becker-Ho maintains herself within the limits of her thesis, it is probable that she is perfectly aware of having laid a mine—which is ready to explode at any given time—at the very focal point of our political theory.” In other words, it is left to Agamben—and perhaps to us too—to seize the opportunity for theorizing. As Agamben explains the matter himself: “What is at stake here is not to evaluate the scientific accuracy of this thesis [stemming from Becker-Ho] but rather not to let its liberating power slip out of our hands.” Becker-Ho’s claim that “Gypsies are our Middle Ages preserved; dangerous classes of an earlier epoch” might be scientifically questionable, as Salzani also notes, but as Agamben operates in the politico-philosophical sphere that’s not really his problem.
    But what about the romantic temptation towards the “outside” then? Does Salzani’s reading provide us, too, a nice pretext to avoid it, if we only show a bit more sensitivity in framing it? Or should we instead accept some romanticism in our desire for something else than the repulsive “inside” we have to face and, again, just try to show some concern in how to manifest it? Either way, the question appears as a political one in its core, but at the same time it leaves an aporia: it doesn’t really matter what one chooses, as long as the choice is realized in the right way. As true as this might be, it is hardly satisfying.
    Instead of trying to untangle the knot, let’s just cut through it: we cannot really live through “others”, but only ourselves. However, could we, positing ourselves against the “inside”, eventually recover our own otherness? Indeed, if we are to follow Agamben’s own premise that “all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot”, then let’s swallow the consequences and start acting accordingly. This must be central for the “condition of co-unbelonging”, to follow the witty formulation in the afterword of the Dabartis and Nieczytelne publication. In my reading, this togetherness without belonging (understood as being the propertyof a place) fosters a community that reduces the importance of the origins of its members by emphasizing their shared existence here and now. The subsequent questions the authors pose are mainly of a technical nature, like: “How can we develop a truly common way of understanding each other? How can we nurture and strengthen our commitment to our co-unbelonging? How do we make sure that there exists a strong feedback loop between our diasporas and localities?”
    Allow me, to finish, to seize the last one. In the third part of the afterword, the authors refute the “local radical milieus” as “imagined communities” that create a false sense of belonging to a “movement” and opt instead for “various radical gatherings, congresses, festivals and book fairs”. I recognize the parochial tendency that local milieus can often have and understand how refreshing the international gatherings can be, but in themselves they hardly constitute a less imagined community in terms of a movement that would have tangible effects on the conditions of everyday life. Especially, when we return back to where we came from.
    As a historical parallel, the setting resembles the somewhat general conclusion made when the so-called anti-globalization cycle was about to reach its end, that is, in the second half of 2001, according to my chronology (the summit protests of course continued, but the sense of a real opening disappeared at the G8 meeting in Genova and the aftermaths of 9/11 sealed it permanently). It became clear that despite all the fun and games—and some successes too—the event-hopping wasn't in itself able to provide considerable changes in the conditions of our quotidian lives. And without these changes the “movement” would turn increasingly holographic—as I guess it did. The following frame, dominated by the global anti-war mobilization, had somehow even less space for generalizable considerations about feedback loops between different strata. In this regard, the current pro-Palestine movement seems to have much more potential. The authors of the afterward don’t fail to notice that.
    The Palestine movement can – and at least, occasionally, surely does – romanticize the "other". However, what I think is significant in it, is the relationship it manages to show to hereness—a quality I found missing in the so-called anti-globalization movement. This relationship is manifested in local actions such as occupations, that for me show an understanding of the interconnectedness of "there" and "here". For any real solution there (beyond the states and their numbers), a lot has to have already changed elsewhere—including here.

Well, I’ll leave you with these fragmented thoughts.

All the best,
  n.n.

4. 
The Palestinian Solidarity Occupations began, in Poland, on the 24th of May, at the tail-end of of the Student Intifada’s global occupation movement. The fact that they did was a small miracle. One occupation would have honestly already been enough, but there were three, across three different cities! Poland isn’t really attuned to the rhythm of global uprisings, so the appearance of the Palestinian movement was a surprise even—or maybe especially—for the most politically active people. It was a shattering of an illusion: that of a disconnected Poland, a periphery where nothing happens. While some people still argue against the occupations from a peripheral position—arguing that Polish universities aren’t as involved in the slaughter of Palestinians as American or Western European ones—I think that if one thing is clear, it’s that such eventsas Palestinian resistance call for a fidelity that doesn’t respect geopolitical bias. Being against genocide has to be absolute and doesn’t deal in relativities. Such an absoluteness was the moving sprit of these occupations.
    Breaking with a trite localism—that some activists still espouse—what was practiced was an ethical commitment that shattered the distinction between what is local and global. It’s not a matter of “thinking globally, acting locally”, but a manner of acting that cannot but be global. By this globality, I mean less a spatial expansiveness than a politics that performs its interventions on the highest levels and intensities. For instance, occupations’ delegates making appearances in MSZ (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and in Sejm (Lower House of the Polish Parliament) to pressure Universities from above. As well as pressure from below: taking part in international BDS conferences, and the occupations’ capacity to create a kind of “organic internationalism”, by being a place for encounters with Student Intifada participants from other countries. Thus they demonstrated their continuity with Palestine, in that their locality was in fact a potentiality to being global.


Of course this doesn’t mean that the occupations weren’t constrained by their local circumstances. There were still factors such as: the lack of a tradition of radical organizing; the relatively small pool of potential participants; and more general differences in character of Polish Universities compared to Western ones. The occupations were noticeably “less militant” and the path that they took was for the most part one of dialogue with the university authorities, in hopes of calling their bluff when it comes to their own proclaimed values—such as the institutional policies of being apolitical and that of academic freedom. Only the Warsaw occupation decided on a point-of-no-return-escalation. This took the form ofa road blockade of the main university campus—which forced the hand of the authorities, who scandalously called the cops, welcoming them on University grounds. The occupants were unfortunately kicked out during the second day of the blockade, unable to mount a force sufficient to resist the police. Meanwhile, the occupations in Kraków and Wrocław won some concessions. These included university rectors issuing statements on the Israeli genocide in Gaza (although never actually using the word “genocide” in them)ethics commissions being created and the allocation of spots and funding for Palestinian students.
    To be clear, the apparent lack of militancy isn’t necessarily something that must be looked down upon. True militancy sometimes doesn’t look “militant”but apart from that it’s also a matter of discussion to what extent we should emulate the tactics of Western movements. As I heard from one occupant:“they (activists and militants) for too long have thought that they’re like the West”, when in fact theyfaced different obstacles which a hasty escalation wouldn’t help with. In fact the “lack of militancy” could be instead viewed as opening a terrain for other targets, namely the quite successful mapping of the institutions’ political and legal grey areas. This enabled them to gain ground from a position of relative weakness.


Ultimately the occupations posed a number of important political questions. How to further a politics that obstinately places itself in-between a global protest wave and a localized event? How, while being true to transnational ethical commitments, to act meaningfully where one resides? How not to give in to mere imitation of western politics, but instead to develop political intelligence, sensibility and strategies that are effective even when the tide of struggle is low while speaking the same truth?
    The occupations helped us to imagine a politics of “co-unbelonging”, as we formulated in the recent publication with Dabartis. To inhabit our peripheral localities while refusing toresign ourselves to peripherality and thus to impotence and oblivion as the plaything of bigger fish. Whether it means developing ways of thinking that go beyond the Western paradigm and its historical imputations; refusing our helpless geopolitical positionings; or taking up global fights in our own unique ways—the important thing is to build up our capacity to act; to seize an agency that is still denied to us.

Tłumacz Niespokojn

1.
Marina was involved from the beginning in conversations on the idea of Obecność. She provided erudite and well-informed advice on the concepts and ideas involved in our early efforts to “circulate autonomous forms.” As well as showing gratitude for her role in this and as a contributor to Obecność, this letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party.

The network I encountered through and as Marina lacked cult leadership and master pedagogues, political cliques, and intellectual mafias fighting over territories and prestige as the officiated representatives of class and political interests. The bonds Marina persistently cultivated with me—and with so many others—can be evoked as a form of political belonging that echoes Marx’s account of the historical party: a network of comrades dispersed throughout the class struggle. This entails a correspondence between militants brought together on a common and equal ground to share strategies of revolt and their concrete, historical, developments as lived experiences. The historical party, as Marx noted, “is no school.”

Despite our correspondence almost never taking any public form, and being valorized as such, Marina remained profoundly committed to our decidedly nonprofessional exchanges of thought. These came to center on contemporary social movements, questions of class composition, and autonomy. Even while her life in London became increasingly busy, grinding and absorbing, Marina held a magnificent ability to steal time for such conspiracies. A theft, I’m well aware, that could only be consistently perpetrated with the help of her friends, her partner, union comrades and fellow travelers of the historical party. A few years ago she introduced me to the concept of obstinacy—a notion of historical agency within conditions of dependency—in Negt and Kluge, and Marina’s path of class struggle evoked a great deal of this. One of the many expressions of this was in her militant commitment to the non and para institutional correspondences of the historical party.

Finally, I begin to ask myself and ask you what the particular significance of our historical party is? For me the correspondence with Marina, as one of my most significant bases of belonging to the party—which I now share in various ways with some of you—has been integral to thinking and practicing a communist form of life. A way of thinking and knowing the world that is radically situated in the concrete positionality of the historical totality. What I’m trying to say here is that the correspondence form that Marina cultivated, in its capacity to welcome intimacy and the personal, uniquely situated theorizations of the world within the concrete instances of their historical compositions. It is often noted that there is no theorizing the totality outside the totality, but it is far less emphasized in much of the Marxist communist camp—in which Marina remained firmly situated—that this in turn means navigating the domain of affect and the haptic particularities of singular lives in their struggles. Marina was critical of the misogynistic and didactic impulses that inform certain imperatives to gain an absolutizing knowledge of the object of reality (mechanistic periodizations), so as to liberate these theoretical imperatives from such limitations. She was equally critical towards the new paradigms of institutional care, which she saw as amounting to “the ruthless denial of political questions in favor of an etiolated ethics of care that somehow always affirms market subjectivity.” The correspondence form of the historical party, by contrast, is properly speaking dialectical. It is knowledge as a concrete-abstraction and as a violent negation directed toward the totality of capitalist determinations in historical revolts. As Anthony Iles aptly recounts in his own memorial and celebration:

“For Marina, everything was up for scrutiny and transformation. She believed and practiced that to think and speak about something was to transform it, whether ideas or relations, requiring a responsibility to actively refashion the object until it not only gave up its essence and name, but further until it was rendered completely plastic.”

Marina guided me over the years as I drifted deep into the noise of life with all its miseries, its beauties and truths. We theorized together the division of labor in the kitchens I worked at in Phily, a knowledge that would integrally help me as I began to cultivate the skills to organize a hospitality sector solidarity network with friends in Lithuanian. We broadly conspired together about the idea of communism, certainly not a world where all labor becomes artistic! Marina tirelessly helped me with my writing, as someone who was not connected to a university environment. Her incisive edits, references and always critical summations were integral to my ability to do militant research all of these years.

To conclude for now, I share a passage from our comrade Andreas’ memorial:

“No matter how painful it is to continue without one of our shining lights, as Goldman declared: ‘No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living … He lives in us for ever and ever.’ Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.”

Also see:

The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt, by Mute Collective

Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants

Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier

2. 
“Amidst the chaos of economic crisis, geopolitical realignment, climate change and state failure, emerged the conditions to foster rebellion. The prior decades had eroded the legitimacy of the parties of reform. By the beginning of the forties, some form of mass protests, riots, and armed movements had erupted on every continent. [...] Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character. The first communes to rise out of the wreckage were in the Levant (2041) and in the Andes (2043). These insurrections became models for communization as more and more nation-states fell into disarray. The first commune of East and Central Asia emerged in Xinjiang in 2045, and the first commune of South Asia emerged in Chennai in 2047. The fall of China and India, enormous forces in Asian politics and economics, marked the end of nation-state power on the continent.”

Recorded on September 20, 2067, in Brooklyn, and released on May 1st, 2024 during a demo in Krakow, the broadsheet “Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant” wishfully announces news of the future as though it were the present: Palestine liberated and global empire abolished. We publish this broadsheet amidst rapidly unfolding events in Palestine and beyond. The emergent international solidarity movement, a response to the unthinkable horrors and catastrophes of the latest imperial genocide, is an outburst of radiant paths of autonomy and international solidarity. We can only hope that our reality meets and outpaces the time-lines of O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s sci-fi account. 

The content of the broadsheet was taken from the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Published by Common Notions Press the broadsheet is a collaboration.

Print copies are currently available in Poland at Spoldzielnia Ogniwo (Krakow) and with Niecztelne Illegibles, in Copenhagen at the Book Cafe, as well as Luna6, Vilnius. It will soon be available at 56a London. For a digital copy scroll down, to pick up your own copies get in touch!

3.
Obecność circulates a new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] by the Prague-based Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. It is accompanied with a reflection by member Joe Grim Feinberg on the release of the Declaration as part of an action with Der Bund on May 1st in Krakow. In the following he explores the questions this performative rehearsal of autonomy raises on the relation between states and diasporas generally.

A band of us descended on Krakow, to join the city’s May 1st march. This was specifically to join its Jewish bloc, organized by elements close to the Jewish Labor Bund. The latter is a historically monumental force of Diaspora leftism in Europe, recently revived. We traveled from Vilnius, Berlin, London, and Prague. Why? To say that Diaspora is here. Do, דאָ. And it is marching forward. And it is not just about Jews.

May 1st is the world’s day to celebrate resistance, the day of all the workers of the world. We marched beside the Palestine solidarity bloc, saying: Diaspora is all over the world.

We’re not floating on clouds in the sky or in some faraway place that claims to be our home. Like the last words of the Yiddish partisan song “Zog nit keynmol”: mir zaynen do. We’re here. We are here and other people are there in Israel (the occupied territories). We refuse to let them justify their being there by promising to make us be there too. We aren’t there. We’re here. And some of us here prepared a “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.” We announced this at an event after the march and released a video recording made by the clandestine committee that prepared the declaration. With this declaration, made on International Workers Day, we wanted to make it plain: we aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world.

Diaspora means: our home is where we are. Some of us may force states to secure our rights to be where we are. Some have to struggle against states that deny those rights. But the independence of Diaspora means we need no state to justify our being here. But why should Diaspora be independent? Diaspora is inherently opposed to separation, except under extreme circumstances. But the circumstances are extreme. Israel does not allow Diaspora to be Diaspora. Additionally, it makes Palestinians into a growing diaspora without granting them the right to independence. By declaring independence, we declare the autonomy of Palestinians and Jews everywhere, no matter what the states say.

However, declaring independence is, in itself, never a solution. It is only a way of more adequately posing a problem. The problem is to figure out how to be where we are and how to make it so others can be where they are: it is the question of autonomy. And this means being more than just here. We are here, mir zaynen do, but “do” is a kind of here that is also still there. We have to remember the there that is a part of here. But we should never be there without also being here. We are here and there, where we are and where we might be.

The Bundist ideal of doikayt was not imposed to keep people where they were, or to enclose people in an exclusive here, as if it were enough for them, and as if it were for them alone. Doikayt was invoked to let people dream without having to flee. To let them take trips to the clouds so that they could build their lands a little higher when they came back down.

There’s nothing wrong with taking trips to the clouds or excursions to promised lands, as long as we remember that promises are only promises and clouds are only clouds. As long as we still judge our clouds, whatever fantastical shape they take, by how much they rain. And as long as we still judge our lands by the life that they allow to grow on them.

Diaspora, etymologically, means the spreading of seeds. Seeds grow in soil but they scatter again. They know centers, stems and trunks, not borders. Diaspora has many centers. We sometimes call them “Jerusalems.” Salonika was once “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.” One place that definitely is no where’s Jerusalem today is Jerusalem. Perhaps someday Jerusalem could become the Jerusalem of Palestine, but it isn’t yet, and because of what Israel has done to it, it hasn’t been for a long time now.

Diaspora is here and Diaspora is there too. Israel and Palestine are Diaspora in equal measure. The more Palestinians are exiled, the more Israel becomes a land of exile, and no structure built on exile can be anybody’s home. But if Exile gives way to Diaspora, where people can be where they are, people can begin to be at home again.

Meanwhile, we’ll be building up our own Diaspora here. Not just for Jews. Jewishness is one of many paths to Diaspora. Jewishness is a legacy some of us claim because it is a way of being here without being only here—which is to say, without being whatever the rulers of this place declare that here should be. Jewishness does not have to be about being Jewish. It can be about not having to be fully and exclusively any one thing. The nation-states declare themselves complete and exclusive and pure, and the Jewish legacy answers, alongside other diasporic peoples: “No you aren’t, because we’re still here.”

This is also the legacy of the workers’ movement. The nation-states worship at the altar of the Bourgeoisie and Capital, which makes nations in its image. These states forget that they have also made workers, which they kicked out of Eden. They declare their Eden complete and pure without the workers, but the workers’ movement says: “No you aren’t complete, because we’re not done, and we’re still here.” Mir zaynen do.

4.
It was surprising for us all to hear word of the sudden appearance of a new movement of autonomy in Latvia. Well, surprising since over the past decade of movement activity in the Baltic territories, Latvia has been particularly inert. Besides an older initiative that holds a little space where Zapatista coffee is sold—an isolated tendency running on a seemingly indiscernible impetus from the past—and faint murmurs of Tiqqun followers on a farm, there has been little comradely connection to note.

The new grouping was in part mobilized into action by the recent genocide unfolding in Gaza. They speak of this as an “unprecedented protest for Latvia” with “many new comrades” joining the movement (you can read their full founding letter here). Yet, more than merely a spontaneous response to Gaza, one can discern the roots of this movement in older organizing precedents, found in Riga’s counterculture camp. This was a kind of Eastern European dissident infused artistic bohemia centered around entities like the infamous bar, bookshop, and press Bolderaja. While drawing from the countercultures’ infrastructures (both material and intellectual) the new composition marks an exciting break with them in grounding itself on a politics that sets its goals around more global and radical questions than the immediate existential task of living freely in your daily life. But rather than foreseeing this as a conflict of approaches, one can only hope that these two tendencies continue to learn from one another. That is, achieve their respective goals of connecting the region to international revolutionary movements, while developing new, more effective, strategies for truly practicing the kinds of autonomy the counterculture flirts with in its more fantastical, short-lived, expressions.

The book fair itself was well organized and attracted comrades from around the region and even a handful from far outside it. One can only hope that this will be the first of many fairs in Riga to come. The only critical commentary to note was that the urban tour of “leftist history”, informally organized by a few comrades, omitted the participation of Jews in the city’s radical history and even, alongside Roma, their very existence. That is, until the very end of the tour when we happened to stumble across a Roma museum which prompted our guides to note in passing the former existence of both of these minorities. The omission feels significant at a moment when we are fighting against a zionist ideology that is fundamentally founded on this very erasure of Jewish diasporic histories.

1.
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. The following notes are from the introduction to this discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjancencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto, contemporary refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilna. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.

Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.

Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.

Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.

2. 
Looting is now availble at Hopscotch Berlin. Looting is also circulating at Biblio Cinètika and La Social in Barcelona. You can also get copies at Luna6 and Eureka in Vilnius. In March, friends from Vienna continued the Looting conversation in Europe with editor Jose Rosales in an event called Looting and Totality.

3. 
A new group of anarcho-syndicalists in Riga, Latvia has released an open call to join them May 24–26 for the first ever anarchist bookfair in the city. Call is here: https://www.anarchistfederation.net/anarchist-bookfair-in-riga-latvia/

4.
In the process of translating doikayt into our own here(s) and now(s), the question of what it essentially conveys and what aspects of this conveyance we wish to politically emphasize sharply arose. Whereas in the Lithuanian translation we decided on “the present” as indicative of the “here and now” of struggle from where one stands, the Polish translation wavered between this —obecnosc — and powszechnosc ["commoness"], which placed emphasis on the outcomes of this hereness as a making-in-common of the many against both the unifying territoriality of the nation-state and the separations imposed by capital. Initially taking a similar course as the Lithuanian, a critical question arose on the Finnish translation.

The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.

In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.

Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.

Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:

1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).

Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.

And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, we can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.

Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.

1.
A few years ago the idea of doikayt (hereness) was seeded in a conversation between a few friends on autonomy and the politics of its inheritance in our movements. Historically conceived by Eastern European jews to enact the “we” of political existence as a practice of multiplicity and immanence against the genocidal imperative of the nation-state. We were struck by its resonance with the forms of life being conceptualized against this very genocidal supremacy by Palestinians and other stateless peoples today. And asked:

“Do we need to invent new concepts today in the way the Bund invented doykayt as encapsulating an affirmative desire for a life in common and fighting fascism at the same time. Can we also look into various histories to find and reclaim these ways of conceiving a common life? How can we start thinking further and putting into play those concepts? We, as autonomists, as communists, as anarchists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, as those who are interested in a world-in-common, a world of a here-and-now, a world-in-a-revolutionary becoming. What is it that we need to invent, create, recover and what is the need for it, what moves us to create it. And what is that revolution or even revolutionary organization when it is centered at the level of a form of life?”

Obecność is an invitation to join this conversation, to contribute to the urgent need of circulating and propagating a “life in common” and “fighting a facism” that risks now, perhaps more than ever, the destruction of our world, the destruction of Palestinian life—a destruction we must see more broadly as the threat of the erasure of anti-imperialist life in general.

Tämänhetkisyys is a research organ, a circulator, and a mender between autonomous forms. More than a distributor or producer of research, Dabartis can be approached as an effort circulate autonomy in its myriad forms. Its name, translated and transfigured in its encounters, will be shaped by those that join it—evading capture as one value, signifier, need or territory.

2. 
What form does political belonging take for those expelled from the dominant nomos of the nation-state? While Dabartis was prompted by the particular strategy of hereness as response to this question, history will tell us that the very idea of the commons – understood as a stateless practice of the earth’s inhabitation – was articulated by those vastly excluded from the state. Starting from this thesis, we call for a response to “Looting”, a booklet that features a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe,  Rinaldo Walcott and Vicky Osterweil (mod) Editors: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales.

The contributors’ see Looting as more than an isolated tactical practice, but as the expression of “black socialities” antipolitics. Destituting capital’s violent imposition of need as a “laboratory of managed depletion” looting gives expression to forms of life in absolute antagonism to the modern institution of private property and the civil subject of politics. Through looting, the contributors open a conversation on how this schism with the dominant topos of politics could be conceptualized as a destituent practice of communism. Against a restitutional politics: reappropriating what was unjustly seized through an alternative measure of state making; the authors explore destitution as a qualitative transformation in our very understanding of the self as property.

Dabartis is circulating copies of “Looting” in Europe and we call for groups and individuals to respond to the booklet. If you would like to pick up a copy for your infoshop, social center, bookshop or for personal use, please get in touch. You can also find copies at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and more locations soon. 

3.
Activities began with a screening that Niecztelne (Illegibles) hosted at the Autonomous Book Fair last September in Wrocław, Poland. The film, Sashko Protyah’s 100% OFF (2022) looks at looting movements in Mariupol during the Russian siege in 2022. The film addresses how the crisis of capitalist governance in Mariupol—but also across Ukraine—has led to a massive outgrowth of mutual-aid, looting, and other practices that defy the holy laws of private property and profit; pointing to the possible path of communization as a practicable living alternative to the peace time return of Neo-liberal rule.

At Agit we collectively read excerpts of Looting and had an opening conversation on the basic themes of the book. The following are some notes from the conversation:
    Genovese’s importance for the American Autonomist movements thinking around antipolitics as minor-modalities of everyday resistance.
    The question of what a reader is and how to politically engage with a text not as a consumer but partisanlly, is approached as involving a kind of looting and communalization of the position as co-conspirator in a conversation.
    We also picked up on the question of “need” in politics and how even some of the most militant practices found in demos like vandalising banks and shops remain within a certain austere militancy, only smashing capital but refraining from enriching oneself in these acts … the call for the desecration of politics as a desecration of the political as a domain of reason, intellect, and higher spirit. The emergence of needs as a central matrix of political sense.
    The question of what the aesthetics of black sociality is in Silvia Wynter’s work. Mattin introduced it as a semiotics … was perhaps made more concrete in the case of Move where the “antagonism” between blackness and property is found to not only be a matter of the possession of things but the values tied to their correct maintenance and procurement. Move smashed the sidewalks around the houses. And kinda rejected the role of modern citizens, following hygiene standards and such.
    The idea of destituent politics. Where it came from … Argentina and how it circulated around lately. How framing it from the standpoint of black sociality puts a different spin on things. Someone said it's a very privileged position this anti-politics of destituency and than left the space.
    We ended with thinking around the question of the call for the inheritance reparations of the destituent over reparations as a counter-appropriation and an affirmation of the accumulation relation.

At the community resource center Luna6 in Vilnius we participated in a silkscreen workshop. Together with friends from a number of initatives we made bags, patches and posters that included an image from Looting, the dabartis logo, as well as some Palestine liberation propoganda.