EDITORIAL

Dear Readers,

As the world literally burns in the rising temperatures and wildfires of climate change, the continued instantiation of capitalist social relations appear for what what they always already were: so much ash from a metabolic relation with the planet that threatens to render the latter uninhabitable—both for humanity and many other species. The image of drifting ash enveloping the planet captures something of the ways that existent social relations are shrouded in the logic of capital. A world seemingly defined by this and the symptoms of it, whether the ecological catastrophes most often signified by climate change, or the more prosaic miseries endured by the proletarianised majority of humanity. Or, for that matter, the violent logics of colonialism, genocide and war that hinge upon the continued maintenance of a global order that promises little beyond the continuation of the present in an even more catastrophic form.
    To exist in a world shrouded by the eliminative cerement of capital, makes leaving this world not only desirable, but a kind of necessity. A necessity that brings to mind the kinds of secession, the diffuse forms of disaffiliation, that the recently, sadly, deceased communist thinker Jacques Camatte advocated—writing in 1974: ‘We must abandon this world dominated by capital, which has become a spectacle of beings and things’.¹An abandonment that included, Camatte believed, the revolutionary movements of the Left, as too mired in the world of capital to ever overturn it. For Camatte, to leave this world is to begin to actualise the gemeinwesen, a generic or common being that is historically seperated only in its different modalities of appearance. This realisation of the future and past potentiality of the species would be to eventually brush off the shroud of burning ash, to dismantle the existent material community, and see what might be put to a better, communised use.
    Yet, such a leaving is obviously not as simple as taking a step into an ecology suddenly purged of the burnt remnants of the existent world. The dead ash of existent social relations, deposited in layers that seem equivalent to the world as such, cast a pall over any such endeavour. As Camatte himself recognised in the 1970s, the sheer locked-in weight of the ‘material community of capital’ dominates the world as it is. Such a domination concerns both how commodified social relations displace other potentialities of being, and the ways that capitalism is embedded, how its physical infrastructure shapes and moulds the planet. Such a simultaneity of desertion from, and unfortunate absorption in, the existent material community seems an impossible, paradoxical problem. Indeed, the most difficult kind of problem, the kind both desire and necessity can founder against.
    It is within the ricochet between this desire to leave this world and the structural stasis and immobility that very same world imposes that the essays in Letter no.7 Exits—by Frédéric Neyrat,Almaz and Despina Sanida Crezia, Dionys Mascolo (translated and introduced by Howard Slater), Micah Newberger and Korah Kremer—can be situated. They all address the necessity and desire of leaving this world from within the (im)possibilities of what might be termed the ‘Camatte dilemma’. They share the requisite tension that accompanies it in thought and practice, or rather thought as a practice of imaginative desertion. They do so in very different registers both from Camatte—nowhere is he explicitly cited—and from one another. Yet, all are located in the vanishing point that appears between exit and no exit, the never quite foreclosed overcoming of the limits of the existent. Such a vanishing point of exit/no exit might be characterised as the realisation that this world is predicated upon an inexorable rise in the rate of the unliveable, an unliveable that, somehow, still has to be lived.


In Frédéric Neyrat’s ‘The Dark Iron Prison in the Light of Heresy’, he approaches this necessity for exits through a deeply felt reflection upon the book Theory of the Solitary Sailor, by Giles Grelet. Both Grelet’s Theory of the Solitary Sailor and Neyrat’s response invoke the ghosts of the Gnostics. These were heterogeneous sects that opposed early Christianity with a heterodox theology that posited this world as a material prison created by a demiurge, most frequently personified in the God of the Old Testament. A prison that was to be annulled through the ‘gnosis’ (knowledge) transmitted through gnostic ascesis from the true, ‘alien’ God without the mediation of the Church. Gnosticism—as used in 20th and now 21st philosophy—has been framed as a metaphor for crisis, exile and heresy, and all of these are manifest in ‘The Dark Iron Prison…’.² Theory of the Solitary Sailor is an account of the literal exodus by Grelet from a metropolitan life and career as a philosopher in order to live on a sailing boat off the coast of Brittany, rarely returning to land. The book is both an account of this very real attempt to leave the world and a sketch of what Grelet terms ‘heret(h)ics’—for a ‘gnosis (knowledge) without salvation.’ This heretical ethics is a way of becoming an exilic subject, of simultaneously being at home nowhere, while also fully assuming that there is no salvation in the other-world—whether political (utopia) or religious (heaven). Refusing reconciliation with this world and false assurances of the otherworld, Grelet affirms a mode of alien dwelling in the finisterre: a place at the worlds end, “in the world but not of it.” A world that is to be simultaneously left and grasped in the same gesture of assuming a form-of-life that refuses it. Neyrat finds himself in reading Theory of the Solitary Sailor ‘less alone in daring to declare a certain form of non-belonging to the world—at a time when only the opposite is asserted: total belonging…’. However, in a sympathetically critical reading Neyrat posits his own Gnostic political theology of collective opposition, a ‘communism of the uncreated’. In this Neyrat counters Grelet’s despairing individual revolt with a vision of an egalitarian undoing of the subjects that unfortunately populate the present.
    It seems appropriate that a spectral Gnosticism should haunt a time when the world as it is structured by capital often appears as debased as the historical Gnostics believed it to be. The everyday ascesis of survival in the present is generally experienced as the limits of the pay-to-go life, to which for many are added the equally quotidian but even harsher constraints and humiliations of the exiled and marginalised. ‘The Price of Joy’, the contribution by Almaz, recounts the experience of witnessing the Al-Aqsa Flood, that revolt against the limits of the unliveable, from the distance of exile. Almaz’s narration emphasises how the utterly ordinary—‘I was still half-awake, my first cigarette still burning, my coffee still nearly full’— routines of a visit to his mother are exploded by the initial images of ‘Gaza's wretched breaching the fence—their cheers, their cries of joy mixed with tears.’ Almaz’s melancholic joy—the jubilation of resistance and possible liberation intermingled with generational memories of disappointment—is interrupted days later by the visit of his mother’s physiotherapist. A conversation ensues and against the ‘the void where Mr. Dimitri (the physiotherapist) had exhaled his displeasure and fears’ Almaz asserts the dream of Palestinian liberation, as a leaving of the world that ruptures the desperate pragmatism that instills servitude.
    The motif of this dream of perseverance and fidelity to liberation is taken up by Despina Sanida Crezia in her reply to Almaz, ‘Dragon Dreams and Flood Dances’. She presents her study as a collective dream-work that cuts across the binaries of dream/nightmare, emancipatory desire and oppressive reality. As Crezia writes: ‘By materially tuning their rhythms and tempos, the resistance brings a world of dreams and nightmares—otherwise marked off as mere sediments of ruminations—into action and movement.’ These are dreams that ‘don’t call for interpretation, but for intervention’, that are ‘mobile metaphors’ that rupture the malign reality of ‘death-world capitalism’ and, specifically, its racialised settler-colonial logic. Drawing on anti-colonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and the Palestinian political theorist Zakaria Zubeidi, the flood of these ‘mobile metaphors’, dreams and nightmares, ultimately inverts the legend of St George and the Dragon. The heroic knight—traditionally a symbol of Palestinian resistance—is dethroned by the monster, the resistant dragon that is hunted on the land it calls its own. This strategy of inverting the ecclesiastical ordering of the virtuous and the fallen, resonates deeply with gnosticism’s acosmic rebellion against moral authority. The dragon, like Bataille’s “big toe” in his base materialism, defies hegemonic distributions of global sensibility: the terrorist monster of resistance demands solidarity while the roman saint on his high horse is resignified as a false idol of imperium.
    The piece ends with an extended meditation upon the figure of the alani, which Crezia turns to as a personal account of Zubeidi’s strategy of cosmic inversion in Palestine. In Athens alani designates a working-class vagabond, both very rooted in the sub-cultures of a neighbourhood and willing to drift, opaque and monstrous to the authorities and official Hellenic culture. Just as the unliveble might be rendered liveable by the flood of dreams and nightmares, the alani find ways to inhabit the city to which they are consigned that embody a kind of emancipation.
    In Dionys Mascolo’s ‘Fragment of Utopia’, translated and introduced by Howard Slater, this kind of leaving the world while remaining in situ takes place in one of its most extreme institutions: the psychiatric hospital. Mascolo has barely been translated in the English speaking world even while he is the communist thinker closest to more esteemed figures such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and the writer Marguerite Duras, to whom Mascolo was married. Blanchot, reflecting upon Mascolo’s book Le Communisme, writes of how, alongside the sobriety of a communism based upon needs, the book also emphasises the passion of intense, intersubjective communication below the radar of formal politics. This, writes Blanchot, is ‘an opening, a wrenching violence, a fire that burns without pause, for communist generosity is also this, is first this, this inclemency, this impatience […]: an infinitely hazardous freedom.’³ ‘Fragment of Utopia’ depicts such a moment, during a recreational morning dance for the inmates, where Mascolo glimpses the emergence of a ‘metaphysical communism’. By which (we think) he means the simultaneous presence of the most singular embodiment with the most impersonal aspects of thought, wherein particularity is not assimilated to some legal ‘equality’ but is communicated, ‘wound to wound, from incommunicable pain to incommunicable pain, from solitude to solitude: something secret is spoken publicly here, and upon this kind of speech the community is founded.’ A negative community with all of the force of an impersonal idea. The opening up of a utopia that briefly abrogates for Mascolo the ‘frivolous alienation of the outside world’, in an egalitarianism founded upon the mutual apprehension of the singularity of the pain of others.
    From here we arrive at ‘In Egypt, Now:’ by Micah Newberger which addresses the implications of declaring oneself to have never left this world, in order to continue to express solidarity with the oppressed, ‘wound to wound’. Set in dialogue with Peter Maklouf’s study of Paul Celan in Letter no.6, ‘In Egypt, Now:’ takes on the political stakes of an enigmatic letter written by Celan wherein he refutes ‘having ever left Egypt’ as he makes his way to Pesach, i.e. the very holiday celebrating the Hebrew’s exodus from Egypt. As Newberger writes: ‘Celan’s irony is funny and serious: not to remember that one has left is not equivalent to forgetting the positive fact that one has left; it is to call into question the very fact of leaving.’ In dialogue with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s comment that Celan’s gesture of celebrating Pesach in Egypt (or London, or Zurich) makes it impossible ‘to imagine a Judaism that is more extraneous to the Zionist ideal’. Newberger expands upon this, through a close reading of the biblical psalm of Exodus as retaining ‘Egypt’ as an interruptive ‘unfinished and energetic power’ of the desire for liberation today. In this, Newberger discovers a ‘radical, counter-biblical, heretical’ Celan; or what one might call a hypernomian Celan, who situates himself within and against the law, through the commandment to love the stranger, the oppressed and the outsider. As Celan summates it in Newberger’s translation: ‘Thou shalt adorn the stranger beside you most beautifully.’
    Exits concludes with an afterword by Korah Kremer ‘Party of Aliens’. Inspired by the Letter contributors, Kremer delivers a poetic calling to join a political party that refuses reconciliation with any fatherland—a party, in Blanchot’s phrasing, of the outside: “neither another world nor a hidden world” but a communist movement in opposition to everything that institutes community in the particularisms of language, state, family, and religion. A communism of aliens, an exigency of the present without presence, ‘only the dash [trait d’union] of a disaster, an astral change.’⁴ A poem that is a reminder that even in the midst of the inescapable ashes of this burning world, in the ricochet between the desire and necessity to leave and its seeming impossibility, other potentialities lie buried.

Perhaps this letter, with its gnostic refusals, dreams and nightmares of liberation, monsters and alani, psychiatric hospital dances and heretical readings of Exodus is a minor contribution to the fragmentary remedies Camatte hoped might be found there.


With best wishes,

Anacharsis Kloots Deputation.


1. Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave, Trans: David Brown, Autonomedia (NY), 1995, p.170. The journal Endnoteshave also published two dossiers on Camatte. The first, edited and introduced by cooper is in Endnotes no.5 and is available here:http://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/italian-invariance-in-the-1970s. The second, translated and introduced by Dabartis contributor Howard Slater, is available here:http://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte

2. For gnosticism as a ‘metaphorology’ as well as a more general account of its use in 20th century German philosophy, with particular reference to Jacob taubes see: Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World, Cornell University Press (US), 2019, p.19.

3. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, ‘On One Approach to Communism’, Trans: Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford University Press (US), 1997, p.96.

4. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Communism Without Heirs’, in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans Zakir Paul, Fordham University Press (US), 2010, p.93.

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I had agreed with Maria to spend the day at my mother's house. As the youngest son, it's my duty to spend time with her, tending to her needs—I mustn't stay away too long. Nearly a month had passed since her hip replacement surgery, the joint shattered when she fell during a diabetic coma in Istanbul.
    We woke on Saturday morning around eleven. I walked to the bakery near our house. The sun was bright, the main street empty of passersby like any ordinary weekend. I returned with coffee and some pastries. Mother was still unsteady, so we went to her room to share breakfast.
Maria began eating her potato-filled pastry, asking me to translate what she wanted to tell my mother—I play the translator. She asked how she was feeling today.
    Mother answered, "The pain is still sharp," but she hid a wide smile at seeing us beside her. Mother was in bed, and after my urging, she started eating her cheese pastry.
    As for me, as usual, I was sipping my iced coffee and lighting my morning cigarette—the ritual that precedes everything else. My day doesn't truly begin without the scent of coffee and tobacco, preparing me to scroll through news that rarely brings good tidings.
    At that moment, breaking my habit, I didn't finish my cigarette. I picked up my phone with my left hand, sitting beside Maria on the couch. I saw my friend Omar posting about fighters breaching the borders into the occupied lands. I didn't understand exactly what was happening—I was still half-awake, my first cigarette still burning, my coffee still nearly full.

I stared at my mother and Maria without uttering a word, as they both asked: "What's wrong with you?"

I didn't want to answer. Or rather, I didn't know what to answer. I still didn't understand the story. I started scrolling through the news to learn more. There was a photo of dark-skinned children in torn clothes, atop an armored vehicle, raising victory signs, their white baby teeth filling the frame.
    Then my eyes fell on a video of Gaza's wretched breaching the fence—their cheers, their cries of joy mixed with tears. It reminded me of Andy Dufresne escaping Shawshank Prison, crawling through a sewage pipe to finally reach his longed-for freedom in the rain, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife.
    I remembered all those Gaza prisoners—including my beloved family, my childhood friends, my simple neighbors. For decades, they were sentenced to death and oblivion, guilty of nothing but being Palestinian.
I imagined my neighbor Abu Mahmoud, his thick mustache hiding the teeth the occupation broke when they arrested him. I recalled his sad eyes—but this time, they were joyful and covered with tears.

I shouted at my mother: "Yamma!”

“What's wrong with you?" Mother repeated as Maria patted my shoulder, urging me to answer my mother.

I replied, "Where's the remote? Turn on the news!"As my mother tried to reach the remote, I seized the moment to update Maria on what was happening: "We're going back to our village. We're going back to Al-Sawafir."
    My mother stared at the news ticker, trying to read—the occupation's raids near the school where she taught elementary had damaged her hearing. I shouted at her, "Yamma! Turn up the volume!"

Poor Maria didn't understand what was happening. Her gaze darted from my mother to me to the screen—all she saw was smoke and gunfire.

    As for my mother, once she managed to read the news ticker, she forgot her pain and rejoiced for a moment. But she didn't say we were going back to Al-Sawafir. She had lived through dozens of wars and two intifadas in her life—she knew this momentary joy would come at a terrible price.

The cigarette burned my fingers as I jumped with happiness, numb to the pain, repeating, "Allahu Akbar."

While Maria, with wonder and a childlike gaze, was filled with fear and questions.


I had left my phone on silent mode, forgetting that today was my mother's physical therapy appointment. I was glued to the screen, as if Gaza would vanish if I looked away for a moment, consumed by curiosity about what was happening there. Questions raced through my mind: Had the resistance advanced further? Had they reached my village? Would I glimpse it on television?
    My grandmother, Um Ibrahim, burst into my thoughts—she became the screen itself, in her embroidered dress and white shawl, sitting at the doorway waiting, telling me about our town's beauty and what had lodged in her memory at age six: the harsh events of displacement, the false promise that their return would be a matter of days, as the United Nations had claimed.
    The doorbell rang. The physiotherapist waited at the door with his cheerful face, asking, "Why don't you answer your phone?" I didn't know what to tell him at that moment. I apologized, assuming he didn't know what had happened that morning.
    Mr. Dimitri sat on the chair near my mother's bed, teaching us the exercises she needed to walk again. He hid questions between his thin eyebrows, while trying to focus on his work, which he performed with great skill. My intuition was right—soon as we finished the session, and those eyebrows returned to normal, the questions slipped onto his tongue: "What happened in Palestine this morning?"
    A question I knew the answer to well. But perhaps from the shock, and because I'd been trying to understand since morning what was happening myself, I found my tongue stumbling like a ninety-year-old with Alzheimer's.
    He repeated the question, and the following dialogue unfolded between us:"Mr. Dimitri, I don't know what you know about Palestine. To answer your question, I first need to know you better, so I can give you an answer you'll understand."

"I'm with you. On your side. But they'll annihilate you after this attack."

I responded: "Does an occupier need a pretext to commit massacres? Aren't colonial projects built exactly like construction projects—they need solid foundations to rise, until you can no longer see that their foundation is the blood of the colonized? And this blood, no doubt, gives the occupation its consistency, but it also waters the authentic land, deepening our roots in it until it finally rejects this alien structure that doesn't belong to the country!"
    Astonished, his eyebrows rising to his forehead, his full hands intertwined. Mr. Dimitri shifted in his seat—he had been sitting cross-legged—and pressed his legs together, exhaling a breath I could almost hear, and said: "Son, you're still young. Be a little pragmatic. Leave your poetic metaphors aside and be reasonable! Stubbornness doesn't liberate homelands. Wasn't Gaza's situation good before this attack? So what was the motive behind it? What will the Palestinian gain from it?"
    I placed my palm over my mouth, staring into the void where Mr. Dimitri had exhaled his displeasure and fears. I searched for an answer, but I was suffocating. I began to tense up. I rose from the chair, took two steps toward the window, leaving Mr. Dimitri to my left, and replied with resolve: "We dreamers become pragmatists only if we stop struggling. Palestine is the dream. If we stop demanding its liberation, we betray it. We've grown accustomed over centuries to loyalty—it's become an inseparable part of our identity!"
 
Mr. Dimitri left our house after shaking my hand warmly while noting it was the first time he'd seen pain create dreams instead of nightmares.

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2.

Dragon Dreams and Flood Dances
Despina Sanida Crezia

So, Palestine as Almaz confronts it in “The Price of Joy” is a tenacious dream. The dream that doesn’t let one fall into pragmatism's lethargic coma. A dream that troubles rather than comforts. A dream that has shaken the world awake, eroding its deformed façades of stability.
    For the resistance, nightmares and dreams dwell in the same matrix of experience, whether lived or imagined. By materially tuning their rhythms and tempos, the resistance brings a world of dreams and nightmares—otherwise marked off as mere sediments of ruminations—into action and movement. Through the resistance’s “time of initiative,” as outlined by Nasser Abourahme, the binary division between realistic and unrealistic dreams reveals itself as a barren colonial fiction. Rupturing the “formaldehyde solution” imposed on reality by colonialism as to “freeze the political process”; the resistance for Abourahme acts to take initiative over time, opening it to the rhythms and tempos of liberation.¹
    The nightmare of reality dwells in dreams and vice versa—nightmares are rehearsals of the unconscious, a militant preparation for its eventual spilling into reality.
    In The Trinity of Fundamentals—a fictionalized autobiographical account written in 1993 by Wisam Rafeedie inside an Israeli prison, then smuggled out—we read an account of daydreaming in prison:

Your imagination had gone as far as the graveyard: you saw yourself as a corpse mutilated by torture or torn by bullets, wrapped in the national flag and the workers’ flag, carried on a bier while your comrades eulogized you and chanted your name. Your imagination had gone as far as the victory of socialism. Did your imaginations, your daydreams lead you to where you are now, stretched out on your stomach, hands and feet bound, eyes blindfolded, with a bloody forehead amidst a forest of combat boots? Had the camera lens of your daydreams for the last nine years succeeded in capturing the current cinematic scene? Your daydreams fell short of real life. They failed you. They did not save you with their treasures of visualization, dreams and imaginations… Do not condemn them too quickly; they were full of imagination and limited by endless variables. Life is much fuller than the limits of the imagination and daydreams. / -I admit, I admit it! But my dreams are not to blame. They fell short but they were optimistic and beautiful. / -What optimism are you referring to? You saw your body on a bier as you observed the combat boots. / -How can my dreams be optimistic when the combat boot is above my head? The combat boot and the forest of combat boots are a long way from optimism. / -Then your dreams were not always optimistic. To imagine your body on a bier is neither optimism nor optimistic thinking. / -Martyrdom is a fitting end for the resistance fighter. He who dies at the right place and time is a hero. My bier was smiling, making fun of the killers.²

Dreams in the settler-colonial and broader racial capitalist death-world context don’t call for interpretation, but for intervention. They crack reality open to reveal the “real phantasms,”³ those psychosomatically materialized ghosts of conflict caused by the experience of separation and colonial violence, deeply etched into the bones and daily rehearsed by the musculature—as Frantz Fanon has pointed out:

[T]he native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.⁴

In other words, dreams in the resistance’s time of initiative are neither individual and private night dreams nor lulling myths; they can be used as mobile metaphors inseparable from conscious reality—devices, means, to tangible tactical collective actions, rooted in material reality and social experience. Conversely, when dreams become spectacular myths of liberation, they can take the form of aestheticized rituals and tales, displaying sets of “higher” moral values that usually end up in a uroboric empty pageant, far from any material effect on life. Tufan Al-Aqsa/Al-Aqsa Flood, a mobile dream swelling for years, followed by the Iranian operation Completion of the Flood, straddled and breached the dreams metaphoric denomination in physically enacting the flood of freedom and love across the segregating fence of hate.
    When the colonizer’s formaldehyde submerged metaphors—utilized to transport geographies, dwelled space, and imaginaries into its hellish eternity—are turned on their heads, a potent strategy emerges that is “useless” in Benjamin’s words, “for the purposes of fascism,”⁵ and coloniality. Metaphors can be used as an invitation for a guided dream exercise, a perceptual experiment, that moves beyond the transportation of meaning into the prison of a new static identity. Metaphors open time, grounding the colonizers formaldehyde images of monsters and heroes in a world of movement, dance, and poetry. The dream technique of the resistance breaks the colonial container by overflowing it. An overflowing that even surpasses the ensnaring metaphors the resistance assigns itself to—a prison, as Abdaljawad Omar accounts whose:

[D]ifficulty 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.⁶

In his master’s thesis titled The Hunter and the Dragon,⁷ half written in prison, Zakaria Zubeidi, the iconic resistance fighter and theater director from Jenin, reimagines the iconic image of Saint George (al-Khadr) and the Dragon. Traditionally, Saint George is a symbol of good faith; depicted as a knight on horseback stabbing the Dragon, which represents evil. In Palestine, this allegorical image came to be a metaphor for the fight against colonialism—the dragon being the colonizer and the virtuous resistance as George. As Zubeidi accounts: “Over time, as an endearing metaphor, the image of Saint George, or Al-Khidr, came to represent the Palestinian fighting colonial Zionism. In fact, as I was told by a source, the late Libyan president Colonel Muammar Gaddafi used to call the late leader George Habash “Al-Khidr,” because he was born in God’s land.”

Yet, in the process of his study on fugitivity and resistance, Zubeidi found the need to reverse the metaphor—stating:

When we began to engage with the literature of resistance and the ethics of war, a source discussed with me two phrases from French and German philosophers, Sartre and Nietzsche, which say: “The hunter, when he pursues the dragon, becomes the dragon,” and “Pursuing the dragon should not make our souls as savage as the dragon.” Strangely, all of this reinforces the idea of inherent evil in the dragon and inherent goodness in the hunter. But, when we experienced the pursuit ourselves, staying rooted to the ground, and heard some founders of the undercover units boast about the moment when their eyes meet the eyes of the pursued—this moment was described as the “hunter’s moment,” when his eye meets that of the prey—I decided to transform the dragon’s image, changing it from a malevolent one to a good one, because it is the rightful inhabitant of the land, the one most connected to nature, to the soil, and the one most in harmony with it. It is the only adversary that refuses to be an easy “prey” for the hunter, who is an intruder on the land and a parasite living off the blood of others.

Through this queering experiment, the dragon stands in for the creature that combats the venerated oppressor against all odds, i.e., as the resistance fighter. The hunted Dragon is the conscious, non-nomadic pariah that Omar describes in his writing. It’s neither the “outsider” who claims an esteemed status as the distant intellectual critic, nor is it Benjamin’s petit-bourgeois, predominantly male flaneur nor Arendt’s conscious pariah who walks the boulevards of Europe with a book under his arm—

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.⁸

In the context of Athens, where this text is written from, the Dragon and the Conscious, non-Nomadic Pariah are akin to alani. As a noun referring to a person, it was widely used in the rebetiko context, in both its gendered “alanis / alanissa” version and in the neutral gendered one as “alani.” In modern Greek, the neutral gender is the most common. Alani, roughly translates in English as vagrant or drifter. However, its Ottoman Turkish origin, “alan,” means open space, or open space sheltered between mountains, trees, or houses. In modern Greek, alana signifies an open-air urban space or vacant lot, often used for the places where kids play in the city—or used to play, in a non-mummified city before gentrification. Therefore, alanais not a public square, but a piece in the urban fabric occupied by youth. It is a non-granted open space between constraints.
    The derivative alani, addressed to a person, refers to a wanderer, vagrant, drifter, vagabond, of working-class background and usually but not necessarily of young age. At the same time, it also describes a sincere, direct, courageous, defiant, and potentially playful person. In street culture, when articulated interpersonally as alani mou (my alani) or eisai alani (you’re an alani), it signifies companionship and admiration for one’s bravery and vigor. Nonetheless, the term can hardly be encapsulated into words when abstracted from the lived experience and the culture around it; it is a worldview that resists definition and capture—it ferociously maintains its opacity. A rather comprehensive depiction would always entail an embodied rendition, both from those explaining and from those trying to understand. Ιt would therefore require practice.
    Alani, due to its mixed cultural origin and hint of queerness, refuses the purified identity offered by “Hellenism”: a tradition forged by the patriarchal colonial West that disavows the other half of the Mediterranean as culturally inferior. In contrast, Alani defiantly dwells in the open space of the Mediterranean: a body of water where Southern Europe, Anatolia, Northern Africa, and West Asia converge. Simultaneously, Alani could be in any locality where people try to vigorously invent openness within constraints. In the Athenian origin myth of the labyrinth, Alaniresembles the monstrous Minotaur:

The structure of the labyrinth tests the pertinence of the diacritical couple man/animal, shaking rather than steadying it as does the "closed" discourse of science. Moreover, the labyrinth is the basis of a myth whose stakes are the same. Theseus, destined to be king of Athens, kills the Minotaur: Athens is born by freeing itself from its archaic past (Crete), symbolized by its hybrid, simultaneously man and bull—the Minotaur.⁹

Alani, as the minotaurian human/child/animal, sees itself like Zubeidi’s Dragon, as the feral one that takes on the task to resist colonization and the gentrification of its dwelled space; while refusing nationalist purism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism.
    Alania (plural of alani) communicate in their own language, the grammar of which is dictated by what lies beneath the city’s pavement, beneath the rubble, beneath the concrete. The alani’s physicality reveals itself as both steadfast and rooted, grounded and, at the same time, ungraspable. As much as it is laid-back, it is also grounded and ready for action. It is at the same time childish and experienced, a life’s struggle and daily effort weighing on its shoulders, yet maintaining a playful, cunning attitude.
    Alani knows her living place by heart, a bit too much even; no map could portray the little corners of a street or pieces of pavement where memory and danger are calcified. Alania know place without owning place; they dwell in a hereness and nowness, exiled and trapped in the alleys and arcades; they dwell in places made by the infrastructure of friendship and struggle. This is why they know how to place their bodies in and move through the most unexpected spaces and passageways of their locality, seeking refuge from the ever-pressing capitalist reality. To be Alani is to risk over dwelling—indeed, as Omar accounts: “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.”
    Alani’s Ison,¹⁰—its ever-vibrating counter-tonality to the metropolitan capitalist rhythm—is a moving forwards and outwards, while at the same time being stranded, trapped, unavoidably rooted. Alani is always sti gyra:out and about. on the prowl, adrift. Alani drifts between narrow urban constraints within which she is compelled to engage with the hard task of finding that openness that will allow her dreams to overflow; she strolls to be and stay ready; ready for the next action, the next rhyme, the next antiracist, antifascist, antizionist tag on a wall, the next stride, hand gesture, the next breach of constraint and courageous act of solidarity for friends and comrades, close and afar. To reference Haytham el-Wardany in his imploding and exploding text “Labour of Listening,”¹¹ alani exists in the dashes between AR–CHI–TEC–TURE –these narrow spaces between constraints as the only space she can smuggle. The habitual action to risk, deform borders, and expropriate the means necessary to survive, for her and others, is a direct product of the striving for this openness that breaches the capitalist deathworld, which chooses whose life is more valuable, but most importantly, whose death is more profitable for the empire.
    And however badly alani wants to escape from this enclosure, moving forwards and outwards doesn’t stand as an escape from dreams, reality or contradictions—it is neither leisure nor luxury—it doesn’t represent a granted freedom of movement but rather a way to be in a world of motion while grounding and claiming one’s place and oneself more and more with every step; to overflow, to land oneself in the place we’re at and grow moving roots; to seek an openness through gravity tied to place as land; to negate the fate imposed by the deathworld apparatus; to smuggle one’s desire, love and hate and create what’s necessary against all odds. Every step is a negotiation between non-belonging and place-making.
    In Fred Moten’s thinking: “[…] dance is the city’s mother tongue. The bridge marks, because it also is, where crossing over crosses over into smuggling, a transportation of lost and found desire, lost and found matter, both of which move in constant escape.”¹² The alani dance is a fight inward, forward, outward; a dance that implodes and explodes, spilling into the world-lived-with-others, as opposed to Western-metaphysics-adjacent subject-hood that contains itself for itself. Alania are the insistent situated dreamers—as they also appear in Ahmad, Fanon, Omar, and others’ texts and practices—who thrust daily against the strangling racial capitalist ideology and infrastructure of camps, national borders and identity; construction sites, working places, prisons, gentrified cities, detention centers, checkpoints, and apartheid walls. Alania’s task here and elsewhere is to engage in choral dreamwork praxis and “to imagine all possible methods”¹³ to become the nightmare of these barbed-wire structures and their initiators.

To make overflowing dances that deform fences of empire.


1.Nasser Abourahme, “In Tune with Their Time”, Radical Philosophy 2.16 / Summer 2024: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/rp216_abourahme_time-compressed.pdf

2.Wisam Rafeedie, The Trinity of Fundamentals, trans. Dr. Muhammad Tutunji (New York: 1804 Books, 2024).

3.Elena Vogman, “Embodied Phantasm: Frantz Fanon, Francesc Tosquelles and psychoanalysis by other means,” Radical Philosophy 2.20 (2026), pp. 53-69.

4.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 52.

5.Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland (Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

6.Abdaljawad Omar, “The Meaning of Love in Politics—a response from a conscious (non-nomadic) Pariah,” Dabartis, July 23, 2025.

7.Zakaria Zubeidi, The Hunter and the Dragon: Fugitivity in the Palestinian Condition, 1968-2018.Master’s thesis (Birzeit University, 2022). See my review: https://despinasanidacrezia.substack.com/p/review-zakaria-zubeidis-the-hunter?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=52de1b

8.Omar, “The Meaning.”

9.Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993).

10.Ison in music is a drone, or a slow-shifting tone that accompanies the melody, usually in a lower pitch.

11.Haytham el-Wardany, “Labour of Listening,” minor literatures (2024),https://minorliteratures.com/2024/07/23/labour-of-listening-haytham-el-wardany/.

12.Fred Moten. Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

13.Fanon, The Wretched, 93.

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Reading Theory of the Solitary Sailor made me less alone. Not that my life is unpopulated, nor is it the life of a bachelor. But here I am, less alone in daring to declare a certain form of non-belonging to the world—at a time when only the opposite is asserted: total belonging, whether to the Earth or to the nation, to an identity or a socioeconomic group, their sociological description serving as an ontological imperative. What happens when this imperative—moral, political, intellectual—is called into question?
    A heresy that is not limited to local excommunication by some church: it is a world heresy and ventures into the unlivable—how, indeed, can one live without a world, outside the world…? Hence the “heret(h)ics”¹ Gilles Grelet proposes to us in this book against the current: you who separate yourself from the world need an ethics if you are not merely to wander.²
    An ethics that is necessarily singular—and it is this singularity that these notes seek to preserve. This is not exactly a review; that would make little sense for a book that touches each and every person in their existence, in their most fundamental choices, and in their relationship to a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to endure. This reading—my own—invites every other reader to do the same: it is only through a personal relationship that one can enter into communication with this book out of the ordinary.


Before unfolding this ethics, which resists any hasty generalization, we must understand the imperative of total belonging, its consequences, and the ways of either warding it off or submitting to it. To belong totally to the world would mean this: that every part of the self can be reduced to its social and material reality—to the properties of class, race, gender, or species, as rooted in the body, neurons and the brain, matter, nature, culture and ideology, history, cosmology, or information.
    This reducibility is enough to cause anxiety, producing a feeling of claustrophobia that may perhaps be, though unexpressed, the affliction of our time—to feel crushed upon the Earth, subject only to the law of gravity…To endure the laws of a terrestrial ecology thrown into disorder, ravaged by extractivism… To be reduced to one’s body… There is enough harm here to motivate a search—a religious one—for another world; to be elsewhere at last, even in a virtual, hallucinatory world.
        Unless one decides to reform this world—that is, to organize the given space as well as possible, for bodies and minds; and for everyone, if the reform is driven by a revolutionary idea that goes beyond mere organization and calls the order of the world into question.
    And if both the hypothesis—religious or virtual—of another world and that of the present one’s political transformation are regarded as illusory, literally null, then comes nihilism: namely, the third possibility identified by Theory of the Solitary Sailor—that, ultimately, nothing matters within the immanence of the world, as though the Earth were a flatland of deposed values, with no hope of new creation; a fascination with nothingness that Gilles Grelet calls “worldly radicalization”: a state in which the world and nothingness are rendered equivalent and politics is left to itself.


What if—as Grelet stipulates—we consider a fourth possibility, one that the author not only proposes but lives: leaving the world in order to “purge oneself of it,” but without seeking another—i.e., without “adjusting” human beings to this world nor promising them another world.
    To separate oneself from the world by carrying out that separation within the world, once it has been recognized not only that there is no other, but that there will be no other: this, for Grelet, is the real “rebellion,” which he explores as a solitary sailor, "having one day left Paris, and with it the effort to defend and demonstrate “non-philosophy,”the struggle in the field of ideas, and the cutthroat social life [mondanités] this all entails.3 It is this rebellion—the author’s own term—that I explore in this text, asking how far it can take us beyond the prevailing claustrophobia that binds us to Gaia or to digital networks.
    Whatever one may think of it, I do believe that this separation from the world within the world enables us to assess our relation—political, religious, nihilistic—to the world, whether the term is understood broadly or in the sense in which contemporary anthropology speaks of “worlds” in the plural, with the risk that this plurality of worlds may territorialize existence and divide it into sectors—in this world or that one—leaving no place for what is lived outside the world, whether by decision or, as I will explain later, as a result of a politics that forces people into wandering.


Grelet describes this rebellious stance toward the world as Gnostic. From gnosis—that repressed para-religious thought, historically persecuted by churches that saw in it their intimate enemy—he retains the idea of a radical rejection of the world. Whereas monotheisms identify a catastrophe that befell human beings in the form of a Fall, the expulsion from paradise, the Gnostics trace the catastrophe back to a cosmological event preceding human existence: namely, the production of this world by an evil demiurge.
    Gnosis will thus be the knowledge and practices that make it possible not only to acknowledge that this world is evil, but to escape it in order to recover the part of oneself that precedes it and did not fall with the world. This unscathed part, a light spared from the darkness of the world—from the “Black Iron Prison,” as Philip K. Dick, a writer of Gnostic fiction, called it—is the authentic self from which non-belonging to the world can be expressed. What Grelet retains from gnosis is that we are in this world without being of this world: “I am here, but am not of it”; “the world, no thank you.” The human condition is a condition of exile.⁴
    Gilles Grelet nevertheless rejects from gnosis the idea of a return to the pre-cosmological part. The quest for the Kingdom, for the City of God (Saint Augustine), is abandoned; more than that: exile must be lived from the standpoint of the acknowledged and accepted failure—that is, the subjectivized failure—of this quest for a Kingdom after the end of the world. The world is rejected—this is a gesture he describes as “anti-political”: the world will not be reformed.
    But this rejection leads neither to the nihilism of ontological defeat, which turns exile into wandering, nor to the search for the Kingdom beyond this earthly life, which would redeem exile by having transformed it in advance into a pilgrimage. To hold fast to exile, then—the watchword of “heret(h)ics”—for a “gnosis without salvation.”




The Gnostic being will therefore be at home nowhere, whereas the “cosmopolitical” maxim, that Grelet rejects, affirms that the human being is at home everywhere. Thus let’s note that both oppose, with different means, the abject identitarian claim that “my home is *my* home.”
    Yet, on a crucial page of his book, Grelet recounts an essential turning point not only in his thought but also in his life: the recognition of the importance of “place,” not as the opposite of "nowhere," but as that which defines the boundaries of an existence. For place, as he describes it, is not a location, a point on a territory or a map, but that through which the person who declares themselves to be nowhere in the world becomes a subject. For Grelet, this place was his boat.
    In Grelet’s Gnostic existence, a boat is neither a vehicle for tourism, leisure, sport, or conquest; it is not an object but a part-of-the-subject. It is the vessel on which Grelet—a sailor who has left the life of the world behind—truly became a “subject.” A subject is not an individual, an atomic being, but a “Two”: Gilles Grelet the sailor is “alone with his boat”; “alone with, alone precisely because he is with,” he “forms a Two with his boat.”
    One may therefore wonder whether, if we follow what the author tells us, a subject can exist without a place in the nowhere of the world. To be a subject would necessarily mean: to be-in-place within the nowhere; without a place, all that remains is (geo)localized belonging to the world or wandering, which itself, moreover, does not escape satellite triangulation.


Hence Gilles Grelet’s héréthique (heretic-ethic): if you have been able to see and understand that, as a human being, you are only passing through a world that is not yours, find the place that will allow you to inhabit the uninhabitable. That place may be a boat, or a lighthouse, as he also recounts to us in his book.
    But one senses that it could be many things: why not a house, perhaps a tent—do we, after all, do anything other than bivouac beneath the unthinkable? And why not a musical instrument: the subject-Two formed by John Coltrane and his tenor saxophone in Ascension, the subject-Two formed by Virginia Woolf and her room-of-one’s-own? A historical map should be drawn of the Twos through which the human, as human, holds itself in the abyss of time.


For place, understood in this way, is not a tool but an “institution,” which for Gilles Grelet is “that which enables human beings to stand upright,” not by socializing them, as the world does, but by subjectivizing them against their assimilation into the world.
    Understood in this sense, the solitary sailor’s boat is an institution—that is, what makes a human subject possible. This is one of the strengths of the book: that it seeks anew the conditions of possibility of humanity, person by person, even as institutions disappear before our eyes—an erosion documented by Antoinette Rouvroy—in favor of the asubjective production of available and disposable cognitive time through capitalism, social networks, and synthetic intelligence.
    Grelet constantly says “man,” which has not failed to trouble me, and which I therefore replace with human, human being, and humanity. Let no one tell me that this means yielding to a social and linguistic fashion, since the point is precisely to strike at a world that has been nothing but a world of men; by taking up the term unchanged, one reinstates it within the subject—but as a desubjectivizing reinstatement. Rebels of gnosis without salvation, the human is one more measure to become subjects-other-than-the-man-world!


And for such a rebellion, place is also not enough: try living without ever leaving home and having cut off almost all communication with others… To live only on a boat—that is, in this “floating place”—is rather to expose oneself to the unlivable outside: the sea, as a “devouring inconsistency,” certainly devours the world and dissolves it within the solitary sailor, but very quickly also dissolves the person who embarks upon it; such a person needs a “constancy,” and Gilles Grelet found a form of “rooting” in Brittany.
    Not an identitarian Brittany, nor even a “mystical” one, he says, but an independent one. Independent, as a country, from France. Independent even from the world—and here the place of gnosis in the author’s thought comes into play again, for Brittany is not only against the world but “ante-worldly,” coming before the world, from a “transcendental” prehistory. Transcendental because it is clear that, in the case of Brittany, what is at stake is not a world before the world, but something prior to the time of the catastrophic creation of the world alone.


One certainly cannot propose a generalized heret(h)ics without denying the singularity of Grelet’s experience, and this is precisely why he offers a “theory” of it, that is, something that refuses to propose a mode5for it—not a philosophy, not a wisdom that would universalize too quickly by short-circuiting the singular, or rather the uniqueness of the break-from-the-world.
    But other experiences may be set alongside the solitude of the theoretical sailor, and one might say to each and every person: if you seek to be human, find for yourself not only the radical place with which a subject will be instituted, but also the rootedness that will keep you from drifting.
    “Enracinement” is a “finisterre”—a common noun coined from Finistère, the peninsular part of Brittany; the term means: where the land/earth (“terre” referring in French to both the land and earth) ends (« finis) —and place, a “sub-jectant.”⁷


The entire framework of Theory of the Solitary Sailorproves to be ante-worldly and advance non-belonging: the sea “comes before; it is the ante-world”; it “is no more of the world than of another world”; “the institutional precedes the prosthetic”; “a place is in the world but is not of it”; “I am at home nowhere”; Brittany is “anti-worldly because it is ante-worldly, because it comes before the history of the world,” “not being of the world”; “it is always independence itself,” and so on.
    The metaphors—“a boat is a mobile finisterre”—and analogies—“theory is to the human […] what the boat is to the sailor”—express, I believe, a deeper pre-ontological communication, as it appears in the idea that the sea, “first of all, itself sails,” or that a book is “a kind of finisterre.” I find it difficult to think that it is not the whole world that is transfixed by the radical non-belonging that Gilles Grelet translates from his singular existence into a theory of the world. What matters, then, is not only to experience it as theory, but to make a life of it. A life made of what human existence nevertheless is: the most ordinary existence there is—and therefore the most common, I would add.


I therefore add a term, “common,” whose significance is not absent from Grelet’s book, which speaks of the Breton people as a “negative people, the people of those who have no people”—a formulation modeled on Georges Bataille’s phrases “negative community” and “the community of those who have no community”; yet is a mirroring of them in the sense that they find anchorage in a specific place.
    Community, like politics, is clearly not absent from this book, as this splendid passage attests: “To have everything one needs without having too much of anything, nothing superfluous […]. As distant from poverty as it is from wealth, simplicity7alone is human, nothing but human. To escape from simplicity is not only to enter into the world; it is no more or less than to exit from humanity.” If there were a politics of the coming community from this theory, it would come from the anti-world.


This politics would therefore come from the anti-, hence from the ante-world: I insist on this hypothesis precisely for reasons of community and pre-ontological communication. The world has no outside and no other world, Grelet maintains throughout his book, while also indicating his proximity to the “thought of the outside” (Gilles Deleuze, the early Michel Foucault, and others). Yet these thinkers, in his view, make the mistake of bringing an interest in the world—via “cosmopolitics,” or a “geopoetics” (Kenneth White)—to the Gnostic dimension’s claim that “this world is not all there is”. In their effort to free us from all the “limited localism,” and identitarianism, they finally usher forth a place for the other world.
    In order to distinguish himself from these thinkers of the outside, Gilles Grelet performs a gesture perhaps more classical than he realizes—or rather, one should say, a modern gesture—exemplarily manifested by the philosophy that he nevertheless rejects: cutting off the head of a philosophical and/or theological system while preserving its body. The speculative moment is cut from Hegel (Karl Marx), convergence at infinity from Leibniz (Gilles Deleuze), the messiah from messianism (Jacques Derrida), and so on. Grelet thus proposes a gnosis without gnosticism, just as contemporary thought has seen a “messianism without messiah” (Jacques Derrida), a “Marxism without guarantees” (Stuart Hall), and so on.
    This resonates with me all the more because my own attempts to conceive of existence as an “outside-within-being” amount to nothing less than perpetuating an anti-ontological gesture. The difference in my view is that this gesture has always been at work within philosophy, and this co-presence can be denied only by foreclosing philosophy’s anti-philosophical part—most notably by removing Socrates from Plato, in other words by prohibiting the non-knowledge proper to knowledge, the atopical character of every City, and so on. Like Grelet, I too have read the Gnostic writings in search of a name for exile, understood as an outside-the-world without pre-existence. Is this the last possible gesture of existential philosophy, of what I often call exology, or of “anti-philosophy” as Grelet proposes it?


Perhaps not, provided that we distinguish between pre-existence and the uncreated. By taking up for ourselves a certain meaning of “mystical” thought, which Grelet rejects, we might derive from Meister Eckhart’s sermon entitled “Why We Must Free Ourselves from God Himself” a certain form of non-belonging to the world—one that does not reintroduce the idea of another world, without thereby closing the world in upon itself or rejecting the idea of an outside and an exit.
    Instead of positing the existence of a Self that did not fall with the world, we shall posit the uncreated of the world—the feather of Lucifer that did not fall, which Victor Hugo preserves in The End of Satan: it is what has always been absent, akin to Stéphane Mallarmé’s flower, “the one absent from every bouquet.” At the summit of the mystical Sinai, one would see through the eyes of the uncreated, which is not the Self but the non-Self. A negative angel. The Gnostic return becomes a mystical returning that consists in tracing the thread of time backward, from creation toward the uncreated—toward freedom. For it is as uncreated that the human being is sovereign, since this sovereignty is not annulled by that of God, who is himself a creator only in relation to creatures. The uncreated is without created or creator, and therefore without God; to free oneself from God is to attain the radical freedom that is the truth of our uncreated being.
    In the same sermon, we also read: “So let us pray to God that we may be free of ‘God,’ and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal.” The uncreated is thus the absolute pre-ontological common, circulating everywhere: in human beings, but also in other-than-human beings and in stones. Hence the radical equality of human beings, angels, and flies—a communism of the uncreated that it would be a shame not to bring into the world: to leave the world is also to bring into it the power of liberation.⁸


For this reason, I do not reject the possibility of a cosmopolitics, once this double polarity of entry and exit has been established. Retaining politics is also a way of recalling that there are beings who are nowhere at home because they have been expelled, persecuted, and cast out of the world, unable either to remain where they are or to cross borders.

When what Étienne Balibar calls an “inverted cosmopolitics” prevails, in which the foreigner is the enemy, seeking to reverse this reversal—to reverse this war against foreigners, against “wanderers,”⁹ as Balibar calls them—is an ethical necessity. And it is precisely there that the walls of the “Black Iron Prison” must melt in the sunlight of the common, no longer merely in that of a heresy.



I do not think Grelet would accept my passage from heresy to the common, since what would be at stake is a liberation of the world. Yet, as I have said, what is at issue is precisely “human, nothing but human”: the human “restored to themselves,” in whom “there resonates something of François Laruelle’s ‘Ordinary Man’”: I read nothing here that excludes anyone.
    Is it asking too much that the world be liberated? Or is it a form of angelism, which I embrace? Grelet calls an angel, or “an angel, in becoming” as essentially that which has wings. The angel is the human, nothing but human, freed from the world, from the imperatives of production and therefore from busyness; from, what one might summate, as the very predilection for hands: “Humans have hands because they have no wings, and so as to not have wings.”
    This analysis should be extended into the realm of iconography, toward those angels who, more often than not, have both wings and hands: is this not precisely finitude together with access to what breaks free from it—to the infinite? That we do not belong entirely to the world is one thing; to conclude that we do not belong to it at all is perilous and, indeed, bound to end in failure—with the boat running aground on a real reef.
    What, then, is the degree of our belonging to the world? How—or should we—amplify this non-belonging? Or convert it into a politics of the common, and if so, through what practices, what symbols and
diabols?¹⁰ How can we tear ourselves away from the world in order better to liberate it? What kind of ascent is lacking in the politics of liberation and its attachment to total belonging? These are the questions through which I address myself to a people—if not of angels, then at least of human beings who would cease to come to blows (d’en venir aux mains).


This, then, is the reading I propose of this necessary book—that is, a book that reveals how many other books are not indispensable—an “anti-book,” “a book-trap set to scuttle itself and sabotage all others.” This undoubtedly stems from what Gilles Grelet discovered in the silence of the sea, which devoured even his speech.
    He explains that he had to fashion another kind of speech, a “speech of silence,” in order to prevent the silence of the solitary individual from speaking on its own and bringing back the “phantom” of the world—a kind of insubstantial impersonal voice, a “deaf brouhaha” that had to be warded off.
    This book is that act of warding off. It did not need to be written in order to exist, Gilles Grelet tells us, but in order to be read. A heret(h)ics of writing: writing as that which ends-(by)-falling silent.



1.Quotations from Gilles Grelet’s book follow the exact wording and phrasing of the published English translation, Theory of the Solitary Sailor, rather than being retranslated from the French excerpts quoted by Neyrat. Any significant discrepancy between Neyrat’s French quotation and the published English version is indicated in a translator’s note. Finally, during the translation process for Dabartis Neyrat changed elements of the essay for style and clarity purposes [Trans.]


2.I will not provide the page numbers for the quotations from Gilles Grelet’s book, since my aim in this text is not to substantiate what I say according to academic conventions—which are, after all, relatively recent—but to accompany a book in its existence. It is for each reader, as I suggest later, to make their own solitary journey through this book. [Frédéric Neyrat’s note]

3.I leave to others the courage to speak about “non-philosophy” and its history, in which Gilles Grelet participated, since my attempts to read the books of François Laruelle—the founder of the “non-philosophical” field—have proved unsuccessful. Those books were not for me, assuming that they were addressed to anyone and sought to communicate themselves, which I doubt. [F. N.]

4.I develop these ideas in “Fleeing the World, Fleeing the Empire: Gnosis and Lines of Flight (or the Encounter of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī aboard Philip K. Dick’s Spaceship),” a text that remains unpublished to date. [F. N.]

5.The French mo(n)de inserts the n of monde (“world”) into mode, allowing the word to signify both a mode and a world. [Trans.]

6.Sub-jectant is an expression used here by Frédéric Neyrat, not a term employed by Gilles Grelet. It evokes sub-jectum, “that which is placed beneath”: place is thus presented as what underlies, supports, and helps constitute a subject. [Trans.]

7.The published English translation uses simplicity here. The French term quoted by Neyrat is pauvreté, which is more directly translated as “poverty.” We retain simplicity in order to reproduce the exact wording of the published English edition. [Trans.]

8.I developed this theme here: “Clandestine Yes: Mystical Community and Subjective Opacity” (TQR, 2025,https://lestempsquirestent.org/en/numeros/numero-4/oui-clandestin-communaute-mystique-et-opacite-subjective). [F. N.]

9.Étienne Balibar, Cosmopolitics: From Borders to the Human Species. Writings III (Paris: La Découverte, 2022). [F. N.]

10.Neyrat uses diabolesas a neologistic counterpart to symbols that Bernard Stiegler often used. Whereas “symbol” derives from the Greek symballein, “to bring together,” diabole evokes diaballein, “to throw apart” or “to separate.” [Trans.]

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4.

In Egypt, Now:
Micah Newberger

The Jewish people are commanded to remember the Israelites’ exodus from the land of Egypt. As they retell the story of the ancient nation they must, in fact, do more than remember their redemption. For as part of the ritual of remembrance, one must see oneself as having left Egypt—to have been personally liberated from the “House of Bondage” or, in Rabbinic terms, “the Narrow Place.” This assertion is really two: I was in Egypt, and I have left Egypt. It is important to disaggregate these statements for the sake of those who could utter the first but not the second.

But who stayed in Egypt? Paul Celan. In a letter to his new friend, Max Frisch, before Pesach in spring, 1959, he wrote:

I can’t come to you next week but only the week after, since I have been reminded of a certain obligation from which I do not know how excuse myself. It’s the obligation of a Nephew, promised now many months ago to an elderly Aunt, to travel to London at the Jewish Easter. So now I will—despite the fact I in no way remember at any point having left Egypt (obgleich ich mich keineswegs erinnere, jemals aus Ägypten ausgezogen zu sein)—celebrate this holiday [Pesach], in England, with my relatives, who, even though they don’t eat unleavened bread anymore, still mark this holiday (that is, they don’t go into work).¹

    With deliberate punctuation, Celan writes that he will be “in England,” but because he does not remember having left Egypt he is also “in Egypt.” In England, he is in Egypt; in Zürich, he is in Egypt. During Pesach he will be in Egypt, in England—yet he repeats several times that he will “celebrate” the holiday,despite missing the memory.
    Celan— poet, Jew, survivor of the Nazi genocide—remembers and fails to remember. He remembers his obligation not as a Jew, but as a nephew, to travel to London to be with his aunt for the holiday of Pesach. But Celan cannot fulfill the central imperative of the holiday itself, namely, to remember that God has taken “me” out of Egypt. Celan’s irony is funny and serious: not to remember that one has left is not equivalent to forgetting the positive fact that one has left; it is to call into question the very fact of leaving. In our time, the time since the Exodus, not to rememberleaving is also to forget the name of God, who introduces himself in the first commandment to the Israelites: I am the lord, your God, who took you out of Egypt.

The letter inspired a memorable commentary from Giorgio Agamben in a short text which he titled “Easter in Egypt”:

Celan locates himself out of the exodus, in a Judaism deprived of Moses and of the Law. He has stayed in Egypt; it is unclear on what grounds, whether as a prisoner, a free man, or a slave, but certainly his only abode is Egypt. I do not think it is possible to imagine a Judaism that is more extraneous to the Zionist ideal…Celan, who has never left Egypt, and who lives everywhere—­ in Paris, London, Czernowitz, or Jerusalem—­ as if he were in Egypt, has to celebrate Pesach, the festivity that commemorates the exit from Egypt. I would like to draw your attention to this impossible task—­ celebrating Pesach in Egypt—­ since I believe that it allows us to locate the place not only of Celan’s life but also, and especially, of his poetry…. I believe there is an essential connection between celebrating Easter in Egypt and the situation of Celan’s poetry. They communicate in the same atopia whose name is: Egypt.”²

    Agamben misses the ironic gesture of Celan’s counter-memory, the tension of Celan’s remembering his non-remembering. The statement that he is a Jew “deprived of Moses and the Law” is contestable, since he phrases this alleged “deprivation” in terms that are most proper to the Law. But according to which Law does he remember, or not remember? It would have to be a Law that stipulates the Exodus as incomplete, a counter-nomian commandment to remember those who remain in Egypt, like Celan, like anyone who continues to suffer dispossession, slavery, and genocide. A Law within but against Law, against the Law of any kingdom that would forsake the outsiders only to reassure the deathly subservience of the "free". Agamben’s invocation of the “Zionist ideal” that would have us forget the non-Exodus of some Jews is a reminder, too, of the fascists who make it the reality for other peoples, for Palestine.


Celan’s gesture is radical, counter-biblical, heretical. The biblical passages that narrate the Exodus from Egypt are found in the book called Exodus in English and Shemot in Hebrew. The narrative of the event of liberation is peculiar. It interrupts itself—first, by introducing the not-yet-free Israelites to their national calendar, according to which they will mark the event they are about to experience, and second, by calling on them to recount to their children the Exodus which has not yet happened. Both interruptions anticipate the completion of the redemption from Egypt before it takes place. The narrative is so thoroughly interposed with passages that assume its fulfillment that perhaps speaking of “interruption” is imprecise, for in fact the text refuses, from the outset, the distinction between event and recollection. The narrative of Exodus is their co-occurrence. In so forcefully binding event to memory, the Bible has ensured the rite of remembrance for a singular event and for a single community, passed down through generations.
    The new Hebrew calendar is given between the ninth and final plagues, suspending the destruction of Egypt and its calendric order while anticipating its final act. What, one might ask, would the Exodus have been, or be, without the calendar? A calendar is a regular series of dates, months crossing over weeks and days. Everything is internally registered and coordinated—internally, that is, because there is no beginning and no end. But what is Year Zero, the event before its recollection?
    Nowhere does this question crystallize with more force than in a phrase that is to be found throughout the Bible but which has a striking frequency in these chapters. בעצם היום הזה, Be’etzem Hayom Hazeh. It occurs numerous times, but I want to focus on Ex 12:17: “And you shall keep the [commandment of] Matzot, for on this very day (בעצם היום הזה) I brought your legions out of Egypt, and you shall keep this day (היום הזה) for generations, eternally.”
    “On this very day,” is how one will translate it most often. To what time and to which moment does the shifter “this” refer? This moment? Now? These translations elide the basic etymological meaning of the phrase. The word etzem, which corresponds to “very,” means “bone.” Let us change our translation accordingly: because on the Bone of this Date I took your legions out of Egypt, and you shall keep this date for generations, eternally. In every instance in the text, the only action that attaches itself to the Bone of the Date is God’s taking the Israelites out of Egypt. The Israelites are not said to do anything on the Bone of the Date, they can only observe the rites and ritual of this date.
    When understood in the context of the events that either have occurred (plagues) or will occur (leaving Egypt, splitting of the sea, giving of the Law), the political implications of the difference between the time of the event and calendrical time become transparent. The singular event may be likened to bones or a skeleton in two ways. Measurable time spreads itself over the singularity of this event; it gathers around this entirely unique occurrence as shapeless flesh around the form of a skeleton. But the vitality of flesh also gives the irreparable and irrecoverable moment—the bones of time—renewed life. The calendar is vital.
    That is what one is led to believe. The calendar was given with a double effect: forging the eternal mythical importance of the Exodus, and ensuring it wasn’t remembered, or mis-remembered, at other times or by other peoples. The entire regime of remembrance, its calendrical edifice and edification, implicitly responds to the statement God did not take me out of Egypt. I was not there. It also anticipates and blocks other, unsanctioned remembrances. In the utterance of the obligatory phrase, God took me out, I place myself at the original event and say it already happened to me. I annually remember the moment that I left as having already been. This chrono-logic prevents one from saying, at any moment: They are in Egypt, or: I am in Egypt, or: I am leaving.
    But the text hesitates even here, and Celan may have been a more astute reader of the text than one might think. A series of verses describing the liberatory procession is interrupted again at the very last moment. The text reads: And Moses took the bones (atzamot) of Joseph with him, since Joseph had adjured the sons of Jacob, saying, May God keep a watchful eye over you, so long as you raise my bones up from here. Then the text resumes its procession.
    We note here that what is at stake is a different kind of memory of a different kind of bones, and we insist on it only because it surges into the text immediately after the invocation of the Bone of the Date.
    The bones of Joseph constitute a rupture in the Exodus, a caesura or blockage in the procession. His, Joseph’s skeletal remains, cannot be assimilated into the Exodus and his bones are not remembered for us by the calendar or given life by it. They float to the surface. They erupt into the text at the precise moment when history of the highest importance is taking place, and make it pause.
    Joseph’s bones are introduced in the book of Genesis and recovered, by Moses, in Exodus. They disappear until the book of Joshua, and not until its end. One can say after its end. The Israelites have entered the land. Joshua, the hero of his eponymous book, dies and is buried. The last word is given not to Joshua’s burial but to Joseph’s. And the bones of Joseph, which the Israelites brought up from Egypt, they buried them in Schechem. Joseph’s funeral concludes the book, but it really comes after its conclusion—a remainder buried at the limit, exhumed from the reader’s oblivion as the book and story of Joshua seeks to end.
    It is in this respect that one can understand why the procession from Egypt is interrupted with Moses’ retrieval of Joseph’s bones. They are the remainder of the Exodus, which no date, no narrative, and no ritual can claim. The text carries them at all moments. Perhaps with this in mind the Rabbis imagined that the Israelites carried two Arks in the desert, one with the Divine Presence (Shekhina) and the other with “the dead,” that is, Joseph’s bones. Both are ever-present, yet their appearance to the world—or the text—cannot be calculated.
    We wish to oppose this poetics of return with the kind of repetition exhibited, and enforced, by the calendar. We wish, in other words, to read the eruption of Joseph’s bones into the text—and into the Exodus from Egypt—as figuratively disputing, rejecting, and opposing the regularity of calendrical time, tearing event from recollection, Egypt from Exodus, bone from date, exposing the former in its unfinished and energetic power.



At midnight on May 15, 1948, the Zionist leaders declared independence and gave the Nakba a new name: the State of Israel. Celan was in Vienna at the time. Eight days later, he gave a series of gifts to Ingeborg Bachmann, a young poet and philosopher from Austria. One gift contained a poem and a brief dedication. There is no mention of Israel or any other explicit invocation of what had occurred the week before, but there are indirect reasons to suspect that the new Jewish State had been on Celan’s mind.
    The poem has a name: it is called “In Aegypten”, which Celan apparently underlined in the letter. A week after the Israeli declaration of independence, Celan wrote a poem called “In Egypt.” Underneath the title, he wrote, Für Ingeborg. Bachmann, for her part, would not celebrate her birthday until June 25, but the letter that Celan wrote is dated May 23, a few days after their initial meeting on May 17. He seems to have given her the letter the evening before her birthday, even though he had written it a month prior.

In Ägypten

Für Ingeborg

Du sollst zum Aug der Fremden sagen: Sei das Wasser!

Du sollst, die du im Wasser weißt, im Aug der Fremden suchen.

Du sollst sie rufen aus dem Wasser: Ruth! Noemi! Mirjam!

Du sollst sie schmücken, wenn du bei der Fremden liegst.

Du sollst sie schmücken mit dem Wolkenhaar der Fremden.

Du sollst zu Ruth, zu Mirjam und Noemi sagen:

Seht, ich schlaf bei ihr!

Du sollst die Fremde neben dir am schönsten schmücken.

Du sollst sie schmücken mit dem Schmerz um Ruth, um Mirjam

und Noemi.

Du sollst zur Fremden sagen:

Sieh, ich schlief bei diesen!

In Egypt

For Ingeborg

Thou shalt say to the eye of the stranger: Be water!
Thou shalt—whom you in water know—seek in the eye of the stranger.
Thou shalt call them [or: her] from the water: Ruth! Naomi! Miriam!
Thou shalt adorn them [or: her] when you lie with the stranger.
Thou shalt adorn them [or: her] with the cloudhair of the stranger.

Thou shalt say to Ruth, to Miriam and Naomi:
Look, I sleep beside her!
Thou shalt adorn the stranger beside you most beautifully.
Thou shalt adorn her with the sorrow for Ruth, for Miriam

and Naomi.

Thou shalt say to the stranger:
Look, I slept beside those ones!

“In Egypt” is kind of a love poem patterned after the Decalogue but stripped of prohibitive statements: Thou Shalt, Thou Shalt, Thou Shalt. It lacks a tenth commandment. In this respect it is made in the image of the Decalogue but is actually an Ennealogue.These Nine Commandments are the commandments of love, where proscriptions themselves are forbidden. They precede the giving of the Law and constitute another one.
    Precede, that is, in both number and time. Nine comes before ten, Egypt before the revelation on the mountain of Sinai. The laws of Love are antinomian to the laws of Sinai, and they can be given neither there, nor in Zion: only “In Egypt.”
    This is only true, one might object, because she whom the speaker loves is a “stranger.” She, like Bachmann, is not Jewish, so their love can only take place in the illicit and exilic space of Egypt. But the Israelites, as is well-known, were themselves “strangers” in Egypt; so in a poem titled “In Egypt,” the “stranger” could be Jewish or not Jewish. When we remain in Egypt, the identity of the banned, the estranged, the persecuted, ceases to be a referent exclusive to the destiny of the Jews—who may or may not be named "in Egypt." The three women share the names of Celan’s childhood friends. They are also Biblical heroines, two of whom were not particularly associated with fortune in the arts of love. All three, crucially, were outsiders—to the land, to power, to money. Naomi, for her part, was a stranger in Moab when she left the land of Judah during the famine. Ruth suffers the death of her husband and manages to marry another—but she was a “Moabite” by birth: Where does she fall? Who, after all, is the addressee in the poem? Is it Ingeborg, whose name is given right above the first Du?Would Celan then not also be “the stranger”—truly the “stranger” “in Egypt”?
    It is true that “the stranger” is given in the feminine; but instead of isolating her, the structure of the poem obscures the differences between her with the Biblical women. Celan manipulates the grammatical fact that the feminine singular and plural in German are identical. “Them” or “her” (sie) in the third line, for example, can refer to the “stranger” of the previous line or the three women that are named thereafter; “Thou shalt adorn her” and “thou shalt adorn them” (du sollst sie schmücken) are identical in German. And does the genitive der Fremden designate a stranger or strangers? The singular cannot be estranged from the plural.
    “Adornment,” in each case seems to require the presence of both the stranger and the women. The acts of speaking that follow each command to “adorn” testify that the one or ones not being addressed—the women or the stranger—are being attended to, and adorned. Look, I sleep with the other. The paradox of the final line is that the speaker acknowledges having slept, in the past tense, with the Biblical women but can still point to them—Look, Look at these ones—as if they are as proximate to him as the stranger is. They are in her eyes. The temporal distinction between I sleepand I slept is at once neutralized by the imperative in each case, Look. Sieh,in Celan’s German, which returns us to the ambiguous pronoun sie—as if the command to one already summons the one who is not there.
    Since we have mentioned the imperative, we should acknowledge that our calculation of a total nine commandments is contestable. If one adds the other two imperatives, enjambed to signal that the “Thou” addressed by the other nine is to speak them, one counts a total of eleven. Overstepping the Decalogue, the poem in its totality might be called a Hendeclaogue. Falling short of the Ten and exceeding them, the poem on Love “In Egypt” precedes and succeeds, anticipates and surpasses the giving of the Law. It promises that what comes after revelation—after sovereignty, after the founding of community—is still another age of strangerhood, strangerhood in love, in which “resource” and “poverty,” the two parents of Eros, appear under the sign of Nine and Eleven.
    Love is the law that makes us strangers to our law; it is the law that makes me a stranger in Egypt, for Ingeborg, for you. It is the law that makes me a stranger to the time of the world, declarations of independence, anniversaries, borders, blood. As Israel was created, Celan was falling in love. The poem is as much for Egypt as it is for Ingeborg. I am in Egypt, and not in Israel, because I am in love.


1.This translation is by the author and is from Briefe an Max Frisch,pg. 164. The letter is also in Ingeborg Bachman and Paul Celan, Correspondence, London: Seagull, 2010, pg.257.

2.Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, US: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford University Press, 2017), pg. 72-75.

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Dionys Mascolo is little known to English speakers. A French communist thinker whose circle of friends include Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot and Robert Antelme, his writings, spanning half a century, have recently appeared and been revived on the Entêtement website and via La Fabrique editions.
    Whilst it is impossible to sum up his contribution we could settle upon what he has termed the 'communism of thought'. This, far from being one more excuse for the pundit trudge of an academic symposium, is a means of combating the philosophical tendency to reduce thought to concepts, to have any notion of progress settle into the confinement of a mythically logical truth.
    Against such intellectual certainty, Mascolo's communism of thought concerns a form of thought that mistrusts itself. Such a mistrust, having second thoughts, is as much a matter of how, to paraphrase him, what we might call 'thoughts,' are rather "moods, rebellions, disgusts, and desires."
    It is such a mistrust, when shared, which Mascolo sees as the basis for trust and friendship (communist presuppositions?) as there is a distressing element, a mutual recognition of alienation, a self-exile, that can be a spur to a communisation of the psyche.
    Turning to the translation in hand, written in 1962 and first published in the surrealist journal L'Archibras, we see Mascolo moved to write about an evening spent at a dance at the local mental hospital. On the very threshold of anti-psychiatric initiatives, he reverses the terms, risks seeing in the inmates a form of freedom, and is witness not to the innate but the tacit: a world wholly imbued with misrecognised intelligence. But that is not all.

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A recreational morning in the assembly hall of the N. psychiatric hospital. After the show, once the chairs have been cleared away, there is dancing. The presence of nurses—only a few of whom wear white coats—allows the two species, patients and 'visitors', to mingle; in principle, nothing distinguishes them. Among the patients, only the men are unfortunately marked out by their uniform tunics—a jarring note rather than a humiliation; it is a way of labelling them, a simplification that keeps them at a distance. The women, by contrast, almost all wear clothes of their own choosing. Half of them are young. An unsuspecting observer might imagine themselves at a provincial dance sponsored by some local authority (at first glance, the show’s unique quality lies precisely in this: different social classes brought together—artificially—and eventually pervaded by a certain natural ease). The women, most of whom are schizophrenic, particularly command attention.

After two hours, leaving that place means tearing oneself away from the very essence of allure.

We—visitors, normal people—having managed to leave and finding ourselves free in the café across the street, alongside other free and normal people like ourselves, look on in dismay. We are gripped by bewilderment, by a surprising sense of shame: we are outcasts, the excluded. Returned to our lives—lives teeming with vitality—yet cast back into the vast, frivolous alienation of the outside world. Weighed down by a heavy poverty and boredom, by activity, tasks, projects, and duties—all of them futile. By vanity. Trying to articulate this right then and there, my companion and I both realise that this feeling of exclusion—initially disconcerting, even shocking—is more than justified. For a start, the place we have just left is truly a haven—not an inert or static one, but rather a place that feels like the very orbit within which the act of seeking refuge can actually take place. Madness, admittedly, can always be viewed as the choice of a particular, ordered, personal, and nameable misfortune (or absence, or error)—a choice that makes it possible to keep at bay, or lose sight of, that general, aberrant, anonymous, and unnameable misfortune (or absence, or error). It is a negation of the 'true' meaningless misfortune that is ours (and from which we sometimes derive pleasure, being—fortunately—capable of inconsistency; in this sense, the gods make consistent those whom they wish to destroy). They flee into madness, to escape the senseless misfortune in which we live. It is simple—perhaps a little too simple. A misfortune that has causes, a pain that is relatively explicable—or at least more precisely defined—and seemingly accidental: such would be their 'refuge'… Yet the sense of exclusion stems from far deeper sources. The most compelling aspect is not the vision of the refuge itself—though there is a strange peace to this sanctuary, a place where forces at once unsettling and fascinating are simultaneously contained and set free. There is more. For one thing, if there is suffering here, it is an open, acknowledged suffering—one met with a response, recognised in a twofold sense. Wonderfully swept away—at least in their usual guises—are contempt, envy, guardedness, affectation and all the posturing and pretences born of the desire to impress (into which the conventions underpinning social life constantly degenerate), as well as all the distancing tactics devised by the petty-minded who fear being mistaken for someone else. Gone, too, are the petty demands for dignity and the idle chatter, the suspicious aloofness and the intrusive overtures or unbridled confidences. It is a world where stupidity is, at last, admirably absent. A world wholly imbued with intelligence—with thought: thought reigns supreme. But that is not all.
    Clearly, each person—brought into an equal footing with the inner lives of others—found themselves elevated to that level effortlessly, and even unwittingly, without ever ceasing to be fully and intensely themselves, or bear witness to others who were equally, intensely themselves. Communication from wound to wound, from incommunicable pain to incommunicable pain, from solitude to solitude: something secret is spoken publicly here, and upon this kind of speech the community is founded. No dialogue. No use of language that would tend to reduce the abyss of difference. It is the presence of a new principle, which is neither strictly poetic, nor political, nor social, but rather, one might say, that of a poetic equality, that gives meaning to this society. It is the striking figure of a metaphysical communism. With separation fully maintained, all non-essential differences are eliminated. Dialogue as a 'peaceful' exchange — that idealistic corrective to the wars of prestige, to mercantile competition, and to their consequences (the dialogue so cherished by humanists)—has become all but useless. Because it is no longer linked to the whole (to the coherence of a world), and because this illusion of being connected to the whole has been stripped away, each person seems to be nothing more than one fragment among others of an abolished whole.
    But what they seem to have been deprived of is precisely that which, within them, could serve as a support for the relationships devoid of truth that culminate in the monumental inertia of what has sometimes been called abstract universality. Thus, each person can remain a true stranger for the other—perhaps both having fallen victim to some obscure disaster — yet at the same time, without ceasing to be separate, without breaking their separation, thanks to which, they can enter with everyone into a new whole whose unprecedented cohesion, once again, stems from the fact that a certain kind of equality has been instaurated. A unique equality is manifested, one without that passively experienced enjoyment that is devoid of plenitude, incapable of joy, that is tantamount to a sick equality, an infirm equality. And yet, unlike anywhere else, the other is truly other here, and this means, without any paradox (once the idealist ambiguity of 'similarity' is dispelled) that no one is treated as a thing by anyone else. (It goes without saying that we are only discussing the relationships between patients at this moment; the nurses and doctors in their midst are the bearers of transcendence).
    If stupidity is now absent from such a society, it is surely, first and foremost, because these are minds that know themselves to be sick. They are delivered from the wretched self-assurance of those on the outside, for whom moral health makes error bearable, if not imperceptible. They are delivered from the presumptuous fantasy of participating in 'real' life, of belonging to the 'real' world, of being endowed with reality itself, and above all they are delivered from the smug self-sufficiency of presence of mind. At what price! Yet, how could they doubt the need to distrust the powers of the mind? They are held in these places (as prisoners) only to attempt a cure for these powers—and to be cured means, in the end, finding a way to bear the unbearable error—and error means, more terrifyingly, fault—and the fault is the essential fault: that of being mind—an absent mind, yet one that is active in its absence: instigating absence. And everything happens as if what we call their alienation were the expiation for that deliverance—from the alienation of the outside world—of which they are the chosen ones, and which they did not seek.
    And finally, this: this reserve without reserve, restraint without restraint, discretion without discretion, modesty without modesty, dignity without dignity – metaphysical, not moral; this kindness without kindness, true kindness: metaphysical, not moral; this perfect suspension of all morality, these detached attitudes infinitely removed from any consideration of merit or interest; these behaviours free from the faintest trace of evaluation or calculation, these virtues stripped of any shred of potential value, this humanity devoid of values, without even psychology (when it becomes necessary to enter the labyrinth of psychologies, it will only be through the paths of depth psychology, and there is no question of recognising oneself there); these thoughts cast out into the open, deprived of the security of conventions with which prudent reason surrounds itself, without protection or distance from themselves: left to their own devices and that means: to the ferocity within them; or these thoughts, maternally exhausted by the greed of their own childhood returning upon them, thoughts pressed against the unknowing of their origin, tortured by their own dreams, their inimitable gravity, but not anxious, rather distracted, enraptured, thoughts imposing themselves like the gravity of love itself. As in a spectacle of lovers, this is where the seduction comes from, and the feeling of envy, which dominates all other feelings. Most of the women gathered in this room seem inexplicably seized by a self-evident love (This impression, which in the eyes of doctors especially may be mere fiction, is a truth of the moment, needless to say. There is little doubt that on this exceptional day, pulled from the dreary boredom of other days, they surface. That doesn't change anything. And what 'normal' existence would be bearable if it didn't also have its moments of upwelling?).
    But, at this very point, what is still striking, and forces us to renounce the use of any simple notion, is that this self-evident love, devoid of exuberance and happiness, only serves to reaffirm the reign of thought. Or to put it better, something has intervened that renders this faculty of thought and this state of being in love inseparable.
    If the forces unleashed here seem for a moment to ensure the reign of amorous freedom, we must immediately correct ourselves. These relationships, these free relationships, are also somewhat abstract relationships. Sublimated relationships, like relationships between ideas. But isn’t love recognised by the fact that we approach another person as we would an idea (only to gloriously and miserably stumble upon a body, and what’s more, a body-and-soul, and soon a psychology, at the furthest point from the idea?). And if it is true that in these places the solitude of each individual, far from being shamefully denied, is given, affirmed, evident, then the way in which it is acknowledged reveals, indirectly, this: that the lovers, through the other, are restored to themselves, but that being thus restored, instead of plunging back into the solitude of the self, offers access to the impersonal. But again, is this not also the case in the operation of thought? Impersonality and singularity converge here. Here, and almost only here, this vision of thought-love has been offered to us with simple clarity. In it lies the deepest seduction.
    Seduction is grounded in absence. The other, if loved, is loved as someone distant—or what is loved in them is the very distance they embody. Neither possession nor presence, but an absence of the beloved— one that is constantly within my power to end—is perhaps what we never stop dreaming of. The other can then wondrously become the perpetually forgotten-yet-awaited, the perpetually awaited-yet-forgotten, much like the object of thought itself when thought has become desire. Narcissism, almost always viewed negatively, must nonetheless be an absolute necessity of the life of the mind, given that traces of it are found at the perfect point of impersonality.

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To exit this hellworld we need to cultivate a political grammar against both nomos and fatum—a politics that advances places without territories; that offers infrastructures for the absalieutos, the unsovereign, to dwell under the dominion of no sun.

For this we need a differnt kind of party—a Party of Aliens, whose program can only be the horizon of communism’s spark of light: not a redemption to come, but a return to the uncreated commons of alien existence—a place, in Neyrat’s account, “of radical equality of human beings, angels, and flies.”

Such a Party of refusal should be peopled by the fallen: the stranger, the hostis, the peregrinus, the ghurba and ultimately monsters. All those hunted, persecuted, and ungrounded by civilization’s knights of virtue—the slayers of dragons, the barbarous, and the multi-spirited.

This is not a Party that founds a nomos, that codifies new commandments, that instates a new calendar, that creates new heroes—you will not find it on any map. Not in Jerusalem, but the nameless alleys of an Egypt humanity never departed; not in the Vatican but the dark recesses of the prophets cave; not in Hellenized Athena, that world, our so called world, so long ago muted by military conquest, but the archaic folds of the Minotaur’s labyrinth; not in the integrated spectacle of the city center, but the asylum in the woods. All those places, as Mascolo will account where: “They are delivered from the presumptuous fantasy of participating in "real" life, of belonging to the "real" world, of being endowed with reality itself, and above all they are delivered from the smug self-sufficiency of presence of mind.”

In our refusal of territories, we embrace the emergence of places—nolandslands of the unsoverign. What Gilles Grelet will describe as a finisterre: a place at the worlds end, “in the world but not of it.” Such placeless-places shall not serve as tools of co-habitation with the present, but as technologies for insurgent forms of hereness. A mode of exile that dwells in this world yet is capable of deposing the rights and duties belonging to its nomi would otherwise assume.  

Belonging to the Party calls for a fanatical fidelity to a dream-politics that defies the wisdom our comrade Almaz receives from the doctor—the man of reason—the day following October 7th: “Be a little pragmatic. Leave your poetic metaphors aside and be reasonable!” To stay with this dream, to persistently organize it as an insurgent force, is to embrace what Abdul Rahim Al-Sheikh’s describes as the politics of hope: ‘Between experimental optimism and experienced pessimism, despair/desperation stands waving the reply-sword—the abyss, that resembles an empty quarter with temperamental borders, between a vocabulary of the innocent question, before the optimists and the pessimists messed with it: “Is there hope?” […] Hope is not a person, a self, a quality, an attribute, a state, a residence (even if it resides within us and we reside within it for the sake of Sumud) … Rather, it is a narrowly fleeting moment in an attempt to “contemplate” hope.^1*

1.Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, On the reality of despair and the right to hope,Al-Janoub: The Palestinian Journal for Liberatory Studies(Issues 2–3, Autumn–Winter 2025), excerpt translated by https://d-0.org/  *Contemplation and hope have the same three letter source, a m l, thus one could say … an attempt to “contemplate” contemplation, or, … an attempt to “hope for” hope [translators note]