1.

Prefatory Note:

...what follows is a singularplural voice in the wilderness "to be blown into the future by a storm that is the nightmare of paradise" (as Fred Moten put it to us in June 2021), a sharing of voices bearing the shards kicked up by the "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage, rendering our worlds into ruin and rubble" from Artsakh to Tehran to Gaza, as we tried to parse in December of that year in Berlin in what we named "The Conference of Shards," an ongoing parlay with ruination that continued across dates and geographies through to Chicago, where on October 7th, 2025 we assembled to commemorate the Flood and the founding of the Bund as migrants and comrades were snatched off the streets. The storm known as Nakba, or Unavowable Holocaust, had touched ground in Chicago, while Gaza found itself in one of those faux eyes of the storm that precedes the torrent to come. Here was there and there was here. The "after" was NOW. And if not now, when? We watched, immiserated, as our prophecies of genocidal peace and a sham "ceasefire" were imposed; we raised, indignant, our voice(s) so that it would never again be denied that the Resistance is one—wherever and whenever...
   

I have open before me Mahmoud Darwish's Sarīr al-gharībah (Bed of the Stranger Woman). Among the poems in the collection, which is dated "1998," is the tremendous lyric "A Cloud from Sodom (Ghayma min Sudūm)." The title proves to be a rogue citation from Paul Celan's 1952 poem "Marianne," which Darwish would have known through the 1989 Arabic version ofMohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory) by Loqman Salim and Waddah Shararah, who undertook their translation in a Lebanon laid waste to by civil war and Zionist atrocities. In the mid-90s Darwish left Paris—that city in which so many exiles (Celan & Darwish among them) have found a home—for Ramallah, where he curiously found himself in a kind of exile. "A Cloud from Sodom" concludes with his musing on what remained of the project of a national homeland after the political chill of Oslo had set in: "Who am I after your night | of the last winter?" The closing phrase repeats the opening. Ring composition of the "after" seems to doom Palestinian history to the impasse of dumb repetition. But the poem's middle stanza rends open time as we know it:

“A cloud went from Sodom to Babylon,"

hundreds of years ago, but its poet Paul

Celan committed suicide, today (al-yawm), in Paris's river.

Celan's original line drifts, like the eponymous cloud, into Darwish's poem, where the trope's metapoetic force joins Palestinian and Jew, the poet of the Nakba and the poet of the Holocaust, under the sign of aliaison dangereuse marked by the name of Sodom. In joining Sodom—this cipher for the forbidden union of man and man—to Babylon—the foreign land that precipitated Judaism's transformation into a scriptural deterritoriality—Darwish's poem becomes the locus for a queer binationalism within the sexual-textual space of exile (the precise ethos of dwelling which the Zionist project is premised on negating).
    Darwish temporalizes this illicit encounter into a fiction of occasion: for Celan's 1970 suicide is inscribed with the date of "today (al-yawm)" in a poem first published in 1998. He activates and radicalizes the almost ceremonious intensity with which Celan attends to dates and the poetico-political injunction that their observance demands of us. Al-yawm is the noncoincident coincident temporal rhythm within which Nakba and Holocaust are part of the same process, rather than discrete whiteboxed events. If, as Celan insisted in his Meridian Address, "every poem has its 20th of January inscribed" (the day of the Wannsee conference), it can only mean that the moment of fascists’ planning extermination is never singular, unique, incomparable, but a conspiracy of continual repetition. The poetic isthis constant vigilance to the ongoing catastrophe, not a retrospective "memory" culture.


...from the Seine to the sea that laps the Gazan coast...


 

Paul Celan's name has become nothing less than a shibboleth in postwar European letters, the precondition of a poetry of witness intelligible to a European audience, though the metaphor of the shibboleth resounds in the grim ambivalence of Tony Judt's 2005 pronouncement: "Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket." The metaphor came to be literalized in the 2024 nationality law promulgated and passed by Olaf Scholz's government, which juridically inscribes adherence to Holocaust recognition in the form of German Staatsräson as the precondition of legal asylum for migrants. This cultural politics of an "after Auschwitz" used to devastate Palestinian communities both in historic Palestine and Germany was itself constructed through a selective European reception of cultural artifacts such as Celan's poetry. Postwar criticism's elevation of Celan into a figure contained, confined, exceptionalized, and rendered cryptic, repeats every gesture by which Germany's Nazi past is cordoned off spatially and temporally from other colonial histories. The affective intensity with which Germany disavows the genocidal nature of the Zionist project forms the most egregious contradiction in this soi-disant culture of genocide remembrance.
    To wrest Celan (zum zweiten Mal!) from the grip of the German death cult has been the epochal accomplishment of Arabic, particularly Palestinian, poetry of the past decades—from Mahmoud Darwish to Khalid Al-Maaly, Ghayath al-Madhoun to Ahmad Almallah. It is in the Arabic reception of Celan's work that his refractory political aesthetics has found an afterlife, and Celan himself a new lease on life. For he returns, revenant among the Syrian migrants marching northward in the final stanzas of Ghayath Almadhoun's 2017 poem "Black Milk (Al-Halīb al-Aswad)," the title drawn from Celan's most famous portrait of the camps, "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"):

In those days

When I loved you gently

The great migrations crossed Europe violently

And Paul Celan emerged from the River Seine

And with his wet hand tapped me on the shoulder

And in a trembling voice whispered in my ear

Don't drink the black milk

Dont drink...the black...milk

Don't drink

Don't 

And disappeared among the groups of Syrians marching northwards.

Born to a Palestinian family in the Syrian refugee camp of Yarmouk, Almadhoun lived in Damascus until forced to flee in 2009, settling first in Sweden and now Berlin. His poetry is marked by both the reactionary violence unleashed in the wake of the Syrian revolution and the mass exodus to Europe that followed. Adrenalin, in which "Black Milk" appears, is an exercise in the contrapuntal poetic imaginary: it brings the catastrophes of the Arab present in dialogue with the afterlife of European colonial violence through an indictment of the quotidian complacency that allows for mass atrocities:

my European friends withdraw from me quietly, and I remember how the Europeans withdrew from their Jewish friends seventy years ago, and I remember the black milk.

And I try not to remember Paul Celan.

Throughout his poetic oeuvre, Almadhoun employs the Arabic word zamakān (lit. "timespace" but what we in English term "spacetime") for the new coordinates of this poetic encounter. Spacetime refers to the curve or warp of Cartesian space traversed by the introduction of temporality. In the vernacular conception of Einstein's theories, relativity names how the perception of an event is implicated in the empirical facticity of the event itself. Through the capacious topology of zamakān, the poet castigates Europe's blindness to longue-durée processes of colonial ruination that do not simply unfold in the immediacy of neighborhood or nation. The world is not divided into Nordic efficiency and "Middle East conflict," Celan's Holocaust and Almadhoun's Nakba.

"Black Milk" sets out to forge a pact of literary hospitality outside the strictures of German asylum law:

You emerge from behind the scenes [...]
And grant me asylum for sentimental reasons [wa-tamnahīnī lujū'an l-asbab 'ātifiyya]

 
Sentimental ('ātifiyya) is better translated as "romantic" even "passionate." There is a markedly queer tenor to this exchange, which submerges legal asylum in the erotics of hospitality. Celan grants the Palestinian poet "passionate asylum" outside of the strictures of what Dirk Moses terms the "German Catechism," that is, postwar Germany's political culture of atoning for the Holocaust through support for the Zionist settler colony. More radically still: as it is ultimately Almadhoun who proffers poetic asylum in his verse, Celan is granted a poetic afterlife on the condition that his poetry can speak to the deprivations of the Arab present and the ongoing colonization of Palestine. And on the condition that one refuses what Germany hawks as the sustenance of culture, remembrance, enlightenment.

"Don't...drink...the black...milk..."

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Among the photographs reproduced in W.G. Sebald's famous narrative "Ambros Adelwarth" from Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), there is a cross-page spread of a diary entry dated September 23rd on the left-hand page and September 24th on the right. The diary recounts the journey of the story's protagonists, Ambros Adelwarth and Cosmo Solomon, an eccentric couplet of Christian German and New York Jew whose queer comportment elicits gossip wherever they go. The story recounts their search for home or even humbler aspirations. In a pinch, a temporary refuge will suffice. The litany of place names throughout the story—"Hotel Eden," "Ithaca, NY," "Café Paradeissos"—drive the point home in somewhat heavy-handed fashion: these are emigrés on a desperate search for the respite and dwelling rendered increasingly elusive by capitalist modernity.
    The final quarter of the book recounts their journey eastward from France to Greece to Turkey to Palestine—as if Ambros and Cosmo trace in reverse the grand migratory arc from East to West (Jerusalem to New York) that defined a certain tendency of Jewish history until the Zionist project of "return" gathered momentum in the years of the story's setting. Much of this final section is composed of diary entries reproduced as photographs and then transcribed in the text. Sebald strews the path of reading with rubble. He sets us a kind of vision test: should we take it at face-value that the récit—fiction's or history's—simply reproduces the truth of the evidence? Or do we hazard myopia for the granular scale?
    The diary entry for the 23rd and 24th of September matches the division of the book page, as if the search for inhabitable place in the story might simply be the textual space of narration. For typographical breaks often align with the language of homecoming. In the entry for September 23rd, the almost perfect square of text begins by describing the Jewish quarter made of wood and ends with the narrator describing his feeling of being "at home" (daheim). (In his next novel, Rings of Saturn, Sebald will describe a diorama of the Jewish temple built entirely of wood.) On the right-hand page, the paragraph begins "Have found a home (Haben ein Wohnhaus gefunden)"—and ends: "Or are we no longer in time?” (Oder sind wir nicht mehr in der Zeit?).
    But it has never before been noticed that right after this question there is an errant line in the narrative that appears nowhere in the photograph of the text: "Was bedeutet der 24. September??(What is the meaning of the 24th of September??)." The question, this cry, shatters the neat coincidence of text and place, text and time, and any illusion that the transcendental homelessness of the modern world can find refuge in what George Steiner famously termed "our homeland, the text." What, indeed, is the meaning of any date? We, refugees, are not simply displaced by terrestrial borders, we are lost in the breach between the time of the Event and that of its narration. As if a shard of time had slashed the page. For our pilgrim couple does reach Jerusalem, but it is no homecoming. They detest the place. And what do they find there? The spectral persistence of the camps: "All we passed were a tallow-and-soap factory and a bone-and-hide works. Next to this, in a wide square, the knacker's yard. In the middle a big hole. Coagulated blood, heaps of entrails, blackish-brown tripes, dried and scorched."

To find the potent myth¹ of concentration camp soap production in the middle of Jerusalem is what is meant by the temporal skandalon of the 24th of September: the ragged temporality that enfolds Holocaust in Nakba, implicates Nakba in Holocaust. (When the survivors of the camps arrived in Israel with nothing but rags, "manly" New Jew Sabra types heckled them as sabon (סבון, soap) for they considered them weak, as soft as soap.) Sebald has been lionized as the great German author of postwar Holocaust memory culture, an author who even perhaps too strongly identified with the "unique" destiny of European Jews. But perhaps the disavowals demanded of him as one who seemed to perfectly incarnate the self-repentant German served to gloss over a more radical, unavowable substratum in his fiction which no one dared expose to the light of day: that this subtle interplay of photograph and text, proof and transcription, destituted the entire forensic paradigm that claimed the foundation of the Zionist state as the atonement for Auschwitz and slandered all attempts to narrate history otherwise with the brand of "Holocaust denial."

Perhaps one could say: if every poem is inscribed with its 20th of January, every narration is inscribed with its 24th of September.

1.The use of human corpses for soap in the camps was revealed to be a complete fabrication that the Nazis allowed to circulate as rumor for the ends of mass psychological torture.

 

2. 

We will return, an infinite mob / through all your doors, we’ll return / vengeful spectres, out from the shadows / with raised fists, we will return.

Louis Michele, My Trials

As we constellated distances between our resistances over the past year, in resonation with our friends accanto The Unavowable Holocaust, a number of important tasks became clear. If “al-yawm (today) is the non-coincident coincident temporal rhythm within which Nakba and Holocaust are part of the same process”—as Peter wrote, following the Oct 7, 2025 gathering in Chicago—our resistances al-yawm in turn are never only a matter of fighting injustices in the parochial “heres” and “elsewheres” we dwell.
    If, as one friend said: “every moment of the barricade contains every other moment,”¹ what is at stake in dwelling in the space-time of this cosmic barricade? How to go about summoning the breath of every resistance to the policed orbits of the capitalist cosmos—that space-time of the victors that would like to keep us forgetting, as to only better hold us in the shadows of its catastrophic march toward a “better tomorrow”.
    What than is at stake in our joining of this cosmic barricade? What does it mean to be-with the Palestinian resistance al-yawm, without dwelling in the here and now such a tradition of resistance, in all its singularity, emerges within?
    Here I share a personal reflection on my effort of belonging to the cosmic barricade, which I initially presented as my contribution to a discussion with my comrade Kamal Ahamada called Temporalities of Revolt, Histories of Genocidal Erasure, on January 17, 2026.²


A few weeks before Oct 7 2024, I found myself in the city of Ukmergė, thanks to the understaffed migration department in Vilnius, which didn’t have any openings in the near-future for the language exams I was required to take for my permanent residence.
    Having completed my Lithuanian constitution exam with a few hours to spare before my bus back, I decided to wander into the old town. The weather awful, heavy rains and a bone chilling wind, the thought arose that I might find some refuge in a museum or some other historical site.
    That’s when the idea came to mind that there might be some remnant of Jewish life to explore—given the city was majority Jewish for several centuries. In the main square of the old town I located a Synagogue. Entering the building, I understood it had been converted to serve other purposes, relevant to the needs of the cities current, majority Catholic-Lithuanian, dwellers. Soaking wet, out of the storm, I found myself in a basketball court and as my eyes drifted across the room they locked with the players, who having paused there game, took a moment to assess what it was this stranger wanted in this place.
    Although I doubt they fully pieced together what it was I was doing there, my encounter was ghostly. As though by entering, I had exhaled the breath of the sites former community into its present one. What had been erased through pogroms, ghettos, exterminations and the revisionist histories that would paint these cities as always and forever Lithuanian places of dwelling, was all, however abruptly, challenged—like a weak flash of light from a distant comet; a time beneath the floorboards returned.
    This unexpected coincidence between past and present in the space-time of al-yawm, in turn brought me to Palestine—a place where encounters not unlike these are happening on a daily basis. As the spatio-temporal erasure of Palestinian life is foundational to the psyche of the Israeli Jew, the continued presence of Palestinians haunts the settler, as a ghostly remnant that threatens to usurp the absolutizing identification of the land as theirs—

And so, the ruin, that ever-insistent remnant of catastrophe, is not merely a backdrop but a site of recurrence. It is not a space to be cleared for your projects of settlement, nor for your treatment of land as another commodity form, nor a relic to be mourned from a safe distance. It is lived in, breathed in, built upon, and returned to. The ruin, then, is a structure of refusal. A failed eviction. A testament that no matter how often the scene is razed, the Palestinian remains: unvanquished, untranslatable, and, above all, unrelenting.”³

Through the remnant a dark and deep unity cosmically bonds these historically incommensurable ruins. And the flash of light that cut through the historical separations of our space-times, awakened in me not only a land where memories of injustice converge, but also resistance. Such a tradition of resistance is thus “not the past itself, but the remnants of the past that remain in our hands and cannot be reduced to the present.”⁴
    Against historicisms separation of space-time into the irreconcilable imperatives of nations, peoples, territories; the temporality of the cosmic barricade affirms a shared community of interest between those who dwelled against fascism here and those that dwelled there; between those who resist now and those that resisted—

The barricade uproots the history of the city, stacks up ‘the atrocities of the victor’ into a dense interruption, inducing a blockage in the city’s veins, a cardiac convulsion, the street as missile where each impact on a cop’s head smashes open the cells where ‘the great names which contradict its thesis’ are kept imprisoned, releases the forces imprisoned by ‘the great names’.⁵

Oct 7th in this sense, was not only a call to action for Palestine. The aura of the Palestinian resistance has carried into the present the living breath of every unfulfilled demand for justice of the past.
    In awakening the breath of anti-zionist, imperialist, supremacist space-time, I found myself exposed to an altogether new possibility of relation to the anti-zionist, internationalist, traditions of my ancestors that had been seemingly forever taken captive by the victors history. For in the al-yawm of Oct 7th, resurfaced many other al-yawms—one of them being the October 7th of 1897, when the Jewish Labor Bund was founded in Vilne.
    And although the cosmic barricade is in no sense containable in the marks, evidences, or traces of historical time’s archival orders, I did turn toward an archive in Vilne to converse with the comrades of the other Oct 7. For the first two years of the Palestine solidarity movement in Lithuania, they were the only Jewish comrades in Vilne I found to connect with. Together we conspired about a communist world revolution; I gossiped about the crisis of zio-nazism today; and shared with them news of the impact of their early formulations of political autonomy and ateritorial confederalism for movements that would appear centuries later.
    Summoned back to the barricades in the shadow of the voice of the international Palestinian resistance al-yawm my secret encounter with the past began.
    And although the archivists were initially delighted by my interest in their collection—my weekly visits, convivial greetings, etc. It wasn’t long till they understood that my close engagement with the 12 remaining documents of the Bund was more than a scholarly curiosity. The day after trump was re-elected, I happed to pass through the archive and on the way out the archivist asked me:

“So your American correct?”

– “yes, that is true.”

– “ahh, so you must be happy?”

– “happy about what?”

– “trump, he won—it is good, no?”

– “No.”

The archivist pauses, seemingly sinks into a state of perplexity, and after taking another moment to process, musters: “BUT, you are a Jew, no?”

–“Yes, I’m a jew”.

–“So its good for you, yes?”

As I awkwardly nod my head in disagreement, the assistant archivist sitting behind her puts it all together and in a eureka moment, show his two hands clashing and blurps out:

–“BUNDDDD”

Not unlike the haunting encounters the settler has with the Palestinian, the archivist came to the crushing realization that they had welcomed into their institution of denial, weaponized trauma, and fascist planning, a force of pure negativity, which if left unchecked could sabotage the inner-machinery of their historical edifice.

  As developed in The Unavowable Holocaust, in seeing zionism as a historical collaborator with and a direct successor of European fascism, a revolutionary transfiguration of victim and perpetrator follows. Zionism al-yawm, as an indispensable technology for the preservation of the colonial, capitalist, matrix of Western imperial power, is necessarily brought into war with all those who resist and who have resisted that power.
    And given that the Zionist, settler colonial, order that followed WWII has so centrally employed the Holocaust as a groundwork for its knowledge of how to create a nation-state—I.e. by the sacrifice (holocaust) of otherness, in order to create a “people” for the ethno-supremacist political order; confronting this matrix today shall consist in nothing less than seeing the Palestinian resistance as a descendant of European antifascism, while simultaneously re-conceiving of all those who fought against European nation-statism, who refused to believe that the lands of this continent were not a place for them to dwell; as the survivors of and resistors to the planetary Nakba unfolding before us.
    Such an unworking and delinking from the denialist logic of historicism and the planetary Nakba it enables, is central to the constellation of resistances that have emerged around the Anti-denialist Coalition. Advancing the task of handing the knife to the dead with which they will re-emerge in the cosmic barricades al-yawm, one of our current initiatives is the study of the 1936 general strike against “Fascism and Nazi-Zionism” that began in Vilne, alongside the Palestinian general strike against British colonialism and zionism, and the Battle of Cable Street in London against the brown shirts—all of that same fateful year.


And while we have not found any direct communication between the strikers here and elsewhere, they indisputably belonged to an incommensurable community of interest of our cosmic barricade. This cosmic bond between the strikers may understood through what Benjamin, drawing from the following poem by Baudelaire, called a correspondence:

Like long echoes that from afar blend together

In a dark and deep unity,

Vast as the night and as daylight,

The Scents, the colours, and the sounds correspond.

Benjamin views a correspondence as neither the hidden identity between sensuously dissimilar forms, nor any other stable similarity, but the transient act by which entities belonging to heterogenous temporalities meet in the form of a constellation.⁶And in contrast to tele-communication, which operates as Neyrat develops, through the elimination of space, or the fantasy of the contracting of all distances, through their commensuration in a uniform technological space-time; correspondence is a deep and dark unity across the cosmos’ dialectical multiplicity. As Fredric unpacks:

Correspondences are at first cosmic, between the stars and the entrails of animals, between the outside and inside… the universe of correspondences is not made up of signs, but of expectations, inchoate projects, recalcitrant desires where past and future are associated without merging.⁷

A correspondence only happens through a community that forms around actions that disturb historicisms petrified, linear, ordering of the universe: a universe where communication can only happen through conformity to pre-assigned roles: vocations, divisions of labor, territories, assigned from above. A true correspondence, as Césaire so well gives words to, is the event of the emergence of an altogether new bond between entities:

In those days 

The word shower

And the word topsoil

The word dawn

And the word shavings

Conspired for the first time.⁸

Although I initially intended to end these thoughts with the uplifting calling to join the cosmic barricade, I understood its only right to conclude by confronting the traps and barriers empire has setup up to prevent us from making are way there.
    While we must defend the declaration: “every moment on the barricades contains every other moment”, we cannot deny that some resistances are avowed by history while others systemically disavowed. Imperialism’s selective recuperation of our cosmic community, has been central to its strategies of division, pacification and finally elimination of all that threatens its unchecked dominion over the universe. And perhaps at the center of its technologies of avowal and disavowal has been race. For it is through racialization that this nomos of history categorizes permissible and impermissible resistances—as Baldwin so starkly foretold:

[W]hen white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums. But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers^.9

And this imperial division of the universe into avowed and unavowed resistances does not refrain itself to the mere governance of the images, the external manifestations, of this will to resist, but surgically places itself in the pre-sensuous libidinal economies and cosmic-temporalities that insurgent forms of life find each other through.
    For instance, I doubt even Baldwin would have known that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was organized by anti-zionist communists, anarchists, and socialists, such as Marek Edelman. In other words, the barricades were not inhabited by empire aspiring racial supremacists, but by the ancestors and cosmic compatriots of the intifada, of the Watts rebellion. Meanwhile, in a sickening but all together predictable twist of history, we find an Israeli occupation force unit today named “Batalyon Ha-Ghetto”, who we can imagine has taken part in the fascist liquidation of the ghetto called Gaza and its rebels.
    While the cosmic community of the barricades takes as its bond an always immanent desire for happiness and justice al-yawm, the bond of the historical community is at its very core a sacrificial death cult—inextricably organized around the sacrificial logic exemplified by the holocaust and all the associated violences of modernity’s science of history that places redemption at an abysmal distance from al-yawm.
    To enter the cosmic bond opened by the Palestinian barricade we are called to destitute the very foundations of the European political traditions we have inherited from the victors history. For without this unworking, our joining of the barricade can only result in the tragic imposition of historicism’s policed laws of gravity onto the cosmic correspondence. For instance, the comparison of the Soviet occupation of the past with the Israeli occupation of the present—as some activists in Lithuania go about doing today—risks trapping the present resistance in an order of history where the only possible outcome of life after occupation would follow the post-soviet trajectory from totalitarianism to liberal, bourgeois freedom, of the Western nation-state form.
    While modern historical-time subordinates every avowed moment of resistance to the sacrificial telos of its political forms, the cosmic resistance is a calling for the refusal of these genocidal futurities as the only possible outcomes of the freedom struggle.
    To embrace the unavowed remnants of the traditions of resistance in a place like Lithuania, is to affirm the multitudinous desires for a non-occupied existence of our ancestors. It is to see this resistance as a lasting breath that stays with us today as a weak messianic power. To be called to action by the unfulfilled and historically unavowable desires of the past—whether those be Soviet dissident formulations of a society without a state; the multi-ethnic, working class, 1905 uprising against the Tsarist empire; Jewish anti-zionist visions of the nation-state being dissolved into an aterritorial confederation of autonomous communities; or as a dwelling in placelessness, as given form by the enigmatic communities of co-unbelonging, whose generic title of “from here” cut through the nomos of the earth, pointing to a singular form of dwell in space beyond the order of historical time.

We are the knife with which the dead open their coffins.


1.As cited in Oliver Silverman and Joseph Albernaz, “This-Time”, in A Performance Workbook, edited by Sam Dolbear, Rabrab Press, 2025

2.https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/21146/palestine-teach-outs

3. Abdajawad Omar, Trump’s Plan: Ethnic cleansing as fascist ambition, Mondoweis, Feb 6, 2025.

4.Sean Bonney, Comets and Barricades: Insurrectionary Imagination in Exile, in All this Burning Earth, Ill will Editions, 2016.

5.Tronti, Dello spirito libero, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2015.

6.Fredric Neyrat,Walter Benjamin’s Cosmos, Mosaic Journa, V.54, 2021. p. 60

7.Ibid. 66

8.Aimé Césaire, New Year, https://poetryinvoice.ca/read/poems/new-year

9.James Baldwin, Negroes are anti-semitic because they are anti-white, 1967, Sunday Magazine.

3.

2/12/2024

Dear Ivan,


We are still bored in the city. It has become an occupied territory of sociopathic geometry and murmurating commands. Its streets are full of intellectual predators and the roaming patriarchs are still showered, clean shaven and groomed. The Golden Hand has been sawn-off and smelted down into tiny ersatz suns. The Hotel of Strangers is being ransacked and the quotidian martyrs, though their ranks grow, are still in hiding. They’re starved of that salvific bilingualism that could tell a tale in mime of their undermining treatment at the hands of their intimates. We were all children once…

Does it remain for us, then, to seek refuge and pleasure in poetic prose …

The neighbourhood lived in an advanced wave of parables, and in the evening an invitation to converse with the stars

A city of five branches with an empty circular centre where everyone would plant a tree at their own discretion, a tree that would bear a natural resemblance to any given other person

The windings became more frequent and intricate, and seemed often as if returning in upon themselves, so that us wanderers had long lost all idea of direction

What architecture, what ambient décor could come about if these randomly selected and ready-to-hand phrases could transmute into a three-dimensional blueprint! How many more of them there are! As infinite as the avenues of an inundated psyche as it awakens us at night …

So, let’s walk down mediumistic streets …

Rue de l’Ecorcherie

Rue de Tuerie

Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne

Let’s chalk-up found phrases through which we can entice an envisioning of mousterian grottos, a knocking-through of walls, a depopularisation of snarky habitats …

Secular Ectoplasm

Blue Insomnia

Unlivable Swoon

Sinuous Spiral

Ah! Could I but describe the delicate happiness these syntactical shards inspire in me. Only then would I be an architect. I’d be dizzy with pleasure!


Your ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ still retains its hermetic lyricism. Yes, lyricism. That lyricism which retains its power to appease states of obsessive enrapture and sullied yearning that, if we are to carry on living this way, we cannot recoil from any longer. And, how you yearned and enraptured your readers with notions of a lyrical architecture! Not content with poetry or novels or metagraphieor paintings or drawings you sought out a lyrical fourth dimension which I presume would outstrip the idea of buildings and sculpture. What happened to your notion of a Quadro-dimensional corpus of which the action happens in several novels already published or to be published? Was it, like your idea to make a 500-page glossary of the Formulary, a phantom project that lasted as long as it took to write a letter to Guy-Ernst? You may be interested to hear that I have recently heard Clarice say that the “Last Word will be the fourth dimension” and Alex had hopes, sometime in 1964, for a “plan in four dimensions” etc. I wonder if the three of you share some idea of a different concept of time, some meanwhile, some post-time or a mysticism of the now, a meantime that is neither average, cruel nor related to learnedness?

I could say more (and probably will) but I first need to let you know that those portions of your text that Guy-Ernst edited out were published two decades ago. Sorry for the delay in letting you know, but I have only just read yourEcrits Retrouvés which includes the full version of the Formulary as well as your sparse and tangential commentary upon it. Rather than read these passages solely as an indication as to Guy-Ernst’s critical objections I’d like to present to you three of these omissions in order of appearance and out of context so as they can stand alone as enigmatic prose poems. I made the translations myself so they may not be totally accurate…



We can only talk about a new architecture if it expresses a new civilisation (it is clear that there has been no civilisation or architecture for several centuries; only experiments, most of which have failed: we can talk about Gothic architecture, but there is no such thing as Marxist or Capitalist architecture, even though these two systems have similar features and common goals.)

Everyone therefore has the right to ask us what kind of civilisation we want to base an architecture on. Let me quickly remind you of the starting points of a civilisation:

- A new conception of space (religiously cosmogonenic or not.)

- A new concept of time (numbers starting from zero, various worlds of time unfolding.)

-A new concept of comportment (moral, sociological, political, legal). Economics is only one part of the laws of behaviour accepted by a civilisation.)

---

It’s probable that we can identify a Marxist architecture if we take on board the buildings raised in the former Eastern Bloc and elsewhere. There’s the Lubetkin fetishists etc. But a ‘Capitalist architecture?’ That would give the game away. All architecture is capitalist: functional, cost-effective, war-like, disenchanting, hazardously constructed, unaffordable, airless, subject to a Section 21, etc.
    Maybe by now we should abandon the idea of a civilization? Come up with new ‘starting points,’ new ideas of how to experience space and time based upon the sensoriums of de Chirico, Claude Lorraine, Nicole Lachartre etc. Yes, let’s base such a renewal on entity music be it full and mewling or sparse and diaphragmatic (“What is this music?”) And as for ‘comportment’: the economy is the determining behavioural law when, in conditions of universal prostitution, all we have to trade with is the psyche-soma of our bodies. Themroc had the right idea.
    So, do you mean an architecture without architects? A kind of mass outbreak of outsider architecture, an architecture of blasphemous oddments, of rotting luxuries and upturned hulls? A non-pedigreed architecture: tree houses, floating villages, troglodytic towns. Of course, a rural urbanism with plenty of arcades and sail vaults, skeletal frames and vegetal roofs, rocky loggias and semi-covered streets…

Traversing passages through complicated space that plays on all the senses: sheafs of light piercing darkness; waves of coolness and warmth; the echo of one’s own footsteps; the odour of sun-baked stones

Is it that architecture could be a source of that “contrary determinism” you mentioned but never expounded upon (thankfully, as now it’s just a poetic rubric to peel open and suck at)? Is it that town planning could de-condition us rather than sap our social imaginary? An urbanism based on the Carte du Tendre with its villages of Probity, Sincerity and Lightness?

When I dream, and find myself capable of living in several different places simultaneously, I forget my regurgitated life

They want us dead, deaf, defeated, defamed, deadend … locked up in our vesicle of consumerist hypomania like lobotomised flies ricocheting in an egg timer, etc.



I want as proof only the handbill of the Palais de Paris, distributed in the street. (The manifestations of the collective unconscious always correspond to the affirmations of the creators)

THE DISAPPEARED NEIGHBORHOODS

The major events

PERIOD MUSIC

LIGHT EFFECTS

PARIS AT NIGHT

ENTIRELY ANIMATED

The Court of Miracles: impressive reconstruction over three hundred meters of an old medieval neighbourhood with leprous houses populated by crooks, beggars, ribalds, subjects of the affray KING OF THUNE, who dispenses justice from his barrel.

The Tower of Nesle: The sinister Tower profiles its imposing mass against the dark sky, where black clouds run. The Seine gently laps. A boat docks. Two swordsmen in the shadows watch for their victim. etc.

Other examples of this desire to construct situations have come down to us from the past. Thus, Edgar Poe and his history of a man who devoted his fortune to establishing landscapes. Or the painting of Claude Lorrain. Many of his admirers do not know to what to attribute the charm of his paintings. They speak of their light. It is strange indeed, but is not enough to explain their atmosphere of perpetual invitation to travel. This atmosphere is provoked by an unusual architectural space. The palaces overlook the sea on one level, they have "useless" hanging gardens whose vegetation appears in the most unusual places. The incentive to drift is provoked by the short distance between the doors of the palaces and the ships.

---

• ‘Manifestations of the collective unconscious’: You’re getting into deep waters mentioning such a thing as the ‘collective unconscious’ because not only does it undermine the public/private split and a counted-upon interior volition, it replays pre-lexical notions of a shared psychical field, an affective aria, that is closer to thecoalition signalling andrhythmic synchronyof premodern music. Does this Jungian phrase also summon forth thehypnoid statethat Freud quickly retreated from. This latter, in raising the spectre of unconscious communication and suggestibility, is dangerously close to refuting the very notion of a self-willed and bounded individual that capital is intent on both producing and micro-managing. It achieves this, as Fascism showed, by making mass culture function as the ‘collective unconscious’, a substructure of received thought and mimetic feeling, into which we are all plugged and from which we all draw our ‘comportments.’

• ‘Light effects’ etc: Your interest in son-et-lumiereand mis-en-scenebrings to mind the Boulevard of Crime at the beginning of Les Enfants Du Paradisas well as the spot-lit balletic footwork and animated stage sets that feature towards the end of The Red Shoes (two movies you’ve mentioned.) The notion of a situation presented here is one replete with ‘unusual architectural space’ as much influenced by set-designers and cinematographers as by painters and cartographers. Perhaps the elegiac tone of your Formulary arose because such envisioned settings as these, such ambient provocations to conscientization, were sensed as becoming not just redundantly romantic but less and less imaginable! Are you calling up the fourth dimension again? Can we go!? Right now!? Through the screen? Into the pages? Oh, how I wish I were back in Chevengur!

• ‘King of Thune’: The King of Beggars (or of ‘worthless coin’) is now a character in a 2014 video game franchise: Assassin’s Creed. It’s doubtless that what you summoned in this excised passage is something altogether less sanitised. Maybe it could fall under the heading ‘Sinister Quarter’ as this mock King presides over a utopia of sorts: a counter society of criminals, beggars and thieves. This could be the ‘other country’ of the Formulary’s header quote, an underworld that was charted by Luc Sante – the Zone as an actually existing non-place place of obscure menace, anex-urban wasteland, a rag-picker’s retreat, a site of off-road gibbets rising up from mounds of rubbish. And, of course, it’s that place of wish-fulfilment that attracts the undesiring intellectuals in Tarkovsky’s movie. That place where it rains inside.

A certain St Germain-de-Pres, about which no one has yet written anything, was the first group, on the scale of history, to operate on the ethical basis of the drift. This egregore, hidden until now, is the only explanation for the enormous influence that three blocks of houses have had on the world, and that one has tried to justify by the insufficient domains of clothing, of song, and more stupidly by questionable facilities of prostitution (and Pigalle?)

In future books, we will explain what the coincidence of days and their effects were at Saint Germain (Henry de Bearn's Le Nouveau Normandisme, Guy Debord's La Belle Jeunesse, etc.) The result will be not only an ‘aesthetics of behaviour,’ but practical ways of founding new groups, and above all a complete phenomenology of couples, encounters and duration, which mathematicians and poets will be able to study to their advantage.

Finally, to those who would object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to remember that in each group, characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing the tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the double mechanism of projection and identification. Experience has shown that drifting is a good substitute for a Mass: it is more likely to bring all the energies into communication, to harness them for the benefit of the group.

---

• ‘Egregore’: As Wiki says – “A concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.” This is, then, a reprise of the collective unconscious. It’s the secular ectoplasm of psychical exchange arising from an affect attunement that in our anxiety about the other, or in a similarly intensive state of emotion, we feel as if it were a stake in our chest. Max Jacob offered: “The Egregores are beings from heaven or elsewhere, more material than the gestures we make in dreams and more immaterial than protozoa.” Aren’t we coming to allude to love as that liminal state between material and ideal, as the relational tenor of that ‘distinct group’ of wanderers? The ‘distinct group’ as forming a supernatural tryst? A love that becomes diffuse and unpersonable? An unliveable love in which the very memory of the absent other sustains their presence such that it becomes – through forensic reflexivity and internalised conversation, through involuntary memories of the beloved’s keepsakes, through an introjection of their intimate nucleus– akin to being possessed? Is it along these lines and with these obstacles in mind that you summon forth the groups of the future? Egregorian Groupsthat could be the harbingers of what Fourier called A New Amorous World as it struggles with its oedipal structuration, its monomania, its repressed social guilt and as it re-opens the North-West passage to the Atheist’s Mass.

• ‘For the benefit of the group’: I think your sincere intentions are hinted at here. What was it you wrote to Guy-Ernst in 1964: “These exclusions have to stop. I know it isn't easy: developments have to be foreseen, suspicious characters ought to be rejected in advance. That would be ideal, right? These exclusions have become part of the situationist mythology.” Weren’t you excluded from the Lettrist International in 1954? What for? Maybe you were amongst the first to be excluded and, thus, it’s worth asking what split-off part of the excluder did you then have to carry? It can feel like an entity can’t it!?

We are bored on the couch …

Where are your letters to Guy-Ernst? The editors of Ecrits Retrouvés mention that they are with Michele but, somewhat disturbingly, the letters of choice included here (often as excerpts), are sometimes frowned upon. Take this example. I hope it is not too disheartening to read what others have said about you: “These fragments are deceiving: they show Ivan, under the influence of his psychoanalyst, being incapable of reseizing what makes his text [the Formulary] beautiful, profound and rich and his being ready to disfigure it while believing to correct it.” I don’t know how hard (or if at all) you worked on the glossary – or on that re-write you mentioned that would have followed the psychoanalytical technique of analysing each word, bringing each word under scrutiny – but it is said you included some glosses in your letters to Guy-Ernst. The editors have had sight of these letters and they refer to some of the pages as “delirious” and potentially compromising to those named in them.
    What seems to be happening here is at least twofold. There is the never quite absent backdrop of your mental ill health and confinement in an asylum. The editors refer to your diagnosis as “paranoid delirium” immediately after they speak of your discomfort that the Formulary was edited and published without your knowledge and that you felt that your contribution to the idea-pool of the Lettrist International (and subsequently the Situationist International) was not recognised. They go as far as saying you felt a sense of being dispossessed and, in line with a too-accepting reiteration of your diagnosis, that you felt this as your being “persecuted.”
  The editors suggest that you discarded many of your writings (“scrappings from your drawer”) so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of Guy-Ernst. Maybe you can give your own side of the story? Were there any writings? Or is this enticement a kind of revenge? You were excluded and to take your exclusion into your own hands, to vanquish Guy-Ernst as a super-ego, you must have wanted to become non-existent (“je suis inexistant”) and to respond infra-psychically in an egregorianmanner, by means of the collective unconscious: either by withholding what you sense was expected of you (reverse seduction) or, as you put it, by means of the “SILENCE OF DEATH” through which, curtailing the conversation, you seek to become supra-present in your endless absence.
    However, we both know how very often such things occur: ideas dreamt up with one another become subject to dispute as to their origins and an ugly proprietorship comes into play through which an ambience of mutual creativity degenerates into a neotenic trudge that occludes the general collective effort entailed in it. This is the juncture when we get an inkling of the differing levels of psychical investment in the group and to what ‘wider good’ it was aiming at. It’s when trust has failed, when the lust for recognition becomes cannibalistic and the ‘general intellect’ reveals itself as having been a hollow phrase. Later, some of us called this ‘farming.’
    Maybe this is what provoked that puzzling slogan of yours that had its roots in one more widely known:


In a not unrelated direction there is not only your interest in ‘alchemical texts’ and thesorcellerie of your absence cast as presence, that could be seen as courting a type of mysticism, there is also your almost heretical views about that Situationist shibboleth: the dérive,the drift. As you know better than most, the drift, that means of interacting with what is communicated affectively by the built environment and how it impacts upon the social relations of a group of wanderers, is at the root of many situationist concepts: unitary urbanism and psychogeography for sure, but also the construction of situations in that the drifters, in undergoing a different experience of time and space, are, like those guests of the Zone in Stalker, adventurers in desiring-perceptionat the same time as being in the dynamic process of forming their own group as a party-community. Even Guy-Ernst used the term ‘sub-conscious’ in relation to the drift.
    Does what I’m saying sound at all feasible to you? I’m only taking this tack because of how in your notes on the Formulary, you express a caution about prolonged drifting to such a degree that you have the nerve to say that each group of drifters should be accompanied by a ‘specialist’: someone who is paid to, as you put it: “assist, observe, and correct the drift of a group – not of apprentices, nor of clients…” You relate this payment to how the dangerous point of the drift is the return into the daily round of “petrified life” and that the specialist, in being paid, has a preserved connection to this already “established social context.” This latter hints at the drift as a psycho-social endeavour, a production of social relations, that had not been previously experienced and for which there are no guarantees of re-adjustment or of continuity once it has ceased. This is very close to the notion of a monitor in group psychotherapy who not only ‘holds’ the beginning and end of a session, the threshold moments, but is a consistent gestalt conductor for the projections and transferences etc. of the group without becoming its super-ego.
    So, you are explicit in your evocation of the drift as a form of therapy that entails both physical movement (that could be exhausting) and a free-associational psychical movement (which could be even more exhausting) and so it comes as no surprise that in having to include your commentaries your editors are careful to frame your ideas as either delirious or too much under the influence of your psychoanalyst. The common mythico-ideological idea is that you were forcibly psychiatrised and kept in an asylum as a prisoner of the situationist bid to be a “dual power in culture.” Maybe, an aspect of the truth, that can’t help being revealed in Ecrits Retrouvés, is that you more than tolerated your stay at La Chesnaie, enjoyed your conversations with Dr Kamouth and that, with other patients, you continued your creative endeavours in various revues including one entitled To Our Loves. Perhaps this latter would offer its readers a lyrically vulnerable experience more than equal to your wanting to write a novel influenced by Jens August Schade’s Two Beings Meet and a Gentle Music Arises in their Hearts(“The best novel of the 20th Century” you say on the dust wrapper of the Editions Gerard Lebovici translated) Didn’t you also plan to write a book on Bosch? Maybe all Guy-Ernst and Michelle wanted from you was one more text and in order to rekindle their friendship you strung them along knowing full well that this was the only way they’d maintain any respect for you beyond those of idealising elegies? I’d like to know if they ever visited you? Did you ever miss them, the milieu etc?






Jacques Camatte, Origin and Function of the Party Form, London 1977.

Ivan Chtcheglov, Ecrites Retrouvés, eds. Jean Marie Apostolidès & Boris Dionné, Editions Allia 2006.

Mohammed Khair-Eddine, Adagir, Dialogos 2020.

Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tattooed Memory, Harmattan 2016.

Marie Langer, From Vienna to Managua: Journey of a Psychoanalyst, Free Association Books 1989.

Clarice Lispector, Breath of Life, Penguin 2012.

André Nataf, Dictionary of the Occult, Wordsworth Editions 1994.

Andrey Platonov, Chevengur, Harvill Secker 2023.

Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ in Selected Tales, Oxford 1998.

Luc Sante, The Other Paris, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2015.

Stephen Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music, Zone Books 2015.

4.

In this story, a selection from the 1955 collection A World Not our Own, Ghassan Kanafani explores the subject of alienation. As a Palestinian exile in a newly developing Kuwait he faced a great deal of challenges—from boredom and despair, to a nagging feeling of helplessness.
    Thrown into a world not his own, he expresses his resentment towards the very land he stands on. In “Only Ten Meters” Kanafani shares insights on how he resists temptations toward the easy, baseless, comforts the city presents him. He maintains the consciousness of an exiled militant: neither able to fix the world he dwells within nor surrender to the nihilism of accepting loss and moving on.


Palm trees, skyscrapers, empty alleys with rubble, broken glass, the loud rumbling that comes from the roads nearby.
    Having been confined to the Gulf for nine years myself, I can attest to the feelings of boredom, the alienation, and the ways you get stimulation through observing people and their conversations.
    Being a Palestinian (or a Levantine by extension), the feelings he shares on the meaninglessness and pointlessness of life in exile are no stranger to me. There is a true pain imbued in the nature of life in the Gulf states, the harshness of capitalism and its chokehold on private life.
    Coming from a colorful background, filled with community and laughs, shared with friends, and plenty of family gatherings—the Gulf leaves one aching for home.


– Yassin Eltalhawy, March 12, 2026

---

The circumstances led us to travel there... we met a set of choices that were void; to exile ourselves so we can send to our families what they desire.

And when we met there we put our efforts to make life bearable in one way or another.

And without completely realizing, we were able to form a social circle. Life there was dry, full of despair, and our relationships did not impact our lives in any significant way other than giving life a different flavor every now and then. If not for the kindness of well intentioned people, then life would’ve been much harsher, tougher to handle.
    Little by little we got used to this kind of life and we got used to the struggle and to the superficial nature of our relationships. We accepted it to be the cost to bear for the sake of the relationships themselves.

They were the most valuable thing one could attain in this exile.

We used to spend our holidays in small circles playing cards, cursing... and entertaining ourselves. That’s how we called it, just entertaining ourselves, with simple things.

And today, university.

I left my house which is nestled in the edge of a residential area, and I told myself: “I’ll walk to my friend’s house.”
    Since morning, since I woke up, I’ve been engaging in pointless discourse with my roommate in our isolated home.
    The best part of it all was that he used to listen to me talking to the lady who used to take our clothes and wash them on the sea shore. In reality, I thought he would be asleep, anyways... his wakefulness nor his sleep mattered to me, the lady looked young and was usually jubilant and if our clothes were dirty she’d be cross with us.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes, come on in.”

“No! No! I know you guys, if I come in I’ll find at the very least 10 men inside and they will not repent to me… you always lie...”

I held her by her wrist, it was small and soft, if it were not for my friend dropping something on the floor she wouldn’t have run away frightened.

“So, you made that lady leave on purpose?”

“Yes, I did it on purpose, I did not want you to act disgracefully.”

“What do you mean by acting disgracefully? I am still new to this country, and tomorrow my sorrow and longing will melt away!”

The street was long and silent, parts of it were wrecked. I thought of my times walking, alone and sweating under the sun, feeling incredibly dizzy. As if I didn’t have enough things to go insane over.
    I should’ve rented a car, it really isn’t fun for one to walk at this time of day in a street like this. I reached a point in my journey by foot where it meant nothing whatsoever.

What do I mean when I say: “This society is unbalanced.”

The ratio of women to men is 1:70, and how these seventy men wish to see that one woman! Everything loses it’s meaning when one gets used to his condition.
    I play cards every afternoon, I lose, I win, I curse, and I argue... then the next morning’s sun rises. If that woman came into my room... If she went to my dirty bed which was soaked in sweat caused by the summer, that just reeks of a nasty odor, then some new desire all too human would’ve arisen... and that desire requires my utmost attention!

“How are you taking advantage of such an innocent girl? Humans must control their impulses!”

Oh! How stupid are we when we bring civilization into the subject of human misery and despair.

“Taxi sir!”

“No, I’ve already arrived.”

I still have more than half an hour walk... it’s so stupid when one chooses to be in a car, benefiting from civilization, yet the distance between him and his humanity remains completely severed.
    Screw this civilization that we brag about as much as we brag about how good we are at playing cards.

“Suppose a woman invited you and you entered her home (and slept with her).What would you get from the whole ordeal? Wouldn’t your conscience be bothering you?”

“My conscience? Oh settle down you little boy, my conscience is based on my needs, desires... my normal human desires... I picked up this philosophy here.”

Must I explain myself to this polite sir?

The heat is harsh, but the desire to leave is worse...in the shade of the adjacent apartment building I see two men who were fat and tall—as far as I could tell since they were sitting down.
    Despite the fact that they were attentively playing cards, I couldn’t help but notice, with around 10 meters distance between us, that they were talking about something else.
    One thing came to mind. And I tried as much as humanly possible to think of what they were talking about just from my observation of the entire situation from my location, but only one thing came to mind.
    There was a third man standing by the two men, he was thin and was voraciously following the two men with his eyes almost bulging... it seemed to me as if he was trying to say a word, interrupting others, but then he’d go quiet again with some sort of embarrassment. By the look on his face I could tell he was uncomfortable. And in his large hand he was holding the arm of a child who seemed to be about 6 years old.
    The child turned his head towards the street ad, was looking with joy at the cars and people, while he put two of his fingers in his mouth and without paying attention to anything began sucking on them loudly.

Rafiq will now wait for his partner in the game, no worries, let him wait.

There’s nothing better in this country than a dreamlike moment, even under a burning sun. Outside of space and time. The washing machine’s surface was a wonderfully round one, it’s lower lip about to fall or split. If that idiot hadn’t dropped his mirror, some bump wouldn’t have formed on the perfect round wheel.

But in regards to my conscience...

It was midday, and the weather was hot... there weren’t many people, and there was fewer cars than before. I suspected that hot rain may fall from the sky.

“Taxi sir?”

“Oh. no.”

Five meters remain between me and the three men and the child, and I heard some flickers of sound coming from the fat man while he was talking to his friend without making eye contact with him, keeping his eye-line fixated on the table:

“What do you think? The entire matter requires your agreement...you’ve moved your pieces more than you should’ve. Just remember.”

The other fat man replied: “It was a mistake, I wasn’t trying to cheat, I think it was the kid... anyways—just play don’t think too long—anyways, the matter relies on you...I don’t know, if he were a year or two older. This creature—always cheats us because we’re kind hearted. ‘Shish yak’ I’ll eat two pieces at once, watch out...”
    I had aligned with them and then I looked at the child, he measured me with wide eyes while sucking his finger, and then he extended the tip of his tongue in fear and then tilted his head a bit forward and smiled... I slowed my pace down while walking and I heard the thin man while he was talking and pushing the kid infant of the two men:

“And what matters to you? You guys didn’t even look at him well...”

Now all of them are behind me... I slowed down my speed and heard one of the men saying:

“I don’t understand how you can say it doesn’t matter to us when you’re nothing but a pimp!”

The ivory dice clacked together on the board, then one of the men threw his dice with such force it hit the soft wooden border of the board with an explosive sound, and then the other man burst into laughter whilst saying:

“I don’t think he’s as bad as you say he is... if you thought.”

At that point I couldn’t hear anything anymore, I tried to look behind me but didn’t feel the urge to.

“Taxi sir?”

“No no”

I felt two strong hands on my shoulders shaking me hard, so I turned around frightened:

“My brother..haram..haram..haram.”

I looked to him, he looked like an old man with a slight hunchback, he was wearing circular glasses with a little silver chain that shined behind his small eyes, and he was shivering whilst shaking me and repeating:

“Haram... haram...”

“What’s haram?”

He pointed with his index finger behind me:

“The child...he doesn’t know anything...haram!”

I went around him in confusion and told myself this old man was behind me, and he only heard himself but I didn’t hear him.
    He put his hands on my shoulders again and let his cane hang on his arm and he started shaking me:

“Haram...haram...what can we do?”

“Nothing...you see, I am weak of build, and you’re an old guy... we can’t fix the world and all of its problems taking into account these factors!”

The old man dropped his hands from my shoulders accepting defeat, then he looked around his surroundings:

“The child... the child...he doesn’t know anything”

I repeat to myself:

“Then if this doesn’t fix the world...”

“Taxi sir?”

“Oh. No. No.”

I continued down my path in the ruins, the dust, and the scorching sun that cannot be beared...

“Taxi?”

“Why?”

He could’ve taken me through those 10 meters I just walked?

“Taxi?”

“No!”

This wouldn’t ever fix the world.


– Kuwait, 1959.

1.

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

Because the pariahs are not okay.

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

A conscious, non-nomadic pariah.

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

2. 

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




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

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

   

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

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


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




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




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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

We can perhaps call it the “Hurbinek effect”…


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

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

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




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


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

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

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

Anonymous (in fact Jacques Camatte)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy ed.

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

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

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

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

Etre singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996

La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001.

La communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014.

4.

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

– Danny Hayward, June 2025

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

The Étrennes is available here


 
warmly,

The Children of Cain

2.
Dear friends,

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

Best wishes,

Anacharsis Cloots Deputation.

PS.

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

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

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

3.
Salut,

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

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

All the best,
  n.n.

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


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


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

Tłumacz Niespokojn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also see:

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

Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants

Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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