Peter Makhlouf, Shards of Time

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 Auschwitz, 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), a collection dated to 1997 which contains the tremendous lyric "A Cloud from Sodom (Ghayma min Sudūm)." The poem's title proves to be a rogue citation from Paul Celan's 1952 poem "Marianne," which Darwish would have known through the 1989 Arabic version of Mohn 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. From its opening word— "After (ba'da) your night, the last night of the winter..."—through to its closing verse— "Who am I? Who am I after your night | the last night of the winter?"¹—the poem queries the possibility of living "after" and gives voice to the shame of the one who must go on. The speaker's cry is a supreme distillation of the post-Romantic quandary of belatedness: what possibly remains for us to say, we who have arrived too late? We remain epigones, languishing in the wake of catastrophe. A world "after Auschwitz" lames our poetic faculties.
    But the poem and its frequent invocations of an "after" are shot through with question marks. Darwish gradually militates against this echt deutsch propensity to slice up time sausage-like into before/during/after, pre-/inter-/post-. Such historical scissions render genocide a fait accompli, resistance against it a foregone conclusion. In insisting that the catastrophe has already happened, the "after Auschwitz" episteme concludes its pact with the history of the vanquisher. The temporality of genocide is subtended by the genocidal nature of temporality. If, in the time of the "after," the one who speaks from the poem is bereft of life, shod of voice, deprived of anything to say, it is because there is no possibility of poetic speech without the possibility of resistance against the present catastrophe. Liberation blossoms for the speaker when the "after" is put under erasure: he takes a seat next to "my freedom" and revels in the commandment to "let go of yesterday and dream with all your subconscious." This is no injunction to colonial amnesia but a lifting of the repression that, in ordering the partition of Palestine, ordered the partition of Holocaust from Nakba, which it confined to unconscious oblivion.
    We do not live in a time "after" catastrophe for the catastrophe (which is to say, History) is ongoing; but so, too, is opposition. The "song's sun" lights up the long "shadow" of disaster as if transforming it, in a revolutionary contre-jour, into the outline of utopia. Poetry morphs from belated witness to past horrors, to which it can never do justice, to a revolutionary seizure of the means of temporal reproduction. 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 joins Palestinian and Jew, the poet of the Nakba and the poet of the Holocaust, under the sign of a liaison dangereuse marked by the name of Sodom. What occurs in joining Sodom—this cipher for the forbidden union of man and man—to Babylon? Especially, given the latter is the foreign land that precipitated Judaism's transformation from territory based religion into a scriptural deterritorialization. In this conjoining, 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 1997. Al-yawm names the noncoincident coincident temporal rhythm within which Nakba and Holocaust form part of the same progression of colonial modernity, rather than discretized events. If, as Celan insisted in his Meridian Address, "every poem has its 20th of January inscribed" (the date 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 is this constant vigilance to the ongoing catastrophe, not a retrospective "memory" culture. Darwish activates and radicalizes the almost ceremonious intensity with which Celan attends to dates and what their observance demands of us.
    In his Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida offers an extravagant exegesis of dating and its aporetic signature: of how dating grounds its singular relation to a given day through the iterative multiplicity of a date that recurs. The concept of "today" (but when?) forms a leitmotiv, revenant at variance, throughout Derrida's text. The date never coincides with itself but appropriates its own gesture in the passage to another: another day, another history, another context, another time. Another language: in Arabic, al-yawm means both "today" and "the day", every or any day may be the door—the 20th of January or ianua (<Latin, entrance)—through which the poem's date arrives to the communal sharing of time that is con-temporaneity "today." Al-yawm is how and when Derrida's necessary French distinction between "aujourd'hui" and "en ce jour" return to themselves in the single Arabic word—but only return in the detour or migration through the other, the language of an other, another catastrophe (<Greek, to turn to the side or overturn). "Return" is a kind of shibboleth in Derrida's reading: "How can one date what does not repeat if dating also calls for some form of return (fait aussi appel à quelque forme de retour) [...]?" We, too, call for return as the ultimate horizon of our politics of dating: on what day or date will the martyrs be allowed to return to life and the living to their homes? When can we return to Jaffa? Then will al-yawm finally coincide with itself...but only to turn again or re-turn towards other storms on the horizon, towards the next temporal insurrection of the dispossessed, wherever and whenever.
    The terms of Darwish's poem are so eminently Derridean that one has the suspicion that Darwish—who lived in Paris in the very years that Schibboleth was published—may very well have known it, given his personal relationship to Derrida. Darwish penned his poem in 1997, one year after he had been allowed to return from Paris to Palestine. Among the books that Derrida received that year, now preserved in his library, are two inscribed copies of Darwish's poetry in French translation, which he must have sent in the very months that he was completing "A Cloud from Sodom." For each of the books bears a dedication, a signature, a place and...a date: 27.5.1997. "Au dernier soir sur cette terre"... but never after it.


And, at a later date, Celan returns, revenant among the Syrian refugees marching northwards in the final stanzas of Ghayath Almadhon's 2017 "Black Milk (Al-Halīb al-Aswad)." Almadhoun—a Palestinian born into the Syrian refugee camp of Al-Yarmouk and now resident, as political exile, in Berlin—borrows his title from the mastertrope of the concentrationary universe in Celan's "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.

Is this a time "after Auschwitz" or one of Auschwitz's afterlives? If Celan lives on, does the catastrophe for which he has come to stand in metonymically live on as well? Celan's arrival in the present, with an imperative of refusal, suggests that the violence of the camps figured in the black milk is not finished: neither over nor a foregone conclusion. We might still salvage an interval of potential history; we might still win for ourselves a world without camps; we might still save Celan from drowning. Through Black Milk's fiction of ghostly contact, we are confronted with what Joe and Oliver have so beautifully termed the "vagaries of political necromancy." What do specters ask of us? Is it we who conjure them to force speech in our stead? Can we promise the dead, as Benjamin's angel once did, life—but on the condition of a political redemption of the world?
    From the heart of the German capital, Almadhoun conjures phantoms as a way of asking about how Auschwitz afflicts our present beyond the Holocaust-to-Israel atonement narrative that grounds the myth of a "past-now-mastered." Nakba—a continuation of the Holocaust whose genesis indeed predates it—forms the spectral excess that seeps out of sovereignty's armature, at once perceptible and invisible like Celan's ghost. Almadhoun exposes how a hypervisible memory culture occludes the Palestinian dead; how an EU regime founded on Holocaust remembrance actively unsees drowning migrants. This Celan who haunts us in Arabic insists that the violence of the camp-form persists; but so, too, does the possibility of dissent: Don't drink...Don't... What would have happened if, in 2017, we had together stopped drinking the black milk Kool-Aid of a world that had tasked politics with the art of exterminating undesirables? To read Almadhoun's poem today is to tarry with the promise of paths forsaken that emerges in the act of refusing historical predestination: that there was a course of history along which Auschwitz could never have been built, the dead under the Gazan rubble could still walk.
    In Black Milk, Almadhoun employs the word zamakān or "spacetime" for a poetic cartography beyond Cartesian coordinates in which catastrophes deemed distinct in cartographic space or chronometric time are revealed to be connected—whether in Fortress Europe or the Global South, 1945 or 1948. Spacetime typically refers to the curve or warp of three-dimensional space traversed by the introduction of temporality. In the theory of relativity from which zamakān emerges, the perception of the observer is implicated in the empirical construal of any event. In bending general relativity towards a poetics of catastrophe, Almadhoun asks us where we stand—and when—as we narrate any sacralized "Event":

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.

From the vantage point of colonial amnesia, we are scarcely in a time "after Auschwitz," if the very same architectures of anesthetization remain in place so as to inure the world to Nakba. And there's a kind of paronomastic provocation here at work. To the archons of German memory culture, the audacity to narrate catastrophe otherwise through the theory of relativity constitutes nothing less than Holocaust relativization, a charge leveraged against all those who dare put the Holocaust in dialogue with colonial genocides or insist that Germany bears responsibility for Palestinians' dispossession. Doubly transgressive is the effort to mobilize Celan's antifascist poetics against a fascist Europe that has claimed him as its own.
    For Paul Celan's name has become nothing less than a shibboleth in European letters and the precondition of a poetry of witness intelligible to a European audience. The metaphor of the shibboleth resounds in the grim ambivalence of Tony Judt's 2005 pronouncement, "Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket," a dictum 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 naturalization. But this cultural politics of an "after Auschwitz" used to devastate Palestinian communities both in historic Palestine and Germany was itself constructed through a select European reception of cultural artifacts such as Celan's poetry. As Simone Stirner has noted, postwar criticism's elevation of Celan into a figure immured, confined, exceptionalized, and rendered cryptic, repeats every gesture by which Germany's Nazi past is cordoned off spatially and temporally from other colonial histories. Palestinian poetry, beginning with Darwish, liberates Celan from the enclosure of Zionist appropriation...

... while "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. Almadhoun places the invitation to a "passionate asylum" beyond the policed limits of the "German Catechism" in the mouth of the German-Jewish poet. 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. While the repeated attempts to confine Celan's work to a Jewish context in a gesture of fidelity have the effect of rendering that work a dead letter, it is in the migratory passage of Celan's work to other languages, other worlds, other histories that keeps his recalcitrant aesthetics—indebted as they are to the Jewish radical tradition—alive. And since it was Celan whose poetological reflections most stridently insisted that the poem can be, must be, an ethical gesture of opening to the other, I think this is another tradition that he would have well recognized as his own.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

[...]

But let them be, they're dead and gone...

– Yeats, "September 1913"

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 1913 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," "Café Paradeissos"—drives 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 story 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 tale, the récit—fiction's or history's—simply reproduces the truth of the evidence? Or do we hazard myopia for the granular scale?
    The photograph of the diary entry for the 23rd and 24th of September matches the book gutter on the 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 book, The 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??)." As if a shard of time had slashed the page.
    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 its narration. 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 myth² 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 chronicler of 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: that its 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 bears its 24th of September.


1. Or: "night of the last winter"
2.The claim that human corpses were used for soap production 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.

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Korah, The Cosmic Barricade

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.

Louise Michele, My Trials

As we constellated distances between our resistances over the past year alongside our friends accanto The Unavowable Holocaust, a number of important tasks became clear. If, as Peter wrote, following the Oct 7, 2025 gathering in Chicago: “al-yawm (today) is the non-coincident coincident temporal rhythm within which Nakba and Holocaust are part of the same process”. Then, our resistances al-yawm, in turn, are also never only a matter of fighting injustices in the parochial “heres” and “elsewheres” in which we dwell.
    What then could 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? If as one friend said: “every moment of the barricade contains every other moment.” How may we inhabit the cosmic barricade? How to go about summoning the breath of every resistance against the rigidly 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”.
     Here I share a personal reflection about my effort to belong to the cosmic barricade. I initially presented the following as a contribution to a discussion with my comrade Kamal Ahamada called “Temporalities of Revolt, Histories of Genocidal Erasure”, on January 17, 2026.¹


A few weeks before Oct 7 2024, I found myself in the city of Ukmergė. This was 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 my 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, finally out of the storm, I found myself in a basketball court.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 dwelling places, was all, however abruptly, challenged—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. 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 what appears to them 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.²

Through the remnant, a dark and deep unity cosmically bonds the historically incommensurable ruins of the synagogue in Lithuania and the horror of what is being done to Gaza. And the flash of light that cuts 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.”³
    Against the separation of space-time into the irreconcilable imperatives of nations, peoples and territories, the temporality of the cosmic barricade affirms a community-in-common. A community between those who fought against fascism here and those that fought there, between those who resist now and those that resisted in the past—

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’.⁴

October the 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 ant-zionist, anti-imperialist, anti-supremacist space-time, I found myself exposed to an altogether new possibility of relation the tradition of my ancestors; a tradition, seemingly, forever taken captive by the victors history. For in the al-yawm of the Flood—“The flood itself is an excessive flow, a spilling out of the river's proper circulation and measure, a current overtaking its bounds and washing onto land to liquidate the solidity of grounds and boundaries”⁵—many other al-yawms could emerge from a ground unsettled—one of them being the October 7th of 1897, when the Jewish Labor Bund was founded in Vilne.


Although the cosmic barricade can in no sense said to be contained in the marks, evidences, or traces of historical time’s archival orders, I did turn toward a public archive in Vilne to converse with the comrades of this previous October 7th, following the recent event. For the first two years of the Palestine solidarity movement in Lithuania, a collection of twelve pamphlets were the only Jewish comrades in Vilne I found to connect with. Together we conspired about a communist world revolution and I gossiped with them about the crisis of zio-nazism today. I shared with them news of the impact of their early formulations of political autonomy and aterritorial 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 until 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 shake my head in disagreement, the assistant archivist sitting behind her puts it all together and in a eureka moment, claps his two hands and blurts 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 negativity, which if left unchecked could sabotage the inner-machinery of their historical edifice.


Rather than being the historical repository of the victims of genocide, zionism was always interwoven with the perpetrators. As developed in “The Unavowable Holocaust,” in seeing zionism as a historical collaborator with, as well as 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 conflict with all those who resist and have resisted that power.
    And given the Zionist, settler-colonial, order that took shape after World War II has centrally employed the Holocaust as a groundwork for its knowledge of how to create a nation-state, by the sacrifice (holocaust) of otherness, in order to create a pure people; confronting this ethno-supremacist matrix today will consist in nothing less than seeing the Palestinian resistance as a descendant of European antifascism. Simultaneously this means re-conceiving all those who fought against European nation-statism, those who refused to believe that the lands of this continent were not a place for them to dwell, as the earlier 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  makes up 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, some of us have taken on the study of three seemingly separate but concurrent events in 1936: the general strike against “Fascism and Jewish-nationalism” that began in Vilne, the Palestinian general strike against British colonialism and zionism, and the Battle of Cable Street in London against the brown shirts.
    And while we have not found any direct communication between the strikers here and elsewhere, they indisputably belonged to the incommensurable community of interest of our cosmic barricade. This cosmic bond between the strikers here and elsewhere may be 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 Neyrat 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 historicism’s petrified, linear, ordering of the universe: a universe where communication can only happen through conformity to pre-assigned roles. Those vocations, divisions of labor, and territories, that are assigned from above. A true correspondence, as Aimé 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 an uplifting call to join the cosmic barricade, on reflection 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 are 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 restrain itself to the mere governance of the images, the external manifestations, of this will to resist. It also 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 altogether 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 of the so-called victors of capitalist modernity is at its very core a sacrificial death cult. The death cult is 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 these be Soviet dissident formulations of a society without a state orthe multi-ethnic, working class, 1905 uprising against the Tsarist empire. Whether they areJewish 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. Those whose generic title of “from here” (Tuteishyia) cut through the nomos of the earth, and pointed to a singular form of dwelling in space beyond the violent abstractions of historical time’s national borders.


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

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

2.Abdaljawad Omar “Trump’s Plan: Ethnic cleansing as fascist ambition”,Mondoweis, Feb 6, 2025: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/trumps-plan-ethnic-cleansing-as-fascist-ambition/

3.Mario Tronti, Dello spirito libero, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2015.

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

5.Joseph Albernaz, Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community, California: Standford, 2024. p.142

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

7.Ibid. 66

8.Aime Césaire, New Year

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

3.

Howard Slater, Letter from Even Further Afar

12/12/2024

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

Unliveable 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 metagraphie or 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-Ernest? You may be interested to hear that I have recently heard Clarice say that the “Last Word will be the fourth dimension”¹ and Alex had hopes, sometime in 1964, for a “plan in four dimensions” etc.² 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-Ernest edited out were published two decades ago. Sorry for the delay in letting you know, but I have only just read your Ecrits Retrouvés which includes the full version of the Formulary as well as your sparse and tangential commentary upon it.³ Rather than read these passages solely as an indication as to Guy-Ernest’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…

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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.)

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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.⁴
    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, a deadend … locked up in our vesicle of consumerist hypomania like lobotomised flies ricocheting in an egg timer, etc.

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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 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.

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• “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.

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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.

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• “Egregore”: As Wiki says —“A concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thought-form 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 Groups that 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-Ernest 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-Ernest? 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-Ernest. 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-Ernest. 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-Ernest as a super-ego, you must have wanted to become non-existent (“je suis inexistant”) and to respond infra-psychically in an egregorian manner, 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 the sorcellerie 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-perception at the same time as being in the dynamic process of forming their own group as a party-community. Even Guy-Ernest 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 translation) Didn’t you also plan to write a book on Bosch? Maybe all Guy-Ernest 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?





– Howard Slater



1.Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life, Trans: Johnny Lorenz, Penguin Books, London/New York, 2014, p.15.

2.Alexander Trocchi, “Potlatch: an Interpersonal Log”, Sigma Portfolio No.4, 1964.

3.Ivan Chtcheglov, Ecrits Retrouvés, Éditions Allia, France, 2006. The passages in italics at the beginning of each section are passages from Chtcheglov’s 1953 essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism” that, as HS points out, were excised by Guy Debord from its publication in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste(June 1958). The Formulary can be found here: https://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

4.Themroc (1973, Director: Claude Faraldo) is one of the best, and most hilarious, films to catch the spirit of post-1968 revolt in France. The eponymous protagonist becomes an anti-civilisation barbarian. He kills and eats a cop as well as knocking out a wall to make his flat a cave, both being very literal negations of the disciplinary separations of the capitalist metropolis.


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.

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4.

Ghassan Kanafani, Only Ten Meters (trans. and introduced by Yassin Eltalhawy)

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

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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.