EDITORIAL

In the 4th Letter of Dabartis, we announce the release of our publication Languages and Peoples as well as publishing three letters of response that followed gatherings in Warsaw, London, Vilnius and Copenhagen. The publication was the first fruit of a collaboration between Dabartis and Nieczytelne, that has been brewing for some time. It features a multi-language translation (RU, PL, LT, EN) of Agamben’s essay “Languages and Peoples”, accompanied by our collectively written afterward . Finally we announce our release of an audio recording of a recent talk in Vilnius: “Poppies and Daffodils: Jewish anti-Zionist Solidarity and its Absence” . All of this is prefaced by a New Year greeting from a friend, a response to the circulation of a Palestinian translation of omnia sunt communia and a call to embrace what is common between us today. The friend’s Étrennes (gift) questions the modalities of linear time that contribute to the continuation of the catastrophes of the present.

---

---

The Children of Cain, كل شي مشترك بينا  / A New Year Étrennes

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.

Anacharsis Cloots Deputation, Letter from Here
(London) on ‘Hereness’

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.

N.N., A Cautionary Note on Romanticizing the Outsider (from Copenhagen)

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.

Tłumacz Niespokojn, An Unexpected Tide. A Letter from the Palestinian Solidarity Occupations in Poland

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