EDITORIAL

For we went forth, changing our country more frequently than our shoes
Through the class warfare, despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Bertolt Brecht, To Those Who Follow in Our Wake.¹


In this letter, these disparate pieces of writing by Abdaljawad Omar, Carsten Juhl, Danny Hayward/ Peter Weiss, and Monika Janulevičiūtė, all touch on those pushed beyond the limits of existent legal, national and political communities. That is, these essays, ragged, fragmentary reflections and theoretical folktales are concerned with those considered exiles and pariahs, vagrants and whatever singularities; those without a recognizable – at least on the terms of the state – community. Those that constitute what might be termed the community of those without community, a negative community.² A community of lack, dispersed and heterodox, that with intensifying conditions of wars and genocide, ecological catastrophe and global economic precarity, is even more increasingly threaded through the polities of nation-states.
    This letter, concerned as it is with exiles and pariahs, begins to sketch out a kind of exilic politics. To be in exile is always to be in exile from some familiar habitus, state of belonging, community, language or nation. An essentially negative becoming. It is to be thrown over the borders that define both polity and self, to be undone, to experience an unravelling of a previously constituted subject, to be bereft of coordinates. It is to see clearly how ruined this world is. Perhaps, then, exilic politics is a wager to affirm that the negative capacity of the ruins is worth more than taking on debt in order to rebuild. Given that the foundations of such a rebuilding would be the theft of the future, anyway. In accepting this lack of a foundation, exilic politics welcomes the consequences of thinking modernity not through the standpoint of the community of citizens but of pariahs, vagrants, refugees, and proletarians. It is to ask how, in solidarity with the non or partial-subjects of capitalist modernity, we might reimagine a planetary politics.
    An exilic politics is also a way to begin to reckon with a particular aspect of the malign conjuncture of crises that we currently find ourselves in. The global order is a machine that violently reproduces exile even as it punishes it. Even under the now fully emptied out rule of UN sanctioned international law the global order was always already, de facto orientated towards the racialized, cultural, and political sifting of populations. In current conditions of war, genocide, economic and ecological crises, as well as the legitimization of nativist social sadism across nations, this makes it a machine fundamentally eliminative of exilic populations. We are in the midst of a global reassertion of the division between those lives that are to be expelled and possibly eliminated and those deemed worthy of survival. It is partly out of recognition of this that the notion of exilic politics emerges and this recognition also hopefully acts as a check upon the facile romanticization of exile, its reduction to an aesthetics of individualized alienation.
    Still, even while acknowledging the stark truths of the above, there are as many forms of exile as there are exiles. Rather than a strictly delineated category, the exilic fades in and out of focus, more akin to a blurred image open to interpretation and use than to the crudity of biometric data or a passport mugshot. This does not mean that the exilic becomes so amorphous as to be senseless; more that, just as exiles are themselves often figurations of conflict, the notion of exile is itself conflictual. It is in their use of the possibilities of the exilic that the following pieces of writing attempt to suggest a speculative dimension to the different valences of exile, whether it is the pariah included through exclusion, the refugee, the vagrant or the collective self-exile of political opposition and disaffiliation.
    In the Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar’s “Meaning of Love in Politics”, the author as self-proclaimed (non-nomadic) pariah sifts through the fragments of memory, resistance and despair to discover the clarity of a passionate politics of hatred (and love) that perseveres despite all in present-day Palestine. A politics that the brutalities of occupation and genocide would occlude, as would the myth of the exile as an artiste of displacement. The pariah as conceptualized by Omar embraces a partisan perspective that refuses a fully rationalised politics, evacuated of hatred and love. Omar is in necessary disagreement with both Edward Said’s exposition of exile as including a moment of distanced critique and, most especially, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the pariah.³ Rather than Arendt’s Jewish figure of the pariah as an ‘exilic prophet’, a reflective utopian outsider, Omar’s pariah is enmeshed in the conflicts, the quotidian tension of an intensely experienced habitus.As Omar writes, “This not the exile of elegance. This is the exile of overstay.” An overstay that is a fury of perseverance, intensely antagonistic to the ongoing, intensifying genocide of Palestinian life by the Israeli state, while also refusing the simplistic representation of the heroics of national liberation struggles. Riven and beset with conflict Omar’s pariah digs ever deeper into the pain of persistence.
    Danish philosopher Carsten Juhl’s “The Hubernick Effect” attempts to uncover a historical and conceptual genealogy of the ungrounding of any revolutionary “common ground” in the positively affirmed identities of class or subaltern nation. Juhl traces the response of the destituent thought of Jean Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and The Invisible Committee to the decline of such certainties and their contrasting elaboration of the excess of an (anti)political community, unbound by a constitutive inoperativity. “The Hubernick Effect” then concludes with another kind of ‘overstay’: the barest possibilities of speech and community found at the limits of genocide and atrocity. In this there also resides the awful possibility that the very ground for the community of sensation, the sensus communis, formed through art, politics and language,might itself be destroyed. “The Hubernick Effect” is named after Peter Hubernick, a three year old victim of the Nazi holocaust Primo Levi then writes about, and who through this account then becomes a central figure in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz. In Hubernick’s nonsensical last words Juhl discerns both the remnant of communicativity as such and a kind of “negative potentiality” that, perhaps, mirrors in the most fragile, melancholic form possible the destituent concepts of politics and community outlined in the first half of the essay. Even so, the sensus communis outlined in “The Hubernick Effect” is shrouded in the possibility of its own elimination, overshadowed by questions around “what remains of an immolation of pure proletarians” in the genocide in Gaza.
    The poet Danny Hayward has contributed a translation of a journal entry by the German author and playwright Peter Weiss (1916-1982) entitled “Convalescence”, with a short introduction by the translator. “Convalescence” is a paean to the perseverance of the forms of life that are not destined to live long, at least according to the blueprints of biopolitical capitalism. An inverted psalm of sovereignty, in that rather than wishing “long live the king”, Weiss directs his good wishes to those scorned by such tributes. Recovering from his own near death from a heart attack, Weiss hymns his hope that the exiles, losers and pariahs of this world wrecked by its winners should live long and well, to the point of outlasting their own deaths in mournful commemorations such as the one inscribed in “Convalescence”. This enunciation might even indicate a way out of the impasse of a society that offers no such justice to the living or dead. As Weiss writes: “Fantastic, monstrous idea, that we are still alive, that there is still something for us to do, that something still remains before us, incomprehensible, that we still struggle to remain here, that we still wish to institute justice…”. In this short, ragged, urgent paean to lives considered unworthy and lives already gone Weiss somehow succeeds in articulating a revolutionary politics that does not rely upon the technocratic aspirations of a “progressive” Left, those “militant planners and renewers” that look to the future. Rather, the revolutionary politics Weiss summons up in “Convalescence” draws its strength from “those who have given up on everything”. Perhaps, then, this is a revolutionary politics that finds its very perseverance in a paradoxical hope gained from hopelessness, from the very lack of promise in the present and future. An overstay, to echo Omar again, of revolutionary expectations that have up until now been defeated.
    The Lithuanian writer Monika Janulevičiūtė contributes the theoretical folktales of the Piper and Kaukas. In this, the community of vagrants and exiles is glimpsed in the late medieval folklore of the Pied Piper of Hamelin as a threat to both an emergent capitalism and the stratified social orders of Europe. As Janulevičiūtė writes: “The Piper was an evocative figure for a feudal landscape—scarred by dispossession and exploitation—that desired to impart evilness to those outside of community.” If the Piper is a stand-in for those outside of the legally and religiously sanctioned communities of the time, then the moment in the folktale when he disappears into the hills, leading the youth of the town, evokes for Janulevičiūtė the myth of Baltic cthonic spirits – the Kaukas. The latter are spirits or demons of the earth. They dwell under it, guard its fecundity, and dispense its treasures according to nature’s plenitude and their own moral scorn of any economy of scarcity. Hence, the Piper/Kaukas, is a hybrid figure of vagrancy and fugitivity as well as an anti-economy of just enough abundance. A figure that might align with both Caliban and the witch.4 Piper/Kaukas is a reminder of what continues to haunt the governing fictions that are the mutually privative constructs of the citizen as “western man” and the manufactured scarcities of capitalism. Another overstay, a perseverance in that the fugitive force of the Piper/Kaukas persists and as Janulevičiūtė writes: “The Piper and the Kaukas remind us that the earth is abundant—but only if we refuse to hoard, to enclose, and to settle.”
    It would almost be a comfort to use the almost irredeemable forms of being in exile, of being a pariah, recounted here as a negative mirror to the ideals of ‘progress’ or the ‘human rights’ of the ‘west’, or capitalism, or what counts for civilization. The fact is that any such illusions have long since been exposed by the very catastrophe that is this civilization. It is in the midst of this very catastrophe that the kinds of exilic politics hinted at in this letter might find their worth, their moment of use.

– Anacharisis Kloots


1.https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/

2.For more on this see Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community,Trans: Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press (US), 1988.

3.See: Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press (US), pp. 173-87. And Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: a hidden tradition”, Jewish Social Studies, No. 2, Vol. 6, 1944, pp.99-122.

4.In Sylvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch, Caliban, drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is emblematic of both non-western indigenous populations and the nascent proletariat of 16th century. The witch is a figure of subversive, female power and folk practices that were eliminated by the misogynist witch trials of the same period. Both Caliban and the witch are emblematic of the way the natural world was reduced to a material resource and increasingly exploited by new processes of science and economy in this period. The Piper/Kaukas shares much with Federici’s account of this. See: Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch,Autonomedia (NY/US), 2004.

---

---

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

Because the pariahs are not okay.

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

A conscious, non-nomadic pariah.

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

---

---

2.

Monika Janulevičiūtė, The Piper

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




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

In June 1284 The Mayor of Hamelin held a meeting with the city elite. They were racking their brains to find an end for the onslaught of rodents in their warehouses and granaries. An oddly dressed stranger walks into the meeting, and proclaims themselves capable of handling the city’s rat problem. This vagrant agrees to the Mayor’s offer of 1000 guilders, takes out their flute, and while walking in the streets, calls every single rat and mouse out of their hiding. To the tune of the flute, the Piper leads the rodents out of the city and drowns them in the Weser River.
   The Mayor and elders, holding true to their gluttonous appetite and their wanton greed, that brought about the ‘rat problem’ in the first place, withhold the Piper’s reward. The betrayed stranger leaves furious, in itself a foreboding that the most precious things will soon be taken away from the city of Hamelin.

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


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




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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

---

---

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

We can perhaps call it the “Hurbinek effect”…


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

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

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




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


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

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

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

Anonymous (in fact Jacques Camatte)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy ed.

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

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

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

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

Etre singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996

La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001.

La communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014.

---

---

4.

Peter Weiss, Convalescence
(trans. and introduced by Danny Hayward)

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

---

Long live the encounters with the dead, long live the descent into regions of futility, long live the failed, long live all those who came to nothing, who out of melancholia and pain fail to rouse themselves tomorrow, long live the debauched who can only persevere if they numb themselves with alcohol and narcotics, long live the despised, the mocked, the crippled, the damned, the benighted, long live the lonely, long live those who sit howling in their holes, long live those who have given up on everything, of whom nothing is ever spoken, who leave nothing behind and who die in their own filth. Long live all of those who sought help and who I, due to my own impotence, was unable to help, long live the terrible powerlessness that I hate so much in my clear moments that I want to cut it out of my own consciousness and which in secret hours condemns me to make common cause with it, long live the departure from everything reasonable, sensible, future-oriented, long live Gert who staggers into the city from the world of prehistory, who tumbles at night through the streets, who has his dwelling place anywhere in the backyards, Gert the forgotten, the dully mumbling, who is nearer to me in this hour than any of those young militant planners and renewers, Gert who I avoid when I come across him in a dim corner, in the entrance to a courtyard, shaking in a group of desolate, soilstained brothers, towering over them by a full head, I flee before this echoing laughter that I betray, going quickly from act to act, long live Hieronymus, abandoned by me, who between the mountains of paper with his unreadable scribblings, the ruins of his weird machines, image-machines, star-gazing machines, machines of hell, ended in misery, upon whose lamentable pauper’s funeral I stumbled one blindingly clear winter’s day and where I met, as the only other mourner, that girl who he had fetched when she was a child, into that hole, and who then broke things off with him, with the whole love affair and with everything, as I was able to read in that tiny note, crudely, blotchily and clumsily written, which lay under his pillow. Done with all of that, I know that you’re sick. Done. A yellowed little bit of paper, inscribed with a childish hand, ripped out of a school-book. I had meant to take care of his manuscripts, to put the thousands of crumpled pages in order, to interpret the faint strokes of pen, I didn’t have the stamina for it, I always put my own work first, my own helplessness, the indifference for the mental phantasias, the dream-constructions of another, even when this one was as close to me as a twin. Long live this incapacity, this conspiracy of the defeated, even if they belong to a world against which I struggle, that we have to struggle against, if we aren’t to end in the same way, long live Jacques, who in a train station in Chislehurst, Kent I let disappear forever, who I probably searched for a while, and who was then gone for good, as if that was just how it had to be, long live Uli, my childhood friend from Berlin before the thousand-year Reich, who was so full of imagination, ideas, unexampled possibilities, and who, inserted into the uniform of the murderers, decorated with swastikas, lay, a swollen-up corpse, on the coast of Denmark, long live Elisabeth who managed to make Max’s pallid face even paler, who drew him into despairing, hours-long arguments that broke him, drove him to tears, and who I met two decades later, shortly before her death, once again, on the Stockholm quays, near the ferries, with her broad face snowwhite in the frame of her black hair, her whispered words hardly audible beneath the noise of the traffic, I only have a couple more weeks, cancer, long live the dead, long live all those who carry their death with them written on their faces, who are on the way to the ferry boat, to Acheron, who already hear the stroke of the oars and the call of Charon. Long live the unreal, to which I have so often announced my opposition, long live the thought that my activity lacks any purpose and that silence, giving up, would be more honourable than the compulsion to spend one’s whole life erecting a monument to oneself, long live the capitulation to everything that wants to draw me into the unknown. Only a moment, then I’ll manage to bring myself into agreement with the tasks of the hour, then I’ll be ready again to privilege effort, to get to grips with the sickness and pestilence with all those medicines, then I’ll be the sworn enemy of self-pity again, of the poetry of dissolution, the euphoria of perdition. The layer is thin on which we glide, tap, creep on tip-toes, upon which we slide, skid, crawl, pitifully hold ourselves upright in order to do justice to conclusive, verifiable resolutions; it totters, crunches, cracks under our steps; we have to make ourselves light, draw deep breaths in order not to plunge, to disappear unexpectedly into a tiny hole that closes right back up; we have to summon enormous strength in order to convince ourselves that there is advancement here, with all of the unfathomable blackness below us, we must take care that we don’t waste time laughing about our situation and let the barely perceptible foothold that we imagine burst asunder, we must act as though we were pursuing our undertakings, even though we cannot take them seriously, wherever they lead, must constantly force ourselves to forget that all of our expressions remain tiny fragments and are blown away as soon as we’re done with them, must endlessly commit ourselves to the inspired task, to use our short stay on this planet for the improvement of our conditions of life and thereby to struggle against those who stand in our way, who claim the pleasant and the comfortable only for themselves, and who are mostly stronger than us because they never think of the collapse into the abyss. The ones who master the art of forgetting so much better, who can sweep aside all too easily the ones who know. Those who remain standing are the self-assured, the impudent, the unashamed, the cynical, in gigantic profusion by contrast die out the seeds of hope, love, warmth and assurance. Long live the real, if we have pulled ourselves up again, after our absences, our attacks of weakness, if we can once again touch even the least bit of ground, long live the task, with all of our dead in us, with our lament at death, our own death before our eyes, to balance between the living, to make them visible to themselves, long live the wild wish for everything around us to appear in radiant tangibility. Fantastic, monstrous idea, that we are still alive, that there is still something for us to do, that something still remains before us, incomprehensible, that we still struggle to remain here, that we still wish to institute justice, that we run to the cry of help, that we expect that another will stretch out their hand to us when we need it, since there is only one certainty, that it will be over soon.