“We have escaped the grip of the workers’ movement, but are struggling to move forward. We are in a situation where successful uprisings only produce failed revolutions. Practically and theoretically, we keep hitting our heads against a wall; many are recoiling, political horror vacui, and there is not a lot to learn from history, least of…
Category: disengagement
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “The Movement of Refusal”
“Protests are radically unstable. They dispel the familiarity of late-capitalist life and dissolve all of the identities at our disposal. This is the “poor beginning” Blanchot described, the unarticulated refusal. In this sense, the movement that takes place is a disembarkation, the beginning of a more extensive escape.”
Kristin Ross interviewed: The commune as a form of life
“For me, Les Soulèvements de la Terre are a contemporary example of a Commune form because they have managed to create a common front, and they have created it from very different groups and people. It’s a very specific form. It’s not a political party, it’s not a class- or ethnicity-based organisation, and yet it’s…
Giorgio Agamben: “On Anarchy Today”
“Anarchy, therefore, is first and foremost the radical disavowal not so much of the state or simply of administration but rather of power’s claim to make the state and administration coincide in the government of men. It is against this claim that the anarchist fights, in the name ultimately of the ungovernable, which is the…
Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski: “The failure of May 1968”
“The nature of revolution changed. It ceased to be a collective project based on economic considerations, pursued to change society. Revolution became privatised, reduced to the domain of inner lives.”
Kiersten Solt, V.I.: “Seven theses on destitution”
Constituent vs. destituent insurrections
Amador Fernández Savater: “Like lost children”
‘Thus, like lost children, we feel our way towards the revolutions of the 21st century. Without ever dissociating again what is wanted and how it is wanted, as in the old question of what to do, where the end justified the most aberrant means, but rather accepting that the means already prefigure the ends or…
Josep Rafanell i Orra: “The world returns: Outlines of an anti-politics”
‘Only our enemies persist with identities. We cannot consent to our camp, that of friends, being devastated by exasperated social identities, as if it were a new business for politics. We have learned that only de-identification signals the eruption that defeats the police order. … Let us be clear: against the police, what is called…
Jérôme Baschet interviewed: “History is no longer on our side”
‘What I call “liberated spaces” [espaces liberés] should not be construed as protected islands, where we live out a charming life in the midst of the surrounding disaster, but as spaces for combat. “Free space” implies that we must free ourselves from something, from what oppresses us or causes us to slowly die; it implies…
Jacques Fradin: “The insurrection of the yellow vests and the revolution of the revolution”
“The uprising of the yellow vests can be interpreted as a resurgence of the oldest movements of revolt … Or, rather, this uprising can also be interpreted as the first insurrection of a new revolutionary era, the era of the revolution of the revolution – symptomatic of a new political era that emerges by dissolving…