From Lundi Matin, #443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which by coincidence comes in the wake of our last post, the article by Miguel Amorós, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces may serve to raise – as we believe it does – further, fundamental questions.
Done and to be done: For a manifesto of positive anarchy
1. There is not just one archè[1] but several. Our world is polyarchic.
2. There are positive forms of anarchy.
3. Anarchy is not an object of will but an object of experience.
4. What happens, happens.
5. Capital is a monster without a head or a tail, hence the practical difficulty of “cutting off its head”.
6. The capitalist state is a two-headed apparatus. A repressive apparatus and a management apparatus. A watchword and a password. It can be fascist and liberal at the same time, without any difficulty.
7. The exploitation and accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of sexual satisfaction through the rape and exhaustion of human and non-human resources are part of the same system of domination.
8. People who do not master spelling and grammar think. They are able. They sow seeds. A popular song says so. So do walls.
9. A project of autonomy is a way of choosing dependencies. You can depend on the agro-food industry for food, or you can create and cultivate other dependencies. To be refused.
10. The rich, hetero-normative, biodegrading white man simultaneously exercises all forms of domination. Intersectionality is not a mental police force for classifying subalterns from a small part to a lesser part. It names the operations through which the subalterns organise themselves to do the greatest harm to the order of places, objects and subjects.
11. Anarchy is not static, it is dramaturgical. It is neither a modality of order nor a modality of disorder, but a dynamic milieu of forces and forms, of powers to affect and powers to be affected, of powers to do and powers not to do, which maintains over time a “conflict of worlds”, that is to say, an effective gap within the very fabric of what a world can be.
12. The geometry of progress invented an idea of Revolution as a great radical rupture, with a before and an after. This idea expired at the same time as the belief in human progress. We now inhabit the catastrophe and the pornography of catastrophe.
13. We like to think that other civilisations, everything that does not bear the name of the West, inhabit a cyclical world, that of the seasons. In this they know only the revolution without history as a return to the starting point.
14. We need an idea of revolution in history and with seasons. Neither cyclical nor progressive. One that focuses as much on the event as on the temperature and lunation. Extraterrestrial and maximally terrestrial at the same time.
15. Deleuze said somewhere, not without humour, that etymology is the properly philosophical athleticism. The concept of anarchy has long suffered the consequences of this athleticism. We have always seen a privative -a and therefore a negative form, an-archy. Who commands? Positive anarchy as an experience positively names a gap. It is also a crossing, a test and undoubtedly a putting into danger.
16. There is no power to be taken as a centre. There are fixed configurations and preferential circuits between the centres of power to be attacked, twisted and distorted.
17. People who have back pain because they are fed up, know this. There are fixed configurations and preferential pain circuits. We will not attack the problem at its root.
18. In the circular orbit, there is a single centre; eccentricity is zero. I turn, therefore I am. Same mistakes, same pleasures, same litanies. In contrast, the planets – “those who wander” – turn in an ellipse, a movement that implies not one centre but two foci. It is the gap, the mobile, plastic, dynamic relationship between the foci that gives the eccentricities their substance. These are not miniature exceptions, little micro-cosmic radicalities that defend themselves with their magic potion. They are positive deformations, happy malformations, real reformations of the orbit.
19. Eternity by the stars, Victory is the name of what has duration. We need new beginnings, new beginnings that are simply a way of taking over: positive anarchy with two foci.
20. Anarchising the world, rather than understanding it.
Done and to be done: For a manifesto of positive anarchy
From Lundi Matin, #443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which by coincidence comes in the wake of our last post, the article by Miguel Amorós, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces may serve to raise – as we believe it does – further, fundamental questions.
Done and to be done: For a manifesto of positive anarchy
1. There is not just one archè[1] but several. Our world is polyarchic.
2. There are positive forms of anarchy.
3. Anarchy is not an object of will but an object of experience.
4. What happens, happens.
5. Capital is a monster without a head or a tail, hence the practical difficulty of “cutting off its head”.
6. The capitalist state is a two-headed apparatus. A repressive apparatus and a management apparatus. A watchword and a password. It can be fascist and liberal at the same time, without any difficulty.
7. The exploitation and accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of sexual satisfaction through the rape and exhaustion of human and non-human resources are part of the same system of domination.
8. People who do not master spelling and grammar think. They are able. They sow seeds. A popular song says so. So do walls.
9. A project of autonomy is a way of choosing dependencies. You can depend on the agro-food industry for food, or you can create and cultivate other dependencies. To be refused.
10. The rich, hetero-normative, biodegrading white man simultaneously exercises all forms of domination. Intersectionality is not a mental police force for classifying subalterns from a small part to a lesser part. It names the operations through which the subalterns organise themselves to do the greatest harm to the order of places, objects and subjects.
11. Anarchy is not static, it is dramaturgical. It is neither a modality of order nor a modality of disorder, but a dynamic milieu of forces and forms, of powers to affect and powers to be affected, of powers to do and powers not to do, which maintains over time a “conflict of worlds”, that is to say, an effective gap within the very fabric of what a world can be.
12. The geometry of progress invented an idea of Revolution as a great radical rupture, with a before and an after. This idea expired at the same time as the belief in human progress. We now inhabit the catastrophe and the pornography of catastrophe.
13. We like to think that other civilisations, everything that does not bear the name of the West, inhabit a cyclical world, that of the seasons. In this they know only the revolution without history as a return to the starting point.
14. We need an idea of revolution in history and with seasons. Neither cyclical nor progressive. One that focuses as much on the event as on the temperature and lunation. Extraterrestrial and maximally terrestrial at the same time.
15. Deleuze said somewhere, not without humour, that etymology is the properly philosophical athleticism. The concept of anarchy has long suffered the consequences of this athleticism. We have always seen a privative -a and therefore a negative form, an-archy. Who commands? Positive anarchy as an experience positively names a gap. It is also a crossing, a test and undoubtedly a putting into danger.
16. There is no power to be taken as a centre. There are fixed configurations and preferential circuits between the centres of power to be attacked, twisted and distorted.
17. People who have back pain because they are fed up, know this. There are fixed configurations and preferential pain circuits. We will not attack the problem at its root.
18. In the circular orbit, there is a single centre; eccentricity is zero. I turn, therefore I am. Same mistakes, same pleasures, same litanies. In contrast, the planets – “those who wander” – turn in an ellipse, a movement that implies not one centre but two foci. It is the gap, the mobile, plastic, dynamic relationship between the foci that gives the eccentricities their substance. These are not miniature exceptions, little micro-cosmic radicalities that defend themselves with their magic potion. They are positive deformations, happy malformations, real reformations of the orbit.
19. Eternity by the stars, Victory is the name of what has duration. We need new beginnings, new beginnings that are simply a way of taking over: positive anarchy with two foci.
20. Anarchising the world, rather than understanding it.
Maria Kakogianni
[1] Principle, beginning, command