We share below an essay by Iman Ganji, which he very generously passed onto us and for which we are grateful. It is a powerful and eloquent reflection on what may be called the passions of revolution for our time.
Looking Back at the End of Times: Cockroaches, Fire, Monsters
Iman Ganji
One:
They gassed us—in their streets, on their borders—and we survived. They placed us on the brink of psychological ruin, through the meat grinders of their integration processes, and in the straitjackets that served as uniforms in their academia, yet we survived.
Oh, sisters, brothers, and all others beyond and in between. We are the cockroaches of Europe. We even survive atomic bombs.
Something terrible is on the horizon, and we will survive it. They fear us, screaming and climbing their chairs, retreating into higher positions of repression.
Now, they look back at the end of times, as we do. They know what they’ve done to us and what we’ve survived. They realize that the end of times is already here: winters grow harsher, summers burn the blood in their veins. Their fear of “the great replacement” is a twisted reflection of their own displacement, as their privileges are stripped away by their own governments. They dread becoming like us—cockroaches—gassed, harassed, prosecuted, excluded, deemed surplus by the State, the coldest of monsters that “lies in all languages of good and evil.”[i] White Fear is the psychological defense of abandoned children with dependency issues, distorting the class struggle of the increasingly dispossessed into xenophobia.
Becoming cockroaches ensures our survival against their surveillance-fascism. The Earth will be inherited by the dispossessed, by the disposable. We are the monstrous fire.
The cockroaches of Europe, the prophecy goes, will survive the fatal logic of white European governmentality. They’ve already burrowed underground and ascended into the clouds, they’ve drilled into the sun, and continue to transfer the blood of light beneath the Earth’s crust.
I give you this sign, a coming people: Ten years ago, the Iranian people shouted in the streets, facing live bullets: “Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, we are all together,” addressing themselves. Now, addressing tyranny, they shout: “Be afraid, be afraid, we are all together.”
Two:
These signs are scattered across the planet, like this one: On the “Night of the Four,” four PKK cadres set themselves on fire, chanting, “Don’t put out the fire—fan the flames!”
A dear friend of mine, a writer and journalist living in London at the time, told me that during the July 2022 heatwave in the United Kingdom, housing administrators from a particular real estate agency sent out an FAQ explaining why the hydraulic systems in their buildings might fail. One paragraph read something like this:
“We are often asked: Why doesn’t this happen in the Middle East? In the Middle East, they are accustomed to such weather conditions and are prepared for it; their hydraulic systems are equipped with cooling mechanisms. Here, we haven’t had the need for such systems.”
In 2011, when the mostly non-white surplus population rioted in the streets of London, looting and stripping the market of its value dictatorship, the mostly white leftist academicians and party politicians called them “lumpen proletariat” or “rabbles,”[ii] those who would reverse the “shiny” accomplishments of the left, which only occur within the words and images of the intelligentsia’s mental phantasms. What happens among bodies rioting, among all of “wannabe-us” lumpens, should revolutionize the symbolic, the imaginary, and the intellectual Spectacle.
This sign has been given for a missing people: When the activists’ occupation in Wall Street was threatened by the cold of the nights, it was the homeless, the disposable, who taught them how to survive the murderous reality of the so-called “public space” in wintery New York, only to later be stigmatized again for being poor and excluded.
Three:
The cliché Turkish drinking toast, “Let this be our worst day!”, should be adopted as our immediate and urgent slogan. It is long past time to put a stop to the processes of our criminalization, dispossession, and marginalization.
There is only one identity politics at work: White Identity politics. All other so-called identity politics push against the domination of neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist white supremacy. “Wannabe we” are fragmented and sliced into different types of meat, valued at different prices, but our veins and nerve cords run beneath the ground, my sisters, brothers, and those beyond and in between. We must form our mycelium so our nodes communicate, feed each other, move fast, and occupy forcefully from beneath.
The mycelium in old-growth jungles connects tall, old trees. It is through rhizomatic fungi that trees communicate with their kin, feed each other, and transfer minerals to those in need. Our struggle must have standing trees on the ground, connected through the affective mycelium that colonial capitalism has long tried to eliminate. Those who think in terms of seeds and roots will never find our interconnected veins and nerve cords. Yet, that does not mean they cannot destroy us. Pettiness and triviality are the most potent forces in the contemporary world, fully manifest in wars, genocides, imperial presidential elections of superpowers and old colonial rulers, media, literature, and especially in what is called “contemporary” art—the machine of producing “contemporaneous blocks of sensations”: Petty affects, weak percepts[iii], all serviced and amplified by modern communication technologies and the so-called “social networks,” the most anti-social invention of humankind.
Four:
We know that the grand geopolitical games are wreaking havoc on our lives. Yet our path remains independent of who attacks whom, who encircles whom, in this theater of neo-imperialism. We must resist when they assault the global South, abet genocides, stage coups, deploy private armies, or fund right-wing extremists—be they Islamist, Christian, or Jew. Let the neo-imperialists burn in their pursuit of control, killing themselves in their quest for domination: we remain the monstrous fire that once delivered the inaccessible words of God to Moses, the justice of the Cosmos to Siavash and Abraham, the potency of the heavens to Prometheus, and the power to overturn the market to Jesus; the same fire that consumed the Romanov palace in 1917, that still blazes in the blocked streets of the world among the unemployed and surplus populations; the fire that animates Iblis and the Jinn, the archangels close to the court of God but cast out for being ungovernable.
We burn a fire that transforms into a garden when we embrace it—that is how the prophecy goes.
Five:
For centuries, discrimination, oppression, and racism have permeated both ancient and newly modernized nation-states; they say it is impossible to discard this ancestral heritage. Impossible is the work of poets, and the fire burns poetically.
Maurice Blanchot writes in “The Work of Fire” that poetic language moves away from the existing world and toward the impossible, destabilizing society and identity. It is precisely this impossibility that is the work of fire, destroying the existing world.
Let us consider the work of the fire in the streets: The community is shaken, the dominant identity is shaken by the unheard and unseen, the existing world that speaks of homogeneity, wholeness, and integration goes up in flames. Fire burns poetically.
Martin Luther King said, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” In this sense, fire is the artwork of the unseen. Riot and fire always come together. The unseen, by standing in the light of their own fire, imprint their monstrous awe on the collective imagination of “nations.”
And, naturally, they—the protesting yet civilized white middle classes, whose special privileges the fire has illuminated—fear the ancient trial by fire. They, too, object to the current state of affairs, but they coordinate their protests with the police in advance, securing a permit. It is a strange paradox: entrusting the regulation of dissent against the law to the law itself—transgression bound by the denial of excess, a non-erotic rebellion.
Fire is a symbol of eroticism, as seen in familiar phrases like “fire of desire,” “fire of lust,” and “fiery sex.” On one hand, it ignites passion, while on the other, it becomes the angel of death, flying with flames that consume both material and immaterial realities, embodying the erotic nature of fire. The fire burns with a poetic intensity; it is an erotic poem about time and monsters.
The fire is a duration; it neither begins nor ends, but burns endlessly, relentlessly, in all directions. A monster, too, neither comes into being nor perishes; it exists eternally, beyond history, beyond human grasp.
Yet fire is a transient duration, for what it consumes is finite.
And the monster can never remain in the human world forever. Sometimes, something inherent to this world—like the sun to a vampire—destroys it; sometimes, something equally inherent—like the night to a werewolf—enables its existence. At times, it appears momentarily in this world, proving its existence before retreating to its own realm; other times, it lingers at the threshold between worlds, maintaining its otherworldly power here.
These two forces, the monster and the fire, can amplify each other until they bring about the destruction of “all that is.” It is in this moment that the fire burns most poetically.
But there is a moment when the monster ignites the fire like a torch and shakes the existing world. In that instant, the durations of the monster and the fire converge, intensifying each other to the point of creation. The poetic fire becomes the monster, and the only thing that remains unscathed is the monster itself and the world it heralds.
The riot of the monster is impossible without fire. The human world, recognizing this, has adopted a weapon from the same scheme: it creates its own submissive monster and places the fire of destruction in its hands—anti-riot.
Since the monster is negative from the point of view of this world, the creation of a monstrous anti-insurgency force is achieved through brutality, oppression, and relentless discipline—by channeling all destructive and anti-social impulses into the soldiers. Then comes the fire of bullets, incendiary bombs…
How far will the civil war between these two monsters go? Some argue that the fire wielded by the state monster is more deadly, and therefore “we” should avoid using fire altogether. Others believe that our fire will only fuel the state monster’s blaze, and since the state monster is already stronger, we are destined to lose. Yet there are those who insist that our fire must grow ever stronger, to outburn the state’s fire and claim victory.
Will the intensified duration of fire and monster give rise to a new existence? Will the insurgent monster, this time, transform historical contingency into necessity? Even God remains ignorant of monsters.
Six:
“What they try to do is capture the space in which subjectivity opposes power and by doing so transforms itself into something other that doesn’t even need to fight the same enemy, because this enemy cannot damage it nor access it” – Claire Fontaine
“Antipoder Contra Poder (Anti-power Against Power); Principle: Demonstrate alternative power that challenges traditional forms of power.” – Zapatista: Sharing Leadership Series Handout.
Anti-power is not merely the negation of power, nor is it simply negative power. It is an alternative power that opposes and negates Power, and in doing so, it transcends negativity, becoming something transformative and affirmative.
Nietzsche’s concept of affirmative or positive force is one where the action is inseparable from the value it creates. When value remains tied to the act itself, it becomes more resistant to being reabsorbed into the structures of power. In this context, action becomes a debatable form—a rupture that, in Blanchot’s terms, negates any subsequent form of Power. According to Blanchot, this negation does not remain purely negative; it transforms into something beyond mere opposition, resisting assimilation and creating a new space for existence.
A cockroach may live for up to a year, spending its time scavenging through the wastes and excesses of both human and inhuman worlds. Yet, a single female can give birth to 400 offspring. Among them are those that burrow, fly, and swim, commanding the earth, skies, and waters.
The fungi, disintegrating whatever crosses their path, reintegrate the kingdom of Plantae into a network of communication and nurturing kinship. The fire clears the way, allowing the potency of the mycelium to surface. And from this convergence, the monsters are born.
From the cockroach to the monster—that’s the problem of organization and representation.
Seven:
In the Quranic narrative, when Iblis refuses to obey God by acknowledging the higher status of humans, he argues that he is made of fire while man is made of soil, and thus he should be considered superior. However, Muslim scholars interpreting the Quran disagree with Iblis. They argue that soil, with its many potentialities, possesses a sublimity that surpasses the burning fire. Soil can nurture life, transform, and endure, whereas fire, though powerful, is transient and destructive. This inherent potential for growth and creation within soil is what renders it more sublime.
One of the potentialities of the soil is its ability to produce fire, by giving life to plants and humans. We must preserve our fertile lands, nurturing them as the breeding grounds for the fire-breathing monsters yet to come.
Endnotes:
[i] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 11, “The New Idol.”
[ii] Žižek, Slavoj. “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” London Review of Books, vol. 33, no. 16. Link.
[iii] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?, p. 164: “A bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.”
Iman Ganji is a writer and scholar in exile with a PhD in Performance and Theatre Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. From 2004 to 2012, he lived in Tehran, where he worked as a translator, writer, and activist, co-translating works by Spinoza, Marx, Benjamin, and others.