Agustín García Calvo, poet, dramaturgist, essayist, linguist, philosopher is sadly very little known in the English speaking world. And as an “anarchist”, who would refuse the term, his contributions to “anarchism”, or to a way of thinking describable as anarchistic, are significant. In the essay that we share below, by the philosopher Jordi Carmona Hurtado, we follow García Calvo’s rejection of abstract, theoretical elaborations of anarchism – that would push it into the hands of academicians -, without thereby falling into a blind and reflex activism. What García Calvo endeavoured to do was to trace a path where thought itself is conceived as a form of action that shatters categorical identities (abstract ideas, institutions, traditions, etc.), that leads not their mere negation, but that opens up the infinity-indefinite of the unlimited, of that which is without limit; what the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander called the apeiron; what we might call “anarchism” as a sort of via negativa.
In an important recent book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (PUF, 2022)/Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity, 2024), Cathérine Malabou has argued that some of the most significant thinkers in contemporary philosophy have “stolen” impulses, orientations and concepts from anarchism, in order to develop a critique of domination or a logic of government, without at the same time acknowledging their origin, and without ever recognising themselves as anarchists. Thus, anarchism or anarchist social thought would be the unconfessed source of the thought of philosophers such as Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben or Rancière, who at the same time have always dissociated themselves from the label. There would thus be a persistent denial of anarchism, in a contemporary thought that at the same time draws heavily from it; as if the relationship between philosophers and anarchist literature were hiden up the sleeve and clandestine, as something a little shameful, practised but not declared; an anarchism that is first plundered by philosophy, and later disguised in sublimated conceptual expressions. However, this is beginning to change nowadays, with what has been called an “anarchist turn” in theory, in which various thinkers, one might say, are beginning to come out of the closet. This is what happens with Malabou in philosophy, when she develops a properly anarchist philosophical concept, that of the “ungovernable”. And something similar happens in other branches of research and creation, such as with the anthropologist David Graeber, or with the ?ction author Ursula K. Le Guin. So it seems that anarchism today tends to become more presentable in the worthy debates of academic culture.
However, before embracing this anarchist turn of theory and shelving the process of philosophical denial of anarchism, I would like to reopen it momentarily and call one last witness here, to decide, at least in this particular case, whether it is really a denial as Malabou claims or whether there is something else at play, in this fierce resistance in those who think anarchistically to present themselves as anarchist thinkers. We are talking about the Zamora thinker Agustín García Calvo.
Indeed, García Calvo seems, at first sight, to be a paradigmatic case of this philosophical denial of anarchism, and Malabou might well have included him in her series of cases, had she known his work. Just one example will suffice. The year was 1972. Carlos Semprún and Javier Domingo were at that time editors of the magazine Ruedo Ibérico, created by Spanish intellectuals exiled in Paris, which was distinguished by its genuine freedom and ideological openness to all currents of opposition to the Franco regime, even the most radical or minority ones, and its hospitality also to a certain theoretical, poetic and aesthetic avant-gardism. They sent a letter to García Calvo, inviting him to take part in a special issue on anarchism. The Zamoran thinker politely declined in another letter, which was not published in that issue of Ruedo Ibérico, but years later, in 1978, in another journal of rather smaller scope: Historia libertaria. In that letter, “Against the idea of making the history of anarchism”, Agustín explains the reasons for his refusal to collaborate in the issue, which according to him could only contribute to the historification and institutionalisation of anarchy; to turn it into knowledge and doctrine, and make it enter the official encyclopaedias; to give it some kind of identity alongside the others, and thus prepare it to become some kind of power.
Thus, it is in the name of anarchism itself that Augustín refuses to contribute to a journal issue on anarchism. In this way, Augustín divides the very idea of anarchism, between an anarchism of being and an anarchism of doing:
[…] there is an internal, insuperable contradiction between the action of denying Order and the fact of being a denier of Order, between rebelling against Society and having an ideal of Society, between the denial of all religious faith and the preservation of a belief, between denying the game of political parties and being a party, even if it calls itself anarchist or ácrata[anti-cratic] or libertarian.[1]
As opposed to being anarchist, Agustín vindicates what he calls an “anarchic heart” (or “anarchising, ácratico, rebellious or negative”). Anarchism, García Calvo says in short, is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Anarchism is an action, not an idea. And even anarchist thought cannot be understood as one philosophical system among others, but as a certain type of action, of praxis, which annuls, undermines or creates breaches in systems. This would bring García Calvo closer to conceptions similar to Derrida’s “deconstruction” or Giorgio Agamben’s “destitution”. And indeed, anarchism, for Agustín, can only exist in a certain kind of negative or “destructive” action (according to the word Agustín prefers, as opposed to the more erudite ones of Derrida or Agamben). Anarchist thought has no more foundation, then, than that which that kind of action can occasionally give it. If anarchism gravitates around the experience of freedom, Agustín García Calvo considered that this experience only exists in the action of liberation, in the act of freeing oneself from, of freeing oneself on each occasion from something determined. This negative conception of anarchist freedom (which only exists as a practice of liberation) is what brings him closer, on the other hand, to Jacques Rancière’s thought of emancipation. In this opposition between being and doing, the aim is not to defend any anarchist purism or puritanism, but to show, on the contrary, the radical inadequacy between anarchist practice and any kind of social identity. Hence García Calvo, who throughout his life never stopped practising anarchist acts, never wanted to label himself as an anarchist. In this insistence on doing, and on the fact that anarchism is above all a mode of action, García Calvo draws on the powerful tradition of libertarian communism and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, which was always eminently practical. However, García Calvo takes this tradition to an unprecedented terrain in the history of Spanish anarchism, which is that of theoretical, cultural, or rather counter-cultural action. Hence its often overlooked importance in inspiring the historical counterculture movement. Thus Augustín will always privilege a type of counter-cultural action, which is directed against Culture but which moves at the same level, at the level of word and thought. Hence also, despite his anarchist insistence on action, his rejection of all forms of violence, his radical pacifism.
In this respect, what counts regarding a kind of (counter-)cultural intervention is not what it says, but what it does, or what it does by saying. That is one way of doing politics, but it is about the other politics, the politics of those who are not (and do not wish to be) politicians. Not the politics of the government, but the politics of the people. By leading anarchism into a fundamentally (counter-)cultural terrain, García Calvo proposes a true philosophical understanding of direct action. Among the most famous examples of this type of counter-cultural action, we can think of the anthem of the Community of Madrid, which Leguina commissioned García Calvo to write, and which is a true anti-hymn, which reveals the immense abstraction of any political entity of this type. It is a question, here, of building the edifice of Culture with dynamite instead of bricks. This is a more general characteristic of the anarchist action of thought, which opens space in the Institution (or the State, in the most general sense of the word, the global as well as the local order) for something other than the institution.
This other thing can be called “the living and the palpable”, from a philosophical point of view, that is, the opposite of the idea, of abstraction; that which can only be felt, felt by the senses (heard, smelled, tasted, caressed…) and by the “anarchic heart”, and not thought, not intellectually devised or projected. It is a matter of “the living and the palpable”, of “the body”. However, it is not to be understood that Augustín is against intellectuality. On the contrary, for him, “common reason” [razón común], when it manages to find spaces to enunciate itself, or language, when people gather in a certain number and let themselves speak (even against or beneath their identity or their ideas), become completely living and palpable things. From a political point of view, this other thing is simply the people, as the anti-state, as the ungovernable; a people that, as García Calvo used to say, does not really exist, or only exists when it rebels, when it denies, when it struggles to free itself-from, when it undermines the roots of domination.
However, it is worth drawing attention to the serene Machadian [Antonio Machado] spring from which the direct action of thought flows, through Agustín’s mouth, without any heroic fuss or revolutionary pose. This can be seen, in another example of the kind of anarchism understood as counter-cultural practice, in the radio programme Pensamiento 3. The fact is that this programme, which was on the air for three years (between 1988 and 1990) not only succeeded in bringing philosophy to Spanish radio, a practice of thought developed with the greatest care and the least demagogy, always in active collaboration with the audience, but also in creating an alternative agenda for discussion to that of the mass media. In addition, this programme allowed people from different parts of Spain to meet and get to know each other, and minority associations and groups to have a greater space for dissemination. Through this programme, Agustín showed in practice that thought, which seems the most abstract thing, becomes the most concrete and vital weapon when it comes to fighting in conditions in which what dominates us are not fundamentally singular individuals, but abstractions (such as the State, the Person, Capital, the Future…).
And so, with this way of understanding thought as a direct action, Pensamiento 3 was making people, or rather breaking down abstractions or dominant ideas so that, little by little, maybe and just maybe, some voice of the people would appear. And it did appear. Only, at a certain point, the programme was cancelled. Some listeners then called in completely indignant or furious, denouncing censorship on the part of the public radio station on which it was broadcast. But this indignation hid the secret pride of those who, precisely because they are censored, believe they are the sole possessors of truth and reason: “if they bark, we ride”. At the opposite extreme to this attitude, García Calvo ventured that the reasons for the programme’s cancellation had more to do with a rotation in the schedule, which could have been his or any other programme’s turn, simply because of the need to renew and update the media; and that the strange and astonishing thing was that it had been on the air for three years, not the cancellation of the programme.
Thought as direct action is thus understood, in García Calvo’s practice, as an exercise in the serene destruction of the abstractions that dominate us, which opens up a space in culture for the expression of the ungovernable: of “the living and the palpable”, of “the body” and “the people”, according to names merely indicative of something that has no identity of its own, and which therefore cannot have a name. Thus, it is not, in García Calvo’s case, that philosophy steals from anarchism, but that anarchist action needs to be understood in an extended cultural field, and not only socially or tied to syndicalism, in the conditions of contemporary domination. Anarchist direct action needs to become philosophical, in those conditions. And then, one discovers that this kind of action can come from anywhere, that anarchism cannot be contained in any kind of identity.
But García Calvo not only refused to define himself as an anarchist, but also used various textual strategies to avoid any form of identity, such as the practice of anonymity, the pseudonym, the collective signature (as in the texts of the Comuna Antinacionalista Zamorana) or the proper name placed between question marks. Again, in these kinds of strategies that question the author-function (as Foucault called it), we see that understanding thought as a kind of libertarian action implies extreme attention to the form and conditions in which the action of thought is developed. The background, or theory of thought as direct action is very simple: the negation of the determinate (which must never become negative determination) returns the determinate to a state of infinity, which makes possible (only possible) the resurrection of the primordial chaos, of the original indeterminate something. Or, to put it more simply, the act of destruction of ideas, or of what is known, allows the resurrection of bodies, or of what is not known. But there are countless ways of negating, countless ways of practising thought as direct action. In this respect, we can say that perhaps there has never been a thought so intimately identified with anarchism as that of García Calvo. But to call it anarchist would be to render the negation positive and thus nullify its potency. This is the risk run by attempts to turn anarchism into something respectable, a subject of study among others, a set of ideas or a philosophical current, which is translated like any other into the agreed formats of the paper and the scientific journal. Thus, these papers may say anarchism, but they do neoliberalism. So it would almost be better if they did not say anarchism, but did it one way or the other.
For anarchism is not a theory or a worldview, but a style of action: anarchism lives only in the direct action of people. If anarchism matters, it is because it is a possibility for everyone, and not exclusively for those who choose to define themselves as anarchists. And this is so, as García Calvo’s example shows, even in thought, in thought understood as one form among others of direct action, which has its own characteristics and its relevance especially marked when domination is inseparable from the violence of abstraction.
[1] Jordi Carmona Hurtado, Cómo matar a la muerte. Agustín García Calvo y la ?losofía de la contracultura (La oveja roja, 2022), p. 246.
Libre te quiero is a song composed by Amancio Prada based on a poem by Agustín García Calvo.
Libre te quiero
Libre te quiero, como arroyo que brinca de peña en peña, pero no mía.
Grande te quiero, como monte preñado de primavera, pero no mía.
te quiero, como pan que no sabe su masa buena, pero no mía.
Alta te quiero, como chopo que en el cielo se despereza, pero no mía.
Blanca te quiero, como flor de azahares sobre la tierra, pero no mía.
Pero no mía, ni de Dios, ni de nadie, ni tuya siquiera.
…
I Want You Free
I want you free, Like a stream skipping about From crag to crag. But not mine.
Vast I want you, Like a mountain bursting With spring. But not mine.
Good I want you, Like bread oblivious of Its good dough. But not mine.
Tall I want you, Like a poplar stretching Itself to the sky. But not mine.
White I want you, Like orange blossom Dotting the ground. But not mine.
But not mine, nor God’s, Nor anybody’s Not even yours.
Agustín García Calvo, or Thought as Direct Action
Agustín García Calvo, poet, dramaturgist, essayist, linguist, philosopher is sadly very little known in the English speaking world. And as an “anarchist”, who would refuse the term, his contributions to “anarchism”, or to a way of thinking describable as anarchistic, are significant. In the essay that we share below, by the philosopher Jordi Carmona Hurtado, we follow García Calvo’s rejection of abstract, theoretical elaborations of anarchism – that would push it into the hands of academicians -, without thereby falling into a blind and reflex activism. What García Calvo endeavoured to do was to trace a path where thought itself is conceived as a form of action that shatters categorical identities (abstract ideas, institutions, traditions, etc.), that leads not their mere negation, but that opens up the infinity-indefinite of the unlimited, of that which is without limit; what the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander called the apeiron; what we might call “anarchism” as a sort of via negativa.
From Redes Libertarias, 18/02/2025
In an important recent book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (PUF, 2022)/Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy (Polity, 2024), Cathérine Malabou has argued that some of the most significant thinkers in contemporary philosophy have “stolen” impulses, orientations and concepts from anarchism, in order to develop a critique of domination or a logic of government, without at the same time acknowledging their origin, and without ever recognising themselves as anarchists. Thus, anarchism or anarchist social thought would be the unconfessed source of the thought of philosophers such as Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben or Rancière, who at the same time have always dissociated themselves from the label. There would thus be a persistent denial of anarchism, in a contemporary thought that at the same time draws heavily from it; as if the relationship between philosophers and anarchist literature were hiden up the sleeve and clandestine, as something a little shameful, practised but not declared; an anarchism that is first plundered by philosophy, and later disguised in sublimated conceptual expressions. However, this is beginning to change nowadays, with what has been called an “anarchist turn” in theory, in which various thinkers, one might say, are beginning to come out of the closet. This is what happens with Malabou in philosophy, when she develops a properly anarchist philosophical concept, that of the “ungovernable”. And something similar happens in other branches of research and creation, such as with the anthropologist David Graeber, or with the ?ction author Ursula K. Le Guin. So it seems that anarchism today tends to become more presentable in the worthy debates of academic culture.
However, before embracing this anarchist turn of theory and shelving the process of philosophical denial of anarchism, I would like to reopen it momentarily and call one last witness here, to decide, at least in this particular case, whether it is really a denial as Malabou claims or whether there is something else at play, in this fierce resistance in those who think anarchistically to present themselves as anarchist thinkers. We are talking about the Zamora thinker Agustín García Calvo.
Indeed, García Calvo seems, at first sight, to be a paradigmatic case of this philosophical denial of anarchism, and Malabou might well have included him in her series of cases, had she known his work. Just one example will suffice. The year was 1972. Carlos Semprún and Javier Domingo were at that time editors of the magazine Ruedo Ibérico, created by Spanish intellectuals exiled in Paris, which was distinguished by its genuine freedom and ideological openness to all currents of opposition to the Franco regime, even the most radical or minority ones, and its hospitality also to a certain theoretical, poetic and aesthetic avant-gardism. They sent a letter to García Calvo, inviting him to take part in a special issue on anarchism. The Zamoran thinker politely declined in another letter, which was not published in that issue of Ruedo Ibérico, but years later, in 1978, in another journal of rather smaller scope: Historia libertaria. In that letter, “Against the idea of making the history of anarchism”, Agustín explains the reasons for his refusal to collaborate in the issue, which according to him could only contribute to the historification and institutionalisation of anarchy; to turn it into knowledge and doctrine, and make it enter the official encyclopaedias; to give it some kind of identity alongside the others, and thus prepare it to become some kind of power.
Thus, it is in the name of anarchism itself that Augustín refuses to contribute to a journal issue on anarchism. In this way, Augustín divides the very idea of anarchism, between an anarchism of being and an anarchism of doing:
As opposed to being anarchist, Agustín vindicates what he calls an “anarchic heart” (or “anarchising, ácratico, rebellious or negative”). Anarchism, García Calvo says in short, is not a matter of theory, but of practice. Anarchism is an action, not an idea. And even anarchist thought cannot be understood as one philosophical system among others, but as a certain type of action, of praxis, which annuls, undermines or creates breaches in systems. This would bring García Calvo closer to conceptions similar to Derrida’s “deconstruction” or Giorgio Agamben’s “destitution”. And indeed, anarchism, for Agustín, can only exist in a certain kind of negative or “destructive” action (according to the word Agustín prefers, as opposed to the more erudite ones of Derrida or Agamben). Anarchist thought has no more foundation, then, than that which that kind of action can occasionally give it. If anarchism gravitates around the experience of freedom, Agustín García Calvo considered that this experience only exists in the action of liberation, in the act of freeing oneself from, of freeing oneself on each occasion from something determined. This negative conception of anarchist freedom (which only exists as a practice of liberation) is what brings him closer, on the other hand, to Jacques Rancière’s thought of emancipation. In this opposition between being and doing, the aim is not to defend any anarchist purism or puritanism, but to show, on the contrary, the radical inadequacy between anarchist practice and any kind of social identity. Hence García Calvo, who throughout his life never stopped practising anarchist acts, never wanted to label himself as an anarchist. In this insistence on doing, and on the fact that anarchism is above all a mode of action, García Calvo draws on the powerful tradition of libertarian communism and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, which was always eminently practical. However, García Calvo takes this tradition to an unprecedented terrain in the history of Spanish anarchism, which is that of theoretical, cultural, or rather counter-cultural action. Hence its often overlooked importance in inspiring the historical counterculture movement. Thus Augustín will always privilege a type of counter-cultural action, which is directed against Culture but which moves at the same level, at the level of word and thought. Hence also, despite his anarchist insistence on action, his rejection of all forms of violence, his radical pacifism.
In this respect, what counts regarding a kind of (counter-)cultural intervention is not what it says, but what it does, or what it does by saying. That is one way of doing politics, but it is about the other politics, the politics of those who are not (and do not wish to be) politicians. Not the politics of the government, but the politics of the people. By leading anarchism into a fundamentally (counter-)cultural terrain, García Calvo proposes a true philosophical understanding of direct action. Among the most famous examples of this type of counter-cultural action, we can think of the anthem of the Community of Madrid, which Leguina commissioned García Calvo to write, and which is a true anti-hymn, which reveals the immense abstraction of any political entity of this type. It is a question, here, of building the edifice of Culture with dynamite instead of bricks. This is a more general characteristic of the anarchist action of thought, which opens space in the Institution (or the State, in the most general sense of the word, the global as well as the local order) for something other than the institution.
This other thing can be called “the living and the palpable”, from a philosophical point of view, that is, the opposite of the idea, of abstraction; that which can only be felt, felt by the senses (heard, smelled, tasted, caressed…) and by the “anarchic heart”, and not thought, not intellectually devised or projected. It is a matter of “the living and the palpable”, of “the body”. However, it is not to be understood that Augustín is against intellectuality. On the contrary, for him, “common reason” [razón común], when it manages to find spaces to enunciate itself, or language, when people gather in a certain number and let themselves speak (even against or beneath their identity or their ideas), become completely living and palpable things. From a political point of view, this other thing is simply the people, as the anti-state, as the ungovernable; a people that, as García Calvo used to say, does not really exist, or only exists when it rebels, when it denies, when it struggles to free itself-from, when it undermines the roots of domination.
However, it is worth drawing attention to the serene Machadian [Antonio Machado] spring from which the direct action of thought flows, through Agustín’s mouth, without any heroic fuss or revolutionary pose. This can be seen, in another example of the kind of anarchism understood as counter-cultural practice, in the radio programme Pensamiento 3. The fact is that this programme, which was on the air for three years (between 1988 and 1990) not only succeeded in bringing philosophy to Spanish radio, a practice of thought developed with the greatest care and the least demagogy, always in active collaboration with the audience, but also in creating an alternative agenda for discussion to that of the mass media. In addition, this programme allowed people from different parts of Spain to meet and get to know each other, and minority associations and groups to have a greater space for dissemination. Through this programme, Agustín showed in practice that thought, which seems the most abstract thing, becomes the most concrete and vital weapon when it comes to fighting in conditions in which what dominates us are not fundamentally singular individuals, but abstractions (such as the State, the Person, Capital, the Future…).
And so, with this way of understanding thought as a direct action, Pensamiento 3 was making people, or rather breaking down abstractions or dominant ideas so that, little by little, maybe and just maybe, some voice of the people would appear. And it did appear. Only, at a certain point, the programme was cancelled. Some listeners then called in completely indignant or furious, denouncing censorship on the part of the public radio station on which it was broadcast. But this indignation hid the secret pride of those who, precisely because they are censored, believe they are the sole possessors of truth and reason: “if they bark, we ride”. At the opposite extreme to this attitude, García Calvo ventured that the reasons for the programme’s cancellation had more to do with a rotation in the schedule, which could have been his or any other programme’s turn, simply because of the need to renew and update the media; and that the strange and astonishing thing was that it had been on the air for three years, not the cancellation of the programme.
Thought as direct action is thus understood, in García Calvo’s practice, as an exercise in the serene destruction of the abstractions that dominate us, which opens up a space in culture for the expression of the ungovernable: of “the living and the palpable”, of “the body” and “the people”, according to names merely indicative of something that has no identity of its own, and which therefore cannot have a name. Thus, it is not, in García Calvo’s case, that philosophy steals from anarchism, but that anarchist action needs to be understood in an extended cultural field, and not only socially or tied to syndicalism, in the conditions of contemporary domination. Anarchist direct action needs to become philosophical, in those conditions. And then, one discovers that this kind of action can come from anywhere, that anarchism cannot be contained in any kind of identity.
But García Calvo not only refused to define himself as an anarchist, but also used various textual strategies to avoid any form of identity, such as the practice of anonymity, the pseudonym, the collective signature (as in the texts of the Comuna Antinacionalista Zamorana) or the proper name placed between question marks. Again, in these kinds of strategies that question the author-function (as Foucault called it), we see that understanding thought as a kind of libertarian action implies extreme attention to the form and conditions in which the action of thought is developed. The background, or theory of thought as direct action is very simple: the negation of the determinate (which must never become negative determination) returns the determinate to a state of infinity, which makes possible (only possible) the resurrection of the primordial chaos, of the original indeterminate something. Or, to put it more simply, the act of destruction of ideas, or of what is known, allows the resurrection of bodies, or of what is not known. But there are countless ways of negating, countless ways of practising thought as direct action. In this respect, we can say that perhaps there has never been a thought so intimately identified with anarchism as that of García Calvo. But to call it anarchist would be to render the negation positive and thus nullify its potency. This is the risk run by attempts to turn anarchism into something respectable, a subject of study among others, a set of ideas or a philosophical current, which is translated like any other into the agreed formats of the paper and the scientific journal. Thus, these papers may say anarchism, but they do neoliberalism. So it would almost be better if they did not say anarchism, but did it one way or the other.
For anarchism is not a theory or a worldview, but a style of action: anarchism lives only in the direct action of people. If anarchism matters, it is because it is a possibility for everyone, and not exclusively for those who choose to define themselves as anarchists. And this is so, as García Calvo’s example shows, even in thought, in thought understood as one form among others of direct action, which has its own characteristics and its relevance especially marked when domination is inseparable from the violence of abstraction.
[1] Jordi Carmona Hurtado, Cómo matar a la muerte. Agustín García Calvo y la ?losofía de la contracultura (La oveja roja, 2022), p. 246.
Libre te quiero is a song composed by Amancio Prada based on a poem by Agustín García Calvo.
Libre te quiero
Libre te quiero,
como arroyo que brinca
de peña en peña,
pero no mía.
Grande te quiero,
como monte preñado
de primavera,
pero no mía.
te quiero,
como pan que no sabe
su masa buena,
pero no mía.
Alta te quiero,
como chopo que en el cielo
se despereza,
pero no mía.
Blanca te quiero,
como flor de azahares
sobre la tierra,
pero no mía.
Pero no mía,
ni de Dios, ni de nadie,
ni tuya siquiera.
…
I Want You Free
I want you free,
Like a stream skipping about
From crag to crag.
But not mine.
Vast I want you,
Like a mountain bursting
With spring.
But not mine.
Good I want you,
Like bread oblivious of
Its good dough.
But not mine.
Tall I want you,
Like a poplar stretching
Itself to the sky.
But not mine.
White I want you,
Like orange blossom
Dotting the ground.
But not mine.
But not mine, nor God’s,
Nor anybody’s
Not even yours.
Suggested reading (in English):
Agustín García Calvo, “Analysis of Welfare Society” (1995), The Anarchist Library.
“Rebelling against reality: Agustin García Calvo”, Autonomies, 2012.
Vicente Ordóñez, “Agustin García Calvo in our time”, Radical Philosophy, December 2018, pp. 73-77.