From lundimatin #501, 15/12/2025
Everyone agrees that the current political landscape in France is frankly depressing. On the one hand, there is an obvious fascistisation of stupidity, and on the other, a kitsch revival of Leninist leftism. It’s easy to forget that for almost 15 years, from the anti-CPE movement in 2006 to the Yellow Vests movement in 2019, there was a much more joyful and vibrant anarchist and destituting movement. The defeat of some is always the joy of others. In any case, the happy thing about history is that everything can always be rethought and restarted, which is what a new online magazine, À bas bruits, des paysages anarchiques [Quietly/ Discretely, Anarchic Landscapes], proposes. We are publishing one of its first articles here, written by Josep Rafanell i Orra, who is well known to readers of lundimatin. A launch party is planned for 24 January in Paris.
Anarchism has always asserted itself as the community’s escape route from the iron cage of society. More than ever, it is disrupts our current affairs and the vectorised time of disaster.
Let’s start at the beginning, which is to say, in the middle. For example, in a neighbourhood of exiles, migrants and transients: early in the morning at the Jardin d’Éole in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, a plot of land fenced off by the town hall to prevent the settlement of exhausted migrants, condemned to wander the streets, a space bordered by an urban farm with a few sheep to give an eco-friendly touch to this neighbourhood where exiles hang out, but also zombie like crack addicts, both harassed by police dispersals. There is also the building of an annex to the Théâtre de la Villette, barricaded behind wire fences where portraits are plastered, intended to represent “the diversity of the neighbourhood”, a clumsy way of expressing the integration of cultural facilities into this working-class area. It is in this place, inside other fences, that migrants gather for breakfast. There stands a heavy Algeco module, its ugliness concealed as best it can be by a coat of paint. Inside are shelves stocked with food and hygiene products, a sink and a worktop with an electric hob. And then there is Latifa, in her fifties, standing in front of a large pot, overseeing the preparation of the meal, surrounded by other people making the breakfasts that will be served this morning. Outside, in the freezing cold of February, under a persistent drizzle, a group of Afghans are busy setting up marquees under which the distribution will take place. Young men and women from the neighbourhood, members of disparate collectives, some coming from far away, set about arranging food, fruit, thermos flasks of coffee and tea on the tables, donations from local shops. The meal takes place, conversations begin among this small, diverse crowd of migrants, squatters and volunteers. Someone turns on the speaker on their mobile phone and music from other worlds leads to some impromptu dancing. This has been going on for almost ten years. A whole constellation of links has been established, based on the palimpsest of the neighbourhood’s history, its struggles and solidarity, and its tradition of mutual aid. But there remains a troubling asymmetry, the terrible risk of institutionalising the abject nature of a charity system.
The life of a neighbourhood that remains alive is made up of “influence peddling”, as Isaac Joseph wittily put it in the preface to Ulf Hannerz’s Explorer la ville [Exploring the City]. It is a composition of determinations that thwart the social repertoires already in place. Forms of community that the figure of the stranger makes breathable, inscribed in the interstices of existential geographies. Ungovernable futures arise in this stubborn weaving, composing a patchwork of relationships, affections, connections, places, practices, forms of survival, conflicts, mutual aid, and attentions, from which emerge the shifting regimes of sensitivity that make up the texture of an inhabited city. There are always potential counter-cartographies that silently resist the suffocation of a space administered and policed by its forces. And there are new forms of knowledge that investigations can bring to light if we cross the thresholds between disparate worlds; knowledge that does not concern identities and their representations, but rather modes of existence of experience where attachments and interdependencies are forged despite adversity. And where, sometimes, suddenly, uprising bursts forth.
If we are to speak of knowledge here, it is migratory knowledge that we are referring to (David Lapoujade, Fictions du pragmatisme). Knowledge that arises within constantly shifting boundaries: a “mosaic of small worlds” where passages from one world to another undo social totality. A society of societies, as Landauer said, or the resurgence of the community that lies dormant within the enclosures of the social body with its assignments and subjects. It is the pornography of representation that is then conjured away. It is the imagination that is then revitalised. For what is imagination if not the experience of becoming other, of metamorphosis, of undoing identity of and for oneself, when we encounter those who make us strangers to ourselves? What an invaluable advantage it is to be able to become strangers in a world invaded by the insane proliferation of connections between atomised selves, where the overexposure of images is based on the negation of presence, destroying the experience of sharing that gives existence to places of community, the ethopoetics of animated worlds.
In these worlds in the making, if we commit ourselves to them, it is always a question of animating, of bringing to life, where we can create a soul for ourselves through encounters with other souls. But to do so, we must break free from the detestable familiarity imposed by representation, which hinders the becoming of what we are not yet.
We must break free from the shackles of identity so as not to lose the world to the subjects represented. Disidentification becomes the condition for a community where we can become a wandering people of relay among and between each other (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine).
*
Deleuze and Guattari also tell us that when thought takes its form from the model of the state, it is captive to the two poles of the foundation of its sovereignty – tense but complementary. The muthos, the archaic foundation, operates through magical capture. And the pact or contract between “reasonable people”, that is to say, those subject to the rationality of the state (“always obey, for the more you obey, the more you will be masters…”). This is fascism lying dormant. Yet neither can exist without an “outside” traversed by nomadic thoughts that conjure up the two universals, that of totalisation as the horizon of being and that of the Subject as the condition of subjection (or of the “being-for-us” of the social contract).
But we can find other beginnings, the emergence of other times that are drifting away. This was the case with the Yellow Vests uprising, during the hundreds of blockades across France. These were moments when countless occupied roundabouts became wild assemblies where people gathered, shared stories, built narratives and shelters, helped each other and hatched conspiracies.
On the 1st of December 2018, as in the weeks before and after, tens of thousands of people descended on the capital’s affluent neighbourhoods. From early in the morning, a myriad of gatherings formed. The same was true in dozens of other cities, with no organisation giving instructions other than a flurry of disorderly calls that spread like wildfire. The Champs-Elysées attracted jubilant crowds. Luxury shops were looted, and burning barricades punctuated the unexpected wanderings. Sometimes people strolled, sometimes they engaged in frantic races, confronting or fleeing police charges, amid the tear gas-filled air and deafening explosions of stun grenades and flash ball shots. People talk, tell stories, sing, shout, jokes fly, thousands of tags leave traces of this wave of unrest. The Arc de Triomphe is ransacked. Elsewhere, everywhere, buildings are attacked, set on fire, looted: prefectures, toll booths, police stations, shops and supermarkets… During this insurrectionary movement, which lasted several months, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were used against demonstrators and rioters. The number of people maimed by police weapons multiplied. In Marseille, Zineb Redouane, an 80-year-old woman, was killed by CRS riot police when a grenade hit her in the face. Since then, as we know, the embers have not been extinguished; the riot lies dormant. It could reignite at any moment, as it did in the summer of 2023 following the police killing of Nahel Merzouk. Or, as in New Caledonia, where the recent uprising resulted in the killing of at least ten Kanaks.
*
Neo-fascism. Liberal fascism. Capitalo-fascism. Techno-feudalism. Cyberfascism… The semantic field is expanding in an attempt to respond to the incredulity in the face of the upheaval that is plunging the world into a monstrous cacophony, with the spectacular displays and brutal eccentricity of the figureheads who preside over the stages of power. There are, of course, national atavisms that give these new forms of fascism their unique colouring, but the fact remains that the logic of destruction, across all latitudes, brings with it forms of homogenisation, a new contract that could well be summed up by the word “occupation”: absolute occupation of the Earth by commodities, devastating the unique ways of inhabiting it, but also occupation of souls, turning people into atomised beings preoccupied with themselves, captive to a mad restlessness.
There is no doubt that our era knows how to prolong its terminal stage. In the liberal world, the social contract has been hacked by socio-technical machinery with neo-Nazis at the controls who are remobilising a fantasised arkhè. The international legal order has become the mop with which we no longer even clean the floor where the massacred lie. The old coordinates of political discourse and the civilised conventions of public communication are collapsing. Have we not heard that the Gaza Strip, transformed into a field of ruins by heavily armed psychopaths, after tens of thousands of people have been massacred and its inhabitants are about to be deported, could be turned into an amusement park, a new investment plan for a deranged global bourgeoisie?
Masses of atomised individuals are prey to identity mergers in all globalised geographies. Even the French Socialist Party, never late for an ignominy, proposed not so long ago to debate the identity of the French. The old antagonisms based on class, which created division, have vanished, whatever the self-proclaimed emancipators who stir up trouble in their media bubble may think, stubbornly imposing their fantasised subjects on a devastated social landscape in an attempt to exist. But in the game of propaganda, cybernetic fascism will now always have the upper hand. A word of warning to the neo-leftists: it is a lost cause to try to compete with Elon Musk and his cronies in the noisy arena of representation, via digital platforms, the new insane polis where the processes of recognition are played out, absorbed by the predatory logic of a reputation market.
But it may be that the political arena has always carried within it the seeds of its own decay. That the Greek polis was haunted from its very origins by predators, those “programmed citizens, as Marcel Detienne told us in Les dieux d’Orphée, trained to kill each other around their bloody altars”. Today, the demos, with its sacrificial altars, unfolds behind a mesmerising touch screen, in a mad rush for followers, in practices of seduction that pierce fragments of public space, which claim to be political but ultimately only contribute to universal isolation; an absolutist kingdom of communication politics, a meta-politics that murders language and presence with its zones of opacity. In their obsession with mimetic communication, the new leftists condemn themselves to leaving the regions where the languages of the people, those of the community, are spoken, “all that is in part shadow, indeterminacy and nuance, that kind of frisson that can only be expressed in the language of the people and the language of the heart” (Landauer). With all due respect to the neo-Bolshevik apparatchiks, community can only exist if it is pluralised.
*
To step outside the presentism imposed by governmentality with its projections towards a future that is already present; the failed projections of the old, ruined institutions of the state, the failure of planning, replaced by algorithmic machinery that depopulates the world, turning it into a monstrous pile of rubbish heaped with clichés. To step out of the prisons of what is, in order to rediscover what is different. And to do so, to venture onto “the edge of time that surrounds our present, that overlooks it and indicates it in its otherness”, where the untimely becomings are born that dispel the identity “where we like to look at ourselves” (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge).
Forms of life become anarchic modes of existence when they cease to demand their foundation, refuse the deterministic chain of causes and effects, when they no longer revel in the morbid circularity of a status of domination, when they are able to face dispossession and then risk joining transitive zones of experience between beings, where what is properly itself – relational properties – becomes singular, and where regions of sensitivity are established during encounters that allow a multiplicity of times to be woven anew.
We must archive communal forms where ways of existing and interdependencies are intertwined, which alone will allow us to escape the time of vectorised disaster. How can we make their legacy possible? How can we collect traces of what could not have happened, what could have been, sometimes as an extension of what was, in order to rediscover its potential? We must remain awake despite the blindness caused by an excess of light projected onto the world, which makes us close our eyes. Jean-Christophe Bailly evokes these singular cartographies, partly erased, partly yet to come, which emerge when we look at a gaze. It is then that community is established: a “community of gazers” whose gazes bring fragments of the world into presence, invite us to cross boundaries – starting with the boundaries of the self – and engage us in the becoming of what we are not yet. As old as revolutionary thought itself, the untimely and radical plurality of the world can re-emerge if we pay attention to it, if we take care of it. But these lines of plural times, their bifurcations that bring singular environments to life, are not given to us: they are to be made. It is this forever unfinished work that we call (once again) anarchism; a relationship to the world, between beings, without origin or the command of a reason that precedes us. The actualisation of revolutionary virtualities today, as it was in the past, consists of gestures of desertion from what the machinery of government wants to assign us: the identity of our status as subjects.
Resurgences and insurgencies can once again take shape. Such was the history of anarchisms, which with their bursts interrupted the course of time to establish new beginnings. But it is also the history of the slowness of communal forms, of transmission, of bonds created sparingly against the ruthless socialised brutality that leads to atomisation and obedience. We must test the ways of inheriting them in an era when the habitability of the Earth is endangered. We affirm that anarchic forms of life will no longer be social. They will be cosmological; populated by an infinite variety of beings and environments; inhabited by strangers, emigrants who carry a plurality of worlds inhabited by other beings that prevent the reproduction of the same. It is in the shadows, far from the clarity claimed by representatives with their catechisms and clichés, that new ways of connecting and new sensibilities are born.
“I have the impression that the real struggles are always struggles with the shadow. There are no other struggles than the struggle with the shadow. The clichés are already there, they are in my head, they are in me.” (Gilles Deleuze, On Painting)
In 1919, the year Landauer was brutally murdered, Martin Buber, in an essay on community, recalled the words of Ferdinand Tönnies, with which he acknowledged the death of culture, that which had succumbed to the combined effects of commercial enterprise and state apparatuses which had led to industrialised massacres. But he also spoke of the hope for the discreet blossoming of a new culture from the scattered, buried but still living seeds of community. We are there again, cultivating this discretion. Gone are the days of chatter about monumental social theories. We flee the noisy stages of the avant-garde that political entrepreneurs want to resurrect. We want to cultivate attention to the vulnerable experience of community that dwells in ordinary, shifting worlds that cannot be represented. And it is thus, through presence, sharing, mutual aid and pooling resources, that we will bring to life places that are good to live in.
Community is not exceptional; it is an entanglement of bonds fully experienced in ordinary worlds. But it is also hospitality: welcoming the anomalous, the irregular, the foreign, the different. How can we fail to notice the shared commitment that keeps an exhausted medical team going after a night spent in the emergency room of a hospital in Seine-Saint-Denis? Or to the care worker who fled a blood-soaked Haiti and, after ten years of struggle to obtain her papers, now cares for the elderly at the end of their lives in a nursing home run by a mafia that contributes to the CAC 40? Or to the child shattered by domestic violence who mobilises a small crowd of social workers perplexed by her strange trance-like episodes? Or to those eccentric madmen who wander the city, having escaped the clutches of psychiatry? Or to that Kabyle bar on the corner of a street in my neighbourhood, where a silent old man with long white hair and the air of a prophet has found a place to live, replacing a psychiatric institution that would have assigned him the status of schizophrenic, dulling his mind with neuroleptics?
*
We must bear witness to the worlds in which we can set out to “reconquer our relationships” (Landauer) in order to “seize something external and foreign” (William James). Paying attention to what diverges in uncertain everyday life: this is where we find the potential migrations that form the backdrop to insurrections.
It is not a question of invoking a mystique of community, but rather the power of generative bonds in place of the social reproduction of atomised subjects. It is a question of summoning hospitable communities, caring for vulnerability, attentive to what makes them different – fleeing and conjuring away the social cages to which we are assigned. In anarchic landscapes, alliances can take place without conditions of identity. Differences communicate with others through differences in differences, said Deleuze. “Crowned anarchies replace the hierarchies of representation; nomadic distributions replace the sedentary distributions of representation.” Cultivating relationships with otherness means learning that others always have their own others. That our here will always have elsewheres with their own elsewheres. And so on…
This is how open communities are born, making the world habitable.
Only when anarchy becomes, for us, a dark, deep dream, not a vision attainable through concepts, can our ethics and our actions become one.
Gustav Landauer, Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism
The launch of the magazine À bas bruit
Against the enormity of global destruction, in the face of new forms of globalised fascism, amid the dismantling of what was once the welfare state in certain parts of the world, all that remains are our experiences and the new bonds they enable us to forge. This might seem insignificant, but we believe that it is precisely by paying attention to ordinary, invisible worlds that we will be able to combat dispossession. The fight against the crushing of sensitivity is key to this.
We want to conduct investigations that bear witness to forms of mutual aid, attention to vulnerability, care for living environments, struggles and resistance against atomisation and its identity mergers. We know that the most formidable weapon against the fascism that is coming and is already here is hospitality, welcoming what is foreign to us so that we do not remain suffocated in the iron cages of identity.
Emancipation has never been a chain of causes and effects unfolding in a single timeline, waiting for its authorised interpreters. It arises from the anarchic entanglement of a plurality of lifelines unfolding in singular places.
We say that thought is above all an act of sympathy. And that sympathy is always a migration, a passage between worlds.
With À bas bruit, we want to encourage encounters. The first will take place on 24 January at the MJC des Hauts de Belleville. Regular meetings will be offered thereafter.
After the presentation of the magazine and a discussion, we invite you to join us for a drink.
The meeting will take place on 24 January from 7 p.m.
at the MJC des Hauts de Belleville
43 rue du Borrégo, 75020 Paris
Josep Rafanell i Orra: Anarchism, once again
From lundimatin #501, 15/12/2025
Everyone agrees that the current political landscape in France is frankly depressing. On the one hand, there is an obvious fascistisation of stupidity, and on the other, a kitsch revival of Leninist leftism. It’s easy to forget that for almost 15 years, from the anti-CPE movement in 2006 to the Yellow Vests movement in 2019, there was a much more joyful and vibrant anarchist and destituting movement. The defeat of some is always the joy of others. In any case, the happy thing about history is that everything can always be rethought and restarted, which is what a new online magazine, À bas bruits, des paysages anarchiques [Quietly/ Discretely, Anarchic Landscapes], proposes. We are publishing one of its first articles here, written by Josep Rafanell i Orra, who is well known to readers of lundimatin. A launch party is planned for 24 January in Paris.
Anarchism has always asserted itself as the community’s escape route from the iron cage of society. More than ever, it is disrupts our current affairs and the vectorised time of disaster.
Let’s start at the beginning, which is to say, in the middle. For example, in a neighbourhood of exiles, migrants and transients: early in the morning at the Jardin d’Éole in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, a plot of land fenced off by the town hall to prevent the settlement of exhausted migrants, condemned to wander the streets, a space bordered by an urban farm with a few sheep to give an eco-friendly touch to this neighbourhood where exiles hang out, but also zombie like crack addicts, both harassed by police dispersals. There is also the building of an annex to the Théâtre de la Villette, barricaded behind wire fences where portraits are plastered, intended to represent “the diversity of the neighbourhood”, a clumsy way of expressing the integration of cultural facilities into this working-class area. It is in this place, inside other fences, that migrants gather for breakfast. There stands a heavy Algeco module, its ugliness concealed as best it can be by a coat of paint. Inside are shelves stocked with food and hygiene products, a sink and a worktop with an electric hob. And then there is Latifa, in her fifties, standing in front of a large pot, overseeing the preparation of the meal, surrounded by other people making the breakfasts that will be served this morning. Outside, in the freezing cold of February, under a persistent drizzle, a group of Afghans are busy setting up marquees under which the distribution will take place. Young men and women from the neighbourhood, members of disparate collectives, some coming from far away, set about arranging food, fruit, thermos flasks of coffee and tea on the tables, donations from local shops. The meal takes place, conversations begin among this small, diverse crowd of migrants, squatters and volunteers. Someone turns on the speaker on their mobile phone and music from other worlds leads to some impromptu dancing. This has been going on for almost ten years. A whole constellation of links has been established, based on the palimpsest of the neighbourhood’s history, its struggles and solidarity, and its tradition of mutual aid. But there remains a troubling asymmetry, the terrible risk of institutionalising the abject nature of a charity system.
The life of a neighbourhood that remains alive is made up of “influence peddling”, as Isaac Joseph wittily put it in the preface to Ulf Hannerz’s Explorer la ville [Exploring the City]. It is a composition of determinations that thwart the social repertoires already in place. Forms of community that the figure of the stranger makes breathable, inscribed in the interstices of existential geographies. Ungovernable futures arise in this stubborn weaving, composing a patchwork of relationships, affections, connections, places, practices, forms of survival, conflicts, mutual aid, and attentions, from which emerge the shifting regimes of sensitivity that make up the texture of an inhabited city. There are always potential counter-cartographies that silently resist the suffocation of a space administered and policed by its forces. And there are new forms of knowledge that investigations can bring to light if we cross the thresholds between disparate worlds; knowledge that does not concern identities and their representations, but rather modes of existence of experience where attachments and interdependencies are forged despite adversity. And where, sometimes, suddenly, uprising bursts forth.
If we are to speak of knowledge here, it is migratory knowledge that we are referring to (David Lapoujade, Fictions du pragmatisme). Knowledge that arises within constantly shifting boundaries: a “mosaic of small worlds” where passages from one world to another undo social totality. A society of societies, as Landauer said, or the resurgence of the community that lies dormant within the enclosures of the social body with its assignments and subjects. It is the pornography of representation that is then conjured away. It is the imagination that is then revitalised. For what is imagination if not the experience of becoming other, of metamorphosis, of undoing identity of and for oneself, when we encounter those who make us strangers to ourselves? What an invaluable advantage it is to be able to become strangers in a world invaded by the insane proliferation of connections between atomised selves, where the overexposure of images is based on the negation of presence, destroying the experience of sharing that gives existence to places of community, the ethopoetics of animated worlds.
In these worlds in the making, if we commit ourselves to them, it is always a question of animating, of bringing to life, where we can create a soul for ourselves through encounters with other souls. But to do so, we must break free from the detestable familiarity imposed by representation, which hinders the becoming of what we are not yet.
We must break free from the shackles of identity so as not to lose the world to the subjects represented. Disidentification becomes the condition for a community where we can become a wandering people of relay among and between each other (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine).
*
Deleuze and Guattari also tell us that when thought takes its form from the model of the state, it is captive to the two poles of the foundation of its sovereignty – tense but complementary. The muthos, the archaic foundation, operates through magical capture. And the pact or contract between “reasonable people”, that is to say, those subject to the rationality of the state (“always obey, for the more you obey, the more you will be masters…”). This is fascism lying dormant. Yet neither can exist without an “outside” traversed by nomadic thoughts that conjure up the two universals, that of totalisation as the horizon of being and that of the Subject as the condition of subjection (or of the “being-for-us” of the social contract).
But we can find other beginnings, the emergence of other times that are drifting away. This was the case with the Yellow Vests uprising, during the hundreds of blockades across France. These were moments when countless occupied roundabouts became wild assemblies where people gathered, shared stories, built narratives and shelters, helped each other and hatched conspiracies.
On the 1st of December 2018, as in the weeks before and after, tens of thousands of people descended on the capital’s affluent neighbourhoods. From early in the morning, a myriad of gatherings formed. The same was true in dozens of other cities, with no organisation giving instructions other than a flurry of disorderly calls that spread like wildfire. The Champs-Elysées attracted jubilant crowds. Luxury shops were looted, and burning barricades punctuated the unexpected wanderings. Sometimes people strolled, sometimes they engaged in frantic races, confronting or fleeing police charges, amid the tear gas-filled air and deafening explosions of stun grenades and flash ball shots. People talk, tell stories, sing, shout, jokes fly, thousands of tags leave traces of this wave of unrest. The Arc de Triomphe is ransacked. Elsewhere, everywhere, buildings are attacked, set on fire, looted: prefectures, toll booths, police stations, shops and supermarkets… During this insurrectionary movement, which lasted several months, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were used against demonstrators and rioters. The number of people maimed by police weapons multiplied. In Marseille, Zineb Redouane, an 80-year-old woman, was killed by CRS riot police when a grenade hit her in the face. Since then, as we know, the embers have not been extinguished; the riot lies dormant. It could reignite at any moment, as it did in the summer of 2023 following the police killing of Nahel Merzouk. Or, as in New Caledonia, where the recent uprising resulted in the killing of at least ten Kanaks.
*
Neo-fascism. Liberal fascism. Capitalo-fascism. Techno-feudalism. Cyberfascism… The semantic field is expanding in an attempt to respond to the incredulity in the face of the upheaval that is plunging the world into a monstrous cacophony, with the spectacular displays and brutal eccentricity of the figureheads who preside over the stages of power. There are, of course, national atavisms that give these new forms of fascism their unique colouring, but the fact remains that the logic of destruction, across all latitudes, brings with it forms of homogenisation, a new contract that could well be summed up by the word “occupation”: absolute occupation of the Earth by commodities, devastating the unique ways of inhabiting it, but also occupation of souls, turning people into atomised beings preoccupied with themselves, captive to a mad restlessness.
There is no doubt that our era knows how to prolong its terminal stage. In the liberal world, the social contract has been hacked by socio-technical machinery with neo-Nazis at the controls who are remobilising a fantasised arkhè. The international legal order has become the mop with which we no longer even clean the floor where the massacred lie. The old coordinates of political discourse and the civilised conventions of public communication are collapsing. Have we not heard that the Gaza Strip, transformed into a field of ruins by heavily armed psychopaths, after tens of thousands of people have been massacred and its inhabitants are about to be deported, could be turned into an amusement park, a new investment plan for a deranged global bourgeoisie?
Masses of atomised individuals are prey to identity mergers in all globalised geographies. Even the French Socialist Party, never late for an ignominy, proposed not so long ago to debate the identity of the French. The old antagonisms based on class, which created division, have vanished, whatever the self-proclaimed emancipators who stir up trouble in their media bubble may think, stubbornly imposing their fantasised subjects on a devastated social landscape in an attempt to exist. But in the game of propaganda, cybernetic fascism will now always have the upper hand. A word of warning to the neo-leftists: it is a lost cause to try to compete with Elon Musk and his cronies in the noisy arena of representation, via digital platforms, the new insane polis where the processes of recognition are played out, absorbed by the predatory logic of a reputation market.
But it may be that the political arena has always carried within it the seeds of its own decay. That the Greek polis was haunted from its very origins by predators, those “programmed citizens, as Marcel Detienne told us in Les dieux d’Orphée, trained to kill each other around their bloody altars”. Today, the demos, with its sacrificial altars, unfolds behind a mesmerising touch screen, in a mad rush for followers, in practices of seduction that pierce fragments of public space, which claim to be political but ultimately only contribute to universal isolation; an absolutist kingdom of communication politics, a meta-politics that murders language and presence with its zones of opacity. In their obsession with mimetic communication, the new leftists condemn themselves to leaving the regions where the languages of the people, those of the community, are spoken, “all that is in part shadow, indeterminacy and nuance, that kind of frisson that can only be expressed in the language of the people and the language of the heart” (Landauer). With all due respect to the neo-Bolshevik apparatchiks, community can only exist if it is pluralised.
*
To step outside the presentism imposed by governmentality with its projections towards a future that is already present; the failed projections of the old, ruined institutions of the state, the failure of planning, replaced by algorithmic machinery that depopulates the world, turning it into a monstrous pile of rubbish heaped with clichés. To step out of the prisons of what is, in order to rediscover what is different. And to do so, to venture onto “the edge of time that surrounds our present, that overlooks it and indicates it in its otherness”, where the untimely becomings are born that dispel the identity “where we like to look at ourselves” (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge).
Forms of life become anarchic modes of existence when they cease to demand their foundation, refuse the deterministic chain of causes and effects, when they no longer revel in the morbid circularity of a status of domination, when they are able to face dispossession and then risk joining transitive zones of experience between beings, where what is properly itself – relational properties – becomes singular, and where regions of sensitivity are established during encounters that allow a multiplicity of times to be woven anew.
We must archive communal forms where ways of existing and interdependencies are intertwined, which alone will allow us to escape the time of vectorised disaster. How can we make their legacy possible? How can we collect traces of what could not have happened, what could have been, sometimes as an extension of what was, in order to rediscover its potential? We must remain awake despite the blindness caused by an excess of light projected onto the world, which makes us close our eyes. Jean-Christophe Bailly evokes these singular cartographies, partly erased, partly yet to come, which emerge when we look at a gaze. It is then that community is established: a “community of gazers” whose gazes bring fragments of the world into presence, invite us to cross boundaries – starting with the boundaries of the self – and engage us in the becoming of what we are not yet. As old as revolutionary thought itself, the untimely and radical plurality of the world can re-emerge if we pay attention to it, if we take care of it. But these lines of plural times, their bifurcations that bring singular environments to life, are not given to us: they are to be made. It is this forever unfinished work that we call (once again) anarchism; a relationship to the world, between beings, without origin or the command of a reason that precedes us. The actualisation of revolutionary virtualities today, as it was in the past, consists of gestures of desertion from what the machinery of government wants to assign us: the identity of our status as subjects.
Resurgences and insurgencies can once again take shape. Such was the history of anarchisms, which with their bursts interrupted the course of time to establish new beginnings. But it is also the history of the slowness of communal forms, of transmission, of bonds created sparingly against the ruthless socialised brutality that leads to atomisation and obedience. We must test the ways of inheriting them in an era when the habitability of the Earth is endangered. We affirm that anarchic forms of life will no longer be social. They will be cosmological; populated by an infinite variety of beings and environments; inhabited by strangers, emigrants who carry a plurality of worlds inhabited by other beings that prevent the reproduction of the same. It is in the shadows, far from the clarity claimed by representatives with their catechisms and clichés, that new ways of connecting and new sensibilities are born.
“I have the impression that the real struggles are always struggles with the shadow. There are no other struggles than the struggle with the shadow. The clichés are already there, they are in my head, they are in me.” (Gilles Deleuze, On Painting)
In 1919, the year Landauer was brutally murdered, Martin Buber, in an essay on community, recalled the words of Ferdinand Tönnies, with which he acknowledged the death of culture, that which had succumbed to the combined effects of commercial enterprise and state apparatuses which had led to industrialised massacres. But he also spoke of the hope for the discreet blossoming of a new culture from the scattered, buried but still living seeds of community. We are there again, cultivating this discretion. Gone are the days of chatter about monumental social theories. We flee the noisy stages of the avant-garde that political entrepreneurs want to resurrect. We want to cultivate attention to the vulnerable experience of community that dwells in ordinary, shifting worlds that cannot be represented. And it is thus, through presence, sharing, mutual aid and pooling resources, that we will bring to life places that are good to live in.
Community is not exceptional; it is an entanglement of bonds fully experienced in ordinary worlds. But it is also hospitality: welcoming the anomalous, the irregular, the foreign, the different. How can we fail to notice the shared commitment that keeps an exhausted medical team going after a night spent in the emergency room of a hospital in Seine-Saint-Denis? Or to the care worker who fled a blood-soaked Haiti and, after ten years of struggle to obtain her papers, now cares for the elderly at the end of their lives in a nursing home run by a mafia that contributes to the CAC 40? Or to the child shattered by domestic violence who mobilises a small crowd of social workers perplexed by her strange trance-like episodes? Or to those eccentric madmen who wander the city, having escaped the clutches of psychiatry? Or to that Kabyle bar on the corner of a street in my neighbourhood, where a silent old man with long white hair and the air of a prophet has found a place to live, replacing a psychiatric institution that would have assigned him the status of schizophrenic, dulling his mind with neuroleptics?
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We must bear witness to the worlds in which we can set out to “reconquer our relationships” (Landauer) in order to “seize something external and foreign” (William James). Paying attention to what diverges in uncertain everyday life: this is where we find the potential migrations that form the backdrop to insurrections.
It is not a question of invoking a mystique of community, but rather the power of generative bonds in place of the social reproduction of atomised subjects. It is a question of summoning hospitable communities, caring for vulnerability, attentive to what makes them different – fleeing and conjuring away the social cages to which we are assigned. In anarchic landscapes, alliances can take place without conditions of identity. Differences communicate with others through differences in differences, said Deleuze. “Crowned anarchies replace the hierarchies of representation; nomadic distributions replace the sedentary distributions of representation.” Cultivating relationships with otherness means learning that others always have their own others. That our here will always have elsewheres with their own elsewheres. And so on…
This is how open communities are born, making the world habitable.
The launch of the magazine À bas bruit
Against the enormity of global destruction, in the face of new forms of globalised fascism, amid the dismantling of what was once the welfare state in certain parts of the world, all that remains are our experiences and the new bonds they enable us to forge. This might seem insignificant, but we believe that it is precisely by paying attention to ordinary, invisible worlds that we will be able to combat dispossession. The fight against the crushing of sensitivity is key to this.
We want to conduct investigations that bear witness to forms of mutual aid, attention to vulnerability, care for living environments, struggles and resistance against atomisation and its identity mergers. We know that the most formidable weapon against the fascism that is coming and is already here is hospitality, welcoming what is foreign to us so that we do not remain suffocated in the iron cages of identity.
Emancipation has never been a chain of causes and effects unfolding in a single timeline, waiting for its authorised interpreters. It arises from the anarchic entanglement of a plurality of lifelines unfolding in singular places.
We say that thought is above all an act of sympathy. And that sympathy is always a migration, a passage between worlds.
With À bas bruit, we want to encourage encounters. The first will take place on 24 January at the MJC des Hauts de Belleville. Regular meetings will be offered thereafter.
After the presentation of the magazine and a discussion, we invite you to join us for a drink.
The meeting will take place on 24 January from 7 p.m.
at the MJC des Hauts de Belleville
43 rue du Borrégo, 75020 Paris