Sylvain George
From lundi matin #486, 01/09/2025
A few months ago, the Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli army a few kilometres off the coast of Gaza. On August 31, a flotilla of several dozen boats set sail for the Mediterranean in the hope of breaking the blockade that surrounds, starves, and genocides Gaza. The most realistic minds, as well as the most cynical, see this as a futile or senseless attempt given the power against which the sailboats can only crash. In this excellent text, the author and director Sylvain George demonstrates and defends the exact opposite. What is at stake in this flotilla is a shift in our political reference points; incompleteness as a path, vulnerability and obstinacy as power, fragmentation as form.
Introduction: From a Singular Event to an Unfinished Chain
Last June, the departure of the Madleen was conceived of as the invention of a singular political form: that of of incompletion.[1] Through this fragile and interrupted gesture, the possibility of a politics opened up that is not one of sovereign accomplishment, of a definitive act, or of a resounding victory, but of a fragment, of a recommencement, of an exposure. The ship, prevented from reaching Gaza, nevertheless carried an irreducible symbolic and material weight: it inscribed in reality an act of maritime disobedience, a breach in the established order, an image that cannot be closed.
It should be remembered, however, that the Madleen was not a first and came after a series of attempts, since the late 2000s, to break the blockade. But its merit was to have rekindled public attention, to have shed a harsh light on Gaza, and to have shown that it is still possible to produce a dissident image in a world saturated with consent and complicity. For while the ship was prevented from reaching its goal, it carried into the international arena proof that a minor, vulnerable gesture could still crack the symbolic barrier of the siege.
Now, shortly after the Madleen, and the Handala in July 2025, a new flotilla set sail on Sunday, August 31, 2025, this time with several ships, the “Global Sumud [Steadfast/Resilience] Flotilla”, which intends to mark a decisive shift and attempt once again to break the blockade. This time, Israel will not have to intercept a single ship, but it will face an entire fleet. The coalition of associations (Freedom Flotilla, Global March to Gaza, Sumud Convoy), bolstered by the presence of international figures and thousands of volunteers from 160 nationalities, claims to want to launch “the largest humanitarian maritime mission in history”.[2] It is therefore a diverse, heterogeneous fleet, composed of activists, doctors, artists, and “ordinary people,” that sets sail to confront the horizon of the siege.
The question that arises, then, is: how should we philosophically think about this new beginning? Is it a simple repetition of the same thing, a linear continuation, or rather a shift that transforms the meaning of the act? If the first boat could appear as a one-off event, both heroic and vulnerable, the fact that others follow engages a different regime of temporality and thought: that of a politics of persistence—not a persistence based on an immutable essence, but a discontinuous, fragmentary resumption, where each failure calls for a re-launch, or repetition engenders difference and not identity—of beginning again, of the unfinished chain.
One might be tempted to reduce these flotillas to tactical failures: each ship is intercepted, confiscated, impeded. But it is precisely in this very impediment that their strength lies. For incompleteness is not a contingent flaw here, but becomes the condition of the possibility of repetition. What is not accomplished once can be replayed differently, in another form, in another constellation. What fails to close is reborn as a fragment, exposed to seizure, but also to re-inscription.
Thus, the flotillas’ gesture does not fall within the paradigm of a single event, one that, in its suddenness, would disrupt the established order. Rather, it is a discontinuous series of fragile acts, each doomed to incompleteness, but which together compose a long-term political writing or narrative. Each boat is a page torn from an unfinished book, a fragmentary image that persists. This is where a problematic emerges: how can we conceive of a political action whose power lies not in its accomplishment, but in its repetition? How can we conceive of a politics that accepts the fact that it is not a “great event” but a series of minor, intermittent, but persistent gestures?
This issue takes on its full gravity when we recall what these ships are sailing toward: a territory transformed into an open-air camp, where starvation[3] has become a method of government, where a methodical ethnic cleansing is unfolding before our eyes, covered up by Western and Arab complicity, and by the established consent of most nations. From this, the profound question arises: what does the departure of a few ships—or even dozens of ships—mean in the face of genocide?
In this sense, the “Global Sumud Flotilla” is not simply a continuation of the previous one. It marks a shift: the transition from an isolated gesture to becoming-a-flotilla, that is, to a politics that finds its strength in repetition, in the constant reopening of the blockade’s wound, in the stubborn refusal of closure. Where Israel aims to normalize the exception, to naturalise the blockade as an insurmountable horizon, the flotilla reopens time, revives the intolerable, and inscribes a rebellious temporality.
It is this transition that needs to be analyzed: from the Madleen, which successfully shone a light on Gaza by actualising the power of incompleteness, to the new flotilla as a politics of persistence, as a fragile heterotopia in the face of the camp, as a fragmentary writing that continually re-inscribes itself despite its impediment.
I. Incompletion as a Political Form
The Madleen, prevented from reaching Gaza, did not “succeed”: it neither opened a maritime corridor, nor materially broke the blockade, nor provided concrete relief to the besieged population. But to reduce its significance to this tactical failure would be to miss the heart of its political operation. For the Madleen was not primarily a logistical or military act. It was a gesture. And this gesture must be thought of philosophically as the implementation of a singular form: that of incompletion.
In the sovereign logic of states, a political act is defined by its completion. It is valid if it concludes, if it produces a decisive result, if it establishes an end. Sovereignty, as Schmitt reminds us, consists in the power to decide, that is, to bring closure. In this political economy of completion, the incomplete is nothing more than a lack, a failure, a residue. But the flotilla radically shifts this logic: it proposes a policy whose value lies not in closure but in openness, not in accomplishment but in revival. It transforms the incompleteness of a flaw into a resource, a paradoxical power.
For what the Madleen has inscribed in reality is not an accomplished victory, but a breach, a maritime disobedience which, precisely because it was interrupted, remains available, re-inscribed, capable of returning. It is in this sense that Benjamin, in his Theses on the Concept of History,[4] teaches us that the history of the oppressed is not read as a victorious continuity but as a series of fragments, unfinished constellations, and repetitions. Incompleteness is not what condemns, but what promises: it keeps open the space of possibility. What is not closed, what is not concluded, can be taken up in another constellation, in another montage.
Thus, each interception, each impediment, does not constitute an end, but becomes a condition of repetition. Incompleteness is not the failure of the action; it is its mode of persistence. The Madleen, seized, dispersed, confiscated, left behind an image that calls for other images, an action that demands other actions. It is precisely because it was interrupted that it could be re-enacted by the Handala, and then by the new flotilla. Far from extinguishing the gesture, the impediment forces it to restart.
Incompleteness, thus understood, is more than a circumstance. It is a political category. It defines a way of acting that breaks away from the paradigm of sovereignty, that rejects completion as the sole criterion of value, and that invents a fragmented, fragile, yet persistent politics. This politics does not aim to impose an ultimate end but to keep the fault line open, to reopen time, to produce persistence in and through interruption.
II. The Logic of Repetition: From the One-Time Event to the Becoming-Flotilla
While the Madleen may have appeared as an isolated event, a fragile flash soon absorbed by the immense apparatus of the blockade, the reappearance of the Handala, followed by the departure of a new flotilla, mark a decisive turning point. What is now unfolding is no longer a one-time act, but a logic of repetition. The flotilla becomes a becoming-flotilla, a political temporality that cannot be exhausted in the singularity of a single gesture.
However, to repeat is never simply to reproduce. As Deleuze emphasizes in Difference and Repetition, true repetition is not identity, but differentiation. It does not repeat the same thing; it introduces an alteration, a new intensity, a shift in meaning. To repeat is to “raise the first time to the “nth” power,” writes Deleuze.[5] Each boat, far from being a copy of the previous one, is a variation that unfolds a new form of the initial gesture. The Madleen called the Handala; the Handala calls other ships; and each, through its difference, forms with the others a discontinuous but insistent chain.
Here, we must emphasise the political significance of this logic. State sovereignty, as we have said, aims to close: it is defined by decision, by the imposed end, by completion. In contrast, the flotilla opens. Its gesture, doomed to incompleteness, does not fade away. It remains re-launched and calls for other gestures. Where the sovereign act ends in its own effectiveness, the fragile, unfinished act unfolds in an insurgent temporality, made of repetitions, returns, and new beginnings.
This is why the repetition of flotillas should not be understood as redundancy but as creative obstinacy. Each time, the blockade seems to impose itself definitively, like an insurmountable inevitability. And yet, each time, boats set sail again, reopening the wound, reinscribing the intolerable into the present. Their repetition says: the time of the blockade is not closed; it can be punctured, cracked, interrupted…
To repeat, here, is not to fall back into helplessness, but to transform failure into a condition of possibility, to make interruption the driving force of persistence. The becoming-flotilla is this paradoxical temporality where the gesture knows it is impeded, yet persists in replaying itself, not despite the failure, but because of it.
III. Fragmentation as Political Writing
If the flotilla must be thought of as a process of becoming, it is because it does not totalise in a single accomplishment, but unfolds in the form of fragments. Each departure is a fragment of political writing, a fragment torn from the sea and from history, which only takes on meaning in relation to the other fragments that preceded it and those that will follow. A flotilla cannot be read as a closed narrative, but as a scattered page of an unfinished book, whose unity is never given but always to be reconstituted in retrospect, in the montage of traces.
This fragmentary character does not signify weakness or contingency; on the contrary, it constitutes a form of resistance. For sovereign power aims for closure, decision, totality. The state seeks to impose meaning through completion: a law promulgated, a border sealed, a war won. The flotilla, on the contrary, rejects this logic. It is part of a politics that does not complete, that does not unite, that does not aim for the completion of the totality but rather the opening of the fragment. It invents a mode of action where value lies in intermittence, in re-inscription, in resumption.
Foucault recalled that the boat is “the heterotopia par excellence”: a mobile place, an alternative space that carries with it its own outside, a fragile but real counter-space. Gaza, for its part, encapsulates the extreme experience of enclosed space: suspension of the law, normalisation of the exception, administration of survival through deprivation and starvation. Between enclosure and crossing, between camp and heterotopia, a decisive contrast opens up. The camp encloses, fixes, freezes; the flotilla opens, displaces, de-centers. The camp seeks to make enclosure absolute; the flotilla reminds us that other spaces always exist, even fleeting, even precarious.
This contrast illuminates the scope of fragmentation. For each ship is a fragment of heterotopia opposed to the disciplinary fragment of the camp. Each flotilla deploys a counter-fragment that fractures the spatial and symbolic order of the blockade. And since these fragments do not add up to form a stable whole, but repeat and shift, their power lies in their ability to persist through interruption.
Blanchot and Nancy proposed that the modern community be no longer based on a closed totality, but on the exposure of fragments, on the juxtaposition of unfinished singularities held together by their non-coincidence. The flotilla updates this logic: each ship is an exposed singularity, each departure a vulnerable fragment, but it is in their connection, in their discontinuous constellation, that a political form is constructed.
Thus, the flotilla is not simply a one-off event doomed to failure. It is a fragmentary writing that undoes the logic of enclosure, that opposes to the imposed totality of the camp a constellation of vulnerable but insistent heterotopias. It is a policy that does not aim to constitute a whole, but to bring fragments to life, to keep open the possibility of an outside.
IV. Insurgent Temporality: Breaking the Normalization of the Blockade
The blockade of Gaza is not simply a spatial closure. It also constitutes, and is above all, a technique of temporalisation, a way of producing time as an instrument of domination. Since 2007, Israel has sought to make the blockade not an exceptional and temporary measure, but an insurmountable horizon, an established normality. Gaza is thus reduced to a suspended temporality, a present without a future, punctuated by food quotas, water shortages, power outages, and recurring bombardments.
This suspension of time is not an accident: it is the heart of the strategy. For one of the most terrifying features of the blockade is the systematic use of hunger as a weapon, not of war in the classical sense, since the asymmetry prevents us from speaking of war in any strict sense, but of annihilation. Starvation is not an indirect consequence, but a deliberate policy. The aim is to deprive the population of food, water, and medicine, subjecting them to a minimum of daily survival. This is what we must call slow ethnic cleansing, a policy of methodical erasure that combines spatial annihilation (the siege, the destruction of infrastructure) and temporal annihilation (the imposition of a timeout, that of waiting, rationing, prolonged agony).
In this configuration, as outlined above, Gaza appears as the paradigmatic figure of the camp, in the sense Agamben gave to it: the space where the law is suspended in order to better enforce it, where the exception becomes the rule, where lives are reduced to the state of “bare life” that is administered, exposed, and destroyed.[6] The camp is the space where time is confiscated, where the future is annulled, where history is as if frozen in the repetition of disaster.
Faced with this logic of closure and immobilization, the flotilla introduces a counter-time. Each departure, even when prevented, even intercepted, produces an intermittence, a rupture in the homogenised time of the siege. It inscribes a dissonance in the present, a reminder that the blockade is not a natural horizon, but a political construct, and that it can therefore be contested. In this sense, each flotilla embodies what Benjamin called a Jetztzeit, a “time of the now” that tears history away from imposed continuity, from the continuity of disaster, to open up a new constellation, restoring density to the present where everything seemed frozen.
The ship, as we have seen, is this “heterotopia par excellence,” an other, mobile, wandering space, which carries within itself its own outside. The flotilla, in this sense, is an insurgent heterotopia that opposes the closed spatiality of the camp. It does not materially triumph over the blockade, but it deploys another space-time; a space of crossing, a time of beginning again. Where the blockade seeks to impose the repetition of survival, the flotilla imposes the repetition of insurrection.
This is why the flotillas’ struggle is not merely logistical or symbolic: it is also kairopolitical. It counters the dead time of the siege with the eruption of a time that comes, a present that persists, an emergence that opens. Even if intercepted, even if prevented, the flotilla has already cracked the time of the blockade. It has reminded us that history is not closed, that it can be rewritten, that other configurations remain conceivable.
Thus, faced with the camp which locks us into a frozen temporality, the flotilla deploys not a new continuity, but the experience of a temporal discontinuity, of an insurgent temporality, fragile, intermittent, but capable of breaking the evidence of the disaster, of reminding us that it is still possible to act and to resist.
V. Politics of Persistence: Vulnerability and Obstinacy
Everything seems to condemn the flotillas to insignificance. They have been and will be intercepted by an overpowering army, seized by naval forces with overwhelming technological and military superiority. They carry only small cargoes, insignificant compared to the immense needs of a starving population. They cannot materially break the siege or reverse the machine of destruction unleashed on Gaza. How, then, can we understand the value of these fragile gestures in the face of a genocide unfolding before the eyes of the world?
It is precisely in this disproportion that their significance lies. Judith Butler has shown that vulnerability must not be understood solely as exposure to injury, but as a condition of collective action, as an ethical and political resource.[7] The flotillas embody this vulnerability: they deliberately expose themselves, they know their relative powerlessness, they accept the likelihood of failure. But it is in this very exposure that their strength lies. For the challenge is not to compete with the state, but to demonstrate, through a gesture, the impossibility of accepting the general consent.
The disproportion thus becomes revealing. What do a few boats signify in the face of a genocide? The question does not abolish the meaning of the act, but rather grounds it. It highlights the complicity of Western nations, which arm and support Israel; the passivity, even tacit cooperation, of many Arab regimes; the silence or indifference of an international opinion that has ended up naturalising the siege and considering starvation as a fait accompli. The flotilla then opposes a front of refusal. It says: no; No to silence, no to established consent, no to reducing the crime to an inevitability.
This fragile obstinacy is not naivety. It knows that it cannot win militarily. But it invents a minor politics in the Deleuzian sense: a politics of margins, of re-launching, of intermittence. It opposes sovereignty, which closes, not with a symmetrical counter-sovereignty, but with a series of vulnerable, open, re-inscribable gestures. It produces not a victory, but a persistence.
This persistence must therefore be thought of as a form of resistance on both a spatial and temporal level. Faced with the camp, a space of normalised exception, the flotilla embodies a precarious but insubordinate heterotopia. Faced with the dead time of the siege, it deploys an insurgent time, that of re-commencement. What it opposes to genocide is not power, but the vulnerable obstinacy of an action that refuses to disappear, that persists despite failure, that comes again and again despite defeat.
Thus, the flotilla is not defined by what it accomplishes, but by what it prevents. It prevents defeat from being total, silence from being complete, consent from being unanimous. It inscribes a fault in the murderous consensus, and reminds us that even in the face of the abyss, it is still possible to act, weakly, as a minority, but stubbornly.
Conclusion: A Constellation of Unfinished Acts
The flotillas to Gaza should not be understood as a succession of failed attempts. They compose a constellation of unfinished acts, scattered but connected fragments, which never resolve into a final accomplishment and which find their strength in the very persistence of their incompleteness.
The Madleen, stopped, did not triumph, but it reopened a space of visibility and shed a harsh light on Gaza. The Handala extended this gesture. The new flotilla, with several ships, asserts a stubbornness that goes beyond the one-off event. It invents a becoming-flotilla, a temporality of creative repetition where each impediment becomes the condition for beginning anew.
Thus, a paradoxical logic unfolds: failure does not close, it opens. Incompleteness does not condemn, it promises. Fragmentation does not dissolve, it composes. Vulnerability does not reduce, it intensifies. This is what Benjamin called the power of fragments, what Deleuze thought of as differentiating repetition, what Butler recognizes in exposed vulnerability, what Foucault and Agamben illuminate through the opposition between heterotopia and the camp.
For this is where the essential dialectic is played out: on the one hand, Gaza as an open-air annihilation camp, a paradigmatic figure of the exception that has become the norm, a laboratory for a politics of starvation and methodical erasure, supported by Western and Arab complicity; on the other, the flotilla as an insurgent heterotopia, an other, mobile, fragile space, yet capable of tearing away an outside, of fissuring the enclosure, of producing an insurgent temporality that recalls the intolerable.
Here we must once again ask the question in all its bitterness: what do a few boats mean in the face of genocide? The disproportion is abysmal. But it is precisely in this disproportion that the power of these gestures lies. They do not claim victory; they refuse to consent. They do not claim to end the blockade; they refuse to naturalise it. They do not claim to abolish the genocide; they reject the silence that surrounds it.
Each departure marks a dissent, however fleeting, in a world saturated with complicity. Each boat testifies that it is still possible to act, however weakly, however “small” the minority that acts. Each fragment reminds us that history is not over, that it can be rewritten, that there are still gestures capable of breaking the imposed states of normality.
Thus, the flotillas compose a rebellious memory. Not a memory of victory, but a memory of persistence. Not completion, but incompleteness as a political form. Not the whole, but the fragmentary constellation of vulnerable and stubborn acts that, in the midst of disaster, recall the urgency to act and the refusal of consent.
“If it is written that I must die / Then may my death bring hope / May my death become a story”,[8] wrote Refaat Alareer, a 43-year-old poet assassinated by an Israeli bombing on December 6, 2023. These words, which say that hope is born from interruption itself, that the unfinished fragment becomes a promise, that violent death is transmuted into a call for persistence, echo, a century and a half later, Blanqui’s formula: “only the chapter of bifurcations is open to hope”.[9] For it is in the bifurcation after failure, in the beginning again after obstruction, in the refusal of closure, that the possibility of another future remains. Perhaps this is the silent lesson, or the secret signal, that the flotillas send: like the water that constantly turns against the dike, they each time open a breach, reminding us that no blockade, however impermeable, can forever abolish the movement of the sea and the stubborn hope of those who cross it.
Gaza, you will not disappear.
[1] Sylvain George « Le Madleen ou l’inachevé comme forme politique », in AOC, 10 juin 2025.
[2] https://globalsumudflotilla.org/press/
[3] Sylvain George “L’affamement comme technologie politique”, in AOC, forthcoming.
[4] Walter Benjamin, « Sur le concept d’histoire », in Oeuvre III, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Essai, 2000.
[5] Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris, PUF, coll. “Épiméthée”, 1968, p.7. This formula encapsulates one of the major axes of the book: distinguishing repetition, which produces something new, from simple generality, which renews the same. True repetition does not reproduce an already given identity, but generates a difference at each occurrence. In this sense, to repeat is never to redo, but to open a first time that happens again.
[6] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, Paris, Seuil, 1997. Here we borrow from Agamben the intuition that Gaza condenses certain paradigmatic traits of the camp: suspension of the law, normalisation of the exception, administration of survival. But it is immediately important to dissociate ourselves from his approach: where Agamben tends to hypostatise the camp, to make it the exclusive nomos of modern politics in a reading marked by Heidegger, we prefer to think of these spaces not as a saturating totality but as situated, historically determined configurations, which other spaces (heterotopias, insurgent fragments, forms of persistence) fissure.
[7] Judith Butler, Ce qui fait une vie : Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil. Paris, Zones, 2010 ; Rassemblement. Pluralité, performativité et politique, Paris, Fayard, 2016.
[8] Refaat Alareer, « S’il est écrit que je dois mourir… » in Orient XXI, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/s-il-est-ecrit-que-je-dois-mourir,6951; https:/ www.france-palestine.org/Que-ma-mort-apporte-l-espoir-poemes-de-Gaza
[9] Louis Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes, L’Éternité par les astres et autres textes, Miguel Abensour and Valentin Pelosse eds., Paris, Édition de la Tête des Feuilles, 1972. On the elective affinities between W. Benjamin and Blanqui, see the very beautiful text by Miguel Abensour, “W. Benjamin entre mélancolie et révolution. Passages Blanqui”, in Heinz Wismann ed., Walter Benjamin et Paris, Paris, éd. du Cerf, 1986.
For news on the Global Sumud Flotilla, click here, and on the Global Freedom Flotilla Coalition, click here.
Suggested parallel readings about and with Sylvain George:
Jacques Rancière, “Outbursts of Light”, e-flux Notes, 05/14/2024
Arta Barzanji, “Dark Night of the Body: Sylvain George’s Obscure Night Trilogy Uncovers Immigration Experiences”, International Documentary Association – IDA, 05/01/2025.
The flotillas to Gaza or the unfinished as a political form
Sylvain George
From lundi matin #486, 01/09/2025
A few months ago, the Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli army a few kilometres off the coast of Gaza. On August 31, a flotilla of several dozen boats set sail for the Mediterranean in the hope of breaking the blockade that surrounds, starves, and genocides Gaza. The most realistic minds, as well as the most cynical, see this as a futile or senseless attempt given the power against which the sailboats can only crash. In this excellent text, the author and director Sylvain George demonstrates and defends the exact opposite. What is at stake in this flotilla is a shift in our political reference points; incompleteness as a path, vulnerability and obstinacy as power, fragmentation as form.
Introduction: From a Singular Event to an Unfinished Chain
Last June, the departure of the Madleen was conceived of as the invention of a singular political form: that of of incompletion.[1] Through this fragile and interrupted gesture, the possibility of a politics opened up that is not one of sovereign accomplishment, of a definitive act, or of a resounding victory, but of a fragment, of a recommencement, of an exposure. The ship, prevented from reaching Gaza, nevertheless carried an irreducible symbolic and material weight: it inscribed in reality an act of maritime disobedience, a breach in the established order, an image that cannot be closed.
It should be remembered, however, that the Madleen was not a first and came after a series of attempts, since the late 2000s, to break the blockade. But its merit was to have rekindled public attention, to have shed a harsh light on Gaza, and to have shown that it is still possible to produce a dissident image in a world saturated with consent and complicity. For while the ship was prevented from reaching its goal, it carried into the international arena proof that a minor, vulnerable gesture could still crack the symbolic barrier of the siege.
Now, shortly after the Madleen, and the Handala in July 2025, a new flotilla set sail on Sunday, August 31, 2025, this time with several ships, the “Global Sumud [Steadfast/Resilience] Flotilla”, which intends to mark a decisive shift and attempt once again to break the blockade. This time, Israel will not have to intercept a single ship, but it will face an entire fleet. The coalition of associations (Freedom Flotilla, Global March to Gaza, Sumud Convoy), bolstered by the presence of international figures and thousands of volunteers from 160 nationalities, claims to want to launch “the largest humanitarian maritime mission in history”.[2] It is therefore a diverse, heterogeneous fleet, composed of activists, doctors, artists, and “ordinary people,” that sets sail to confront the horizon of the siege.
The question that arises, then, is: how should we philosophically think about this new beginning? Is it a simple repetition of the same thing, a linear continuation, or rather a shift that transforms the meaning of the act? If the first boat could appear as a one-off event, both heroic and vulnerable, the fact that others follow engages a different regime of temporality and thought: that of a politics of persistence—not a persistence based on an immutable essence, but a discontinuous, fragmentary resumption, where each failure calls for a re-launch, or repetition engenders difference and not identity—of beginning again, of the unfinished chain.
One might be tempted to reduce these flotillas to tactical failures: each ship is intercepted, confiscated, impeded. But it is precisely in this very impediment that their strength lies. For incompleteness is not a contingent flaw here, but becomes the condition of the possibility of repetition. What is not accomplished once can be replayed differently, in another form, in another constellation. What fails to close is reborn as a fragment, exposed to seizure, but also to re-inscription.
Thus, the flotillas’ gesture does not fall within the paradigm of a single event, one that, in its suddenness, would disrupt the established order. Rather, it is a discontinuous series of fragile acts, each doomed to incompleteness, but which together compose a long-term political writing or narrative. Each boat is a page torn from an unfinished book, a fragmentary image that persists. This is where a problematic emerges: how can we conceive of a political action whose power lies not in its accomplishment, but in its repetition? How can we conceive of a politics that accepts the fact that it is not a “great event” but a series of minor, intermittent, but persistent gestures?
This issue takes on its full gravity when we recall what these ships are sailing toward: a territory transformed into an open-air camp, where starvation[3] has become a method of government, where a methodical ethnic cleansing is unfolding before our eyes, covered up by Western and Arab complicity, and by the established consent of most nations. From this, the profound question arises: what does the departure of a few ships—or even dozens of ships—mean in the face of genocide?
In this sense, the “Global Sumud Flotilla” is not simply a continuation of the previous one. It marks a shift: the transition from an isolated gesture to becoming-a-flotilla, that is, to a politics that finds its strength in repetition, in the constant reopening of the blockade’s wound, in the stubborn refusal of closure. Where Israel aims to normalize the exception, to naturalise the blockade as an insurmountable horizon, the flotilla reopens time, revives the intolerable, and inscribes a rebellious temporality.
It is this transition that needs to be analyzed: from the Madleen, which successfully shone a light on Gaza by actualising the power of incompleteness, to the new flotilla as a politics of persistence, as a fragile heterotopia in the face of the camp, as a fragmentary writing that continually re-inscribes itself despite its impediment.
I. Incompletion as a Political Form
The Madleen, prevented from reaching Gaza, did not “succeed”: it neither opened a maritime corridor, nor materially broke the blockade, nor provided concrete relief to the besieged population. But to reduce its significance to this tactical failure would be to miss the heart of its political operation. For the Madleen was not primarily a logistical or military act. It was a gesture. And this gesture must be thought of philosophically as the implementation of a singular form: that of incompletion.
In the sovereign logic of states, a political act is defined by its completion. It is valid if it concludes, if it produces a decisive result, if it establishes an end. Sovereignty, as Schmitt reminds us, consists in the power to decide, that is, to bring closure. In this political economy of completion, the incomplete is nothing more than a lack, a failure, a residue. But the flotilla radically shifts this logic: it proposes a policy whose value lies not in closure but in openness, not in accomplishment but in revival. It transforms the incompleteness of a flaw into a resource, a paradoxical power.
For what the Madleen has inscribed in reality is not an accomplished victory, but a breach, a maritime disobedience which, precisely because it was interrupted, remains available, re-inscribed, capable of returning. It is in this sense that Benjamin, in his Theses on the Concept of History,[4] teaches us that the history of the oppressed is not read as a victorious continuity but as a series of fragments, unfinished constellations, and repetitions. Incompleteness is not what condemns, but what promises: it keeps open the space of possibility. What is not closed, what is not concluded, can be taken up in another constellation, in another montage.
Thus, each interception, each impediment, does not constitute an end, but becomes a condition of repetition. Incompleteness is not the failure of the action; it is its mode of persistence. The Madleen, seized, dispersed, confiscated, left behind an image that calls for other images, an action that demands other actions. It is precisely because it was interrupted that it could be re-enacted by the Handala, and then by the new flotilla. Far from extinguishing the gesture, the impediment forces it to restart.
Incompleteness, thus understood, is more than a circumstance. It is a political category. It defines a way of acting that breaks away from the paradigm of sovereignty, that rejects completion as the sole criterion of value, and that invents a fragmented, fragile, yet persistent politics. This politics does not aim to impose an ultimate end but to keep the fault line open, to reopen time, to produce persistence in and through interruption.
II. The Logic of Repetition: From the One-Time Event to the Becoming-Flotilla
While the Madleen may have appeared as an isolated event, a fragile flash soon absorbed by the immense apparatus of the blockade, the reappearance of the Handala, followed by the departure of a new flotilla, mark a decisive turning point. What is now unfolding is no longer a one-time act, but a logic of repetition. The flotilla becomes a becoming-flotilla, a political temporality that cannot be exhausted in the singularity of a single gesture.
However, to repeat is never simply to reproduce. As Deleuze emphasizes in Difference and Repetition, true repetition is not identity, but differentiation. It does not repeat the same thing; it introduces an alteration, a new intensity, a shift in meaning. To repeat is to “raise the first time to the “nth” power,” writes Deleuze.[5] Each boat, far from being a copy of the previous one, is a variation that unfolds a new form of the initial gesture. The Madleen called the Handala; the Handala calls other ships; and each, through its difference, forms with the others a discontinuous but insistent chain.
Here, we must emphasise the political significance of this logic. State sovereignty, as we have said, aims to close: it is defined by decision, by the imposed end, by completion. In contrast, the flotilla opens. Its gesture, doomed to incompleteness, does not fade away. It remains re-launched and calls for other gestures. Where the sovereign act ends in its own effectiveness, the fragile, unfinished act unfolds in an insurgent temporality, made of repetitions, returns, and new beginnings.
This is why the repetition of flotillas should not be understood as redundancy but as creative obstinacy. Each time, the blockade seems to impose itself definitively, like an insurmountable inevitability. And yet, each time, boats set sail again, reopening the wound, reinscribing the intolerable into the present. Their repetition says: the time of the blockade is not closed; it can be punctured, cracked, interrupted…
To repeat, here, is not to fall back into helplessness, but to transform failure into a condition of possibility, to make interruption the driving force of persistence. The becoming-flotilla is this paradoxical temporality where the gesture knows it is impeded, yet persists in replaying itself, not despite the failure, but because of it.
III. Fragmentation as Political Writing
If the flotilla must be thought of as a process of becoming, it is because it does not totalise in a single accomplishment, but unfolds in the form of fragments. Each departure is a fragment of political writing, a fragment torn from the sea and from history, which only takes on meaning in relation to the other fragments that preceded it and those that will follow. A flotilla cannot be read as a closed narrative, but as a scattered page of an unfinished book, whose unity is never given but always to be reconstituted in retrospect, in the montage of traces.
This fragmentary character does not signify weakness or contingency; on the contrary, it constitutes a form of resistance. For sovereign power aims for closure, decision, totality. The state seeks to impose meaning through completion: a law promulgated, a border sealed, a war won. The flotilla, on the contrary, rejects this logic. It is part of a politics that does not complete, that does not unite, that does not aim for the completion of the totality but rather the opening of the fragment. It invents a mode of action where value lies in intermittence, in re-inscription, in resumption.
Foucault recalled that the boat is “the heterotopia par excellence”: a mobile place, an alternative space that carries with it its own outside, a fragile but real counter-space. Gaza, for its part, encapsulates the extreme experience of enclosed space: suspension of the law, normalisation of the exception, administration of survival through deprivation and starvation. Between enclosure and crossing, between camp and heterotopia, a decisive contrast opens up. The camp encloses, fixes, freezes; the flotilla opens, displaces, de-centers. The camp seeks to make enclosure absolute; the flotilla reminds us that other spaces always exist, even fleeting, even precarious.
This contrast illuminates the scope of fragmentation. For each ship is a fragment of heterotopia opposed to the disciplinary fragment of the camp. Each flotilla deploys a counter-fragment that fractures the spatial and symbolic order of the blockade. And since these fragments do not add up to form a stable whole, but repeat and shift, their power lies in their ability to persist through interruption.
Blanchot and Nancy proposed that the modern community be no longer based on a closed totality, but on the exposure of fragments, on the juxtaposition of unfinished singularities held together by their non-coincidence. The flotilla updates this logic: each ship is an exposed singularity, each departure a vulnerable fragment, but it is in their connection, in their discontinuous constellation, that a political form is constructed.
Thus, the flotilla is not simply a one-off event doomed to failure. It is a fragmentary writing that undoes the logic of enclosure, that opposes to the imposed totality of the camp a constellation of vulnerable but insistent heterotopias. It is a policy that does not aim to constitute a whole, but to bring fragments to life, to keep open the possibility of an outside.
IV. Insurgent Temporality: Breaking the Normalization of the Blockade
The blockade of Gaza is not simply a spatial closure. It also constitutes, and is above all, a technique of temporalisation, a way of producing time as an instrument of domination. Since 2007, Israel has sought to make the blockade not an exceptional and temporary measure, but an insurmountable horizon, an established normality. Gaza is thus reduced to a suspended temporality, a present without a future, punctuated by food quotas, water shortages, power outages, and recurring bombardments.
This suspension of time is not an accident: it is the heart of the strategy. For one of the most terrifying features of the blockade is the systematic use of hunger as a weapon, not of war in the classical sense, since the asymmetry prevents us from speaking of war in any strict sense, but of annihilation. Starvation is not an indirect consequence, but a deliberate policy. The aim is to deprive the population of food, water, and medicine, subjecting them to a minimum of daily survival. This is what we must call slow ethnic cleansing, a policy of methodical erasure that combines spatial annihilation (the siege, the destruction of infrastructure) and temporal annihilation (the imposition of a timeout, that of waiting, rationing, prolonged agony).
In this configuration, as outlined above, Gaza appears as the paradigmatic figure of the camp, in the sense Agamben gave to it: the space where the law is suspended in order to better enforce it, where the exception becomes the rule, where lives are reduced to the state of “bare life” that is administered, exposed, and destroyed.[6] The camp is the space where time is confiscated, where the future is annulled, where history is as if frozen in the repetition of disaster.
Faced with this logic of closure and immobilization, the flotilla introduces a counter-time. Each departure, even when prevented, even intercepted, produces an intermittence, a rupture in the homogenised time of the siege. It inscribes a dissonance in the present, a reminder that the blockade is not a natural horizon, but a political construct, and that it can therefore be contested. In this sense, each flotilla embodies what Benjamin called a Jetztzeit, a “time of the now” that tears history away from imposed continuity, from the continuity of disaster, to open up a new constellation, restoring density to the present where everything seemed frozen.
The ship, as we have seen, is this “heterotopia par excellence,” an other, mobile, wandering space, which carries within itself its own outside. The flotilla, in this sense, is an insurgent heterotopia that opposes the closed spatiality of the camp. It does not materially triumph over the blockade, but it deploys another space-time; a space of crossing, a time of beginning again. Where the blockade seeks to impose the repetition of survival, the flotilla imposes the repetition of insurrection.
This is why the flotillas’ struggle is not merely logistical or symbolic: it is also kairopolitical. It counters the dead time of the siege with the eruption of a time that comes, a present that persists, an emergence that opens. Even if intercepted, even if prevented, the flotilla has already cracked the time of the blockade. It has reminded us that history is not closed, that it can be rewritten, that other configurations remain conceivable.
Thus, faced with the camp which locks us into a frozen temporality, the flotilla deploys not a new continuity, but the experience of a temporal discontinuity, of an insurgent temporality, fragile, intermittent, but capable of breaking the evidence of the disaster, of reminding us that it is still possible to act and to resist.
V. Politics of Persistence: Vulnerability and Obstinacy
Everything seems to condemn the flotillas to insignificance. They have been and will be intercepted by an overpowering army, seized by naval forces with overwhelming technological and military superiority. They carry only small cargoes, insignificant compared to the immense needs of a starving population. They cannot materially break the siege or reverse the machine of destruction unleashed on Gaza. How, then, can we understand the value of these fragile gestures in the face of a genocide unfolding before the eyes of the world?
It is precisely in this disproportion that their significance lies. Judith Butler has shown that vulnerability must not be understood solely as exposure to injury, but as a condition of collective action, as an ethical and political resource.[7] The flotillas embody this vulnerability: they deliberately expose themselves, they know their relative powerlessness, they accept the likelihood of failure. But it is in this very exposure that their strength lies. For the challenge is not to compete with the state, but to demonstrate, through a gesture, the impossibility of accepting the general consent.
The disproportion thus becomes revealing. What do a few boats signify in the face of a genocide? The question does not abolish the meaning of the act, but rather grounds it. It highlights the complicity of Western nations, which arm and support Israel; the passivity, even tacit cooperation, of many Arab regimes; the silence or indifference of an international opinion that has ended up naturalising the siege and considering starvation as a fait accompli. The flotilla then opposes a front of refusal. It says: no; No to silence, no to established consent, no to reducing the crime to an inevitability.
This fragile obstinacy is not naivety. It knows that it cannot win militarily. But it invents a minor politics in the Deleuzian sense: a politics of margins, of re-launching, of intermittence. It opposes sovereignty, which closes, not with a symmetrical counter-sovereignty, but with a series of vulnerable, open, re-inscribable gestures. It produces not a victory, but a persistence.
This persistence must therefore be thought of as a form of resistance on both a spatial and temporal level. Faced with the camp, a space of normalised exception, the flotilla embodies a precarious but insubordinate heterotopia. Faced with the dead time of the siege, it deploys an insurgent time, that of re-commencement. What it opposes to genocide is not power, but the vulnerable obstinacy of an action that refuses to disappear, that persists despite failure, that comes again and again despite defeat.
Thus, the flotilla is not defined by what it accomplishes, but by what it prevents. It prevents defeat from being total, silence from being complete, consent from being unanimous. It inscribes a fault in the murderous consensus, and reminds us that even in the face of the abyss, it is still possible to act, weakly, as a minority, but stubbornly.
Conclusion: A Constellation of Unfinished Acts
The flotillas to Gaza should not be understood as a succession of failed attempts. They compose a constellation of unfinished acts, scattered but connected fragments, which never resolve into a final accomplishment and which find their strength in the very persistence of their incompleteness.
The Madleen, stopped, did not triumph, but it reopened a space of visibility and shed a harsh light on Gaza. The Handala extended this gesture. The new flotilla, with several ships, asserts a stubbornness that goes beyond the one-off event. It invents a becoming-flotilla, a temporality of creative repetition where each impediment becomes the condition for beginning anew.
Thus, a paradoxical logic unfolds: failure does not close, it opens. Incompleteness does not condemn, it promises. Fragmentation does not dissolve, it composes. Vulnerability does not reduce, it intensifies. This is what Benjamin called the power of fragments, what Deleuze thought of as differentiating repetition, what Butler recognizes in exposed vulnerability, what Foucault and Agamben illuminate through the opposition between heterotopia and the camp.
For this is where the essential dialectic is played out: on the one hand, Gaza as an open-air annihilation camp, a paradigmatic figure of the exception that has become the norm, a laboratory for a politics of starvation and methodical erasure, supported by Western and Arab complicity; on the other, the flotilla as an insurgent heterotopia, an other, mobile, fragile space, yet capable of tearing away an outside, of fissuring the enclosure, of producing an insurgent temporality that recalls the intolerable.
Here we must once again ask the question in all its bitterness: what do a few boats mean in the face of genocide? The disproportion is abysmal. But it is precisely in this disproportion that the power of these gestures lies. They do not claim victory; they refuse to consent. They do not claim to end the blockade; they refuse to naturalise it. They do not claim to abolish the genocide; they reject the silence that surrounds it.
Each departure marks a dissent, however fleeting, in a world saturated with complicity. Each boat testifies that it is still possible to act, however weakly, however “small” the minority that acts. Each fragment reminds us that history is not over, that it can be rewritten, that there are still gestures capable of breaking the imposed states of normality.
Thus, the flotillas compose a rebellious memory. Not a memory of victory, but a memory of persistence. Not completion, but incompleteness as a political form. Not the whole, but the fragmentary constellation of vulnerable and stubborn acts that, in the midst of disaster, recall the urgency to act and the refusal of consent.
“If it is written that I must die / Then may my death bring hope / May my death become a story”,[8] wrote Refaat Alareer, a 43-year-old poet assassinated by an Israeli bombing on December 6, 2023. These words, which say that hope is born from interruption itself, that the unfinished fragment becomes a promise, that violent death is transmuted into a call for persistence, echo, a century and a half later, Blanqui’s formula: “only the chapter of bifurcations is open to hope”.[9] For it is in the bifurcation after failure, in the beginning again after obstruction, in the refusal of closure, that the possibility of another future remains. Perhaps this is the silent lesson, or the secret signal, that the flotillas send: like the water that constantly turns against the dike, they each time open a breach, reminding us that no blockade, however impermeable, can forever abolish the movement of the sea and the stubborn hope of those who cross it.
Gaza, you will not disappear.
[1] Sylvain George « Le Madleen ou l’inachevé comme forme politique », in AOC, 10 juin 2025.
[2] https://globalsumudflotilla.org/press/
[3] Sylvain George “L’affamement comme technologie politique”, in AOC, forthcoming.
[4] Walter Benjamin, « Sur le concept d’histoire », in Oeuvre III, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Essai, 2000.
[5] Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris, PUF, coll. “Épiméthée”, 1968, p.7. This formula encapsulates one of the major axes of the book: distinguishing repetition, which produces something new, from simple generality, which renews the same. True repetition does not reproduce an already given identity, but generates a difference at each occurrence. In this sense, to repeat is never to redo, but to open a first time that happens again.
[6] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, Paris, Seuil, 1997. Here we borrow from Agamben the intuition that Gaza condenses certain paradigmatic traits of the camp: suspension of the law, normalisation of the exception, administration of survival. But it is immediately important to dissociate ourselves from his approach: where Agamben tends to hypostatise the camp, to make it the exclusive nomos of modern politics in a reading marked by Heidegger, we prefer to think of these spaces not as a saturating totality but as situated, historically determined configurations, which other spaces (heterotopias, insurgent fragments, forms of persistence) fissure.
[7] Judith Butler, Ce qui fait une vie : Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil. Paris, Zones, 2010 ; Rassemblement. Pluralité, performativité et politique, Paris, Fayard, 2016.
[8] Refaat Alareer, « S’il est écrit que je dois mourir… » in Orient XXI, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/s-il-est-ecrit-que-je-dois-mourir,6951; https:/ www.france-palestine.org/Que-ma-mort-apporte-l-espoir-poemes-de-Gaza
[9] Louis Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes, L’Éternité par les astres et autres textes, Miguel Abensour and Valentin Pelosse eds., Paris, Édition de la Tête des Feuilles, 1972. On the elective affinities between W. Benjamin and Blanqui, see the very beautiful text by Miguel Abensour, “W. Benjamin entre mélancolie et révolution. Passages Blanqui”, in Heinz Wismann ed., Walter Benjamin et Paris, Paris, éd. du Cerf, 1986.
For news on the Global Sumud Flotilla, click here, and on the Global Freedom Flotilla Coalition, click here.
Suggested parallel readings about and with Sylvain George:
Jacques Rancière, “Outbursts of Light”, e-flux Notes, 05/14/2024
Arta Barzanji, “Dark Night of the Body: Sylvain George’s Obscure Night Trilogy Uncovers Immigration Experiences”, International Documentary Association – IDA, 05/01/2025.