Pascal once said, in his magnificent style: “The universe is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”[1] Could there be a more striking image of infinity? After him, let us say, a little more precisely: the universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.
… to participate in a revolution, to commit one’s responsibility for reciprocal equality and shared dignity has never been a realisation. It is first to produce the possible.
Maria Kakogianni
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At night, we no longer see the stars. This is not a metaphor, but rather a sign. A sign of our own disaster. Under the sky, everything is collective fate and conditioned freedom. Ordinary violence and its chronic pains, humiliation. Our bodies turn against themselves. No justice anywhere, autoimmune diseases everywhere. The future has a fever. And yet. In the midst of the darkness, the light trembles like a burst of laughter. Joy as a new idea. Anarchy as an experience. Revolution as a new beginning. At the edge of worlds rather than at the end of the world. We [as a collective subject] is still here.
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A new book from lundimatin press was released this last March 20: Under the Starry Sky, a Summer Night; Reflections on Anarchy and Revolution [Sous le ciel étoilé, une nuit d’éte: Réflexions sur l’anarchie et la révolution], by Maria Kakogianni.
In this short essay, philosopher Maria Kakogianni sets out to dust off our preconceived notions of revolution and anarchy. “The aim of these pages is a positive manifestation of anarchy”.[2]
Starting from a simple yet stark observation, that we hardly see any stars anymore, she derives a metaphor for the world: we live in a starless age.
The twenty-two short sections that make up the book are like rays radiating in every direction. We encounter Catherine Malabou and Margaret Thatcher, Immanuel Kant and Auguste Blanqui, Vincent Bolloré and the Invisible Committee. We discuss everyday fascism, pirate pleasures, Plato, and even Tai Chi.
A book of politics, poetry, and philosophy, Under the Starry Sky, a Summer Night is above all a book of mixtures for a revolutionary space. At its heart lies the necessity of inventing a positive and regular anarchy, with feet on the ground and head in the stars.
Maria Kakogianni is a philosopher and writer. She has published numerous books, including Entretien platonicien avec Alain Badiou (éd. Lignes), Le Printemps précaire des peuples (éd. Divergences), Surgeons et autres pousses (éd. Excès).
Our enthusiasm for this work led us to venture an English language translation of selections from text. Any such selection of course may be contested and we are perfectly aware of the limitations of this exercise. And yet our hope remains that the selection that we have made will be sufficient to demonstrate the importance of Maria Kakogianni’s essay.
What we offer below is of course no substitute for any English language translation-publication that may eventually be forthcoming. Until then, let this stand as a modest introduction for those who are not entirely comfortable with French.
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Made/Did and to make/to do [Fait et à faire]
1. There is not only one arche[3], but many. Our world is polyarchic.
2. There are positive, affirmative forms of anarchy.
3. Anarchy is not an object of will, but an object of experience.
4. What comes about comes about.
5. Capital is a monster with neither head nor tail; therefore the practical difficulty of “cutting its head off”.
6. The State is a two headed apparatus; a repressive and management apparatus; watchword and password. It can be both fascist and liberal at the same time, without difficulty.
7. The exploitation and accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of sexual satisfaction through rape and the exhaustion of human and non-human resources are part of the same system of domination.
8. People who do not master orthography and grammar think; they can; they sow. A popular song speaks of it. The walls do too.
9. A project of autonomy is a way to choose dependencies. One can depend on agribusiness for food or cultivate other dependencies. To be enumerated and elaborated.
10. The white, rich, heteronormative and biodegrading man simultaneously exercises every form of domination. Intersectionality is not a mind police to separate the subalterns of one small part from another smaller part. It names operations through which the subalterns organise themselves to cause the greatest damage to the order of places, subjects, objects.
11. Anarchy is not static, it is dramaturgical. It is neither a modality of order nor a modality of disorder, but a milieu of forces and forms, potencies/potentialities [puissances] to affect and potencies/potentialities to be affected, potencies/potentialities to do/make [faire] potencies/potentialities to not do/make, which maintains for the duration a conflict of worlds, that is, an effective gap/difference/deviation [écart] in the very interior of what can be a world.
12. The geometry of progress invented an idea of Revolution as a rupture with a capital letter, a radical break between a before and an after. This idea expired at the same time as the belief in human progress. We now inhabit the catastrophe and the pornography of the catastrophe.
13. We like to think that other civilisations, those which do not bear the name of Occidental, inhabit a cyclical world, that of the seasons, with a knowledge only of revolution without history.
14. We need an idea of revolution in history and with the seasons; neither cyclical nor progressive; that attaches itself as much to the event as to the temperature and the lunar cycle; extraterrestrial and maximally terrestrial at the same time.
15. Deleuze said somewhere, not without humour, that etymology is a properly philosophical athleticism. The concept of anarchy has for a long time suffered the consequences of this athleticism. We have always seen this privative -a and therefore a negative form of absence or non-presence, an-archy. Who commands? Affirmative anarchy as experience names a gap/difference/deviation [écart] positively. It also names a crossing, a trial and undoubtedly a putting in danger.
16. There is no power to take, conquer, as a centre. There are fixed configurations and preferential circuits between centres of power to be attacked, to bend, to deform.
17. People who suffer pain know, because they’ve had enough of it, that there are fixed configurations and preferential circuits of pain. The evil will not be attacked at its root.
18. In a circular orbit, there is only one centre; eccentricity is nothing, worthless. I turn therefore, I am; the same errors, the same joys, the same litanies. On the other hand, the planets[4] – celestial bodies that hover and wander – turn in ellipse, a movement that implies not a centre but two places [foyers]. The gap/difference/deviation [écart], the plastic, dynamic relation between the places [foyers] effectively gives body to the eccentricities. These last are not miniature exceptions, small micro-cosmic radicalities that defend themselves with their magic potions. They are positive deformations, felicitous malformations, real reformations of orbit.
19. There is no greater joy than that which says we, without begging or compensation or unity. Eternity by celestial bodies that turn and wander; Victory is not a result, it is the name of a certain duration capable of renewals/follow-ups [relances] New beginnings are necessary, new beginnings of the kind that are only a way of picking up the relay; a regular and positive anarchy with at least two places [foyers].
20. To anarchise the world, rather than to comprehend it.
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Anarchy or the passage between fatality and freedom [Part One]
I can’t breathe
…
Very often, strong, hard theory gives the impression of being a concentrate of categorical testosterone. I can therefore you follow. Conceptual thought exposes itself in its power to do/make, leaving to literature, to the arts, to the sensitivity of experience, the task of addressing its weaknesses, its difficulties, its lapses, its power to not make/do; the task of experimenting with dramaturgies different from those where everything is done to vigorously happen at a culminating point, at the apogee. As someone once said, see you tomorrow for some good sex.
Until now, the Western idea of political revolution has been marked by two great insignia: God who makes itself flesh and sex. On the hand, the incarnation of an absolute and, on the other, phallic pleasure, discharge, on the occasion of the great event [le grande soir], when the conditions are ripe to reach the end, the goal. The concept of political revolution gained form not only in the face of political monarchy, but in the heart of a fundamentally mono-archic conception of the world: a single arche. An eroticised zone; a Centre, the Good; and hence the desired Revolution as a miracle that can change Everything, the Origyne[5] of the new world. To anarchise the revolution is to spill over its dominant symbolism, this mixture of messianism and masculinism, to declare that it is not-One and not-Everything – there are revolutions.
…
Our world is in a chronic state of inflammation. Our bodies are in a chronic state of inflammation. Our souls are in a chronic state of inflammation. And our ideas, regardless of what we may think of them, no longer suffice as remedies. Chemical, toxic, microbial, traumatic, social aggressions; when an organism suffers an aggression, it inflames. Inflammation is therefore a defensive reaction to remove the aggressors and to treat the lesions. However, what should be temporary sometimes becomes a chronic state. Popular revolts, the coming insurrections, growing anger: people are not blind and they do not need to be illuminated to act. Despite what right-thinking people may think, the problem is not one of mobilisation. In a state of inflammation, fire spreads, things catch fire.
…
If the expression There Is No Alternative has managed to mark our time, it is perhaps because it has touched a sentient soul, the collective state of mind, the spirit of the times such that it spreads in a specific time. Why? Because a certain theoretical and practical idea of revolution has expired; and because a certain affective attachment as well. Not only do those who dominate want to ring the end of the match, but also and above all those who struggle think no less. From which results this chronic inflammatory state. How can the aggressors be eliminated, the wounds healed, to render our milieus of life breathable, without falling into little, microcosmic radicalisms.
…
Let us put it a little bluntly that communism as an emancipatory hypothesis, supported by a logic of political organisation (the Party) and a historical subject (the Proletariat), has gone through a zone of turbulence with both practical and theoretical consequences. From a historical subject, objectively inscribed in the social body, we have moved to an event-relative subject, emergent, ethereal and interiorly unpredictable. Exit planning and the meaning of History; welcome to the age of events and of flexibility without limits. Today, anarchy and anarchism appear to provoke intense debate. [TN. Against this reality]
…
I can’t breathe. … While the world is unbreathable, something of anarchy marks the spirit of the time. There is a complicity between an-archy as the absence of any principle and mono-archy as the principle of One; chaos without rules on the one hand and a severe, strict and unchanging order, on the other; with one, everything moves, with the other, nothing changes. Together, that gives us a world where everything moves and nothing changes. And what of a positive anarchy? Of what revolutions would it be the dream?
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Me, the starry sky and the moral law
…
The between-two worlds, the between-two settings, the between two laws can be double. It is either what maintains the order of one and the other, or what positively anarchises one and the other. In the between-the-two, there are two options: the police and anarchy. One calls for order or a cosmic laugh. One calls for order or for what unsettles the ontological divisions between what is and what is not, what counts and what does not, what is possible and what is not. A positive anarchy does not oppose itself to a world; it plays at the edges of worlds, in the passage ways from one to another.
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TINA and the pornography of catastrophe
There is no Alternative bears another name: fatality. There is something in the sentient soul of the present time that is fashioned out of fatality and which appears to have admitted the incapacity to make common or to make community differently. For the minute exceptions, there is always room. Micropolitics is safe. It is the politics of grand surfaces that is marked by impossibility. Even sometimes in the ranks of those who resist and who organise themselves to do differently, a change of scale does not seem to be desirable. The experiences of autonomy and of self-organisation are not scalable, the fact of carrying them to another level necessarily implies contaminations and therefore the risk of recuperation and of betrayal. This however has never prevented people from trying things. That beings and human communities rub up against fatality, against constraint and partial forms of liberation is absolutely not novel, neither in space nor in time. The paradox today is that collective fatality is accompanied by a culture of individual liberty pushed to the extremes. Be free and shut up.
Let us call pornography of catastrophe the ensemble of discourses, gestures and languages that teach us and thoroughly mould us to take the measure of the current environmental, existential, affective, intimate, social … catastrophe. Something on the order of enjoyment, pleasure, is at stake. Have you seen how sick the rivers are? Have you seen how the children die over there? Have you seen everything that people refuse to see? Enjoy, be free and shut up.
Before referring to destruction, disaster, cataclysm, catastrophe in poetry designated change, the return or the revolution that takes place at the end of a dramatic poem. And there was this basic rule one taught to apprentice poets: the interest weakens if the catastrophe is too predictable. In any case, it was considered a moment of denouement, a turning or tipping point, and not a permanent state. Today, we know that there is a catastrophe; intellectually, emotionally, physically, to the smallest cell of our flesh. Everything is played out in the minute variations in the way the catastrophe happens, already happened, will happen. The pornographic resource intervenes here. In a porno film, one knows that there will be a sexual relation; everything is played out in the variation, in the different modalities with which what happens must happen. More than a spectacle, today the catastrophe is a live and permanent transmission. And a whole art is necessary for the interest not to weaken. Yet another film about starving children! Yet another essay on predatory neoliberalism! Oh look, an influencer who has her/himself assassinated live on TikTok. The pornography of the catastrophe and the fatality of TINA walk hand in hand.
In contrast to the desire that always desires more or something else, enjoyment incorporates another relationship to failure. In the repeated movement to reach a goal, the repetition of failure becomes the source of enjoyment. Alcoholic pleasure does not lie in the fact of drinking too much; it points rather to where one does not stop to want to stop drinking and failing to do so. How many strategies does one put in place to “hold firm” this time! Alcoholic joy is that first glass each time one falls again, each time one stops stopping. It is this exchange with one’s self where one is always the loser; I’ll have only one more glass and I’ll go home. And what of insurrections and popular revolts and assemblies of struggle? Everything started so well, everything could have turned out well, but finally nothing happened. Radical intelligence seats itself at the bar to sip a beer; bitter dead ends, bitter solutions. I’ll have only one more glass and I’ll go home.
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Plato and Tai-Chi
The psychic economy, that is, to speak of psychism, to analyse psychism in economic terms, has for us become obvious, while in the experience of ancient Greece this seems unthinkable. On the other hand, the City has a soul. Political regimes are also psychic regimes. Historians, orators, doctors take up this theme which is not Plato’s philosophical invention. His Republic proposes a singular variation of what seems to be a climate of thought, a speculative atmosphere: the individual is a micro-politics of the City and the City is a macro-politics of the individual. The structure is not binary, for between reason and desire there is what the Greeks call the thymos. What is this? One can translate it as anger (Achilles’ anger, for example, in Homer). It is at one and the same time the irritable element and the mediating instance, the water between two banks, that from which indignation rises up against injustice, emotive courage. According to different uses, that can refer as much to extreme right-wing riots – the “there is not a place for everyone”, and other macho, xenophobic, racist, anti-immigration, etc., demonstrations – as well as to those who maintain and guarantee, against governments, beyond the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1798, the resistance to oppression and the duty of insurrection. All of this is thymotic.
The City is a community of affects and individual psychic life is revelatory of politics, not of the economy. It is a micro-graphy of the City. It is not a coming and going between the individual and the universe or the cosmos (something that one finds in other civilisations), but between the individual and an intermediate scale of a political commons, the polis. Neither has any meaning without the other, and thus this central problem: how can there be a concern for the one without a concern for the other? Even if the Greeks were ignorant of ecological problems, there is enough here to consider this political thinking as environmental. More precisely, there is not “one” individual in “a” milieu. Everything is a coming and going. Every individual is already a milieu and each milieu individualises itself insofar as it is not space itself (the place of places).
To find refuge in an ethical stylisation is henceforth marked by suspicion, as well as its exact opposite: to concern oneself with politics without concerning oneself with one’s self. Angela Davis speaks of a radical self-care, of a radical concern for one’s self, “anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of herself, himself, their selves”.[6] There is not the care for the self on the one hand and practical politics on the other. Rather than two opposing principles, tai-chi as a practice that works on supports, the transfer of weights between the Self and the City can be called upon. Headaches, insomnias, blockages, irritability: if every individual is a milieu, we will never be in better health than our milieus. Between the care for everyday life, simple gestures, local networks to eat, to take care of oneself, to move, and large scale politics, it is a matter of practicing the shifting of weights. There are of course dissymmetries between the two, but there is no hierarchy, that is, an archic [of the nature of an arche that grounds, commands, that is prior to] relation from one to the other. On the other hand, the change of support, speed, weight, anarchises the one and the other. Neither master nor state.
…
Politics grows in a milieu as a milieu, in the refusal of the enforced choice between care for the self and the great cause, the construction of autonomy and the conflictual reality of power relations, the calm of regeneration and the tumults of action.
The ability to refuse an enforced choice does not fall from the sky. It is learned, it is something that is exercised; it is learned in movement and by movement, in searching to render fluid the passage from one to the other. Michel Foucault’s care for the self was largely co-opted by the neoliberal machine. In militant milieus, for a time, the calls for a micro-politics, completely turned attention away from relations of power on a larger scale. The history of the origins of this present must not be forgotten. In an epoch where there was a great disequilibrium, the weight was placed on grand planning and large, bureaucratised organisations to change the world. We learned to be suspicious of the great strategies of the Party, as we today learn to be suspicious of miniature exceptions. To change our support, we need to slow down, to feel the shift in weight, to detail the movement, to recognise point by point the circuits, to pass to the other side, to start anew; the art of combat and the art of life, to learn to change our supports: to be sometimes a tree, sometimes a forest, but never one without the other.
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Radical stoppage and broken cycle
It seems that the arrow of time points today towards catastrophe. While the imaginary of political revolution implied not long ago an irreversible event or a threshold of no-return for the creation of another society, today this chronopolitics is poured out into a time of catastrophe and disaster. It is at its heart that one recognises the irreversible effects of the capitalocene, toxic chemistry, mining extraction, the depletion and exhaustion of lakes and rivers, from which emerges a new governmentality, the governmentality of crisis, of urgency. It is urgent to act.
At the same time, it might be said that there is no longer anything that can be done. Unless you overdo it and you get back pain for your troubles. It is a Molotov cocktail of feelings, an explosive mix of urgency and impotence: if it appears obvious that it is urgent to act, to do something, it also seems almost certain that to stop the course of events collectively and on a large scale is too immense a task. Activism becomes frenetic agitation, permanent hyperactivity. When it is not by the police, crushing a movement comes at the hands of overwork and militant burn-out. And yet our bodies rebel – if we cannot taste joy in your struggles, we will not take part in them.
It was at a party, and Emma Goldman was dancing when a comrade asked her to stop, believing that her frivolity undermined the Cause.[7] To which she answered that if she couldn’t dance, she would not take part in the revolution.[8] We are in 1931. It is not a matter of sexual liberation; the anecdote seems to point to something else. The dancers say that it is not the body that makes the gestures: it is the gestures that make the body. A revolution where one cannot dance is an arrested revolution. The political organisation is too organised, fixed, its joints are stiff. The vicious cycle of domination however cannot be broken without joy. Would it be the same joy, with the same form, the same rhythm? One can imagine a revolution of joy itself, joy as a new idea and of gestures that organise themselves.
Beyond dancing and celebrating, breaking with the vicious cycle of domination demands a redistribution of the power to do/make and the powers to not do/make. Supposing that there will not be a final struggle, our bodies know – sometimes for us and without us – that it will be necessary to rethink positively the power of pausing, of silence and of resting. The most tangible example is perhaps that of music. In a very superficial way, it can easily be seen how much and in what way a musical pause can-without-playing notes. And in our everday lives? And in our collective struggles? And in our combat strategies? What measure is there for a sigh, a half-sigh, a quarter-sigh? And what of the power of not-doing/making? The art of not-acting? Pausing cannot be reduced to a modality of exhaustion and fatigue, to what must be administered in small doses to avoid cracking up. The ancient Greeks knew; the slave is not only someone who works for another; they are also fundamentally those whose rest, vacations, holidays are fixed by another; they have no mastery over their pauses.
Political struggle is also a question of rhythms and cadences; it is not only a modality of doing/making; it is also a modality of stopping. That is at least perhaps what is suggested by the word the Ancients used to designate civil troubles, insurrections, sedition: stasis. Their thinking made no room for a political event as an absolute rupture or apogee. Like a tempest in a summer night, even though it happens, it remains exceptional; it may even happen a few times over the course of a lifetime. While maintaining its exceptional character, there is not an image such as that of the great revolutionary dawn. Discord, sedition, revolt, civil troubles, stasis designate a little of all of this, but also the fact of holding a position, of stopping. In Modern Greek, a bus stop or a metro station is referred to by this same word. Haunted by division, trouble, sign of a disequilibrium that finally erupts, stasis is an unyielding problem; as much in political and history texts, as in those of philosophers and doctors. It would however be difficult to simply consider it as an evil to be eradicated, without imposing on it our idea of good health and its presuppositions. Is revolutionary fever an illness, an evil, to be cured? And what is to come after?
The ancient Greeks were not familiar with the figure of the revolution in the modern sense. In their eyes, political regimes succeed and recycle each other: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy. The regimes succeed each other, but also corrupt themselves and rot; each has its shadow and its double. It is difficult to know with the ruins of the texts that have come down to us. Philosophers, historians, rhetoricians do not necessarily acknowledge the same cycles, the same order of succession or even the same number of regimes, but all agree that political time is comprised of loops. It turns. There is a recycling of regimes that makes one think of the moon’s phases, the seasons, more than of the linear time of the historicity of progress, which points like an arrow.
It is May 12, 1839, in a misunderstanding that only history knows the secret, a clandestine network, the Société des saisons, at the initiative of Barbes and Blanqui, launch an insurrection aiming to overthrow the regime of the July Monarchy and to establish a social republic. Why misunderstanding? Because it is usually thought that the cyclical time of the seasons ignores political revolutionary time. More fundamentally, it is thought that the time line and progressive hope, the time of automats and clocks; that all of this is a colonial, Eurocentric, modern invention and that consequently the political concept of revolution belongs to this regime of time.
And yet; much more than is suspected, with our tired knowledge, for the revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries, the revolution has something of the interminable. It is not just a line of progress; it is comprised of cycles, loops, which sometimes collide with each other. We have seen this with Blanqui, but it can also be witnessed with a melancholy Saint-Just in Year II of the revolution. The revolutionaries, who sense, think, live, try to readjust their action in the revolutionary fever, are able to perfectly grasp that the overthrow of a regime is insufficient; the return of an authoritarian regime keeps watch. It is not only because of the enemies of the revolution or of the violent reaction of those who dominate; the problem is posed also among the friends of the revolution. There is the power of habit, the tendency to take up again the same postures, the same organisations, the same circulations. There is also however the fear of the new, of that which had been physically experienced. The tremor of a new joy, in reciprocal equality and freedom, terrorises. This can reanimate a desire for a strong state; it can consolidate despotism. How can this circle be broken? How can the eternal repetition of the same, the interminable vicious cycle of domination, cruelty and contempt be avoided?
The permanent or interminable revolution is a sensitive idea that the revolutionaries experience. It arises in the time after, the time of the second wind, when it’s a matter of passing the baton not of a failed revolution but more radically still of a successful revolution. The exalted body at once exposed to the return of calm. Post coïtum, melancholy animal. How does one return to form, come back to life, after what is commonly called a “petite mort”[9]? The old regime [ancien régime]is overthrown. What of a new organisation? Will it be sand, fixed, unbending? “A revolution determines, within the social body, an instantaneous process of reorganisation akin to the tumultuous combinations of the elements of a dissolved body that then tend to recompose themselves in a new form.”[10] How does one come back to life without taking up the same habits? A revolutionary body can be everything except a finished, completed work.
Ode to tired heroism, there will not be a final victory; what there is to revolutionise is the relation between activity and rest, to act and to be acted upon, to suffer, desire and pleasure. As opposed to our political imaginary, which always reasons in terms of movement, a long tradition explores the potential/power of stopping, of pausing, the way in which a blockage can unblock what was blocked or an occupation empty what was full or too much. Let us stop living like the miserly. Neither linear time nor cyclical time; emancipation belongs neither to the clocks nor to the seasons. It belongs to follow-ups, relays, renewals [relances]. It is an affair of curves and bends. When time freezes and the moment becomes eternal, a radical pause gains form at the same time as what Mélanie Henry and Sophie Wahnich call a chain collision of times [carambolage des temps]. Perhaps the Gilets Jaunes, who occupied the roundabouts and blocked circulation, are not totally divorced from stasis. The general strike as a radical stoppage followed in the same tradition, as did the insurgents of the July Revolution who opened fire on clocks. One stops, one pauses and one will see. It is perhaps not too serious to not know where one is going; to not have a precise image of the world of tomorrow. The first cycle to be broken is that of humiliation, to live on one’s knees while standing. One stops, one blocks, one pauses oneself.
The Greeks of course were unaware of the temporality of progress and of revolution as an event, an eroticised new dawn, a fantasised apogee. However, they were aware of and practiced broken cycles. Classical theatre, the open air peoples’ assembly; these are practices that take place in a hemicycle. It has the form of a broken circle and of a face-to-face between the one and the many, the self and the City. Who commands? A doubles game, masks and verbal jousts, the power to convince and dramaturgies of blindness, neither master nor state. The heroes of Greek tragedy are never completely sovereign subjects who decide, nor simple cogs of forces that surpass them; they are a milieu, a middle-ground. How to break the vicious circle? The Greek tragedies offer us a few traces of this anarchy as a game between freedom and fatality.
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Oedipus, the eye too many
…
The revolution as a great dawn when the conditions are ripe to see things through to the end is surely an exhausted imaginary. Today, in the 21st century, the charms of revolution find other narratives and other cartographies different from those of a fantasised Origyne, other dramaturgies than that of an absolute apogee, other philosophemes than the extasis before the Open.[11] Despite the hyper-secured and arch-security that we are promised, today as always, popular revolts bring about the fall of political regimes. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal between 2022 and 2025, to mention but the most recent. It is not for speculative thought to catch the question of revolution by the hair, to force it to land here and now in a popular manner. All the powers of thought, all the tensions of intelligence, can do nothing to catch up with this indecisive and floating silhouette on the horizon.
…
What are we to make revolutionary renewals [relances]? Next to the monarchy of power, it is perhaps necessary to question the monarchy of pleasure. What can an anarchic joy accomplish? The revolution is not forcibly a much loved and lightly clad young woman.[12] Can we not desire another revolution, a revolution without smooth skin?
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Network/algorithmic surveillance and the traps of horizontality
…
Today, pure horizontality seems to function as a militant or protest ideal, structuring the way by which one sees the real experiences of struggle. In “Pièges et principes de l’horizontalité”, Hanane al-Jouri underlines a paradox with regards to two important contemporary experiences: the Zapatista movement and the communalism of Rojava. While these experiences combine horizontal and vertical forms, there is a tendency to refuse to see the latter. “Paradoxically, many people who support these revolutionary processes challenge and reject, in their own communities, any form of top-down hierarchy/verticality in the experience of political organisations. It must be said that in the countless accounts, analyses and pamphlets on Chiapas or Rojava, the role of centralising and hierarchical bodies is often absent, suggesting that residents’ assemblies decide everything, without delegation or mediation.”[13] In both cases, the demands of the armed struggle imply a vertical organisation. It would however be reductive to consider the mixed character of these experiences through the lens of warfare. Despite their differences, they share in common a formal experimentation with non-state federalist institutions.[14]
On a much more ordinary, everyday level, for anyone who has participated in a collective experiment of self-management – strike, blockage, occupation –, where a group of people get together, creating rules for themselves, they will have lived many things, but not forcibly pure horizontality. Relations tried and tested, yes; efforts at undoing consumed, interiorised, carcinogenic forms of domination, yes; tensions, conflicts to manage, the games of “little bosses” to undo, those who speak too often and too loudly to be dealt with, as well; surely all of these things come up. But pure horizontality! Where does this flat, tepid ideal come from?
It is an ideal that has some resemblance to decaffeinated coffee. It functions as an ideal, stimulating the perception of truly existing experiences (coffee). On the other hand, however, it is a flat ideal, without normative force, absolutely not vertical (decaffeinated). In sum, it is a non-idealistic ideal. A little like the ideology of the end of ideologies, it would be the ideal of the end of ideals, the universal of the end of universals. This pure horizontality and a certain phobia of institutions seems to dominate the libertarian, anarchist, autonomist, activist imaginaries of this beginning of the 21st century, while they are completely foreign to the revolutionary anarchism of the 19th century. What happened? By what kind of operation were ideals such as equality and freedom declared weapons of domination? What is hoped for from new struggles? Decaffeinated coffee?
After a time of enthusiasm and eruption, every collective experience begins to stagnate and has the need for follow-ups/new starts [relances]. We begin to know each other too well, to get tired of each other, always sleeping on the same side, relations of power and domination fix themselves again from within, consolidate themselves. A whole collective intelligence is required to throw the dice again. Sometimes, one succeeds in doing so, other times, no. But there is a need to re-conquer theses experiences. Why this passion for pure horizontality? And what if we looked towards the starry sky?
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Anarchy or the sublime hysteric [Part Two]
New federalisms and hybrid struggles
A contemporary of Blanqui’s, Élisée Reclus, geographer and communard, offers a singular reflection with regards to the terms evolution and revolution. Most often, the two notions are considered in temporal terms, while the geographer brings to them a spatial form. “Evolution is the infinite movement of all that exists, the ceaseless transformation of the Universe and all its parts since time immemorial and throughout the ages. The Milky Way galaxies that appear in boundless space, condensing and dissolving over millions and billions of centuries, the stars and celestial bodies that are born, coalesce and die, our solar system with its central star, its planets and moons, and, within the narrow confines of our little Earth, the mountains that rise and then fade away, the oceans that form and then dry up, the rivers that we see glistening in the valleys, then drying up like the morning dew, the generations of plants, animals and humans that succeed one another, and our millions of imperceptible lives.”[15] Revolution, on the other hand, is presented as a brusque vibration, as the brutal change of a milieu. As such, it is not tied to the religion of progress; revolution, as a local torsion, will involve both advances and regressions. The geographer is accordingly a revolutionary. He participates in the Commune, he experiences exile, he participates in collective efforts at creating anarchist communism. He does not lose hope, he does not claim to be tired before having fought, he does not fold his arms. While Blanqui, the unruly prisoner in his cell, clings to the earthly revolution all the while contemplating the stars, the geographer in exile takes us towards the idea of revolution as a gap/disruption/discarding [écart] and local torsion. Done/made and to do/to make.
The “Soulèvements de la Terre” issued from local, situated struggles, with the stated objective of jumping to a higher scale. A first important and touching element is the desire to jettison the superhero costume. “If the earth is a celestial object, it is more the soil and the glebe that are in here in question. To bring ecology back to earth, to the ground, is to renounce the desire to “save the planet”. This superhero ambition is far too grand for us. The earth does not need us. It preceded us and it will survive us.” This is a new formal experiment, different from that of the Party, while setting for itself the objective of a change of scale, so as to carry a greater weight in the conflict of forces and the conflict of worlds. A hybrid form, at the same time a movement, an organisation and an experimental school of/for new federalisms, the “Soulèvements de la Terre” pose the question of a leap to a higher scale, while fully accepting the irreducibility of the confusion and disorder. How can one get past miniature struggles without betraying them? What is a positive contamination? How can one deal with the seasons, the lands, the terroirs – the senses of place -, and the milieus, to move from the earth to the uprisings of the water [soulèvements des eaux]? Experience and experimentation are called for, on the condition of a double refusal: neither pure horizontality nor a central committee to manage efficiently. Neither an-arche, nor arche. But then what? A centre that is not the centre; the multiplication of local committees, transversal encounters/gatherings, nocturnal councils during nights of insomnia, the raising/rising up of solidarities, ties that are woven between those who should be separated. Fundamentally, it is less a matter of searching for an enemy than mapping sectors (for example, the cement sector). Drawing a map and navigating go together.
…
We live in ultra-transformed spaces and we need hybrid, tentacle-like struggles, which bring IT and AI down to earth. The enemy cannot be abstract; otherwise there would be no scenes of confrontation. The practice of cartography is inseparable from the struggle for our milieus.
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AI and its carbon footprint
We are in the post-war: the “Trente glorieuse“, with the emergence of strange numeric beings such as flux, hyper-connection, the virtual, the info-sphere, that mark with their footprints cartographic imaginaries, the planning of spaces of control, as well as the analytic of domination. Disciplinary power makes its exit from on high; the new narrative now speaks of networks of power. The centrality of the capitalist exploitation of labour is displaced by a polymorphic domination which has lodged itself in the interior of all kinds of relations: at work, but also at home, at school, on a football pitch, between activists of a civil rights organisation. In sum, power is everywhere. On the other hand, the network utopia participates in a new political imaginary of forms of struggle and organisation which desire to be absolutely horizontal, flexible, light, a-centric. The miracle of the multitude and of revolts without revolution has come to replace the Party, the Union and a dirty kid called the Proletariat.
We could speak of a transformation of the cartographic imaginary, moving from a spatial representation with a centre (arche) to a representation without a centre; From the idea of a central power, a source of sovereignty, belonging to a few, to the idea of a network of power in which everyone is caught up. None of this was the work of any one individual; it was the vibration of an epoch, a climate. The epoch desired and saw itself as anti-dialectical and it celebrated multiplicities against the great oppositions. One finds in Foucault a singular articulation: in his work, there is no binary and global opposition between the dominant and the dominated. He endeavours to theorise a power from below. At the same time and for the same reason, points of resistance are present everywhere. “Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial.”[16]
The climate today seems to be changing. We need other cartographies, other representations of power than this a-centric power, co-extensive with the multiplicity of resistances. And this quite simply because in the relations of power/force with bankocracies without borders, industrial giants, the GAFA …, one loses, one retreats, and, despite our efforts, it is often without a fight. Rather than a decline of the nation-state and its dissolution in the movement of globalisation, the young 21st century presents new forms of hybridisation between an apparatus of a police-state, war machines and a techno-feudalism; rather than a power from below, a “millefeuille”[17] of dominations and exploitations. Foucault did not consider power either as an institution, or as a structure; it is the name of a complex strategic situation in a given society.[18] There is no ontology of power for Foucault. Today, he would surely be the first to try to free himself from himself; to see otherwise, so as to struggle otherwise.
If the Marxist tradition was obsessed by grand strategy, conversely, today, it is remarkable how the “thinkers of the living world” ignore or decide to ignore all thought in a strategic or tactical situation, all relations of power/force. As there was no meaning or direction to History, there is not a Modernity to make land. We have to construct scenes of confrontation, shelters and barricades, which requires, in part, the materialisation of the numeric, the landing, or making land, of IT and AI. This task implies new cartographies that permit drawing lines between barbed fencing, refugee camps and heavy institutions, such as the police-state on the one hand, and the cloud-space and the info-sphere on the other. On the other side, the multiple resistances, the symbolic, real, improbable, incommensurable, necessary struggles, the spontaneous lines of flight, savage cultures, pose the question of new federalisms: not a-centric, but poly-centric.
…
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Cartographies of struggle
…
A certain radical thought still resonates in terms of missed/failed opportunities. It falls under this revolutionary imaginary as an orgasmic apogee at a great dawn, or – its little brother -, intensive insurrectionalism (“we don’t give up!”). As long as the idea of revolution remains bound to this kind of idea, like a limpet attached to its rock, we will only see and we will only analyse moments of giving up and failed opportunities. We have become a sad courage. The first thing that we have to win anew is the precious joy of starting again. And who but the children can teach us this? These children of a young age, before being able to walk, before becoming little men trained to success and to progress, try to stand and fall and fail and before trying yet again, break out in laughter. Let us begin again!
[1] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 58.
[2] [TN: All page references, unless otherwise indicated, are to Maria Kakogianni, Sous le ciel étoilé, une nuit d’éte: Réflexions sur l’anarchie et la revolution, lundimatin, 2026.]
[4] We use the word planet here in an anachronistic sense. The ancient Greeks called all celestial bodies by this name that gave the impression of being shaken, of wandering, in opposition to the bodies that appeared stable, immobile, fixed.
[7] Vivian Gornick, Emma Goldman. La révolution comme mode de vie, Essais Payot, 2024.
[8] [TN: At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman, Goldman s lover], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance… My frivolity would only hurl the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, .should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931).
[9] [TN: La petite mort (lit.?”the little death”) is an expression that refers to a brief loss or weakening of consciousness, and in modern usage refers specifically to a post-orgasm sensation as likened to death. Wikipedia.org]
[11] [TN: A reference to central concepts in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.]
[12] [TN: The reference is to the symbolic representation of the revolution or freedom as a young, partially undressed woman. See, famously, Eugène Delacroix’s painting, “Liberty leading the people” (1830)].
[14] The Zapatistas refuse to have a constituent text, though they have declarations that serve as references, while the Rojava commune gave itself a constitution. See: Pierre Bance, “La construction de la démocratie directe éclairée par l’expérience du Chiapas et du Rojava”, in Les Juristes anarchistes. Vers de nouvelles utopies concrètes, Paris, classique Garnier, 2024.
[15] Élisée Reclus, L’Évolution, la revolution, et l’idéal anarchique, Lux editeur, 2004, p. 7.
[16] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume 1: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 93-4. [Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 126.]
[17] [TN: The French “millefeuille” pastry – otherwise known as a Napoleon or Vanilla Slice in English – is employed here as a metaphor to suggest a a multiplicity of layered dominations and exploitations.]
[18] “… power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume 1: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 93. [Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 123.]
Under the starry sky, a summer’s night; Reflections on anarchy and revolution
Pascal once said, in his magnificent style: “The universe is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”[1] Could there be a more striking image of infinity? After him, let us say, a little more precisely: the universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.
Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars (1872), The Blanqui Archive
… to participate in a revolution, to commit one’s responsibility for reciprocal equality and shared dignity has never been a realisation. It is first to produce the possible.
Maria Kakogianni
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At night, we no longer see the stars.
This is not a metaphor, but rather a sign.
A sign of our own disaster.
Under the sky, everything is collective fate and conditioned freedom.
Ordinary violence and its chronic pains, humiliation.
Our bodies turn against themselves.
No justice anywhere, autoimmune diseases everywhere.
The future has a fever. And yet.
In the midst of the darkness, the light trembles like a burst of laughter.
Joy as a new idea.
Anarchy as an experience.
Revolution as a new beginning.
At the edge of worlds rather than at the end of the world.
We [as a collective subject] is still here.
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A new book from lundimatin press was released this last March 20: Under the Starry Sky, a Summer Night; Reflections on Anarchy and Revolution [Sous le ciel étoilé, une nuit d’éte: Réflexions sur l’anarchie et la révolution], by Maria Kakogianni.
In this short essay, philosopher Maria Kakogianni sets out to dust off our preconceived notions of revolution and anarchy. “The aim of these pages is a positive manifestation of anarchy”.[2]
Starting from a simple yet stark observation, that we hardly see any stars anymore, she derives a metaphor for the world: we live in a starless age.
The twenty-two short sections that make up the book are like rays radiating in every direction. We encounter Catherine Malabou and Margaret Thatcher, Immanuel Kant and Auguste Blanqui, Vincent Bolloré and the Invisible Committee. We discuss everyday fascism, pirate pleasures, Plato, and even Tai Chi.
A book of politics, poetry, and philosophy, Under the Starry Sky, a Summer Night is above all a book of mixtures for a revolutionary space. At its heart lies the necessity of inventing a positive and regular anarchy, with feet on the ground and head in the stars.
Maria Kakogianni is a philosopher and writer. She has published numerous books, including Entretien platonicien avec Alain Badiou (éd. Lignes), Le Printemps précaire des peuples (éd. Divergences), Surgeons et autres pousses (éd. Excès).
lundimatin #517, 28/04/2026
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Our enthusiasm for this work led us to venture an English language translation of selections from text. Any such selection of course may be contested and we are perfectly aware of the limitations of this exercise. And yet our hope remains that the selection that we have made will be sufficient to demonstrate the importance of Maria Kakogianni’s essay.
What we offer below is of course no substitute for any English language translation-publication that may eventually be forthcoming. Until then, let this stand as a modest introduction for those who are not entirely comfortable with French.
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Made/Did and to make/to do [Fait et à faire]
1. There is not only one arche[3], but many. Our world is polyarchic.
2. There are positive, affirmative forms of anarchy.
3. Anarchy is not an object of will, but an object of experience.
4. What comes about comes about.
5. Capital is a monster with neither head nor tail; therefore the practical difficulty of “cutting its head off”.
6. The State is a two headed apparatus; a repressive and management apparatus; watchword and password. It can be both fascist and liberal at the same time, without difficulty.
7. The exploitation and accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of sexual satisfaction through rape and the exhaustion of human and non-human resources are part of the same system of domination.
8. People who do not master orthography and grammar think; they can; they sow. A popular song speaks of it. The walls do too.
9. A project of autonomy is a way to choose dependencies. One can depend on agribusiness for food or cultivate other dependencies. To be enumerated and elaborated.
10. The white, rich, heteronormative and biodegrading man simultaneously exercises every form of domination. Intersectionality is not a mind police to separate the subalterns of one small part from another smaller part. It names operations through which the subalterns organise themselves to cause the greatest damage to the order of places, subjects, objects.
11. Anarchy is not static, it is dramaturgical. It is neither a modality of order nor a modality of disorder, but a milieu of forces and forms, potencies/potentialities [puissances] to affect and potencies/potentialities to be affected, potencies/potentialities to do/make [faire] potencies/potentialities to not do/make, which maintains for the duration a conflict of worlds, that is, an effective gap/difference/deviation [écart] in the very interior of what can be a world.
12. The geometry of progress invented an idea of Revolution as a rupture with a capital letter, a radical break between a before and an after. This idea expired at the same time as the belief in human progress. We now inhabit the catastrophe and the pornography of the catastrophe.
13. We like to think that other civilisations, those which do not bear the name of Occidental, inhabit a cyclical world, that of the seasons, with a knowledge only of revolution without history.
14. We need an idea of revolution in history and with the seasons; neither cyclical nor progressive; that attaches itself as much to the event as to the temperature and the lunar cycle; extraterrestrial and maximally terrestrial at the same time.
15. Deleuze said somewhere, not without humour, that etymology is a properly philosophical athleticism. The concept of anarchy has for a long time suffered the consequences of this athleticism. We have always seen this privative -a and therefore a negative form of absence or non-presence, an-archy. Who commands? Affirmative anarchy as experience names a gap/difference/deviation [écart] positively. It also names a crossing, a trial and undoubtedly a putting in danger.
16. There is no power to take, conquer, as a centre. There are fixed configurations and preferential circuits between centres of power to be attacked, to bend, to deform.
17. People who suffer pain know, because they’ve had enough of it, that there are fixed configurations and preferential circuits of pain. The evil will not be attacked at its root.
18. In a circular orbit, there is only one centre; eccentricity is nothing, worthless. I turn therefore, I am; the same errors, the same joys, the same litanies. On the other hand, the planets[4] – celestial bodies that hover and wander – turn in ellipse, a movement that implies not a centre but two places [foyers]. The gap/difference/deviation [écart], the plastic, dynamic relation between the places [foyers] effectively gives body to the eccentricities. These last are not miniature exceptions, small micro-cosmic radicalities that defend themselves with their magic potions. They are positive deformations, felicitous malformations, real reformations of orbit.
19. There is no greater joy than that which says we, without begging or compensation or unity. Eternity by celestial bodies that turn and wander; Victory is not a result, it is the name of a certain duration capable of renewals/follow-ups [relances] New beginnings are necessary, new beginnings of the kind that are only a way of picking up the relay; a regular and positive anarchy with at least two places [foyers].
20. To anarchise the world, rather than to comprehend it.
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Anarchy or the passage between fatality and freedom [Part One]
I can’t breathe
…
Very often, strong, hard theory gives the impression of being a concentrate of categorical testosterone. I can therefore you follow. Conceptual thought exposes itself in its power to do/make, leaving to literature, to the arts, to the sensitivity of experience, the task of addressing its weaknesses, its difficulties, its lapses, its power to not make/do; the task of experimenting with dramaturgies different from those where everything is done to vigorously happen at a culminating point, at the apogee. As someone once said, see you tomorrow for some good sex.
Until now, the Western idea of political revolution has been marked by two great insignia: God who makes itself flesh and sex. On the hand, the incarnation of an absolute and, on the other, phallic pleasure, discharge, on the occasion of the great event [le grande soir], when the conditions are ripe to reach the end, the goal. The concept of political revolution gained form not only in the face of political monarchy, but in the heart of a fundamentally mono-archic conception of the world: a single arche. An eroticised zone; a Centre, the Good; and hence the desired Revolution as a miracle that can change Everything, the Origyne[5] of the new world. To anarchise the revolution is to spill over its dominant symbolism, this mixture of messianism and masculinism, to declare that it is not-One and not-Everything – there are revolutions.
…
Our world is in a chronic state of inflammation. Our bodies are in a chronic state of inflammation. Our souls are in a chronic state of inflammation. And our ideas, regardless of what we may think of them, no longer suffice as remedies. Chemical, toxic, microbial, traumatic, social aggressions; when an organism suffers an aggression, it inflames. Inflammation is therefore a defensive reaction to remove the aggressors and to treat the lesions. However, what should be temporary sometimes becomes a chronic state. Popular revolts, the coming insurrections, growing anger: people are not blind and they do not need to be illuminated to act. Despite what right-thinking people may think, the problem is not one of mobilisation. In a state of inflammation, fire spreads, things catch fire.
…
If the expression There Is No Alternative has managed to mark our time, it is perhaps because it has touched a sentient soul, the collective state of mind, the spirit of the times such that it spreads in a specific time. Why? Because a certain theoretical and practical idea of revolution has expired; and because a certain affective attachment as well. Not only do those who dominate want to ring the end of the match, but also and above all those who struggle think no less. From which results this chronic inflammatory state. How can the aggressors be eliminated, the wounds healed, to render our milieus of life breathable, without falling into little, microcosmic radicalisms.
…
Let us put it a little bluntly that communism as an emancipatory hypothesis, supported by a logic of political organisation (the Party) and a historical subject (the Proletariat), has gone through a zone of turbulence with both practical and theoretical consequences. From a historical subject, objectively inscribed in the social body, we have moved to an event-relative subject, emergent, ethereal and interiorly unpredictable. Exit planning and the meaning of History; welcome to the age of events and of flexibility without limits. Today, anarchy and anarchism appear to provoke intense debate. [TN. Against this reality]
…
I can’t breathe. … While the world is unbreathable, something of anarchy marks the spirit of the time. There is a complicity between an-archy as the absence of any principle and mono-archy as the principle of One; chaos without rules on the one hand and a severe, strict and unchanging order, on the other; with one, everything moves, with the other, nothing changes. Together, that gives us a world where everything moves and nothing changes. And what of a positive anarchy? Of what revolutions would it be the dream?
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Me, the starry sky and the moral law
…
The between-two worlds, the between-two settings, the between two laws can be double. It is either what maintains the order of one and the other, or what positively anarchises one and the other. In the between-the-two, there are two options: the police and anarchy. One calls for order or a cosmic laugh. One calls for order or for what unsettles the ontological divisions between what is and what is not, what counts and what does not, what is possible and what is not. A positive anarchy does not oppose itself to a world; it plays at the edges of worlds, in the passage ways from one to another.
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TINA and the pornography of catastrophe
There is no Alternative bears another name: fatality. There is something in the sentient soul of the present time that is fashioned out of fatality and which appears to have admitted the incapacity to make common or to make community differently. For the minute exceptions, there is always room. Micropolitics is safe. It is the politics of grand surfaces that is marked by impossibility. Even sometimes in the ranks of those who resist and who organise themselves to do differently, a change of scale does not seem to be desirable. The experiences of autonomy and of self-organisation are not scalable, the fact of carrying them to another level necessarily implies contaminations and therefore the risk of recuperation and of betrayal. This however has never prevented people from trying things. That beings and human communities rub up against fatality, against constraint and partial forms of liberation is absolutely not novel, neither in space nor in time. The paradox today is that collective fatality is accompanied by a culture of individual liberty pushed to the extremes. Be free and shut up.
Let us call pornography of catastrophe the ensemble of discourses, gestures and languages that teach us and thoroughly mould us to take the measure of the current environmental, existential, affective, intimate, social … catastrophe. Something on the order of enjoyment, pleasure, is at stake. Have you seen how sick the rivers are? Have you seen how the children die over there? Have you seen everything that people refuse to see? Enjoy, be free and shut up.
Before referring to destruction, disaster, cataclysm, catastrophe in poetry designated change, the return or the revolution that takes place at the end of a dramatic poem. And there was this basic rule one taught to apprentice poets: the interest weakens if the catastrophe is too predictable. In any case, it was considered a moment of denouement, a turning or tipping point, and not a permanent state. Today, we know that there is a catastrophe; intellectually, emotionally, physically, to the smallest cell of our flesh. Everything is played out in the minute variations in the way the catastrophe happens, already happened, will happen. The pornographic resource intervenes here. In a porno film, one knows that there will be a sexual relation; everything is played out in the variation, in the different modalities with which what happens must happen. More than a spectacle, today the catastrophe is a live and permanent transmission. And a whole art is necessary for the interest not to weaken. Yet another film about starving children! Yet another essay on predatory neoliberalism! Oh look, an influencer who has her/himself assassinated live on TikTok. The pornography of the catastrophe and the fatality of TINA walk hand in hand.
In contrast to the desire that always desires more or something else, enjoyment incorporates another relationship to failure. In the repeated movement to reach a goal, the repetition of failure becomes the source of enjoyment. Alcoholic pleasure does not lie in the fact of drinking too much; it points rather to where one does not stop to want to stop drinking and failing to do so. How many strategies does one put in place to “hold firm” this time! Alcoholic joy is that first glass each time one falls again, each time one stops stopping. It is this exchange with one’s self where one is always the loser; I’ll have only one more glass and I’ll go home. And what of insurrections and popular revolts and assemblies of struggle? Everything started so well, everything could have turned out well, but finally nothing happened. Radical intelligence seats itself at the bar to sip a beer; bitter dead ends, bitter solutions. I’ll have only one more glass and I’ll go home.
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Plato and Tai-Chi
The psychic economy, that is, to speak of psychism, to analyse psychism in economic terms, has for us become obvious, while in the experience of ancient Greece this seems unthinkable. On the other hand, the City has a soul. Political regimes are also psychic regimes. Historians, orators, doctors take up this theme which is not Plato’s philosophical invention. His Republic proposes a singular variation of what seems to be a climate of thought, a speculative atmosphere: the individual is a micro-politics of the City and the City is a macro-politics of the individual. The structure is not binary, for between reason and desire there is what the Greeks call the thymos. What is this? One can translate it as anger (Achilles’ anger, for example, in Homer). It is at one and the same time the irritable element and the mediating instance, the water between two banks, that from which indignation rises up against injustice, emotive courage. According to different uses, that can refer as much to extreme right-wing riots – the “there is not a place for everyone”, and other macho, xenophobic, racist, anti-immigration, etc., demonstrations – as well as to those who maintain and guarantee, against governments, beyond the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1798, the resistance to oppression and the duty of insurrection. All of this is thymotic.
The City is a community of affects and individual psychic life is revelatory of politics, not of the economy. It is a micro-graphy of the City. It is not a coming and going between the individual and the universe or the cosmos (something that one finds in other civilisations), but between the individual and an intermediate scale of a political commons, the polis. Neither has any meaning without the other, and thus this central problem: how can there be a concern for the one without a concern for the other? Even if the Greeks were ignorant of ecological problems, there is enough here to consider this political thinking as environmental. More precisely, there is not “one” individual in “a” milieu. Everything is a coming and going. Every individual is already a milieu and each milieu individualises itself insofar as it is not space itself (the place of places).
To find refuge in an ethical stylisation is henceforth marked by suspicion, as well as its exact opposite: to concern oneself with politics without concerning oneself with one’s self. Angela Davis speaks of a radical self-care, of a radical concern for one’s self, “anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of herself, himself, their selves”.[6] There is not the care for the self on the one hand and practical politics on the other. Rather than two opposing principles, tai-chi as a practice that works on supports, the transfer of weights between the Self and the City can be called upon. Headaches, insomnias, blockages, irritability: if every individual is a milieu, we will never be in better health than our milieus. Between the care for everyday life, simple gestures, local networks to eat, to take care of oneself, to move, and large scale politics, it is a matter of practicing the shifting of weights. There are of course dissymmetries between the two, but there is no hierarchy, that is, an archic [of the nature of an arche that grounds, commands, that is prior to] relation from one to the other. On the other hand, the change of support, speed, weight, anarchises the one and the other. Neither master nor state.
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Politics grows in a milieu as a milieu, in the refusal of the enforced choice between care for the self and the great cause, the construction of autonomy and the conflictual reality of power relations, the calm of regeneration and the tumults of action.
The ability to refuse an enforced choice does not fall from the sky. It is learned, it is something that is exercised; it is learned in movement and by movement, in searching to render fluid the passage from one to the other. Michel Foucault’s care for the self was largely co-opted by the neoliberal machine. In militant milieus, for a time, the calls for a micro-politics, completely turned attention away from relations of power on a larger scale. The history of the origins of this present must not be forgotten. In an epoch where there was a great disequilibrium, the weight was placed on grand planning and large, bureaucratised organisations to change the world. We learned to be suspicious of the great strategies of the Party, as we today learn to be suspicious of miniature exceptions. To change our support, we need to slow down, to feel the shift in weight, to detail the movement, to recognise point by point the circuits, to pass to the other side, to start anew; the art of combat and the art of life, to learn to change our supports: to be sometimes a tree, sometimes a forest, but never one without the other.
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Radical stoppage and broken cycle
It seems that the arrow of time points today towards catastrophe. While the imaginary of political revolution implied not long ago an irreversible event or a threshold of no-return for the creation of another society, today this chronopolitics is poured out into a time of catastrophe and disaster. It is at its heart that one recognises the irreversible effects of the capitalocene, toxic chemistry, mining extraction, the depletion and exhaustion of lakes and rivers, from which emerges a new governmentality, the governmentality of crisis, of urgency. It is urgent to act.
At the same time, it might be said that there is no longer anything that can be done. Unless you overdo it and you get back pain for your troubles. It is a Molotov cocktail of feelings, an explosive mix of urgency and impotence: if it appears obvious that it is urgent to act, to do something, it also seems almost certain that to stop the course of events collectively and on a large scale is too immense a task. Activism becomes frenetic agitation, permanent hyperactivity. When it is not by the police, crushing a movement comes at the hands of overwork and militant burn-out. And yet our bodies rebel – if we cannot taste joy in your struggles, we will not take part in them.
It was at a party, and Emma Goldman was dancing when a comrade asked her to stop, believing that her frivolity undermined the Cause.[7] To which she answered that if she couldn’t dance, she would not take part in the revolution.[8] We are in 1931. It is not a matter of sexual liberation; the anecdote seems to point to something else. The dancers say that it is not the body that makes the gestures: it is the gestures that make the body. A revolution where one cannot dance is an arrested revolution. The political organisation is too organised, fixed, its joints are stiff. The vicious cycle of domination however cannot be broken without joy. Would it be the same joy, with the same form, the same rhythm? One can imagine a revolution of joy itself, joy as a new idea and of gestures that organise themselves.
Beyond dancing and celebrating, breaking with the vicious cycle of domination demands a redistribution of the power to do/make and the powers to not do/make. Supposing that there will not be a final struggle, our bodies know – sometimes for us and without us – that it will be necessary to rethink positively the power of pausing, of silence and of resting. The most tangible example is perhaps that of music. In a very superficial way, it can easily be seen how much and in what way a musical pause can-without-playing notes. And in our everday lives? And in our collective struggles? And in our combat strategies? What measure is there for a sigh, a half-sigh, a quarter-sigh? And what of the power of not-doing/making? The art of not-acting? Pausing cannot be reduced to a modality of exhaustion and fatigue, to what must be administered in small doses to avoid cracking up. The ancient Greeks knew; the slave is not only someone who works for another; they are also fundamentally those whose rest, vacations, holidays are fixed by another; they have no mastery over their pauses.
Political struggle is also a question of rhythms and cadences; it is not only a modality of doing/making; it is also a modality of stopping. That is at least perhaps what is suggested by the word the Ancients used to designate civil troubles, insurrections, sedition: stasis. Their thinking made no room for a political event as an absolute rupture or apogee. Like a tempest in a summer night, even though it happens, it remains exceptional; it may even happen a few times over the course of a lifetime. While maintaining its exceptional character, there is not an image such as that of the great revolutionary dawn. Discord, sedition, revolt, civil troubles, stasis designate a little of all of this, but also the fact of holding a position, of stopping. In Modern Greek, a bus stop or a metro station is referred to by this same word. Haunted by division, trouble, sign of a disequilibrium that finally erupts, stasis is an unyielding problem; as much in political and history texts, as in those of philosophers and doctors. It would however be difficult to simply consider it as an evil to be eradicated, without imposing on it our idea of good health and its presuppositions. Is revolutionary fever an illness, an evil, to be cured? And what is to come after?
The ancient Greeks were not familiar with the figure of the revolution in the modern sense. In their eyes, political regimes succeed and recycle each other: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy. The regimes succeed each other, but also corrupt themselves and rot; each has its shadow and its double. It is difficult to know with the ruins of the texts that have come down to us. Philosophers, historians, rhetoricians do not necessarily acknowledge the same cycles, the same order of succession or even the same number of regimes, but all agree that political time is comprised of loops. It turns. There is a recycling of regimes that makes one think of the moon’s phases, the seasons, more than of the linear time of the historicity of progress, which points like an arrow.
It is May 12, 1839, in a misunderstanding that only history knows the secret, a clandestine network, the Société des saisons, at the initiative of Barbes and Blanqui, launch an insurrection aiming to overthrow the regime of the July Monarchy and to establish a social republic. Why misunderstanding? Because it is usually thought that the cyclical time of the seasons ignores political revolutionary time. More fundamentally, it is thought that the time line and progressive hope, the time of automats and clocks; that all of this is a colonial, Eurocentric, modern invention and that consequently the political concept of revolution belongs to this regime of time.
And yet; much more than is suspected, with our tired knowledge, for the revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries, the revolution has something of the interminable. It is not just a line of progress; it is comprised of cycles, loops, which sometimes collide with each other. We have seen this with Blanqui, but it can also be witnessed with a melancholy Saint-Just in Year II of the revolution. The revolutionaries, who sense, think, live, try to readjust their action in the revolutionary fever, are able to perfectly grasp that the overthrow of a regime is insufficient; the return of an authoritarian regime keeps watch. It is not only because of the enemies of the revolution or of the violent reaction of those who dominate; the problem is posed also among the friends of the revolution. There is the power of habit, the tendency to take up again the same postures, the same organisations, the same circulations. There is also however the fear of the new, of that which had been physically experienced. The tremor of a new joy, in reciprocal equality and freedom, terrorises. This can reanimate a desire for a strong state; it can consolidate despotism. How can this circle be broken? How can the eternal repetition of the same, the interminable vicious cycle of domination, cruelty and contempt be avoided?
The permanent or interminable revolution is a sensitive idea that the revolutionaries experience. It arises in the time after, the time of the second wind, when it’s a matter of passing the baton not of a failed revolution but more radically still of a successful revolution. The exalted body at once exposed to the return of calm. Post coïtum, melancholy animal. How does one return to form, come back to life, after what is commonly called a “petite mort”[9]? The old regime [ancien régime]is overthrown. What of a new organisation? Will it be sand, fixed, unbending? “A revolution determines, within the social body, an instantaneous process of reorganisation akin to the tumultuous combinations of the elements of a dissolved body that then tend to recompose themselves in a new form.”[10] How does one come back to life without taking up the same habits? A revolutionary body can be everything except a finished, completed work.
Ode to tired heroism, there will not be a final victory; what there is to revolutionise is the relation between activity and rest, to act and to be acted upon, to suffer, desire and pleasure. As opposed to our political imaginary, which always reasons in terms of movement, a long tradition explores the potential/power of stopping, of pausing, the way in which a blockage can unblock what was blocked or an occupation empty what was full or too much. Let us stop living like the miserly. Neither linear time nor cyclical time; emancipation belongs neither to the clocks nor to the seasons. It belongs to follow-ups, relays, renewals [relances]. It is an affair of curves and bends. When time freezes and the moment becomes eternal, a radical pause gains form at the same time as what Mélanie Henry and Sophie Wahnich call a chain collision of times [carambolage des temps]. Perhaps the Gilets Jaunes, who occupied the roundabouts and blocked circulation, are not totally divorced from stasis. The general strike as a radical stoppage followed in the same tradition, as did the insurgents of the July Revolution who opened fire on clocks. One stops, one pauses and one will see. It is perhaps not too serious to not know where one is going; to not have a precise image of the world of tomorrow. The first cycle to be broken is that of humiliation, to live on one’s knees while standing. One stops, one blocks, one pauses oneself.
The Greeks of course were unaware of the temporality of progress and of revolution as an event, an eroticised new dawn, a fantasised apogee. However, they were aware of and practiced broken cycles. Classical theatre, the open air peoples’ assembly; these are practices that take place in a hemicycle. It has the form of a broken circle and of a face-to-face between the one and the many, the self and the City. Who commands? A doubles game, masks and verbal jousts, the power to convince and dramaturgies of blindness, neither master nor state. The heroes of Greek tragedy are never completely sovereign subjects who decide, nor simple cogs of forces that surpass them; they are a milieu, a middle-ground. How to break the vicious circle? The Greek tragedies offer us a few traces of this anarchy as a game between freedom and fatality.
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Oedipus, the eye too many
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The revolution as a great dawn when the conditions are ripe to see things through to the end is surely an exhausted imaginary. Today, in the 21st century, the charms of revolution find other narratives and other cartographies different from those of a fantasised Origyne, other dramaturgies than that of an absolute apogee, other philosophemes than the extasis before the Open.[11] Despite the hyper-secured and arch-security that we are promised, today as always, popular revolts bring about the fall of political regimes. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal between 2022 and 2025, to mention but the most recent. It is not for speculative thought to catch the question of revolution by the hair, to force it to land here and now in a popular manner. All the powers of thought, all the tensions of intelligence, can do nothing to catch up with this indecisive and floating silhouette on the horizon.
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What are we to make revolutionary renewals [relances]? Next to the monarchy of power, it is perhaps necessary to question the monarchy of pleasure. What can an anarchic joy accomplish? The revolution is not forcibly a much loved and lightly clad young woman.[12] Can we not desire another revolution, a revolution without smooth skin?
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Network/algorithmic surveillance and the traps of horizontality
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Today, pure horizontality seems to function as a militant or protest ideal, structuring the way by which one sees the real experiences of struggle. In “Pièges et principes de l’horizontalité”, Hanane al-Jouri underlines a paradox with regards to two important contemporary experiences: the Zapatista movement and the communalism of Rojava. While these experiences combine horizontal and vertical forms, there is a tendency to refuse to see the latter. “Paradoxically, many people who support these revolutionary processes challenge and reject, in their own communities, any form of top-down hierarchy/verticality in the experience of political organisations. It must be said that in the countless accounts, analyses and pamphlets on Chiapas or Rojava, the role of centralising and hierarchical bodies is often absent, suggesting that residents’ assemblies decide everything, without delegation or mediation.”[13] In both cases, the demands of the armed struggle imply a vertical organisation. It would however be reductive to consider the mixed character of these experiences through the lens of warfare. Despite their differences, they share in common a formal experimentation with non-state federalist institutions.[14]
On a much more ordinary, everyday level, for anyone who has participated in a collective experiment of self-management – strike, blockage, occupation –, where a group of people get together, creating rules for themselves, they will have lived many things, but not forcibly pure horizontality. Relations tried and tested, yes; efforts at undoing consumed, interiorised, carcinogenic forms of domination, yes; tensions, conflicts to manage, the games of “little bosses” to undo, those who speak too often and too loudly to be dealt with, as well; surely all of these things come up. But pure horizontality! Where does this flat, tepid ideal come from?
It is an ideal that has some resemblance to decaffeinated coffee. It functions as an ideal, stimulating the perception of truly existing experiences (coffee). On the other hand, however, it is a flat ideal, without normative force, absolutely not vertical (decaffeinated). In sum, it is a non-idealistic ideal. A little like the ideology of the end of ideologies, it would be the ideal of the end of ideals, the universal of the end of universals. This pure horizontality and a certain phobia of institutions seems to dominate the libertarian, anarchist, autonomist, activist imaginaries of this beginning of the 21st century, while they are completely foreign to the revolutionary anarchism of the 19th century. What happened? By what kind of operation were ideals such as equality and freedom declared weapons of domination? What is hoped for from new struggles? Decaffeinated coffee?
After a time of enthusiasm and eruption, every collective experience begins to stagnate and has the need for follow-ups/new starts [relances]. We begin to know each other too well, to get tired of each other, always sleeping on the same side, relations of power and domination fix themselves again from within, consolidate themselves. A whole collective intelligence is required to throw the dice again. Sometimes, one succeeds in doing so, other times, no. But there is a need to re-conquer theses experiences. Why this passion for pure horizontality? And what if we looked towards the starry sky?
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Anarchy or the sublime hysteric [Part Two]
New federalisms and hybrid struggles
A contemporary of Blanqui’s, Élisée Reclus, geographer and communard, offers a singular reflection with regards to the terms evolution and revolution. Most often, the two notions are considered in temporal terms, while the geographer brings to them a spatial form. “Evolution is the infinite movement of all that exists, the ceaseless transformation of the Universe and all its parts since time immemorial and throughout the ages. The Milky Way galaxies that appear in boundless space, condensing and dissolving over millions and billions of centuries, the stars and celestial bodies that are born, coalesce and die, our solar system with its central star, its planets and moons, and, within the narrow confines of our little Earth, the mountains that rise and then fade away, the oceans that form and then dry up, the rivers that we see glistening in the valleys, then drying up like the morning dew, the generations of plants, animals and humans that succeed one another, and our millions of imperceptible lives.”[15] Revolution, on the other hand, is presented as a brusque vibration, as the brutal change of a milieu. As such, it is not tied to the religion of progress; revolution, as a local torsion, will involve both advances and regressions. The geographer is accordingly a revolutionary. He participates in the Commune, he experiences exile, he participates in collective efforts at creating anarchist communism. He does not lose hope, he does not claim to be tired before having fought, he does not fold his arms. While Blanqui, the unruly prisoner in his cell, clings to the earthly revolution all the while contemplating the stars, the geographer in exile takes us towards the idea of revolution as a gap/disruption/discarding [écart] and local torsion. Done/made and to do/to make.
The “Soulèvements de la Terre” issued from local, situated struggles, with the stated objective of jumping to a higher scale. A first important and touching element is the desire to jettison the superhero costume. “If the earth is a celestial object, it is more the soil and the glebe that are in here in question. To bring ecology back to earth, to the ground, is to renounce the desire to “save the planet”. This superhero ambition is far too grand for us. The earth does not need us. It preceded us and it will survive us.” This is a new formal experiment, different from that of the Party, while setting for itself the objective of a change of scale, so as to carry a greater weight in the conflict of forces and the conflict of worlds. A hybrid form, at the same time a movement, an organisation and an experimental school of/for new federalisms, the “Soulèvements de la Terre” pose the question of a leap to a higher scale, while fully accepting the irreducibility of the confusion and disorder. How can one get past miniature struggles without betraying them? What is a positive contamination? How can one deal with the seasons, the lands, the terroirs – the senses of place -, and the milieus, to move from the earth to the uprisings of the water [soulèvements des eaux]? Experience and experimentation are called for, on the condition of a double refusal: neither pure horizontality nor a central committee to manage efficiently. Neither an-arche, nor arche. But then what? A centre that is not the centre; the multiplication of local committees, transversal encounters/gatherings, nocturnal councils during nights of insomnia, the raising/rising up of solidarities, ties that are woven between those who should be separated. Fundamentally, it is less a matter of searching for an enemy than mapping sectors (for example, the cement sector). Drawing a map and navigating go together.
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We live in ultra-transformed spaces and we need hybrid, tentacle-like struggles, which bring IT and AI down to earth. The enemy cannot be abstract; otherwise there would be no scenes of confrontation. The practice of cartography is inseparable from the struggle for our milieus.
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AI and its carbon footprint
We are in the post-war: the “Trente glorieuse“, with the emergence of strange numeric beings such as flux, hyper-connection, the virtual, the info-sphere, that mark with their footprints cartographic imaginaries, the planning of spaces of control, as well as the analytic of domination. Disciplinary power makes its exit from on high; the new narrative now speaks of networks of power. The centrality of the capitalist exploitation of labour is displaced by a polymorphic domination which has lodged itself in the interior of all kinds of relations: at work, but also at home, at school, on a football pitch, between activists of a civil rights organisation. In sum, power is everywhere. On the other hand, the network utopia participates in a new political imaginary of forms of struggle and organisation which desire to be absolutely horizontal, flexible, light, a-centric. The miracle of the multitude and of revolts without revolution has come to replace the Party, the Union and a dirty kid called the Proletariat.
We could speak of a transformation of the cartographic imaginary, moving from a spatial representation with a centre (arche) to a representation without a centre; From the idea of a central power, a source of sovereignty, belonging to a few, to the idea of a network of power in which everyone is caught up. None of this was the work of any one individual; it was the vibration of an epoch, a climate. The epoch desired and saw itself as anti-dialectical and it celebrated multiplicities against the great oppositions. One finds in Foucault a singular articulation: in his work, there is no binary and global opposition between the dominant and the dominated. He endeavours to theorise a power from below. At the same time and for the same reason, points of resistance are present everywhere. “Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial.”[16]
The climate today seems to be changing. We need other cartographies, other representations of power than this a-centric power, co-extensive with the multiplicity of resistances. And this quite simply because in the relations of power/force with bankocracies without borders, industrial giants, the GAFA …, one loses, one retreats, and, despite our efforts, it is often without a fight. Rather than a decline of the nation-state and its dissolution in the movement of globalisation, the young 21st century presents new forms of hybridisation between an apparatus of a police-state, war machines and a techno-feudalism; rather than a power from below, a “millefeuille”[17] of dominations and exploitations. Foucault did not consider power either as an institution, or as a structure; it is the name of a complex strategic situation in a given society.[18] There is no ontology of power for Foucault. Today, he would surely be the first to try to free himself from himself; to see otherwise, so as to struggle otherwise.
If the Marxist tradition was obsessed by grand strategy, conversely, today, it is remarkable how the “thinkers of the living world” ignore or decide to ignore all thought in a strategic or tactical situation, all relations of power/force. As there was no meaning or direction to History, there is not a Modernity to make land. We have to construct scenes of confrontation, shelters and barricades, which requires, in part, the materialisation of the numeric, the landing, or making land, of IT and AI. This task implies new cartographies that permit drawing lines between barbed fencing, refugee camps and heavy institutions, such as the police-state on the one hand, and the cloud-space and the info-sphere on the other. On the other side, the multiple resistances, the symbolic, real, improbable, incommensurable, necessary struggles, the spontaneous lines of flight, savage cultures, pose the question of new federalisms: not a-centric, but poly-centric.
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Cartographies of struggle
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A certain radical thought still resonates in terms of missed/failed opportunities. It falls under this revolutionary imaginary as an orgasmic apogee at a great dawn, or – its little brother -, intensive insurrectionalism (“we don’t give up!”). As long as the idea of revolution remains bound to this kind of idea, like a limpet attached to its rock, we will only see and we will only analyse moments of giving up and failed opportunities. We have become a sad courage. The first thing that we have to win anew is the precious joy of starting again. And who but the children can teach us this? These children of a young age, before being able to walk, before becoming little men trained to success and to progress, try to stand and fall and fail and before trying yet again, break out in laughter. Let us begin again!
[1] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 58.
[2] [TN: All page references, unless otherwise indicated, are to Maria Kakogianni, Sous le ciel étoilé, une nuit d’éte: Réflexions sur l’anarchie et la revolution, lundimatin, 2026.]
[3] Principle, beginning, commandment
[4] We use the word planet here in an anachronistic sense. The ancient Greeks called all celestial bodies by this name that gave the impression of being shaken, of wandering, in opposition to the bodies that appeared stable, immobile, fixed.
[5] “Origyne” as a female origin.
[6] “Radical Self Care: Angela Davis”, Afropunk, Dec. 17, 2018, YouTube.
[7] Vivian Gornick, Emma Goldman. La révolution comme mode de vie, Essais Payot, 2024.
[8] [TN: At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman, Goldman s lover], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance… My frivolity would only hurl the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, .should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it. Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931).
[9] [TN: La petite mort (lit.?”the little death”) is an expression that refers to a brief loss or weakening of consciousness, and in modern usage refers specifically to a post-orgasm sensation as likened to death. Wikipedia.org]
[10] Auguste Blanqui, “On Revolution” [1850], The Blanqui Archive.
[11] [TN: A reference to central concepts in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.]
[12] [TN: The reference is to the symbolic representation of the revolution or freedom as a young, partially undressed woman. See, famously, Eugène Delacroix’s painting, “Liberty leading the people” (1830)].
[13] Hanane al-Jouri, lundimatin, #395, 19/09/2023.
[14] The Zapatistas refuse to have a constituent text, though they have declarations that serve as references, while the Rojava commune gave itself a constitution. See: Pierre Bance, “La construction de la démocratie directe éclairée par l’expérience du Chiapas et du Rojava”, in Les Juristes anarchistes. Vers de nouvelles utopies concrètes, Paris, classique Garnier, 2024.
[15] Élisée Reclus, L’Évolution, la revolution, et l’idéal anarchique, Lux editeur, 2004, p. 7.
[16] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume 1: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 93-4. [Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 126.]
[17] [TN: The French “millefeuille” pastry – otherwise known as a Napoleon or Vanilla Slice in English – is employed here as a metaphor to suggest a a multiplicity of layered dominations and exploitations.]
[18] “… power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Volume 1: An Introduction, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 93. [Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: la volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 123.]