From mexico: State authorities condemned the violence of a women’s protest against sexist police violence and femicide, in a country where on average ten women are murdered every (the Guardian 26/08/2019) …
(from its going down, 20/08/2019)
Just over a week ago, a riotous demonstrations broke out in Mexico City after it was discovered that four police officers had abducted a 17 year-old woman and raped her in a police car. This is not an isolated incident, and soon feminist, anarchist, and community organizations marched on the Attorney General’s office smashing windows, destroying office materials, and writing graffiti on the side of the building.
Then Friday, August 16th, the demonstrations led by women’s collectives continued with people marching in the city against the police, attacking a metro bus depot as well as setting fire to a police station. According to ABC News:
Continue readingThey chanted “Rapist police!” and “My friends protect me, you don’t!” and some trashed a bus station, breaking windows and gates. The crowd moved on to a police station, where they smashed windows and set a fire on the second floor. Many then went to the nearby Independence Monument, the symbolic center of the city, and spray painted the base of the stone monument with slogans like “damned pigs!” The demonstrations have become known as the “glitter protests” after marchers earlier this week doused the city’s police chief in pink glitter.
Giorgio Agamben: Challenging the anarchy of power through the anarchy of forms-of-life
Smettetela di pensare ai vostri diritti,
smettetela di chiedere il potere.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Pci ai giovani
We return to the work of Giorgio Agamben, in the translation of a lecture from 2013, dedicated to the concept of destituent power. If we were not as “fast” as the lundimatin collective in posting this text (the original audio and transcript can be found here), we believe that it has lost none of its importance in the intervening years.
At the heart of this reflection is a questioning of a series of concepts and conceptual oppositions that have fundamentally structured western political thought and practice (including modern, anti-capitalist politics): constituent and constituted power, enemy and friend, economy and politics (oikos and polis), naked life and particular life (zoe and bios), production and action (poiesis and praxis); concepts which trap thought and practice in a logic of inclusion and exclusion, and condemn all insurrection and revolution to repeating the same tragedies of only substituting the old power by the new.
Of what interest is all of this, some may ask? For many, before the multiple horrors of capitalism, what is called for is militant activism. Yet if we keep in mind, as we should, that “theory” is but a way of seeing, and that our ways of seeing solidify in practices and institutions of power, then “seeing” differently, that is, reflecting theoretically, in dialogue with the ways in which we live/are forced to live, is essential.
What Agamben’s reflection then proposes is that we endeavour to think beyond the concepts cited above. More precisely, a truly radical politics must, instead of imagining or working to build a “counter-power” or “counter-hegemony”, strive instead towards the destitution of power, that is, the undoing, deactivating, the désœuvrement of existing relations of power – what Agamben has also called elsewhere profanation; something which in turn demands not any particular action or praxis as such, but the creation of ways of life or forms-of-life.
Hierarchical power works through the appropriation and definition of life (of anarchy, of anomie). To contest this power, Agamben proposes that we not so much “overthrow” power, as render it irrelevant, a plaything, thereby opening up spaces and times for the creation-expression of forms-of-life in which the way we live is at stake in how we live.
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