Considering the story of my life, it is obvious to me that I cannot produce a cinematic “work” in the usual sense of the term.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
In the summer heat of a southern European capital city swept by tides of mass tourism, tax evading pensioners and “nomads”, real-estate speculation, gentrification and “touristification” – while its hinterlands burn and the physical infrastructure that makes possible this capital flight cracks and breaks -, a small, alternative cinema organises a retrospective of Guy Debord’s films. Whatever the motivation for the showings, the timing seemed more than fitting.
Official news is elsewhere. Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers — the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens. The world of the rulers is the world of the spectacle. The cinema suits them well. Regardless of its subject matter, the cinema presents heroes and exemplary conduct modeled on the same old pattern as the rulers.
This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it was always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention. And end up being rather disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? When did we miss our chance? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We’ve let things slip away.
A few months ago, the Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli army a few kilometres off the coast of Gaza. On August 31, a flotilla of several dozen boats set sail for the Mediterranean in the hope of breaking the blockade that surrounds, starves, and genocides Gaza. The most realistic minds, as well as the most cynical, see this as a futile or senseless attempt given the power against which the sailboats can only crash. In this excellent text, the author and director Sylvain George demonstrates and defends the exact opposite. What is at stake in this flotilla is a shift in our political reference points; incompleteness as a path, vulnerability and obstinacy as power, fragmentation as form.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, from Allegoria ed effetti del Buono e del Cattivo Governo, 1338-39
A good definition of political power is that which characterises it as the art of placing people in false relationships. This, and nothing else, is what power does first and foremost, in order to then govern them as it wishes. Once they have allowed themselves to be drawn into oblique relationships in which they cannot recognise themselves, people are easily manipulated and oriented as desired. If they so easily believe the lies proposed to them, it is because the relationships in which, without realizing it, they already find themselves are false.
The first step in a political strategy worthy of the name is therefore the search for a way out of the false relationships into which power has placed people in order to govern them. But this is precisely not easy, because a false relationship is precisely one from which there is no visible way out. Something like a way out becomes possible only if we understand that the false relationship is the very form of power, that to be in a false relationship is to be in a relationship of power. That is, the relationship is false not because we lie, but because we lack awareness of its essentially political character. Whether relationships that are apparently intimate and private, or those technically or socially determined, are in truth always already political—that is, we find ourselves in a false relationship from the very beginning—this awareness is the only way to fundamentally change the way we experience them.
In every city in the world, no matter how small, there is at least one person who calls themselves an anarchist. This solitary and unusual presence must conceal a meaning that transcends the order of politics, just as the triumphant dispersal of seeds is not limited to a mere struggle for the survival of a botanical lineage. Perhaps the “psychic” evolution of political species corresponds to the wisdom of seminal sprinkling in nature. In like manner, anarchist ideas were never oriented according to the intensive methods of ideological-partisan “planting”: they already spread following the inorganic undulations of the plebeian grass. A doctrine constructed in the mid-nineteenth century managed to spread from a rather flimsy base, no more than a handful of people settled in Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, until it became known in almost every inhabited corner on earth. Thus, anarchism can be considered, after Christian evangelisation and capitalist expansion, the most successful migratory experience in world history. Perhaps this is the reason why the word “anarchy,” ancient and resonant, is still here, despite the dire predictions that declared the end of libertarian history. To mention anarchism implies a kind of “miracle of the word”, a linguistic resonance almost equivalent to waking up alive each new day. That the anarchist ideal has appeared in history can also be considered a miracle, a gift of politics, politics being, in turn, a gift of the human imagination. Undoubtedly, the persistence of that word is sustained by its critical power, in which both panic and consolation reside, both derived from the “gritty” style and the desire for urgency characteristic of anarchists: their biographies have always taken on the contours of hot coals. But the anarchist idea also survives because the meanings it absorbs condense the human malaise caused by hierarchy. However, for most people, anarchism, as political knowledge and as a community project, has been transformed into a mystery; not necessarily as something unknown or unknowable, but something similar to a mystery: incomprehensible, inaudible, invisible.
What will remain of the word “anarchists” in a future dictionary? A footnote, the conceptual definition of a sect of conspirators, the cardiogram that recorded the historical ups and downs of an extreme idea, the silhouette of an extinct animal? It is inevitable that, even in the best of cases, the aberrant features will be highlighted and the archetype that has long identified the anarchist in the political imagination of modern liberalism will end up being faceted: a monster. This spectral shadow ends up being curiously reassuring, as the police, and also—not to mince words—quite a few political philosophers and historians, tend to emphasise the facts of the record in order to leave the motivations behind the acts out of the picture. These are the classic attributes: the bomb, the call to sedition, the blasphemous gesture, the art of the barricade, regicide, the stale air of the catacomb, the undisciplined attitude, the clandestine life; and exaggeration. But this identity-kit is scarcely distinct. Although all the data gathered seems to lead to the antechamber of political hell, the plain truth is that the biographies of anarchists can perfectly well be recounted as the lives of saints. There is of course the violence, and the account of their uprisings is not inaccurate, nor is the “demonic” feature of the events in which they played a leading role negligible. But only contingently were anarchists storm birds; in general, the motive for their activities was constructive, and their lives resembled more those of evangelists and dissidents than those of “cursed poets” or tormented nihilists.
Christian Ferrer’s work on anarchism is among the most erudite and eloquent that we know. Refusing to limit himself to merely describing anarchist acts of militancy, or to fruitless ideological debates, he unearths what we could call the “longue durée” of anarchism’s history; its subterranean movements that were fed and feed still so much more than the spectacle of political commentary would lead us to believe.
In a modest effort to share his work with English language readers, we share two essays, along with the introduction (below), from a short anthology of his essays entitled Cabezas de tormenta; Ensayos sobre lo ingobernable/Storm heads; Essays on the ungovernable (2004).
Marc Chagall, On the way, On the Road or The Wandering Jew/En route, Sur le chemin ou Le Juif errant, 1925
As a complementary text to our last post by Noah Brehmer, we share a further essay by him, again with his generosity and the kind permission of the journal Alienocene(18/08/2025) exploring the concept of “exodus” as an ontological and moral-political possibility, one that again endeavours to think us past sovereignty.
Abstract
Exodus threads through the history of political praxis as that ever present temptation to overcome one’s incompleteness here through an outside there. Making its canonical appearance in the Torah, the strategy was not only employed as a mythological technology for the establishment of the second (BC) and third (AD) millennium Israelite theocracies. In a present characterized by entropy, enclosure, emplacement – the maddening imperative to subsume all life forms into the valorization process of capital – this phantasmagorical desire for exodus swells.
The study takes us through a genealogy of the concept and asks what the stakes would be in practicing a non-denialist politics of flight from a world we can not simply transcend. Confronting the limits of exodus, the exilic is introduced as a theory of movement that refuses any transcendental exteriors to our shared condition; instead grounding itself in the immanence of the threshold as neither within the political domain nor outside it, but in a zone of obstinate tension and situated inter-territoriality.
From The Wonders of Creation by Zakariya ibn Muhammad Qazwini, circa 1283. Source: Library of Congress
In the post-Nazi era, the idea that it is legitimate to decide whom we should cohabit with has held firm. “To each their own home!” It is here that populist xenophobia finds its greatest strength; crypto-racism is its springboard. However, it is often unknown that this is a direct legacy of Hitlerism, i.e. the first project at a biopolitical remodelling of the planet, and one which purported to fix stable criteria for cohabitation. The discriminatory act claims an exclusive place for itself. Whoever accomplishes this act erects himself as a sovereign subject who, fantasizing about a supposed identity between himself and that place, demands his rights of ownership. As if the other, who has always already preceded him, did not have any rights or had never existed.
Donatella Di Cesare, Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration
Carl Schmitt wrote in a 1950 forward to his work, The Nomos of the Earth, that “Human thinking again must be directed to the elemental orders of its terrestrial being here and now.” The essay that we share below, by Noah Brehmer under the collective alias Vilna Goles, “We Do Not Belong Here: From the Diaspora to Jalut”, endeavours to do just that, but freed from the frame of “sovereignty”, the central concept of Schmitt’s legal-political philosophy.
For Carl Schmitt, the power of sovereignty is created and expressed by the decision over who belongs and who does not under the constitution of a legal order. It is and remains, as a permanent possibility within the political domain, an exceptionalact that includes and excludes, that defines friends and foes, and without which there is no political community.
While sovereignty is not, according to Schmitt, the same as the state, it finds its paradigmatic expression, in the modern era, in the nation-state. Furthermore, underlying its varying historical manifestations is an even more fundamental act: “land appropriation”.
[I]n some form, the constitutive process of land-appropriation is found at the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth, every empire. This is true as well for the beginning of every historical epoch. Not only logically, but also historically, land-appropriation precedes the order that follows it from it. It constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law. It is the reproductive root in the normative order of history. All further property relations – communal or individual, public or private property, and all forms of possession and use in society and in international law – are derived from this radical title. All subsequent law and everything promulgated and enacted thereafter as decrees and commands are nourished, to use Heraclitus’ word, by this source.
(Carl Scmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, Telos Press, 2006, p. 48)
If we consider anarchism as a criticism of sovereignty – and not just a criticism of the modern state –, then it is also invited to think anew our “terrestrial being here and now”, our ways of being in or dwelling on the earth.
(This invitation, for anarchism, would extend to a whole series of concepts central to the tradition: individual and collective freedom, autonomy, self-government. Divorced from the notion of “sovereignty”, what becomes of these notions?)
Noah Brehmer seeks the resources for this rethinking in the Jewish and Palestinian Arab experiences of “diasporic estrangement”.
To my Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel:
My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of this prison where I am held as a revolutionary by this country that has chased you away. For twenty to thirty years the lies of the Jewish Moroccan upper class have led you into the trap of Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Muslim Moroccan upper class under the tutelage of the Moroccan regime, in fact a feudal enslavement supported by racist police violence, has done the rest. Since 1961 this regime has deliberately been selling Zionism to you.
Guy Debord’s film eye
Considering the story of my life, it is obvious to me that I cannot produce a cinematic “work” in the usual sense of the term.
Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
In the summer heat of a southern European capital city swept by tides of mass tourism, tax evading pensioners and “nomads”, real-estate speculation, gentrification and “touristification” – while its hinterlands burn and the physical infrastructure that makes possible this capital flight cracks and breaks -, a small, alternative cinema organises a retrospective of Guy Debord’s films. Whatever the motivation for the showings, the timing seemed more than fitting.
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