Christian Ferrer
One
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.
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Giorgio Agamben: On False Relationships
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.
Quodlibet, September 1, 2025