We share below an essay by Iman Ganji, which he very generously passed onto us and for which we are grateful. It is a powerful and eloquent reflection on what may be called the passions of revolution for our time.
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From lundi matin #450, 04/11/2024.
Lahoucine Duvaast sent us this document from Fresnes, where he has been interned since a certain event. He points out that the signatories mentioned at the end of the document are completely fictitious.
Déclaration universelle des droites de l’homme
Year 1 of complete liberalism and its universal police force
Preamble
Acknowledging the recognition of the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family, blah blah blah…,
Acknowledging that the knowledge of and respect for so-called human rights has led to vaguely more equality etc.,
Acknowledging that it is essential that human rights be crushed for the greater good of friendly relations between a few,
The United Republican Humanist International proclaims the present Universal Declaration of the Right(s)-Wing of Man.
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The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
…
The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
… there are some books that allow one to get a glimpse, as is also true of a lesser number of encounters, of a more accomplished world than the present pestilential decomposition.
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 6, 1986)
A abecedarium/a primer is “a small book for teaching children how to read”. Furthermore, a literate person is, according to the definition published by UNESCO in 1962, one who “has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainment in reading, writing and arithmetic make it possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development”.
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What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For anyone who has not renounced the desire for authentic communication, for anyone who is not an impotent intellectual, the real scandal is not the fact that the information technicians lie to us more or less often, but the reinforcement, by way of their falsifications as much by way of their revelations, of our separation from the practical means of truth; a separation that is evidently the origin of the imposture of the communications media and all their particular lies, rather than the unfortunate result of their policies and their interests.
Stupefaction (Abasourdir) – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
Stupefaction – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 5, 1985)
Merely by examining the modern means at its disposal, the process of stupefaction—deafening, “extreme bewildering by means of a loud noise”—leaves us vaguely dazzled by the multiplicity of transmitters that contribute with “noise” of every kind to the stupefying present, to the loss of consciousness of our time. We shall encompass a large number of them under one heading, by tranquilly asserting that all existing information must be considered, by virtue of its most general function, to be socially harmful noise.1
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… the reality that we start from is ignorance. This appears to us to be a human faculty whose exercise must be truly familiar and an everyday experience for all our contemporaries; thus, it is a more solid and more easily observable reality than the immense field of knowledge with which they preserve—and we preserve—less direct or more timid relations. Any Encyclopaedia that takes human knowledge as its object and does not begin by asserting and assuming as a general starting point the fact that men are socially separated from that knowledge, can only participate in that popular soup of culture that is nothing but a distribution carried out by specialists of pre-masticated fragments of knowledge that float in a broth of ideology, a distribution that participates in the reproduction of ignorance and its paternalistic maintenance. Instead, our method consists in a development that starts with the immediate sense of privation in the face of science and technology, and with the revolt that this privation inspires; it is a grandiose conception that never loses sight of the totality, and tries to preserve it and to master it; it penetrates directly to the core of unrest in everything that exists and takes nothing for granted.
Preliminary Discourse – Encyclopédie des Nuisances (November 1984)
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the magazine Encyclopédie des Nuisances (subtitled Dictionnaire de la déraison dans les arts, les sciences et les metiers, in reference to Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers by Diderot and D’Alembert). The project was one of the most significant “theoretical” interventions in the radical critique of Capital of the late 20th century. A collective endeavour, it followed in the footsteps of the Situationist International, though with some distance. The main editors were Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Pierre Lepetit, Guy Bernelas, Jacques Fredet, François Martin, Pascal Moatti, Jacques Philipponneau, Christian Sébastiani and Jean-Pierre Gomez.
Dedicated to a total and radical critique of capitalism, the authors of the many entries to the Encyclopédie would elaborate a series of analyses and criticisms of different, yet interconnected, dimensions of capitalist social production and reproduction, having always at their centre the “ignorance and dispossession” that animates the whole. Through this exercise, the Encyclopédie sought to keep critical language and the historical memory rebellion against alienation alive, while trying to contribute, however modestly, to the next revolutionary crisis.
Over the course of this month, we will share a series of the entries from the Encyclopédie, for the continuing relevance of its critique and to do our small part in the same rebellion.
We share below the first part of the “Preliminary Discourse” of the first number of the Encyclopédie, of November 4th 1984, preceded by a brief introduction by one of the original members of the collective, Miguel Amorós.
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The force of Constantine Cavafy’s poetry continues to resonate in our times.
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With the generous permission of Nika Dubrovsky and the David Graeber Institute, we share an article by David Graeber on his experience and reflection on daily life under Israeli state occupation.
Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank
Year: 2015
In Nablus, every street seems to have a men’s hair salon. There are literally thousands of them. Most stay open until at least 2 at night; often other than mosques they’re the only places lit up and open at two at night; and it seems any time you pass by one, there are likely to be four or five nicely coiffed young men clustered inside, watching someone get a haircut. The odd thing is that women’s hair salons seem entirely absent. Occasionally you do see impressive posters for women’s cosmetics and hair products; often, the women are blonde (and a surprising number of Palestinians in Nablus are, in fact, blonde; even children), but the shops are absent. I asked a friend why this was. He explained that while Palestinian society was traditionally considered the most liberal Arab society outside of Beirut, and young women never used to go with their hair covered, things started to change in the ‘90s with the political rise of Hamas. But in the case of women’s hair salons, there was another, much more immediate factor. During the ‘80s, Israeli intelligence agents began taking advantage of their existence to spike the sweet tea with knock-out drugs, and take nude pictures of women so as to blackmail their husbands into turning collaborator or informant. So now women’s salons exist, but they’re not visible from the street, and women no longer take tea from strangers.
My first reaction on hearing the story was: Did this really happen? It sounds like the very definition of a paranoid fantasy. But Palestinians in Nablus are living in an environment where insane things do happen; where there actually are people conspiring against them; spies, informants, security forces of a dozen varieties including many with advanced degrees in psychology and social theory do exist and are actively trying to come up with ways to destroy social trust and tear apart the fabric of society. Innumerable stories circulate. Only some are true. How can anyone possibly know which?
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Palestinian
This name
Today more than ever we must pronounce it, articulate it, utter it
chant it, shout it, whisper it, sing it
Until our last breath
This name, this witness
Before the night swallows it up forever
I am writing these few words from Beirut, once again under intense enemy fire. And the south of the country, of which there is almost nothing left, and the Bekaa.
(Source: lundi matin, #448, 21/10/2024)
In Gaza, the death is so constant, the devastation so relentless, the intention so explicit, there can be no acceptance – only rupture, withdrawal, disorientation. There can be no accommodation with what is happening. And as Israel reaches another sickening summit, what becomes undeniably clear is that the powers that let it all get this far cannot be reasoned with and cannot be shamed. They can only be rebelled against.
Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, 28/10/2024
We share a 1948 statement from the International Jewish Labor Bund, in New York, after the founding of the state of Israel and an open letter to the New York Times expressing great alarm that Zionists implicated in atrocities were given a warm reception in the United States. Signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish notables.
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Encyclopédie des Nuisances: Movement as illusion, stillness as meaninglessness (IV)
Introduction
It is said that the automobile industry created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world, chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems—cities and a world for cars, not for people.
The automobile is a murderous weapon, responsible for 40,300 to 50,000 deaths and one and-a-half to two million disabling injuries yearly in the U.S. alone. Between 1913 and 1985, 2,530,119 people were killed in the U.S. in traffic accidents. Countless others were killed and injured on the job, in the production of the automobile. These figures have been on the rise all over the “civilized” world for the past five years. They are called “accidents” and yet they are assumed, calculated, expected—acceptable losses that go with the territory. Sterile, cold statistics somehow blur the bitter reality of this horrifying yet preordained massive slaughter.
The automobile is the embodiment of a culture of waste—the waste of human lives, of natural resources, the waste of people’s time and energies. A blatant example of material waste is the phenomenon of the abandoned car: 7 million cars are junked each year in the U.S. The automobile lays waste to the landscape with its unending network of roads and freeways. It lays waste to the environment, creating acid rains that critically threaten the ecosystem, polluting the city air and thus perilously increasing the incidence of respiratory diseases. In its production, each automobile creates 50 barrels of toxic waste.
And we waste our days on this commodity that wastes us. Think of the time spent shopping for and purchasing a car, buying car insurance, getting licenses, driving permits; the time spent in maintenance and repair; the time spent waiting in your car in traffic jams, on the road, waiting at lights, in gas stations, in auto supply stores, in traffic court; the time spent looking for parking spaces and running nervously back and forth to parking meters; and worst of all, think of all the time spent at work making money to pay for it all. The car is clearly the focal commodity of capitalism. It purports to free us, but it binds us tightly in to a maniacal mechanical circle that parcels out our time in a frenetic stop and go.
City dwellers grow up listening to the constant roar of freeway traffic, engine noises, squealing brakes, and horns outside their windows. Most seem unaware when the urban disquiet breaks the “acceptable” decibel levels. Most seem not to notice when yet another “necessary” invention, like the car alarm, fills the day and night with countless frantic interruptions. Perhaps they adapt somewhat to the noise. Perhaps they grow quietly insane.
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