Autonomies

War conducted by states against “communitarianism.” Implosion of popular communities. Negligence toward the weaving of our interdependences. And then, as if this social disaster wasn’t deep enough, emancipators who have nothing better to propose than the prisons of identity politics. A wretched fragmentation indeed.

To this, however, we may oppose another fragmentation, communal and generative in character, at odds with the production of value, beginning with the valorization of ourselves and our supposed identity. A fragmentation motivated by the joy of hospitality, which emerges in the welcoming of difference: communities through heterogenesis. These are the old anarchist values of mutual aid, forms of sharing that are always situated somewhere in particular, and which engender places that express them. These are the values that enable us to shun social determinations as well as any idea of foundation. We are all ungrounded [des effondrés]. We’re free to unfold our interdependencies over a multitude of paths that lead us to new perceptions and sensibilities. That is how we can overcome our fears in the face of the state-created chaos that is building up to new Armageddons.

From the Ill Will collective, an essay by Josep Rafanell i Orra (20/06/2024).

Neoliberal society is in freefall. As the fiction of a social totality crumbles away, we are increasingly confronted by two opposed forms of fragmentation: one designed to terrorize our souls, siphon our living energy, while hyper-mobilizing our bodies through constant exposure to vulnerability; another emerging within the cracks and caesurae of the economic order, through the restoration of a communal fabric of life in the passages between souls, fragment-by-fragment, until a life world comes alive between us. By insisting upon this distinction, the following text seeks to clarify a common misunderstanding related to the anti-political project of communist rupture: to push for desertion and secession from the political project of representation — a project defined first of all by its cultivated negligence toward our interdependencies on one another — does not “imply cutting ourselves off from a fantasized social body, but rather establishing fragmentary worlds within it, where the communities-in-process can materialize and we can relearn to cultivate hospitality and new ways to link together.”

First published in May 2024 on Lundi Matin, “Against Liberal Fascism” was written to accompany the Spanish translation of Josep Rafanell i Orra’s Fragment the World(Éditions Divergences, 2018). October of 2023 saw the release of a major follow-up work, entitled A Short Treatise on Cosmoanarchism, which will hopefully find its way into English translation shortly. For more of his writing in English, see “The World Returns,” “Carnivals and Revolt,” and “Crowds Against Pathology.”