A secret harmony exists between the earth and the peoples whom it nourishes, and when reckless societies allow themselves to meddle with that which creates the beauty of their domain, they always end up regretting it. In places where the land has been defaced, where all poetry has disappeared from the countryside, the imagination is extinguished, the mind becomes impoverished, and routine and servility seize the soul, inclining it toward torpor and death.
Élisée Reclus, The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society
… the system of unlimited competition … is after all nothing but a continuous implacable war.
William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy
In fact, it is war, a war that has been going on for a long time, a war that unfolds on all levels, a war without frontiers. It is an escalating war that worsens as the anonymity of power increases its strength along with the weakness of those who oppose it.
For many, they have seen but the fire. The majority ignore even that they are the actors of this strange, ongoing struggle between what is shown, what is not and what must not be. … It would be too easy to conclude that there is a war of representation, while this is only one of the aspect of a proteiform struggle, of which the breadth and complexity paradoxically succeeds at dissimulating its existence.
For I could just as well speak of a war against silence, of a war against attention as well as a war against sleep, or again of a war against tedium, of a war against reverie. But also and above all, of a war against passion. In other words, of a war waged against everything “that nothing of value can be extracted from”. (Jonathan Crary. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep)
Annie Le Brun, Ce qui n’a pas de prix
A recent video interview with Annie Le Brun for the lundimatin collective is the occasion to return to her critical work. Below, we share this interview, followed by a second for Le Média, and an excerpt from her essay, Ce qui n’a pas de prix, translated from the french by the NOT BORED! collective.
A beautiful documentary film by Valérie Minetto and written by Minetto and Cécile Vargaftig dedicated to Annie Le Brun entitled, L’échappée, à la poursuite d’Annie Le Brun (2014) (and in this case, with english language subtitles), is well worth the viewing and is available on Vimeo.
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Édouard Jourdain: The savage and the political
Over a series of video recorded interviews, the lundimatin collective has recently engaged with a number of writers to explore the relationships between philosophy, anthropology and anarchism. The series began with Catherine Malabou and her critical reflection on the fragility or absence of any serious philosophical inquiry into anarchism – while some later 20th century philosophers gave considerable attention to the concept of anarchy. With the intuition that anthropology could provide a missing link between the two, the collective then set out to interview anthropologists or writers, philosophers, who work at the borders of anthropology. These include Jean Vioulac (of the series, the only interview recorded only in text), Barbara Glowczewski, Nastassja Martin, Philippe Descola and Alessandro Pignocchi, Patrice Maniglier. And the most recent interview of the series is with Édouard Jourdain (lundimatin, #374, 14/03/2023).
The interviews are in french, but the significance of the effort is such that we felt that the possible language barrier was not reason enough to not try to share something of what has been registered and we can only commend the lundimatin collective for this endeavour.
Below, we share the last interview with Édouard Jourdain (an author who, among other things, has written extensively on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), along with a translation of a review-summary of his recently published essay that is the occasion for the interview: Le Sauvage et le Politique, PUF, 2023.
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