From the date of his first publication, in 1962, to the present, Tomáz Ibáñez has engaged with anarchism with a depth, sensitivity and generosity matched by few of his contemporaries. To walk through this work is to discover a complex path, like the weave of a rope. But like a rope, held together by a seemingly small set of intuitions or ideas, or perhaps even a method, that Ibáñez continually returns to, not repetitively, but as with an expanding musical refrain, turning ever again on itself, simultaneously changing and clarifying its first steps and the next.
This is a body of work that can in no way be read as “pure theory”, whatever that might mean. Ibáñez’s written reflections bare the traces of a “militancy” that has always marked his life, from a childhood exile to France because of his mother’s anarchist affinities, to his early participation in French and exiled Spanish anarchist youth and student groups, to May 68, to his return to Spain after Franco’s death in 1975, joining the effort to reconstruct the CNT, and the less than negligible work in various anarchist magazines and newspapers.
The seemingly esoteric or more philosophical nature of many of Ibáñez essays are both the herald and the artisan of that very same militancy.
One of the first essays posted on Autonomies was Ibáñez’s 1984 essay, Farewell to the Revolution. This early essay not only remains relevant, but in hindsight and now read in the light of the essay that we share with this post, already points to Ibáñez’s concern with an anarchism freed from dogma, or more profoundly, an anarchism without the comforting conceptual and political ballast of a past that is no longer ours, and cannot be so.
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René Char: Poetry in/as resistance
… si nul n’est bon volontairement, nul n’est esclave du Bien.
Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence
In old days men were absorbed in wars, filling all their existence with marches, raids, victories, but now all that is a thing of the past, leaving behind it a great void which there is so far nothing to fill: humanity is searching for it passionately, and of course will find it. Ah, if only it could be quickly! [a pause] If, don’t you know, hard work were united with education and education with hard work. . . [Looks at his watch] But, really, it’s time for me to go. . . .
Vershinin, from The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov
The illusion of Chekhov’s character lies perhaps in the belief that the void can or should be filled, the very illusion that ultimately feeds war. Power is such an illusion. It is a force that seeks to fill the emptiness that underlies, that is present in, all that we are. And perhaps a step can be taken in the direction of freeing ourselves from this illusion by living in this emptiness, or what the poet René Char describes in these words: “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us that keeps awake courage and silence.” (Leaves of Hypnos)
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, writes of war as a joust of wills and victory “as the onrush of a conquering force” that is “like the bursting of pent-up waters into a chasm a thousand fathoms deep”.
Power abhors a vacuum.
If wars then are our tragic fate, their mere acceptance as something to be strategically and tactically thought through or as something to be hunted to extinction by moralism and law, is both absurd and obscene. The question is rather how we are to face this reality, ethically.
There is a long tradition of human reflection on the ethics of war (and we are not here speaking of just war theory or the laws of war), on how the seemingly inevitable engagement with it, can possibly push beyond it.
We share a selection of passages from René Char’s notes of resistance of 1943-44, the Leaves of Hypnos.
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