After months of lockdown, during which the state continued to rape, murder and massacre, Colombians are out in the streets again to protest their criminal government.
After lockdown, anti-government protests resume in Colombia
José Antonio Gutiérrez D.
By late 2019, a historic wave of anti-government protests was sweeping through Latin America, with unprecedented uprisings taking place in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Haiti and Colombia. For the besieged governments that were part of a new pack of right-wing parties that had come to power after the receding of the pink tide, help arrived in the form of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing national lockdowns which effectively — but temporarily — quelled the protests.
… although she [nature] made all other animate creatures face the earth for grazing,she made the human alone upright and roused him to look on the sky,as if on his family and former home; and she shaped the appearance of his face so as to mold in it the character hidden within.
Cicero, On the laws
All living beings are in the open/in openness; they show themselves and communicate to each other, but only humans have a face, only they make their appearance and their communication with others their own fundamental experience, only humans makes of the face the place of their own truth.
“ … All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need, intact and safe. We’re not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good. We are model citizens, in our own special way; we walk the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be. We’re stopped and searched occasionally, but there’s nothing on our persons to incriminate us. The organization is flexible, very loose, and fragmentary. Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we’re waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It’s not pleasant, but then we’re not in control, we’re the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”
“Do you really think they’ll listen then?”
“If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Thousands on the roads, the abandoned rail tracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, travelling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war’s over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
What would a God be to whom neither prayers nor sacrifices were addressed? And what would a law be that knew neither command nor enforcement? What is a word that has neither meaning nor command, but is truly held in the beginning—indeed, before the beginning?
Giorgio Agamben
Reading our times with Giorgio Agamben, we share below parts of his recent essay entitled, Quando la casa brucia (Quodlibet) and which was translated and published by (and which can be read in its entirety at the site of) the ill will editionscollective. We have interspersed our own comments among the selected passages.
If we have pursued this exercise, however modest, it is because we believe that Agamben’s contribution to our self-understanding continues to be fundamental.
Head-on war is the mistake we make time after time There is a way around it, way to outflank technology, short circuit “energy crisis”: retreat & silence cunning courage and love
Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #58
Diane di Prima, famous beat poet, radical, anarchist, activist, died at age 86 on October 25, 2020. One of the better tributes to her was an interview with her daughter, Dominique di Prima, on CBC radio in Canada:
Below, we share a selection from Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters May 1968 – December 1971. The full collection of letters may be found here. A collection of her work entitled The Poetry Deal is also available online here.
We share a statement from leftist youth of azerbaijan against the war over nagorno-karabakh. Its english translation was passed onto to us by the notbored.org collective, whom we warmly thank.
Anti-War Declaration of the Leftist Youth of Azerbaijan (1)
“Our enemy is not an Armenian; our enemies are the people in power.”
The most recent escalation of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh region(2) once again shows the degree to which the system of the Nation-States has been surpassed by today’s realities.
With the Earth still spinning around, with the Sun still shining bright, Oh Lord, grant everyone’s wishes to make both ends meet: To the wise man give a wisdom, to the coward give a horse, To the happy man give some money … But please do remember me as well.
With the Earth still spinning around, Oh Lord, Thy Will Be Done! He, who is hungry for power, make him eat his fill, He who is liberal, give him a break at least, until the end of the day. Give repentance to Cain… But please do remember me as well.
I know, you can do everything, as I trust you and your wisdom, Just like a soldier killed in battle believes he is living in Paradise, Like every ear believes Your Soft Speech…. As we do believe ourselves, though we know not what we are doing.
Oh Lord my God, you’re my green-eyed ONE, With the Earth still spinning around: Something the Earth finds very strange indeed, Even though, there is still time and fire to travel in space, May you grant everyone’s little wishes…. But do remember me as well. May you grant everyone’s little wishes …. But do remember me as well.
Bulat Okudzhava, François Villon’s Prayer
The essence of politics can be subsumed in the question: what are individuals capable of when they meet, organize, think and take decisions? In love, it is about two people being able to handle difference and make it creative. In politics, it is about finding out whether a number of people, a mass of people in fact, can create equality. And just as the family exists at the level of love to socialize its impact, at the level of politics the power of the State exists to repress its enthusiasms. The same prickly relation exists between politics as a practical, collective way of thinking through the issue of power with the State as the instrument for its management and regulation, and the issue of love with the unbridled invention of Two and the family as the fundamental unit of ownership and egotism.
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
The politics of sex and sexuality is often read purely ideologically. Patriarchal-state oppression is to be countered by sexual liberation; in both instances, sex is appropriated politically, to be given form in political thought and institutions. Yet human sexuality escapes both. It can never be fully politically instrumentalised and efforts to do so can only produce aberrations of desire and relations of control. If this is perhaps obvious under totalitarian regimes (whether State-socialist or liberal-capitalist), it is no less the case under regimes of “free-love”.
If how we love is not politically irrelevant, nor free of political power, it cannot be equated with it without destroying love. And the violence of reading love politically is the drama of Dusan Makavejev’s brilliant film, WR, Mysteries of the Organism (1971).
For Makavajev, the “body” and “sex-sexuality” are not to be read as manifestos, but as fragile “adventure playgrounds”. (Raymond Durgnat, cited in Richard Porton)
In gratitude to the CrimethInc. collective (13/10/2020) for reminding us of this work, we share their recent celebratory post dedicated to the film.
From the CrimethInc. Collective (15/10/2020), a reflection on the chilean uprising …
Chile: Looking Back on a Year of Uprising – What Makes Revolt Spread—and What Hinders It? The Fight for Dignity and the Campaign for a New Constitution
October 18, 2020 marks the one-year anniversary of the revolt in Chile. In Chile, the US, and beyond, we stand at the intersection of a pandemic, an economic crisis, and growing uprisings against the police. In this tangled situation, demands for police abolition erupt in a context in which many people imagine that only increased police intervention can manage this moment of crisis.
Sovereignty’s gradual slide toward the darkest areas of police law, however, has at least one positive aspect that is worthy of mention here. What the heads of state, who rushed to criminalize the enemy with such zeal, have not yet realized is that this criminalisation can at any moment be turned against them. There is no head of state on Earth today who, in this sense, is not virtually a criminal. Today, those who should happen to wear the sad redingote of sovereignty know that they may be treated as criminals one day by their colleagues. And certainly we will not be the ones to pity them. The sovereigns who willingly agreed to present themselves as cops or executioners, in fact, now show in the end their original proximity to the criminal.
The revolutionary potential of abolitionist demands
Andrew Lee,
The most recent cycle of revolts against anti-Blackness and policing in the United States carried over a slogan from the protests in the wake of Trayvon Martin murder in 2012: “Black Lives Matter!” Alongside it, a new demand was voiced: “Abolish the police!” A statement of fact followed by a statement of intent.
Anarchists, as Amedeo Bertolo so clearly expressed, act and think within the permanent tension between anarchy as ideal and as lived. The mistake is to believe that this tension can be surpassed, set aside, in a finally realised anarchy, or worse, stultified in fixed sub-ideologies which are of interest only to an anarchist priesthood. The truth is rather that the tension should be assumed as irremovable, as irremediable, but that it is precisely here where freedom and equality lie.
To share, an essay for reflection …
Who do the passionate communards of our time work for?
(An earlier translation of this piece was published with anarchist news. We share this translation, with changes).
I will become a worker: such is the idea that stops me, when the mad rages push me towards the battle of Paris – where, however, so many workers continue to die while I write to you! Work now, never again. (1)
Rimbaud
Since 1871 – the year in which the “accursed poet” wrote this letter -, it was not necessary to be a “diviner” to see the obvious: the masses of workers who fought on the barricades in Paris continued to work. That “wildcat strike” in front of the Versailles authority was, in turn, a new job that produced new obligations and condemned them to perpetuate work in saecula saeculorum. Such a profound reflection, in the midst of a necromancing trance, probably prompted Rimbaud to ask himself the question: who were the passionate communards working for?, thereby prophesising a system of domination based on direct democracy as the axis of political-social management, which ensured the permanence of the authority and the continuity of work.
If everyone were able to look closely within themselves, they would realise that everyone from below is mad, that we are all mad, and that we live, from below, in a very secret madness which allows us, from there, the most unfamiliar boldness, of leaps and connections with others and the world. And so we feel, from below, but with clarity, the condition of the insanity of normality, the simplification and the misery of the organisation and of the social life in which, from above, everyone participates. So, what happens above is that we act as if we believe in it, when in that sense we know (from below) that we are leading a life of fiction and acting in poor play (real life), supported only by the “fear of living” which was established in the beginning of time (with History) of each and everyone. There lies the true utopia, the place without a place for desire, while the ordinary ideal utopias, which want to marry Reality, are therefore condemned to be located in the Future, the space of the dominant illusion which is called Reality. But the real utopia is here, now, in me where I am no real person. And it may be that the only difference between the ones and the others is in the degree of faith, insofar as each one identifies with his real (fictitious) personage and becomes, consequently, insensitive to the divine madness which runs through us, from below, between the flesh.
“En la hora de nuestra muerte”
If someone asks, … why the attempt to de-realise Reality, or does it even makes sense, it must be answered, first, that Reality is both a product of and a support for Power that weighs on the living and on us as people and it endeavours to close off possibilities of life and reason; and, secondly, that, despite the oppressive and crippling effect of that Power, it is clear that Reality is never as made and as sure as we are supposed to believe, as evidenced by the very fact that Fathers, Priests of the Soul, Statesmen, the Media, vulgarised Science are daily determined to demonstrate the fatality and completeness of Reality, or, that Reality is all that there is.
But this is a lie, and it is not necessary to go looking for reasons or justifications for the war: because for the love of the truth, that is, the discovery of falsehood, reasons are not lacking, right?
“Presentación”
Agustín García Calvo, Contra la realidad: Estudios de Lenguas y de cosas
Giorgio Agamben: Becoming faceless
Returning to our loss of face in pandemic times …
A country without a face
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet
The face and the mask
… although she [nature] made all other animate creatures face the earth for grazing,she made the human alone upright and roused him to look on the sky,as if on his family and former home; and she shaped the appearance of his face so as to mold in it the character hidden within.
Cicero, On the laws
All living beings are in the open/in openness; they show themselves and communicate to each other, but only humans have a face, only they make their appearance and their communication with others their own fundamental experience, only humans makes of the face the place of their own truth.
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