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Title: baedan
Author: baedan
Date: summer 2012
Language: en
Topics: queer, anti-civ, nihilism, anti-social, wildness, domestication, sexuality, gender, sex
Source: authors’ manuscript, baedan — journal of queer nihilism — issue one

baedan

But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure

in a single second?

~ C. Baudelaire

The Anti-Social Turn

No Future, Edelman’s magnum opus of queer negativity, offers a series of

crucial lessons for baedlings; that is, for those of us whose queerness

means the refusal of society and not any negotiation with or within it.

In our reading and use—or abuse—of Edelman’s singular work, we have no

choice but to take him to task for his academic form, his position

within institutionalized queer theory, and the separation between his

theory and practice. His project fails in that it locates queer

negativity within various cultural productions—literature, film—and yet

never works to unveil this negation in the context of lived revolt or of

active struggle against the society he purports to oppose.

In exploring No Future, we insist on expropriating it from the ivory

tower of theory and using it as a tool for our life projects. Against

the safe interpretations offered by the academy and its theorists, we

embark on an elaboration of queer negativity that means nothing less

than the destruction of the civilized world.

Judith/Jack Halberstam, another popular queer theorist, reads the

significance of Edelman’s text in regard to what they term the

anti-social project, but also experiences it as lacking:

Edelman’s polemic opens the door to a ferocious articulation of

negativity (“fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re

collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck

the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and

with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future

that serves as its prop”) but, ultimately, he does not fuck the law, big

or little L, he succumbs to the law of grammar, the law of logic, the

law of abstraction, the law of apolitical formalism, the law of

Genres...

Elsewhere, Halberstam more explicitly frames their particular interest

as follows: “I want to engage critically with Edelman’s project here in

order to argue for a more explicitly political framing of the

anti-social project.”

Halberstam’s aim is like ours, in a way. Edelman’s ferocious negativity

remains caught within the web of formal knowledge and domination that is

the academy. Trapped within these laws—logic, abstraction,

formalism—Edelman’s theory, as it stands, can only serve to be a

somewhat more naughty articulation of the law of the social order

itself. And yet Halberstam’s alternative project fails in the same way.

We don’t desire a more explicitly political framing of the anti-social

project, when the logic of politics itself can only really offer us more

abstraction, more formalism, more of the same. For us, queer theory is

only important to the extent that we make it a tool or a weapon for our

projects. But in this we cannot look to politics, which is the science

of organizing and representing society. Instead we have to exceed

Edelman’s project, discarding his apolitics in favor of an explosive

anti-politics.

If Edelman opened a door, as Halberstam argues, for an anti-social queer

project, then let’s cross through the threshold and let’s set the whole

house on fire while we’re at it. What follows is a close reading and

overthrowing of No Future. These are the vital elements of the theory

without the baggage of the academy, the crucial points of the text

sharpened into weapons for anti-social projects.

Pure Negativity

Edelman’s project, insofar as we can imagine it as a starting point, is

intriguing because for him queerness is fundamentally negative. Whether

in the form of gay assimilation, identity politics, or ‘radical queer’

subculture, any contemporary engagement with queerness must reckon with

decades of capitalist integration into society and its state. These

varying forms are joined together through positive queer identity as a

shared content. If we read Edelman with a great sense of catharsis, it

is because his conception of negative queerness allows us to discard all

the identitarian baggage which accompanies queerness.

This move against a positive queer projects is a crucial one; it

illustrates one truth about capital. Capital is predicated on

accumulating value—any value—for its own self-reproduction. Capital is

in a constant process of revolt against itself. Subjects which were once

marginalized or annihilated by the civilized order are absorbed into its

circuitry, positions that could mark an outside are moved inward. There

is no positive queerness that isn’t already a site of society’s

reproduction. The positivist institutions of queerness—its dance

parties, community projects, activist groups, social networks, fashion,

literature, art, festivals—form the material structure of civilization.

Whatever antagonism or difference these forms possess is thoroughly

re-made in capital’s image; all value extracted, all danger neutralized.

To our horror, queerness becomes the avant-garde of marketplaces and the

dynamic lifeblood of the advanced postmodern economy.

This analysis of positivism is not particular to queerness. One can as

easily point to any number of anarchist projects and expose the ways in

which they reproduce the very alienation they aim to overcome.

Cooperative business, radical commodities, independent media, social

spaces, Food Not Bombs: when positive anarchist projects aren’t doing

social work to stave off collapse or upheaval, they are developing the

innovations (self-management, decentralized production, crowd-sourcing,

social networking) that will help to extend capital’s reign into the

next century.

The departure from these forms is the elaboration of queerness in the

negative. In this linking of queerness and negativity, we join Edelman,

who defines queerness thus:

[Q]ueerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,” to what

chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good

susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity

that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer

negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it

to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in

its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical

challenge to the very value of the social itself.

Put another way, we are not interested in a social project of queerness,

in queer contributions to society, in carving out our own ghettos within

the material and symbolic structures of capitalist life. Rather, our

engagement with queer theory must be attuned to locating the moments

which reveal the potential undoing of society, its structures and its

relations. For Edelman, a theory of queer negativity begins from an

exploration of the fantastic position of queers within society’s

collective imaginary. His methodology is to navigate the discourses and

nightmares of right-wing heteronormativity. Citing one fundamentalist

pundit after another, he fleshes out the terror with which the

anti-queer establishment imagines the threat of queerness. A thread

persists through history into the present which imagines queers as the

destroyers of social cohesion, the ‘gravediggers of society,’ the

repudiation of the values of hard work and family, the persistent wave

which erodes the bedrock of the monetary and libidinal economies,

thieves, tricksters, hustlers, sinners, murderers, deviants, and

perverts. Queers are not just damned, they are the proof of society’s

fundamental damnation as well. Sodomites, after all, are named for their

symbolic position as the sexual symbol of civilization’s decadence and

imminent annihilation.

Analyzing an example of this fantasy, Edelman writes:

We might do well to consider this less as an instance of hyperbolic rant

and more as a reminder of the disorientation that queer sexualities

should entail: “acceptance or indifference to the homosexual movement

will result in society’s destruction by allowing civil order to be

redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children and grandchildren

into an age of godlessness. Indeed, the very foundation of Western

Civilization is at stake.” Before the self-righteous bromides of liberal

pluralism spill from our lips, before we supply once more the assurance

that ours is another kind of love but a love like his nonetheless,

before we piously invoke the litany of our glorious contributions to the

civilizations of east and west alike, dare we pause for a moment to

acknowledge that he might be right—or, more important, that he ought to

be right: that queerness should and must destroy such notions of “civil

order” through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction

of futurity?

Edelman’s desire for a queerness that would hear itself called a threat

to the social order and takes this as a challenge rather than an insult

is paralleled by the text “Criminal Intimacy,” authored by ‘a gang of

criminal queers’ and published in the anarchist journal Total Destroy in

2009:

The machinery of control has rendered our very existence illegal. We’ve

endured the criminalization and crucifixion of our bodies, our sex, our

unruly genders. Raids, witch-hunts, burnings at the stake. We’ve

occupied the space of deviants, of whores, of perverts, and

abominations. This culture has rendered us criminal, and of course, in

turn, we’ve committed our lives to crime. In the criminalization of our

pleasures, we’ve found the pleasure to be had in crime! In being

outlawed for who we are, we’ve discovered that we are indeed fucking

outlaws! Many blame queers for the decline of this society—we take pride

in this. Some believe that we intend to shred-to-bits this civilization

and it’s moral fabric—they couldn’t be more accurate. We’re often

described as depraved, decadent and revolting—but oh, they ain’t seen

nothing yet.

This position of ownership of the negative means a liberatory conspiracy

between the enemies of society. It allows us to escape the traps that

lie in any attempt at affirming a positive counter-narrative. One cannot

deny the destructive and anti-social potential of queerness without also

affirming the social order. One cannot argue against the anti-queer

paranoia which imagines us to be enemies of God and state and family

without implicitly conceding the legitimacy of each. The hope for

progressive notions of tolerance or combative activism to undo this

fantasy is an expression of the desire for assimilation into society.

Even ‘radical’ or ‘anti-assimilationist’ queer positions attempt to deny

this negativity and to create space for queer representation in the

State or queer belonging within capitalism.

We’ll follow Edelman as he elaborates on this idea:

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, the ascription of

negativity to the queer, we might… do better to consider accepting and

even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect

social order—such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the

constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally

occasion the negativity of the queer—but rather to refuse the insistence

of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order

whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And

the trump card of affirmation? Always the question: If not this, what?

Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, or

negativity into some determinate stance or “position” whose

determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it

in some stable and positive form… I do not intend to propose some “good”

that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that

nothing, and certainly not what we call “good,” can ever have any

assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic… [W]e might rather,

figuratively cast our vote for “none of the above,” for the primacy of a

constant “no” in response to the law of the symbolic, which would echo

that law’s foundational act, its self-constituting negation.

Again, a simple shift can apply this argument to the discursive and

imaginary constructions of anarchists. Many anarchists find themselves

compulsively responding to negative characterizations of our intentions

and dispositions. In the face of an array of flattering accusations—we

are criminal, nihilistic, violent, sowers of disorder—the proponents of

a positive anarchism instinctively respond by insisting that we are

motivated by the highest ideals (democracy, consensus, equality,

justice), seek to create a better society, are non-violent, and believe

anarchism to be the greatest order of all. Over and over again

anarchists and other revolutionaries offer their allegiance to society

by denying the reality or possibility of their enmity with the social

order.

Leftist notions of reform, progress, tolerance, and social justice

always come up against the harsh reality that any progressive

development can only mean a more sophisticated system of misery and

exploitation; that tolerance means nothing; that justice is an

impossibility. Activists, progressive and revolutionary alike, will

always respond to our critique of the social order with a demand that we

articulate some sort of alternative. Let us say once and for all that we

have none to offer. Faced with the system’s seamless integration of all

positive projects into itself, we can’t afford to affirm or posit any

more alternatives for it to consume. Rather we must realize that our

task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we

have an entire world to destroy. Our daily life is so saturated and

structured by capital that it is impossible to imagine a life worth

living, except one of revolt.

We understand destruction to be necessary, and we desire it in

abundance. We have nothing to gain through shame or lack of confidence

in these desires. There cannot be freedom in the shadow of prisons,

there cannot be human community in the context of commodities, there

cannot be self-determination under the reign of a state. This world—the

police and armies that defend it, the institutions that constitute it,

the architecture that gives it shape, the subjectivities that populate

it, the apparatuses that administer its function, the schools that

inscribe its ideology, the activism that franticly responds to its

crises, the arteries of its circulation and flows, the commodities that

define life within it, the communication networks that proliferate it,

the information technology that surveils and records it—must be

annihilated in every instance, all at once. To shy away from this task,

to assure our enemies of our good intentions, is the most crass

dishonesty. Anarchy, as with queerness, is most powerful in its negative

form. Positive conceptions of these, when they are not simply a quiet

acquiescence in the face of a sophisticated and evolving totality of

domination, are hopelessly trapped in combat with the details of this

totality on its own terms.

In No Future, Edelman appropriates and privileges a particular

psychoanalytic concept: the death drive. In elaborating the relationship

of “queer theory and the death drive” (the subtitle of No Future), he

deploys the concept in order to name a force that isn’t specifically

tied to queer identity. He argues that the death drive is a constant

eruption of disorder from within the symbolic order itself. It is an

unnameable and inarticulable tendency for any society to produce the

contradictions and forces which can tear that society apart.

To avoid getting trapped in Lacanian ideology, we should quickly depart

from a purely psychoanalytic framework for understanding this drive.

Marxism, to imagine it another way, assures us that a fundamental crisis

within the capitalist mode of production guarantees that it will produce

its own negation from within itself. Messianic traditions, likewise,

hold fast to a faith that the messiah must emerge in the course of daily

life to overthrow the horror of history. The most romantic elaborations

of anarchism describe the inevitability that individuals will revolt

against the banality and alienation of modern life. Cybernetic

government operates on the understanding that the illusions of social

peace contain a complex and unpredictable series of risks, catastrophes,

contagions, events and upheavals to be managed. Each of these contains a

kernel of truth, if perhaps in spite of their ideologies. The death

drive names that permanent and irreducible element which has and will

always produce revolt. Species being, queerness, chaos, willful revolt,

the commune, rupture, the Idea, the wild, oppositional defiance

disorder—we can give innumerable names to what escapes our ability to

describe it. Each of these attempts to term the erratic negation

intrinsic to society. Each comes close to theorizing the universal

tendency that any civilization will produce its own undoing.

Explosions of urban rioting, the prevalence of methods of piracy and

expropriation, the hatred of work, gender dysphoria, the inexplicable

rise in violent attacks against police officers, self-immolation,

non-reproductive sexual practices, irrational sabotage, nihilistic

hacker culture, lawless encampments which exist simply for

themselves—the death drive is evidenced in each moment that exceeds the

social order and begins to rip at its fabric.

The symbolic deployment of queerness by the social order is always an

attempt to identify the negativity of the death drive, to lock this

chaotic potential up in the confines of this or that subjectivity.

Foucault’s work is foundational to queer theory in part because of his

argument that power must create and then classify antagonistic

subjectivities so as to then annihilate any subversive potential within

a social body. Homosexuals, gangsters, criminals, immigrants, welfare

mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc,

communists, extremists: power is always constructing and defining these

antagonistic subjects which must be managed. When the smoke clears after

a riot, the state and media apparatuses universally begin to locate such

events within the logic of identity, freezing the fluidity of revolt

into a handful of subject positions to be imprisoned, or, more

sinisterly, organized. Progressivism, with its drive toward inclusion

and assimilation, stakes its hope on the social viability of these

subjects, on their ability to participate in the daily reproduction of

society. In doing so, the ideology of progress functions to trap

subversive potential within a particular subject, and then to solicit

that subject’s self-repudiation of the danger which they’ve been

constructed to represent. This move for social peace fails to eliminate

the drive, because despite a whole range of determinisms, there is no

subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt.

The simultaneous attempt at justice must also fail, because the

integration of each successive subject position into normative relations

necessitates the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or

destroyed.

Rather than a progressive project which aims to steadily eradicate an

emergent chaos over time, our project, located at the threshold of

Edelman’s work, bases itself upon the persistent negativity of the death

drive. We choose not to establish a place for queers, thereby shifting

the structural position of queerness to some other population. We

identify with the negativity of the drive, and thereby perform a

disidentification away from any identity to be represented or which can

beg for rights.

Following Edelman further:

To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the dominant

order, is neither to be nor to become that drive; such a being is not

the point. Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing

and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of that

drive. As the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that

permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on

disturbing, on queering, social organization as such—on disturbing, and

therefore on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization.

For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb

one. And so, when I argue, as I aim to do here, that the burden of

queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an oppositional

political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing

fantasy of realizing identities, I am proposing no platform or position

from which queer sexuality or any queer subject might finally and truly

become itself, as if it could somehow manage thereby to achieve an

essential queerness. I am suggesting instead that the efficacy of

queerness, its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a

symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we

invest ourselves in it, clinging to its governing fictions, its

persistent sublimations, as reality itself.

This negative queerness severs us from any simple understanding of

ourselves. More so, it severs us from any formulaic or

easily-represented notions of what we need, what we desire, or what is

to be done. Our queerness does not imagine a coherent self, and thus

cannot agitate for any selves to find their place within civilization.

The only queerness that queer sexuality could ever hope to achieve would

exist in a total refusal of attempts at the symbolic integration of our

sexuality into governing and market structures. This refusal of

representation forecloses on any hope that we ever have in identity

politics or positive identity projects. We decline the progressive faith

in the ability for our bodies to be figured into the symbolic order. We

decline the liberal assurance that everything will turn out right, if we

just have faith.

No, instead we mean to “unleash negativity against the coherence of any

self-image, subjecting us to a moral law that evacuates the subject so

as to locate it through and in that very act of evacuation, permitting

the realization, thereby, of a freedom beyond the boundaries of any

image or representation, a freedom that ultimately resides in nothing

more than the capacity to advance into emptiness.”

A non-identitarian, unrepresentable, unintelligible queer revolt will be

purely negative, or it won’t be at all. In the same way, an

insurrectionary anarchy must embrace the death drive against all the

positivisms afforded by the world it opposes. If we hope to interrupt

the ceaseless forward motion of capital and its state, we cannot rely on

failed methods. Identity politics, platforms, formal organizations,

subcultures, activist campaigns (each being either queer or anarchist)

will always arrive at the dead ends of identity and representation. We

must flee from these positivities, these models, to instead experiment

with the undying negativity of the death drive. Edelman again:

The death drive’s immortality, then refers to a persistent negation that

offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor

any promise of the future. Instead, it insists both on and as the

impossibility of Symbolic closure, the absence of any Other to affirm

the Symbolic order’s truth and hence the illusory status of meaning as

defense against the self-negating substance of jouissance… [Queerness]

affirms a constant, eruptive jouissance that responds to the

inarticulable real, to the impossibility of sexual rapport or of ever

being able to signify the relation between the sexes. [Queerness] then,

like the death drive, engages, by refusing, the normative stasis, the

immobility, of sexuation… breaks down the mortifying structures that

give us ourselves as selves and does so with all the force of the Real

that such forms must fail to signify… the death drive both evades and

undoes representation… the gravediggers of society [are] those who care

nothing for the future.

We’ll return soon to the concepts of futurity and of jouissance, but to

conclude this point, we’ll assert that an insurrectionary process can

only be an explosion of negativity against everything that dominates and

exploits us, but also against everything that produces us as we are.

Not for the Children

In an above passage, we cited a text by J. Halberstam in which they

state their intention to re-work Edelman’s theory into something more

explicitly political. We share Halberstam’s dissatisfaction with

Edelman, for whom queer negativity amounts to little more than lecture

circuits, circuit parties, hours at the gym, Botox, and the crass

narcissism of gay life. As we will argue later, Edelman’s theory is

heavily indebted to the work of Guy Hocquenghem, but Edelman fails to

apply Hocquenghem’s critique of queer subculture to his own life,

foolishly choosing to ignore what the latter warned in The Screwball

Asses:

As long as we are not burned at the stake or locked up in asylums, we

continue to flounder in the ghettoes of nightclubs, public restrooms and

sidelong glances, as if that misery had become the habit of our

happiness. And so, with the help of the state, do we build our own

prisons.

In order to flee the self-constituted prisons described by Hocquenghem,

we must turn Edelman’s own critique against him and the pathetic form of

his life project. Our argument remains that his project must be taken

beyond its own limits. In fact, it is the very detachment of this theory

from any practice of revolt that weakens the potential power in No

Future. To reach a conclusion of apolitical detachment through queer

negativity is weak thinking. We are interested instead in a praxis

through which queer theory and queer revolt are fused in an elaboration

of active nihilism, of anti-politics.

To return to Halberstam for a moment:

No future for Edelman means routing our desires around the eternal

sunshine of the spotless child and finding the shady side of political

imaginaries in the proudly sterile and antireproductive logics of queer

relation. It also seems to mean something (too much) about Lacan’s

symbolic and not enough about the powerful negativity of punk politics….

Negativity might well constitute an anti-politics but it should not

Halberstam is correct again to critique Edelman’s over-reliance on

psychoanalysis. In this regard, we can only really interpret his

methodology as a cop-out, a way to elaborate queer negativity from the

safe positions of the academic or the analyst. We’ll further agree that

negativity should be anti-political as opposed to apolitical. However,

to be honest, we’re not really sure what ‘punk politics’ might be, and

fear that they’d probably be as terrible as any other politic. On this

point, it is important that we define our anti-politics as refusing all

political logic: representation, mediation, dialogue with power. And so,

once again, we must abandon queer academics and their easy answers. We

diverge from Halberstam in that we will not locate our anti-politics in

any music genre or the subculture that accompanies it. Instead, we’ll

attempt to show that the lack in Edelman’s thought would be completed by

the anti-political tendencies of an insurrectionary anarchist practice

of self-organized attack.

Edelman’s critique of politics begins with the figure of the Child. All

political positions, he argues, represent themselves as doing what is

best for the children. Politicians, whatever their parties or leanings,

universally frame their debates around the question of what policies are

best for the children, who keeps the Child safest, or what type of world

we want to be building for our children. The centrality of the Child in

the field of the political is not limited to electoral politics or

political parties. Nationalist groups organize themselves around a

necessity to preserve a future for their children, while anarchist and

communist revolutionaries concern themselves with revolutionary

organizing meant to create a better world for future generations.

Politicians concern themselves with different children depending on

their varying from ideologies, but the Child stays constant as a

universal Möbius strip, inverting itself and flipping so as to be the

unquestioned and untouchable universal value of all politics. Politics,

however supposedly radical, is simply the universal movement of

submission to the ideal of the future—to preserve, maintain and upgrade

the structures of society and to proliferate them through time all for

the sake of the children. The Child must always name the horizon and the

beneficiary of every political project.

It is for this reason that Edelman contends that queerness finds itself

missing from all political discourse:

For the liberal’s view of society, which seems to accord the queer a

place, endorses no more than the conservative right’s the queerness of

resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the

right wing imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to

confront their existence), the left would eliminate queerness by shining

the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely

a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive coloring, the

determining fantasy formation, by means of which it can seem to portend,

and not for the right alone, the undoing of the social order and its

cynosure, the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for

the right wing, the nothingness always at war with the positivity of

civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need

of demystification.

The Child, of course, has very little to do with real children. Like all

people, children are enslaved under the political order of the state and

capital, expected to bear the burden of being the innocent beneficiaries

of political initiatives. No, rather the Child is the fantastic symbol

for the eternal proliferation of class society. The Child represents the

succession of generations and the continuation of this society beyond

the lifespans of its living members. All politics, being concerned

primarily with the Child, then reveal themselves to be only ever a

process by which to manage and secure the continued existence of

society. As enemies of society, we are also enemies of politics.

To quote Edelman:

The fantasy subtending the image of the child invariably shapes the

logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic

compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically

responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed of

the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes

as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on

political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute

privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting

outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to

this organizing principle of communal relations.

If the varying discourses of politics are only ever about the Child (as

society’s future), queerness must be anti-political because it marks a

fundamental interruption of the societal norms and apparatuses that

exist to mandate the reproduction the Child. Yes, queer sex can be

non-reproductive sex, but we cannot define queerness through such

overly-simple and naturalistic logics. Queerness, beyond being the

negation of the heteronormative family matrix, must also be practiced as

a willful refusal of the political imperative to reproduce class

society. In a world where all social relations are enchanted by our

obligation to the Child as the future of the social order, we must break

those communal relations and break the stranglehold of politics over our

daily lives. Queerness must be an outside to politics, an antagonism

against the political, or it isn’t queer at all.

By Edelman’s account:

Queerness names the side of those “not fighting for the children.” The

side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute

value of reproductive futurism. The ups and downs of political fortune

may measure the social order’s pulse, but queerness, by contrast figures

outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social

order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the

stigma, sometimes fatal that follows from reading that figure literally…

More radically, though, as I argue here, queerness attains its ethical

value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its

figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while

insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social

structure.

Queerness, as we’ll thus conceive it, is not locked in a dialectical

battle of queer identity versus normative identities, nor of queer

politics versus heteronormative politics. Rather our queer opposition is

leveled against the false oppositions which politics always serves to

represent. Queerness marks the space which is outside and against

political logic. Insurrectionary anarchists are no strangers to this

space. While leftist anarchists articulate their activity as politics,

insurrectionary anarchy doesn’t concern itself with such abstractions.

We flee from all political roles which we’re called upon to symbolize,

whether those constructed by the media or by those self-appointed

leaders of struggles. Unlike most other self-declared revolutionaries,

we are not fighting for a utopian future (communist, anarchist,

cybernetic). We are not looking for victories that will be enjoyed by

symbolic children in a future society. We are not fighting for an

abstract ideal. We are not creating a world, and we are not motivated by

anything outside of ourselves. Our anti-political practice, our attempts

at insurrection, emerge purely from the context of an awareness of our

daily lives. If we speak of social war, it is because we’re

experimenting with types of relationships and combat in order to attack

the social order.

In order to genuinely break from politics, we must develop forms of

struggle that shatter the illusions with which politics are made

necessary. To quote Edelman again:

Politics names the social enactment of the subject’s attempt to

establish the conditions for [an] impossible consolidation by

identifying with something outside itself… deferred perpetually of

itself. Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatic

order of reality in which the subject’s alienation would vanish into the

seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of

signifiers lived as history.

Politics is such a sinister force because it is moved by an alienation

and lack rooted in society’s foundations. To remedy this ennui,

individuals turn to politics to discover some universal truth to

struggle for—a comfortable abstraction to fill the void in their

experience. This is a paradox, of course, as this alienation is

intrinsic to capitalist society, and politics can only ever reproduce

that society, and therefore its concomitant misery. The fantasy of

politics promises to suture one’s empty subjectivity to some abstraction

outside of oneself in an attempt to find some meaning, to situation

oneself within history, to really do something. Like a form of

performance art, politics acts as a great representation of resistance

to society, yet as mere representation remains inseparable from the

symbolic order. The reality of politics is that it offers nothing; a

nothingness that corresponds to the meaninglessness of social life.

An insurrectionary, queer anti-politics functions to interrupt the

closed circuitry of emptiness-politics-emptiness. Halting the ceaseless

pursuit of a better world for the Child, our project centers itself on

immediate fulfillment, joy, conflict, vengeance, conspiracy and

pleasure. Rather than politics, we engage in social war. Without

demands, we expropriate what we desire. Instead of representation, we

rely on autonomous self-organization. We do not protest, we attack. As

with our queerness, our anti-politics strives to escape political

identification or ideological attachment to this or that political

subjectivity.

Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity,

which is also to say with the disarticulation of social and symbolic

form, might well be described as politically self-destructive… but

politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as mere

prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural child), are what

queerness, again as figure, necessarily destroys—necessarily insofar as

this “self” is the agent of reproductive futurism and this “politics”

the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality… Political

self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one; the act of

resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life.

Evading the Trap of the Future

It should be obvious through Edelman’s treatment of the relationship of

politics to the Child that the cathexis which captures all political

ambition is a drive toward the future. The social order must concern

itself with the future so as to create the forward-moving infrastructure

and discourse to proliferate itself. Edelman’s name for this insistence

on the Child as the future is reproductive futurism. Reproductive

futurism is the ideology which demands that all social relationships and

communal life be structured in order to allow for the possibility of the

future through the reproduction of the Child, and thus the reproduction

of society. The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the sacrifice

of all vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized

continuation of society. Edelman argues that “futurity amounts to a

struggle for Life at the expense of life; for the Children at the

expense of the lived experiences of actual children.”

If queerness is a refusal of the symbolic value of the Child as the

horizon of the future, queerness must figure as being against the future

itself. To be specific, our queer project must also pose itself as the

denial of the future of civilization.

Edelman argues that “the queer comes to figure the bar to every

realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to

every social structure or form.” He locates this queer anti-futurity as

being the primary fantastic justification for anti-queer violence: “If

there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must

fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as

inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the

undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably,

life itself.” He invokes the anti-queer interpretations of the Biblical

destruction of Sodom to describe the ways in which the collective

imaginary is still haunted by the notion that a proliferation of

queerness can only result in a persistent threat of societal apocalypse.

Thus in the name of the Child and the future it represents, any

repression, sexual or otherwise, can be justified.

The Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege,

condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer

sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as

sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly find itself

condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an

Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of

heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid

sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of

reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the

battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a

Child whose ruin is pursued by queers. Indeed, as the Army of God made

clear in the bomb-making guide it produces for the assistance of its

militantly “pro-life” members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the

logic of reproductive futurism: to “disrupt and ultimately destroy

Satan’s power to kill our children, God’s children.”

Edelman goes on to cite the ways in which reproductive futurism is

intrinsic to white supremacist ideology and white nationalism; bound as

the Child is to notions of race and nation:

Let me end with a reference to the “fourteen words,” attributed to David

Lane, by which members of various white separatist organizations

throughout the United States affirm their collective commitment to the

cause of racial hatred: “we must secure the existence of our people and

a future for white children.” So long as “white” is the only word that

makes this credo appalling, so long as the figural children continue to

“secure our existence” through the fantasy that we survive in them, so

long as the queer refutes that fantasy, effecting its derealization as

surely an encounter with the Real, for just so long must [queerness]

have a future after all.

To bolster his argument about the repressive nature of reproductive

futurism, Edelman cites Walter Benjamin in describing the way in which

the fantasy of the future was intrinsic to the spread of fascism in

Europe. Edelman, via Benjamin, describes “the fascism of the baby’s

face,” a phrase meant to illustrate the absolute power afforded to the

ideology of reproductive futurism. This fascism of the baby’s face

serves to reify difference and thus to secure the reproduction of the

existent social order in the form of the future. No atrocity is out of

the question if it is for the Child; no horrible project of industry

should precluded if it will serve to hasten the future of industrial

civilization. Armies of men, imperial and revolutionary alike, have

always lined up to the slaughter in the name of the Child.

But we needn’t look any further than today’s headlines to see the

symbolic power the Child’s face deploys in the service of the social

order. This year, the nation has been captivated by two horrific

examples of the death-regime of white supremacy in the United States.

Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and Bo Morrison in Slinger,

Wisconsin: two black youth murdered at the hands of racist vigilantes.

While the systematic murder and imprisonment of black people is so

commonplace that it cannot make headlines, these stories have swept the

nation particularly because of the way they intersect with the

narratives of innocence and childhood. Specifically in the case of

Trayvon Martin, whose future was taken from him at the age of seventeen,

a debate is raging centered around his character and his innocence with

regard to his symbolic place as the Child.

One side of this debate circulates a “angelic” picture of his face to

assure society of his child-like nature. The other side circulates a

doctored picture of him wearing a grill as a kind of racialized

testament to his adultness. Each side feverishly examines the ‘evidence’

to argue whether or not he had attacked his murderer before he died.

What’s at stake in this debate is Trayvon’s symbolic position as the

Child: if he represents the Child, his murder is the atrocious

destruction of his future (and by extensions everyone’s). If he is not

the Child, then his killer acted out of the need to protect the future

of his own community (and the children within it) from a perceived (even

if falsely) threat. While politicians as high-ranking as the President

invest Trayvon with the burden of carrying the futurity of their own

children, others continue to assert their second amendment right to own

weapons so they may protect theirs.

Bo Morrison was also murdered by a racist homeowner, and his killer

continues on with impunity because he can claim that he needed to

eliminate any threat to his children. Young black men who figured, like

the queer, as threats to the family were destroyed in the Child’s name.

In each instance, the entire discourse is centered on the Child while

entirely obscuring the reality of the actual young individuals executed

in the Child’s name.

Pundits articulate the measures that could be taken by parents and the

state to restore the promise of the future: a ban on guns, more

responsible gun ownership, the removal of ‘hoodies’ from children’s

wardrobes, neighborhood watch, more policing, “justice.” These horrific

killings demonstrate that there truly is no future. It is this truth

which young people everywhere are awakening to. They are swarming the

streets en masse, hoods up, to outrun the police and snare the flows of

the cities. They are walking out of school—that banal prison of

futurity—in order to loot stores and be with their friends. They are

preparing and coordinating, so that the next time one of them is burned

at the stake for the sake of the Future, they’ll make the city burn in

kind. The fires of Greece, London and Bahrain hint toward the

consequences of such an awakening.

To further ground Edelman’s theory of the Child and contemporary debates

around reproduction in the specific historical context which gave rise

to Capitalism, we’ll turn briefly to the work of Silvia Federici in her

book Caliban and the Witch. In Caliban, Federici studies the rise of

Capitalism in Europe through the process of primitive accumulation. For

Federici, the shift from feudalism to capitalism was only possible

through the accumulation of the bodies of women and consequently through

the development of their bodily capacity into a site specifically for

the reproduction of a proletarianized workforce. Her history illustrates

that rather than a seamless transition, the period was marked by a

constant oscillation between insurrection and counter-insurgency. She

characterizes the peasants and proletarianized workers who rebelled

against the State and in the wake of the black plague as having “no care

for the future,” severed as they were from any comfortable teleological

fantasy. She argues that the autonomy and power which peasant women (and

queers) held over their own bodies had to be destroyed in order for the

nascent bourgeois class to turn them into machines of reproductive

labor.

We’ll quote her in elaborating the specific way in which the

construction of the atomized unit of social reproduction—the family—was

crucial in the process of putting down early medieval revolt against

capitalism:

In the middle ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of crimes

against property were part of the resistance to impoverishment and

dispossession; these phenomena now took on massive proportions.

Everywhere—if we give credit to the complaints of contemporary

authorities—vagabonds were swarming, changing cities, crossing borders,

sleeping in the haystacks or crowding at the gates of towns—a vast

humanity involved in a diaspora of its own, that for decades escaped the

authorities’ control…. A massive reclamation and reappropriation of the

stolen communal wealth was underway…. In pursuit of social discipline,

an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and

sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and

other group-rituals that had been a source of boding and solidarity

among workers…. What was at stake was the desocializaton or

decollectivization of the reproduction of the work-force, as well as the

attempt to impose a more productive use of leisure time…. The physical

enclosure operated by land privatization and the hedging of the commons

was amplified by a process of social enclosure, the reproduction of

workers shifting from the open field to the home, from the community to

the family, from the public space, to the private.

Through her argument, Federici consistently turns to the historical

atrocity which was the witch hunts as the primary figure of the

destruction of women’s power and the subsequent accumulation of their

bodies as womb-machines. She specifically argues that in the 16^(th) and

17^(th) centuries, a collective narrative circulated in attempt to

foment anti-witch paranoia and fervor which charged witches as being

child murderers. Common conceptions held that witches would, under the

guise of being healers, enter the homes of their employers and sacrifice

their children to the Devil. At a time when states and families were

becoming largely concerned with population decline, this fear lead to a

tremendous hatred against those accused of witchcraft. Here, we see the

emergence of the primacy of the Child as the governing symbol of the

ideological and material reproduction of class society. Witches, and

medieval women more broadly, can then be situated within the structural

category of queerness laid out by Edelman: the category of those who

refuse enslavement to the future in the form of the Child. It is also of

note, though Federici only mentions it in an endnote, that there was a

very strong association between witchcraft and queerness, and that

countless queers met their deaths during the witch hunts.

Federici argues that with

…the enslavement of women to procreation… their wombs became public

territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly

placed at the service of capitalist accumulation… Marx never

acknowledged that procreation could become a terrain of exploitation and

by the same token a terrain of resistance. He never imagined that women

could refuse to reproduce, or that such a refusal could become part of

class struggle…. Women going on strike against child making.

This blind spot within Marx’s thought must remain present in our

critique of reproductive futurism and its social order. It is useful to

examine the moments where people willfully resisted the reproduction of

society through the subtraction of their bodies from the flows of

futurity. It is readily apparent how, at the historic moment described

in Caliban, the literal refusal to create children was a practice of

resistance to the state’s domination of their bodies. This bodily

resistance and refusal is vital still today, but our contemporary

struggle is not one solely waged against the requirement to produce

actual children. We are confronted with the symbol of the Child whose

interests and whose face governs the operations of politics and of all

political subjects. A different kind of strike will be necessary to

refuse the fantastic power of the Child.

Another useful critique which Federici levels against Marxism is that

from the perspective of women, it is impossible to argue that capitalism

has ever been progressive or liberating. She argues that if we recognize

that class society emerged out of the massacre of thousands of women and

the development of their bodies to suit the needs of industry, then we

must acknowledge that capitalism has universally meant degradation and

exploitation for women. While it isn’t anything new to argue that

capitalism means exploitation, this argument is linked to our analysis

because it specifically indicts and refutes the teleology (specifically

Marxist, but deployed by many other ideologies) which says that

capitalism was a necessary step on the pathway toward utopia. By

rejecting this progressive ideology, Federici fundamentally calls into

question the narrative stability of reproductive futurism, which assures

us that history moves us toward paradise, and that the present

arrangement is but a step along the path.

If we’re to fully understand why the complex of the Child, the

political, and reproductive futurism have entwined into such repressive

conditions, we would be well served to analyze the specific dynamics of

capitalism as it evolved through the counter-revolution of the past

several decades. Specifically, we’ll need to look to capital itself as a

force which colonizes life and re-makes it in its image. For this, we

will turn to the work of Jacques Camatte in his essay “Against

Domestication”:

The future industry has come into its own and assumed an enormous scope.

Capital enters this new field and begins to exploit it, which leads to

further expropriation of people and a reinforcement of their

domestication. This hold over the future is what distinguishes capital

from all other modes of production. From its earliest origins capital’s

relationship to the past or present has always been of less importance

than its relationship to the future. Capital’s only lifeblood is in the

exchange it conducts with labor power. Thus when surplus value is

created, it is, in the immediate sense, only potential capital; it can

become effective capital solely through an exchange against future

labor. In other words, when surplus value is created in the present, it

acquires reality only if labor power can appear to be already available

in the future. If therefore this future isn’t there, then the present

(and henceforth the past) is abolished: this is devalorization through

total loss of substance. Clearly, then, capital’s first undertaking must

be to dominate the future in order to be assured of accomplishing its

production process. (This conquest is managed by the credit system).

Thus capital has effectively appropriated time, which it molds in its

own image as quantitative time. However, present surplus value was

realized and valorized through exchange against future labor, but now,

with the development of the future industry, present surplus value has

itself become open to capitalization. This capitalization demands that

time be programmed and this need expresses itself in a scientific

fashion in futurology. Henceforth, capital produces time. From now on

where may people situate their utopias?

In the course of Camatte’s life, his work in “Against Domestication”

marks a shift in his theory from left-communism to anti-civilization

ideas. This piece would later inspire a tremendous amount of Anglophone

anti-civ theory. His argument is that the specific future-oriented

nature of capital—its tendency to accumulate the future—allowed

capitalism to develop into the monstrosity that it is. Beyond just

appropriating the living labor of human beings and commodifying it as

dead labor, Camatte argues that capital has colonized human beings

themselves, constituting their very being and re-creating human

relations into communities of capital. He describes this process—the

anthropomorphizing of capital—as domestication. In coming to colonize

every aspect of life within industrial society, capital thus comes to

dominate individuals’ futures as much as their presents. Camatte

continues:

The established societies that existed in previous times dominated the

present and to a lesser extent the past, while the revolutionary

movement had for itself the future. Bourgeois revolutions and the

proletarian revolutions have had to guarantee progress, but this

progress depended on the existence of a future valorized in relation to

a present and a past that is to be abolished. In each case… the past is

presented as shrouded in darkness, while the future is all shining

light. Capital has conquered the future. Capital has no fear of utopias,

since it even tends to produce them. The future is a field for the

production of profit. In order to generate the future, to bring it into

being, people must now be conditioned as a function of a strictly

preconceived process of production: this is programming brought to its

highest point….

Domination of the past, the present and the future, gives rise to a

structural representation, where everything is reduced to a

[combination] of social relations, productive forces, or mythmemes, etc,

arranged in such a way as to cohere as a totality.

This totality is our situation. History is only the record of centuries

of defeat and the triumph of capital over the dead. The future is a

horizon dominated by its representation as the sphere of expansion

possibilities and new technologies. And around us are the innumerable

institutions, technologies and processes that would use us as the

submissive tools for this process of domination. This is what it means

to describe capitalism as a totality. This is why we don’t simply argue

against a specific economic system, but against industrial society

itself; not for a particular management of the means of production, but

against them altogether.

That capital now forms the horizon of our lives is evident. To say “no

future” means to say that we have no future except for one drifting at

sea, blown at all times by the winds of the unfolding crisis of the

capitalist mode of production. Precarious employment, lifetimes of debt,

the impossibility of retirement, the need to constantly remake oneself

through countless techniques-of-the-self in order to bring oneself to

market as a pretty new commodity, rent, bills, credit: the facts of our

own daily reproduction force us to continually sell, not just our bodily

capacity, but our futures as well. Every time we offer up our body in a

medical study, or turn a trick, or run a scam, we are wagering our

futures against the daunting task of surviving another month in hell.

The editors of the anti-state communist journal Endnotes write in their

second issue:

Capitalist self-perpetuation presents itself as eternalization it

appears infinite, without a beyond. Since this relation projects itself

into an infinite future, revolutionary theory necessarily concerns

itself with rupture, with an interruption in the very temporality of the

relation.

What could such an interruption look like? How can we imagine a force

capable of blockading the ceaseless flow of time into the future? Let’s

return to Edelman. He cites a passage from a campaign for a ‘parents

bill of right’ (a political campaign aimed a ‘strengthening the

family’):

It is time to join together and acknowledge that the work that parents

do is indispensable—that by nourishing those small bodies and growing

those small souls, they create the store of social and human capital

that is so essential to the health and wealth of our nation. Simply put,

by creating the conditions that allow parents to cherish their children,

we will ensure our collective future.

Edelman continues by analyzing the campaign:

Ignore for a moment what demands to be called the transparency of this

appeal. Ignore, that is, how quickly the spiritualizing vision of

parents “nourishing and growing… small bodies… small souls” gives way to

a rhetoric offering instead the far more pragmatic (and politically

imperative) investment in the “human capital… essential to the health

and wealth of our nation.” Ignore, by so doing, how the passage

renominates those human “souls” as “capital” [and] prompts us to

“cherish” these “capitalized” humans precisely insofar as they come to

embody this thereby humanized “capital.” Ignore all this and one’s eyes

might still pop to discover that only political intervention will

“allow… parents to cherish their children” so as to “ensure our

collective future”—or ensure… that our present will always be mortgaged

to a fantasmatic future in the name of the political “capital” that

those children will thus have become.

And thus the ideology of reproductive futurism comes full circuit within

the context of future-oriented capitalism. The full force of the

political and symbolic orders is put into the thrust to reproduce—to

reproduce the Child. But here we see that capital’s ever-expanding reach

claims the future and even the souls of not-yet-born children. Capital

must continue to expand, and can only do so by appropriating each of our

futures, and even those of the children we could someday have. And the

forward-thrust of reproductive futurism must serve its purpose, to

continually procure sacrifices to the unending process of domestication

where capital comes to possess all life. Capital is our future; and yet

there is no future. It is within this contradiction—the expansion of

capital into all areas of life versus the impossibility of living a life

within capitalism—that we must orient our study and theorize how we

might interrupt the endless perpetuation of the present order.

To do so, of course, requires an acute skepticism toward the fantasy of

the future. Edelman:

We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous

contributions to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist

groups or generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication,

the future will hold a place for us—a place at the political table that

won’t have to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the

bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that future as there can be

no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that

there can be no future at all… That future is nothing but kid stuff,

reborn each day to screen out the grave that gapes from within the

lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality’s gossamer

web.

This belief in a future for queers that Edelman points to is most

recently demonstrated by the “It Gets Better” campaign, a series of

viral YouTube videos directed at queer youth which promise them that

life must get better if only they’re patient enough. Celebrities,

politicians and people of all walks of life joined together to champion

the beautiful inevitability of a better future. In the campaign’s

response to the very real atrocity of queer teen suicide, it only pushes

the atrocity away and encourages its audience to submit patiently to

continued misery. In trying to drive death off, they drive off life,

replacing it with sacrifice and waiting for a better future. The

campaign promises a fulfilling world which exists beyond the nightmare

of high school, yet somehow fails to mention the waking nightmares of

debt, work, family, disease, depression and anxiety which the future

must surely deliver.

Of these videos the most vile and perhaps the most telling is a recent

release by the San Francisco Police Department depicting queer police

officers telling their coming-out stories and assuring the viewers of

the better future to come. Along with these assurances, they further

implore queer youth to call on the police department if in need,

declaring “it will get better, and until it does, we’ll be here for

you.”

The future will continue its mirage-like spectacle, promising redemption

yet continually deferring its delivery. The further we progress down its

path, the farther we’ll be from the utopia it teases us with. We’ll

consistently arrive where we imagined the future would take us, only to

find that the desert of modern life continues to stretch out in every

direction—that the passage of time has continued to deliver us up anew

for pure repetition of the same: the same exploitation, alienation,

depression, meaninglessness. If queerness is to be our weapon, we must

fanatically avoid any tendency toward reproductive futurism that would

dull our daggers. We must refuse the institutions of the future, whether

high schools or police departments, that eternally immiserate our

present. If we are to cease the skyward growth of the pile of queer

bodies sacrificed at the feet of the future, we must silence the chorus

of it-gets-betters and attack, here and now, at whatever is making it

unbearable.

If it is our intention to participate in insurrection against

domestication and capital’s futurity, we mustn’t be deceived by the

fleeing utopias of reproductive futurism. Instead we must situate

ourselves within our present, and studiously explore the methods of

sabotage, interruption, expropriation and destruction that refuse

futurity’s domination. Or, as Edelman puts it:

If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of

futurity… then the only oppositional status to which our queerness could

ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death

drive we’re called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the

Child and the political order it reinforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem

made clear, are “not the signifier of what might become a new form of

‘social organization,’” that we do not intend a new politics, a better

society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the

past, through displacement, in the form of the future. We choose instead

not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or

as site of a projective identification with an always impossible future.

The queerness we propose, in Hocquenghem’s words, “is unaware of the

passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows

nothing about ‘sacrifice now for the sake of future generations… it

knows that civilization alone is mortal.” Even more: it delights in that

mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself,

moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the

tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for

which we’re condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the

advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die;

that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our

queerness has nothing to offer a symbolic that lives by denying that

nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this

nothingness entails, an insistence of the negativity that pierces the

fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with

irony’s always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us,

queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to

insist intransitively—to insist that the future stops here.

Naming the Unnameable

A crucial concept in Edelman’s project is the term catachresis.

Catachresis can be defined as either the use of a term to name something

which cannot be named, or the misuse of a word to describe something.

For Edelman, any use of the word queer must always be a catachresis, as

it mistakenly gives a name to the unnameable. This concept is a tool to

critique all of the political and theoretical processes that affirm an

identity category in the place of our unnameable project. For Edelman,

the fundamental unnameable is the death drive: the undoing of

civilization, and our own undoing, pulsing within the existent. He says

that “it is in fact because it is unnameable with all the resonances you

can give to this name, that it is akin to the quintessential unnameable,

that is to say death.” While we might locate our unnameable drives and

projects differently, we are forced to come up against the political

logic of catachresis and confront the urge to give a name—and therefore

a representation and a politics—to what is essentially ineffable in our

lives.

Edelman’s argument is specifically leveled against Judith Butler and her

project for radical inclusivity. Against Butler he argues that attempts

at legitimizing and including any subject into politics must always

fail. While one might agitate for the inclusion of a particular

catachresis which names the anti-social void, that void remains

untouched, and another name must be given to it. The social order’s

necessary Other cannot be abolished through the reform-oriented

integration of each successive other into the project of representative

politics. Another Other must rise to fill the void. Society will locate

another enemy subject to discipline and to destroy.

Against Butler and her conceptions of social justice, Edelman argues:

Committed as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of

social justice, Butler would affirm “our own power” to re-articulate by

means of catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly calls our

“moralized sexual horror.” Such a re-articulation, she claims, would

proceed through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable

nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the

very terms that are meant to enforces its silence. This, of course,

assumes that the unspeakable intends, above all else to speak, whereas

Lacan maintains … something radically different: that sex, as the

“structural incompleteness of language is that which does not

communicate itself, that which marks the subject as unknowable.” No

doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the social order do, in

fact, change through catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as

figures of moralized sexual horror may trade their chill and silent

tombs for a place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social

roles doesn’t stop the cultural production of figures… to bear the

burden of embodying such a moralized sexual horror. For that horror

itself survives the fungible figures that flesh it out insofar as it

responds to something in sex that’s inherently unspeakable: the Real of

sexual difference.

For Edelman, queerness is the ineffable which escapes the ability to be

named: “queerness as name may well reinforce the symbolic order of

naming, but it names what resists, as signifier, absorption into the

Imaginary identity of the name.” And so this critique of the naming and

subsequent inclusion of deviant subjects must call into question the

structures which produce normative and deviant subjects from the

beginning. Our struggle cannot be one for this or that identity, but

rather against the representative politics of Identity altogether.

Edelman:

The agent responsible for effecting their destruction has been given

many names:… global extermination of meaning… gravediggers of society…

whatever refuses to allow parents to cherish their children…

homosexuals… the death drive and the Real of jouissance…. So [queerness]

knots together these threats to reproductive futurism. No political

catachresis, such as Butler proposes, could forestall the need to

constitute, then, such a category of [queerness]. For even though, as

Butler suggests, political catachresis may change over time the

occupants of that category, the category itself… continues to mark the

place of whatever refuses intelligibility.

And so the question that is posed concerns the refusal of

intelligibility. Contemporary arrangements of power have abolished the

silence that once accompanied the dark ineffable desires of queerness

and destruction. Rather than an injunction against speech, the power of

biopolitical democracy is specifically to make us speak. Cybernetic

relationships ensure that each of us as a speaking subject has the

ability to name ourselves, aestheticize ourselves, deploy blogs and

social networks and avatars to represent ourselves. The contemporary

function of power can be understood as one unending move toward

intelligibility—one of moving what had been blind spots into new

subjects to be marketed; new identities to be surveilled.

We are captured by the state every time we make ourselves intelligible.

Whether demand, political subject, or formal organization, each

intelligible form can be recuperated, represented, or annihilated.

Our project then must proceed in the recognition of the paradox that its

being made truly intelligible—even by us, even to us—would be its

defeat. We must seize the possibility of a life neither constrained by

nor produced through the omnipresence of capital and state. It is

precisely by the fact that words fail to describe it and programs fail

to bring it about that we can know this life. As such, any imperative to

put this ineffable project into words must be understood as a compromise

of what must be an uncompromising project. There is no language which

can make our intentions comprehensible to the social order. Any move

toward such comprehensibility would be a betrayal of the specific

antagonistic character of our project against that social order.

Camatte elaborates on this point:

This is a revolution of life itself, a search for another way of living.

Dialogue should be concerned only with the plans and ideas for realizing

this desire. No dialogue can take place between the social order and

those who are to overthrow it. If dialogue is still seen as a

possibility, then this would be an indication that the movement is

faltering. Underlying all this is a profoundly important phenomenon: all

human life from the very beginning of its development within capitalist

society, has undergone an impoverishment. More than this, capitalist

society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is

not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life,

death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead

and is no more than a ritual of capital … but to those great number of

smugly complacent people, who live on empty dramas and fantasies, this

demand, this passionate need, just seems irrational, or, at best, a

paradise that is by definition inaccessible.

And so a queerness which opposes society must embody the death drive of

what has become death-in-life, the intrinsic negation of a social order

predicated on the use of life for its ends. In this project, we have

nothing to gain by speaking the language of, or making demands to, the

existent power structures. It is specifically these structures’ ability

to comprehend antagonism that makes intelligibility synonymous with

recuperation.

Edelman returns to Butler:

Small wonder then that her subversive act, her re-articulation of the

norm, while promising to open what Butler calls a radical new field of

the human, returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal

humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains “the

future.”

But what if it didn’t? What if … all those doomed to ontological

suspension on account of their unrecognizable and, in consequence,

unlivable loves, declined intelligibility, declined to bring

[themselves], catachrestically, into the gambit of future meaning—or

declined, more exactly, to cast off the meaning that clings to those

social identities that intelligibility abjects…

Such [queers] would insist on the unintelligible’s unintelligibility, on

the internal limit to signification and the impossibility of turning

Real loss to meaningful profit in the Symbolic without its persistent

remainder: the inescapable Real of the death drive. As embodiments of

unintelligibility, of course, they must veil what they expose, becoming,

as figures for it, the means of its apparent subjection to meaning. But

where Butler… conduces to futurism’s logic of intelligibility by seeking

no more than to widen the reach of what it allows us to grasp, where she

moves, by way of the future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social

form through the recognition that is said to afford “ontological

certainty and durability” [queerness], though destined, of course, to be

claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it a

figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it embraces

de-meaning as the endless insistence of the real that the symbolic can

never master for meaning now or in the future.

Here Edelman invokes the Lacanian concept of the Real, or that which

escapes articulation through symbolic structures. The Real is the

indescribable and unnameable characteristic of our lived experience. The

Real is the irreducible essence of revolt, pleasure, conspiracy and joy

which comprises our project and which continually evades representation

by politicians or surveillance by police apparatuses. To the contrary,

Intelligibility offers two options: legitimization and democratic

inclusion, or delegitimization and repression.

Jouissance

Having sketched out the critical components of Edelman’s thought, it’s

time to turn to the question of our lived experience. If we refuse

politics (with its positive projects, reproductive futurity and drive

toward intelligibility) we are left with the question of what means of

enjoyment immediately exceeds it. How to constitute the purely negative

project that is called for by such a rigorously critical conception of

queerness?.

To articulate such an escape, we must look outside the framework of the

teleologies which promise progressive paths toward utopia, outside the

abstract symbolic world where politics and identity function. Edelman

would urge us to look to the psychoanalytic realm of the Real: the

material and affective facts of our existence which escape

representation and signification. For Edelman, the real of

queerness—which cuts through the positivist baggage of identity—is

jouissance. He writes:

Queerness undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as

subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and

the futurism on which it relies have already foreclosed. Queerness,

therefore is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather, of

embodying the remainder of the real internal to the symbolic order. One

name for this unnameable remainder as Lacan describes it, is jouissance,

sometimes translated as “enjoyment”: a movement beyond the pleasure

principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent

passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning and law.

It is useful, in understanding this concept of jouissance, to follow

Edelman in thinking the elements of queer reality which escape

representation: the remainders, as he’d term them. These remainders are

what is left over after capital colonizes the positivities of

queerness—its fashions, parties, academic pursuits, aesthetics, labors,

social networks—and after politics integrates intelligible queerness

into its symbolic order. And so what is this remainder? What remains

after one subtracts the progressive ideology of inclusion, the humble

victim, the upstanding citizens, the eccentric selling points, the fluid

permutations of Identity, the volumes of theory? What remains is

jouissance.

Edelman describes jouissance as a supersession of the boundaries of

pleasure and pain, a shattering of identity and law. We should analyze

this distinction between pleasure and pain as being an inscription of

the social order into our bodies. And in the same way, it is the mundane

and miniscule pleasures produced through contemporary power arrangements

which keep us dependent on those arrangements for our well-being.

Jouissance, in abolishing both sides of this distinction, severs us from

pain as a self-preservation instinct and from pleasure as the society’s

alluring bribe. It is the process that momentarily sets us free from our

fear of death (literal or figurative) which is such a powerful

inhibitor.

We can locate this jouissance in the historic moments of queer riot:

Compton’s cafeteria, Dewey’s, the White Night, Stonewall, and countless

other moments where queer bodies participated in rupture—throwing

bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, rejoicing in the streets. But

more to the point, jouissance is located in precisely the aspects of

these moments (and of others unknown to us) which elude historians, the

ones which cannot be captured in a textbook or situated neatly within

narratives of progress for queer people, or of rational political

struggle for a better future. Jouissance is the rage which boils over in

the first queen to set a fire; the hatred of an entire social order

which flows through one’s veins while they set a dozen San Francisco

police vehicles on fire. It is the ecstatic bliss that must have

shivered its way through the spines of any blessed enough to hear the

siren songs of those police cruisers wailing in flames. Jouissance is

the way that the sexual encounters immediately following such riots were

totally incommensurable to the mundane sex of daily life. Jouissance is

the driving élan of queer sex culture, and yet it is precisely that

element of queer sex which still cannot be locked up in an industry,

sold as a commodity or scheduled at some mass commercialized ritual.

While each element of the sex industry attempts to resolve some

fundamental lack and to integrate one’s desires into a coherent

subjective experience, jouissance is specifically that element of sexual

desire which makes such a union impossible. It is a desire for

jouissance which sends us into the night seeking to overwhelm our bodily

capacity, to disintegrate the corporeal limits of ourselves, to truly

flee from what and who we are. It is specifically this remainder, which

defines the unbridgeable chasm between the public sex culture of New

York and San Francisco in the seventies (massive squatted sex

warehouses, perpetual orgies, a culture of cruising which entirely

dissolved the distinction between sex and the rest of life) and the

so-called cruising of the cybernetic era (Grindr, craigslist, sparsely

attended and overpriced parties at failing sex clubs). This distance

might also be understood as what separates the anarchy of an orgy from

the democratic ideology of purist polyamory. Jouissance is the

unnameable desire that one hopelessly attempts to summarize before

giving one’s body to another: “I want to be negated.” Jouissance is that

essence of queer criminality which cannot be reduced to any vulgar

determinism. It is the joy found in the retribution of robbing some

bourgeois john, the thrill of theft, the satisfaction of destruction. It

is because we are addicted to the intertwining pleasure and pain which

brings us again and again into the streets: seeking to riot or fight or

fuck. It is specifically the pursuit of the unnameable jouissance which

causes, without fail, to risk everything in sacrifice to some more grand

chaos. This aufheben of the categories of pain and pleasure is also the

overthrowing of our attachments and investments in political activism,

stable identity, and reason. The negativity of jouissance is the same

that drives us away from obligations to the economy, the family, the

law, and, above all, the Future.

Edelman:

This jouissance dissolves such fetishistic investments, undoing the

consistency of a social reality that relies on Imaginary

identifications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paternal

metaphor of the name. Hence, there is another name that designates the

unnameability to which jouissance would give us access: Behind what is

named, there is the unnameable. It is in fact because it is unnameable

with all the resonances you can give to this name, that it is akin to

the quintessential unnameable, that is to say death. The death drive,

therefore manifests itself though in radically different guises, in…

jouissance….

To the extent that it tears the fabric of symbolic reality as we know

it, unravelling the solidity of every object, including the object as

which the subject necessarily takes itself, jouissance evokes the death

drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its

fantasy of self-realization, beyond the pleasure principle.

It is worth following Edelman in cautioning against the ways in which

jouissance, or more specifically, futile attempts to identify with or

name jouissance, can lead to a reification of the categories which we’d

call upon jouissance to abolish:

To the extent that jouissance, as fantasmatic escape from the alienation

intrinsic to meaning, lodges itself in a given object on which identity

come to depend, it produces identity as mortification, reenacting the

very constraint of meaning it was intended to help us escape.

Any attempt to situate jouissance as a positive project can only ever be

a step away from it. Circuit parties, pornography, social networking

applications, political demonstrations, activist organizations, art: all

of these strive to recuperate jouissance into some alternative

structure, and yet must always fail because jouissance is inherently

that which evades capture and ruptures the coherent narratives which

justify such structures. This critique is particularly ironic coming

from Edelman, whose own practice as a ‘jouissieur’ never seems to exceed

participation in those same circuit parties, academic conferences,

senseless hours at the gym and lavish shopping sprees. He specifically

advocates “the meaningless eruption of jouissance associated with the

‘circuit parties’ that gesture toward the circuit of the drive.” In his

affirmation of this or that element of contemporary gay culture, he

fails do the work of locating jouissance within the actual subversive

histories of queerness (compared to which, gay culture can only be just

a pathetic substitute). It’s important here to reassert that our

conception and praxis of jouissance absolutely must go beyond the

limitations of Edelman’s work.

Queerness, conceived entirely in the negative, names the jouissance

forbidden by, but permeating the social order itself. It is the specific

reason why we can say that behind the facade of the normal operations of

life within capital, there is a subversive current which infallibly and

irrationally lashes out against the conditions of the existent. This is

why we can also say that in moments of widespread rupture and revolt,

there exists a powerful and sinister drive to assimilate revolt back

into the circuits of politics, identity, and the economy itself. This

tension explains why urban revolt, as witnessed in London or Oakland,

must be rationalized by activists, politicians and police agencies as

the expression of finite grievances by coherent communities. And yet

this contradiction is also why routine traffic stops or raids by police

officers have triggered pain and death for those officers at the hands

of those they are accustomed to governing.

Returning to Edelman once more:

This I suggest is the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a

social order intent on misrecognizing its own investment in morbidity,

fetishization, and repetition: to inhabit the place of a meaninglessness

associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and

unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance,

rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes

aesthetic culture—the culture of forms and their reproduction, the

culture of Imaginary lures—as always already a “culture of death” intent

on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call

life.

The negativity of jouissance, which we understand to be the vital

characteristic of our queerness, is the methods by which we expose the

banality and horror of contemporary life. If the social order

consistently produces moments of rupture and anti-social

violence—expropriation, riot, looting, street fights, sexual depravity,

spree arson, hacking—these moments expose society for what it is: hell

on earth. Our acquiescence to the pull of jouissance functions as a

mirror into which society must gaze and recognize its decadence, the

impending actualization of its undoing. In the context of such horror,

our task is then to “materialize the force of negation, the derealizing

insistence of jouissance.”

This material force of negation must be one that goes on, not only to

disrupt the daily circulation of society, but also to sabotage the

apparatuses which function to reproduce us as subjects within those

flows. We must, as Edelman says, “break open with jouissance and launch

[ourselves] into the void around and against which the subject

congeals.”

Jouissance must be the attack on those all the subjective apparatuses

that entrench us into Identity at every turn: education, careers,

identity politics, political identity, bank accounts, biometric

surveillance technologies, internet avatars, communication

infrastructure, ad nauseam. Capitalist subjects are formed through the

perpetual war between living beings and these technics, and so any

project to abolish capital and its subjects must study and liquidate

these apparatuses. An insistence on jouissance is to consistently

intervene in this war against symbols on the part of the unsymbolized

remainder which is exploited in the game of subjectivity. Jouissance is

the range of deviant and subversive practices which connect our struggle

against society to our refusal to be its subjects.

That we pursue jouissance does not make us queers. Our queerness isn’t

that reified identity but is rather “a mode of enjoyment at the social

order’s expense.” (Edelman). And in doing this, we must resist any

recuperative tendency to identify jouissance with any identity or

grouping of identities. Jack Halberstam critiques Edelman on this point:

The gay male archive, because it is limited to a short list of favored

canonical writers is also bound by a particular range of affective

responses. And so, fatigue, ennui, boredom, indifference, ironic

distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal, insincerity and camp make

up…“an archive of feelings” associated with this form of anti-social

theory. But, this canon occludes another suite of affectivities

associated, again, with another kind of politics and a different form of

negativity. In this other archive, we can identify, for example: rage,

rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity,

earnestness, over-investment, incivility, brutal honesty and so on. The

first archive is a camp archive, a repertoire of formalized and often

formulaic responses to the banality of straight culture and the

repetitiveness and unimaginativeness of heteronormativity. The second

archive, however, is far more in keeping with the undisciplined kinds of

responses that Bersani at least seems to associate with sex and queer

culture and it is here that the promise of self-shattering, loss of

mastery and meaning, unregulated speech and desire are unloosed. Dyke

anger, anti-colonial despair, racial rage, counter-hegemonic violences,

punk pugilism, these are the bleak and angry territories of the

anti-social turn; these are the jagged zones within which not only

self-shattering (the opposite of narcissism in a way) but

other-shattering occurs.

We again find it useful to follow Halberstam’s criticism, and we’ll

happily appropriate the negative affects named above. And yet we must

constantly repeat the importance of severing these affects from

belonging to any subject. Edelman may be wrong for focusing on the gay

male subject, but then so too would Halberstam’s more inclusive project

fail by focusing on others. Edelman fails for exploring jouissance only

within the fields of literature and film, and this failure wouldn’t be

fixed (as Halberstam argues) by widening the canon of artwork to

explore. No, we must experience queer theories limits here, in its

attachment to identity and to art altogether. Specifically because we

want to engage with jouissance, that unnameable remainder, we must avoid

the positivities to be named in literature and identity. Our project of

negativity and jouissance will be one that is located in the subversive

potential hidden by daily life—a potential which cannot be trapped in

subjectivity, but instead possesses subjects and turns them against

themselves.

We’ll conclude our attempts to articulate jouissance by returning to

Jacques Camatte in his essay “This World We Must Leave,” written by the

time he’d already concluded that any struggle against capital must seek

to destroy domestication, and by extension civilization itself:

The crisis postulates a choice, a decision, and thus enforces itself

because there is a difficult and unusual situation. This is true both

for the Capitalist Mode of Production and for humans, without forgetting

the interference between the two…. There is a rigorous determinism that

leads to a certain realization, a determinism that can only be put in

question again if humans become capable of breaking their domestication.

The choice for [humans] appears as the acceptance of [their] destructive

multiplication of life or the domination = restriction of its inhuman

quantitative multiplication, which would allow its continuance. To

abandon a certain fear of death which forces it to look for life in the

extension of life, multiplication and progression of life. Reproduction

is a certain fear of death and [humans] live it in its extension and not

in the intensity of living; that translates the uncertainty in the world

as if the species was not yet sure of its existence on the planet. The

intensity of living implies a reflection of life on itself, then there

is enjoyment by the resorption of life inside the living [being] and not

delegated to another generation.

The capitalist mode of production must respond to the situation which

throws its very future into crisis. It will respond, in part, by

proliferating a wide array of alternatives and measures (austerity,

re-adjustment, sustainability) which might ensure its continued

viability. For all of us implicated in the ‘interference’ between

capitalism and humans, these measures will confront us as the new

conditions of our own immiseration and survival. All of the options

presented for us are always already held hostage by the specter of

reproductive futurism. In each case we are forced to identify the

extension of our own lives with the extension of the capitalist social

order eternally into the future. Austerity confronts us a new ethics to

be integrated into our own being if we are to ever be assured a future

within this failing civilization. We will be expected to work and

suffer, and to be paid solely in the assurance that the future will

continue its death-like march through time. The economists and

politicians will offer a plethora of false options and will foreclose on

the possibility of a real break.

While the statist managers of capital must globally enforce a regime of

austerity and structural re-adjustment in order to maintain their future

(by whatever means possible), a new social movement has emerged which

figures the future another way. In the United States, the Occupy

movement can be understood as a form by which anti-austerity struggles

could take shape and agitate for a different future. For some within the

movement, this means arguing for a return to a failed Keynesianism, a

structural investment in a future for the welfare state. They argue that

they are not anti-capitalist but that they are specifically trying to

‘save capitalism’ from the fundamental contradictions which ensure its

failure. Against this reformist position, the radicals within the Occupy

movement argue instead for a prefigurative politics, through which

activists and other radicals demonstrate that ‘another world is

possible.’ This position focuses on experimenting with and perfecting

forms of struggle and organization which they imagine to be blueprints

for a utopia to come. Prefigurative politics, as with all politics,

invests its energy and faith into the hope that if we only do the hard

work now, our efforts will be redeemed in a future society.

And so the dialectic of reproductive futurism continues to unfold in the

context of a deepening crisis. Whether arguing for the defeated project

of social democracy, the reactionary strategy of a militarized

privatization and re-structuring, or the prefigurative politics of the

new encampments, each position re-asserts the ideology of reproductive

futurism, which demands a lifetime of immiseration and sacrifice for the

possibility of a better world for our children. And yet each option

delivers us, again and again, to deathly repetition. We are asked to

choose between the concentration camps of a neo-fascist austerity on the

one hand and the self-managed poverty of the urban occupation encampment

on the other, between an emaciated means of reproduction in the home or

a ‘collectivized’ means to reproduce ourselves in the plazas. One option

expects us to sacrifice so that the economy might survive and the other

so that we might be redeemed by a constantly deferred utopia.

Regardless, the Camp, as central figure of contemporary reproductive

ideology, is situated at the horizon, eclipsing that unspoken option

which would shatter the double-bind of futurity and austerity.

This unstated option, the one laid out by Camatte and in a different way

by Edelman, is that intensity of living which would break our

domestication and end our investment in civilization’s future. This

intensity of enjoyment (the literal translation of jouissance from the

French) must be the same jouissance which shatters our subjective

enslavement to capitalist civilization. It is that exact current which

permeates all of society and delivers to the necessity of insurrection

against all that exists and for a joy which we cannot name. This

jouissance is the resistance which is hidden by, and yet integral to

every social structure. Within the spectacles of the anti-austerity

demonstrations and the plaza occupations lies the unnameable remainder

which does not promise a better future. It is the unassimilable and

ineffable tendency for people to self-sabotage any efforts at political

organization. It is the darkness so feared by the right and so denied by

the left. It is what the police must be called on to repress and the

organizer to assimilate.

If the activist milieus and the Left had staked their entire future on

Occupy Wall Street (OWS), it is because its represented a desperate

gesture of a social order whose future is falling away. The global

capitalist media has been quick to compare and contrast the supposedly

peaceful, democratic movement of the plazas with the violent irruption

of the lumpenproletarian youth in London. What separates one body of

dispossessed youth from another is specifically their disposition to the

question of futurity. For the indignant occupiers, their future is

something gambled away by financial institutions, to be won back through

righteous struggle. For London’s riotous scum, a future is something

they’ve never been promised, save for one of poverty, boredom, police

violence or prison. Behind the hopeful facade that was OWS, a thousand

Londons lay concealed. Our insurrectional project is the erosion of that

hope and the insistence against the possibility of the future.

This insurrection cannot be understood as another event deferred to the

future, but rather a possibility to seize life in spite of and against

the social order. The promise of jouissance is not to deliver a more

revolutionary futurity, but an irruption of irreducible negativity.

While the activists sacrifice themselves at the police lines, the

youngsters and ne’er-do-wells smash the unguarded windows of police

cruisers and help one another through the shattered plate glass doors of

cafes in order help themselves to the sweets within. While the

assemblies determine how to articulate reproductive futurism ‘from

below,’ the jouissiuers fuck, vandalize, expropriate, and conspire.

Flash mobs in Milwaukee and Philly, demonstrations turned to looting,

churches set alight, irresponsible sexual adventures, shipments

blockaded, explosions of the gender distinction, street parties turned

street fights, jail escapes, boulder-traps set for police officers,

infrastructural sabotage: countless moments where the ideologies and

structures which ensure the self-reproduction of the social order are

destroyed at the expense of an irrational enjoyment; an enjoyment fixed

in the present without a care for the future. What we term the commune

is not a model for another evasive utopia, but rather the process which

intertwines these diffuse moments of pleasure, pain, and joyous attack.

Queers Gone Wild

Having exhaustively analyzed the theoretical body of Edelman’s work, our

task is to distinguish what is useful to our project from what is

hopelessly lost in the abyss of the academy. While the immense weight of

Edelman’s cultural criticism and purely abstract engagement with Lacan

can surely be discarded, it is the insurrectionary potential of his

thought that we wish to cleave out of his books and use as a tool for an

anti-political praxis. To do this, we must explore the ancestral queer

revolutionary to whom he’s hopelessly indebted. So we now turn to the

work of Guy Hocquenghem.

Beyond being a writer and queer theorist, Hocquenghem was a queer

revolutionary who participated in the revolt of May ‘68 and was seduced

by Deleuze and Guattari’s radical ideas on desire. After being purged

from the Communist Party for his homosexuality, he joined the FHAR

(Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire) becoming the first fag to be

a member of the group of lesbian separatist militants. Ultimately he

forged a critique of the militant left and developed a queer theory

which called for nothing less than the destruction of capitalism, the

family, the state and ultimately civilization. The vast majority of his

work remains untranslated into English, and Anglophone queer theory is

all the more impoverished for this absence. The wonder of his work,

however, did not elude Edelman, who cites Hocquenghem sparsely

throughout No Future. Although Edelman only attributes a handful of

pretty phrases to Guy, we’ll argue that Lee’s project of queer

negativity is deeply indebted to the former’s work. Queerness as

negative, the refusal of reified queer identity, insistence against the

succession of generations, the critique of the family as the

foundational structure of the social order, the critique of politics,

conceptions of a destructive jouissance: all are to be found in

Hocquenghem’s theory, and without being diluted by layers of academic

bullshit and bad puns. We experience it as a horrible tragedy that Guy

died of AIDS before he could shape a more prolific canon of queer

theory, and yet it is in his memory that we carry this flame.

Capitalism, the Family and the Anus

“Capitalism, the Family, and the Anus” is the first chapter of the

largest volume of Hocquenghem’s work to be translated to English,

Homosexual Desire. In it, he lays out a theory of the foundational

structures of capitalism as a preface to his theory of a queerness that

might annihilate those structures. Hocquenghem’s theory of capitalism is

largely engaged the work of his contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, in their tome Anti-Oedipus. Elaborating on their work, he

argues that all of capitalist society is reproduced through the specific

relationship of the family—namely, the Oedipal relationship. This

concept is used to describe the way in which capital must respond to the

fundamental disintegration intrinsic to its reign. While the process of

accumulation rips bodies and lives away from the contexts which give

them meaning and provide for their ability to sustain themselves, the

Oedipal relationship of the family functions to capture the chaos of

this unravelling and to reorient human lives into the scheme of

reproduction:

The family is therefore constructed as an artificially

re-territorialized unit where social control has been relocated and in

which forms of social organization can be reproduced. The father becomes

a familial despot, and the mother, for example, an image for earth and

country. Thus the privatized individual that psychoanalysis studies

within the Oedipal family unit is an artificial construct, whose social

function is to trap and control the disorder that haunts social life

under capitalism.

We’ve already explored at length the symbolic order that the family is

called on to defend, but it is worth elaborating that the family is a

capitalist form that is made to function as the basic building block of

the social order. Discipline, work ethic, duty, law, morality, the

gender distinction, sexuality, and of course futurity are all inscribed

into children’s bodies through the machinations of the familial matrix.

In the following from Hocquenghem we see the germinal seed of Edelman’s

entire argument concerning the intrinsic link between the family and

reproductive futurism:

By becoming a father in turn, the former child hands the Oedipus complex

down to his own descendants like a torch of civilization, and takes his

place in the great lineage of Humanity. The absolute need for the

Oedipus complex to be reproduced—and not produced—explains why childhood

conflicts with the father image are finally resolved by the son’s

stepping into his father’s shoes and founding a new family: indeed, the

whole progress of society rests on the opposition between successive

generations.

We’ll follow Hocquenghem in asserting that civilization, and the class

society which is its content, is entirely reliant on the successive

reproduction of the familial unit in order to inseminate future

generations with its values. The social order is born anew in the body

of each child, as it is transmitted from parent to their offspring in an

endless forward movement. It is also here that we can locate the uncited

source of Edelman’s arguments concerning the figure of homosexuality

which must terrorize this familial fantasy:

Homosexual neurosis is the backlash to the threat which homosexual

desire poses for Oedipal reproduction. Homosexual desire is the… terror

of the family because it produces itself without reproducing. Every

homosexual must thus see himself as the end of the species, the

termination of a process for which he is not responsible and which must

stop at himself…. The homosexual can only be a degenerate, for he does

not generate—he is only the artistic end to a species…. Homosexuality is

seen as a regressive neurosis, totally drawn towards the past; the

homosexual is incapable of facing his future as an adult and father,

which is laid down for every male individual.

This terror is the basis for what Edelman describes as the fantasy on

which anti-queer paranoia is based; that complex of dread and desire so

intrinsically tied to queer sexuality, that bodies might find ways of

intercourse which do not produce the child and are not concerned with

the reproduction of the social order through its tiny body. For

Hocquenghem, homosexuality is not a coherent identity or community, but

instead a social category created to capture all the polymorphous and

queer desires which cannot fit neatly into the social form of the

Family. Queerness comes to figure the catch-all fantasy for all the

unnameable nightmares which haunt the capitalist social order.

Hocquenghem describes a growing imperialism of society which functions

to attribute a social status and definition to everything, even that

which cannot be classified. And so the destructive and polymorphic

desires which lurk at the core of social relations are captured into a

specific identity rather than being a capacity which could seduce or

enchant any body:

Capitalism, in its necessary employment of Oedipalization, manufactures

homosexuals just as it produces proletarians, and what is manufactured

is a psychologically repressive category…. They amount to a perverse

re-territorialization, a massive effort to regain social control in a

world tending toward disorder and decoding.

This disorder that homosexuality is called upon to symbolize runs deeper

than that which plagues Oedipal reproduction. Beyond the Family as

capitalist unit, Hocquenghem also describes the specific way in which

the individual is constructed as the subject of capital and the family.

For Hocquenghem, the individual in inherently caught up in what he

describes the privatization of the anus. He describes the anus as the

secret, the shameful, the abject part of every body around which

individuated subjectivity must form. It marks the real bodily threshold

which separates human individuals from one another.

Freud sees the anal stage as the stage of formation of the person. The

anus has no social desiring function left, because all its functions

have become excremental: that is to say, chiefly private. The great act

of capitalist decoding is accompanied by the constitution of the

individual: money, which must be privately owned in order to circulate,

is indeed connected with the anus, in so far as the anus is the most

private part of the individual. The constitution of the private,

individual, proper person is of the anus; the constitution of the public

person is of the phallus…

Every man has an anus which is truly his own, in the most secret depths

of his own person. The anus does not exist in a social relation, since

it forms precisely the individual and therefore enables the division

between society and the individual to be made. To reinvest the anus

collectively and libidinally would involve a proportional weakening of

the great phallic signifier, which dominates us constantly both in the

small-scale hierarchies of the family and in the great social

hierarchies. The least acceptable desiring operation (precisely because

it is the most desublimating one) is that which is directed at the anus.

For Guy, the psychic significance of the anus in self-construction is

precisely why homosexual desire links the destruction of futurity in the

family to the self-shattering embodied in jouissance. To be fucked in

the ass is to sabotage the bodily integrity through which the individual

and his realm of the private is constructed. Hocquenghem argues for the

deprivatization of the anus and the formation of what he terms ‘anal

groupings’—forms of sexual collectivity which destroy the Family and

serve no purpose in the social order’s future. In grouping anal desire,

queer formations are able to sabotage all the psychic fantasies which

lie at the heart of the civilized order.

From Jeffrey Week’s preface to Homosexual Desire:

He argues that since the anus has been privatized by capitalist/phallic

domination, we need to group it, which means, in effect, to reject the

individualized notion of homosexuality as a problem. Practicing

homosexuals are those who have failed their sublimation, who therefore

can and must conceive their relationships in different ways. So when

homosexuals as a group publicly reject their labels, they are in fact

rejecting Oedipus, rejecting the artificial entrapment of desire,

rejecting sexuality focused on the Phallus…

He argues that when the anus recovers its desiring functions, when laws

and rules disappear, group pleasures will appear without the sacred

difference between public and private, social and individual. And

Hocquenghem sees signs of this sexual communism in institutions of the

gay subculture, where scattering or promiscuity, representing

polymorphous sexuality in action reigns…

To fail one’s sublimation is in fact merely to conceive social relations

in a different way. Possibly, when the anus recovers its desiring

function and the plugging-in of organs takes place subject to no rule or

law, the group can then take its pleasure in an immediate relation where

the sacrosanct difference between public and private, between the

individual and the social, will be out of place. We can find traces of

this state of primary sexual communism in some of the institutions of

the homosexual ghetto, despite all the repression and guilty

reconstructions which these undergo: in Turkish baths, for example where

homosexual desires are plugged in anonymously, in spite of ever-present

fears that the police may be present.

The Parasites of Society

We’ll turn briefly to another of Hocquenghem’s texts: The Screwball

Asses. In it, he levels a critique of the (communist and homosexual)

Left that is quite applicable to the various leftist and revolutionary

political formations we still encounter.

His simple yet crucial pronouncement is that “to demand the recognition

of homosexuality as it is is simple reformism.” This single line

foregrounds our entire refusal of identity politics and the quest for

intelligibility with which it is solely concerned.

He continues:

Like the women’s liberation movement that inspired it, the revolutionary

homosexual platform emerged with Leftism and traumatized it to the point

of contributing to its debacle. But while they fissured Leftism by

revealing its phallocentric morphology and its censure of marginal

sexualities (and of sexuality in general), these autonomous movements,

despite their refusal of hierarchy, continued and continue to replicate

the conditioned reflexes of the political sector that produced them:

logomachy, the replacement of desire by the mythology of struggle.

Politics, even a queer politics, must always be based on the sacrifice

of desire in the service and representation of this or that struggle.

For Hocquenghem, activist structures and militant organizations are as

much a part of the self-constituted prisons he argues against. He goes

on to write: “We might have hoped that homosexuality could tear classic

activism away from non-desire and create a true celebration of our

colluding desires, but that was without taking into account the bad

conscience of homosexuals. We must admit that the wildfire was

short-lived.”

We’d be wrong to apply this formulation solely to the activity of

mainstream LGBT activist groups. This fundamental limit of political

activism is applicable to the most radical queer or militantly anarchist

individuals. Militancy and activism can only ever guarantee a

short-lived wildfire, which cannot ever sustain the flames of an

unintelligible drive of queerness and anarchy. Guy writes of militants

that “they freeze the event into a role,” and “the militants of the gay

movement have just as much of a natural tendency to become specialists

on homosexuality as psychiatrists and social workers.”

Guy continues:

Leftism has passed through, and Leftism dries up whatever it touches.

Whatever comes from Leftism will remain permeated by terrorism and

factionalism. For fear of not following the tacit scripture or

counter-scripture that is supposed to unite us, in that environment we

always feel as if we were the students or the professors of those who

have spoken last, even if this is against our will. We could even say

that the desire to deconstruct all relations of power, the uninterrupted

lookout for relations of power, creates an additional, hallucinatory

power relation. Of course within the FHAR, there are and have been

attempts made to reject this whole mechanism of the persecuted and the

persecutor, but the crisis has not been resolved. Today, the collective

body of revolutionary queers lies emptied, lifeless and useless; and

this happened faster to the FHAR than to any other leftist group.

While he situates his critique through his own experience with the FHAR,

we can each surely locate mistaken investments of our own energy into

similar revolutionary groupings, and the way that burnout inevitably

accompanies such an engagement. If are constantly resisting the feelings

of emptiness, lifelessness and uselessness, we should pay close

attention to the fields of activity in which we’re engaged, and attempt

to locate what vampiric forms are depleting our energy. We’ll

undoubtedly find that always this depressive ennui is situated in a

dynamic where joyous experiments in desire are subjugated to the

sacrificial call of “the struggle.”

In his characteristic style of innuendo, Guy goes tackles the anxiety

that characterizes activism:

The leftist is nether a player, nor a jouisseur; he just drills people,

regardless of whether he wants to liberate homosexuality or the

proletariat. Never overwhelmed, the Leftist just saves himself for next

time. The Leftist does not have time on his side. He’s always in a rush.

He produces speed everywhere so as to force you into hysterics or into a

daze. But its not the kind of speed that propels you far away so that

you find yourself stunned at having covered so much ground, stunned by

the change of perspective and of thinking. Instead, its the haste of the

monkey scratching at the same spot till a sore develops.

The Guy [!] describes is located in the terrorizing hold that the Future

has upon activists. Because a better tomorrow requires tremendous ‘good

work’ today, Leftists of all stripes are caught in a never-ending

anxiety of activity, yet never get any nearer to their fleeing utopias.

That the revolution is so close on the horizon and yet flees from us

means that we can’t afford the immature and irresponsible practices of

jouissance which could distract from the sombre struggle at hand. The

ideology of Leftism is truly a living death for all who it entrances.

Leftists argue that we must destroy power relationships, and yet they

leave unchallenged the power relationship of reproductive futurism which

necessitates an endless project of self-discipline and self-control.

Hocquenghem argues that opposed to this sombre struggle must be an

insurgent project based in joy. “Strangely enough,” he writes, “whenever

we speak of joy, professional revolutionaries only hear what churches or

ideologies have put there.” We are not professional revolutionaries, nor

joyless prophets interested in spreading ideology. Rather we must set

our stake on practices of joy and jouissance resonating to unleash an

insurgent contagion.

Here is Hocquenghem at his finest:

All revolutionaries will have to become parasites of society, and more

and more irresponsibly at that, or they will still be the knights of

some morality or another. Our energy is devoted to the destruction of

the animal that feeds us.

Only such a project of parasitism could resist the dead ends of activist

frenzy and militant escalation. We must live, fight and enjoy at the

expense of our enemies. Such a project is a queer in that it must depart

from the paths laid out for us and refuse the specialization and

captivity to time inherent in activism.

Uncivilized Desire

In Hocquenghem’s work, the negative potential of queerness is

intrinsically tied to his conception of desire. In Homosexual Desire, he

puts it as follows:

If the homosexual image contains a complex knot of dread and desire, if

the homosexual phantasy is more obscene than any other and at the same

time more exciting, if it is impossible to appear anywhere as a

self-confessed homosexual without upsetting families, causing children

to be dragged out of the way and arousing mixed feelings of horror and

desire, then the reason must be that for us twentieth-century westerners

there is a close connection between desire and homosexuality.

Homosexuality expresses something—some aspect of desire—which appears

nowhere else, and that something is not merely the accomplishment of the

sexual act with a person of the same sex.

Desire, not specifically homosexual, is the tendency within society

which also figures its undoing. Desire is the polymorphous and perverse

overflowing that refuses to be captured within Oedipal reproduction or

locked up in identity. Queerness, in its association with desire, names

the negativity which is the nightmare of the social order.

Desire, then, cannot be reduced to sexual attraction or orientation.

Desire is a chaotic field which escapes representation, and so the

repressive field of normative desire can only refer to it by the figures

of those whose sexual practices are outside its matrix of

intelligibility. The danger and fear associated with queerness are in

relation to this unthinkability.

From Jeffrey Weeks’ introduction to Homosexual Desire:

For the aim is to find unalienated forms of radical social action, and

these cannot be traditional centralized structures (especially of the

working class), because these, too, are complicit with capitalism. The

model of alternative modes was provided by the spontaneous forms of

activity developed in France in ‘68, fusions of desire which escape the

imprisoning force of the normal. Schizoanalysis provides the

alternative: the schizophrenic is not revolutionary, but the

schizophrenic process is the potential of revolution, and only in the

activity of autonomous, spontaneous groupings, outside the social order,

can revolution be achieved. The result, which is central to

Hocquenghem’s project, is a worship of the excluded and marginal as the

real material of social transformation.

In this analysis, we can draw important ties between Hocquenghem’s

project and the insurrectionary anarchist project as we conceive it. The

intertwining of the desires of autonomous groups in the process of

struggle is exactly what we understand to be an insurrectionary process.

Not the massified expansion of a party, but rather the multiplication

and diffusion of anal groupings. Only by avoiding the old-forms of

‘revolutionary’ or ‘working class’ organization can we side-step the

traps which are laid out by recuperation. To orient ourselves around

desire, and to pursue the ‘blissful enjoyment of the present,’ would

mean to disavow the progressive ideologies of reform, inclusion,

movement building, or incremental change.

The homosexual does not seek a peaceful and harmonious adjustment to

society, and his effusive inclination… leads him along a path of

ceaseless struggle. In short, the homosexual has not developed into a

partner of human society. Here, human society means of course the

Freudian model, in which homosexuality can only find a place according

to the sublimated Oedipal mode. On the other hand, the homosexual points

the way to another possible form of relationship which we hardly dare

call society.

Though the assimilationist tendencies of the homosexual movement have

certainly proved that there isn’t anything inherently radical or

anti-social about homosexuality, Hocquenghem is endeavoring here to

describe a specific tendency within the movement which escaped

representation. We might call this the Real of negativity so closely

bound up in queerness, the desire for disorder hidden in the social

order itself. The anti-social relationships which draw their potential

from queerness could be understood as the potential for an autonomous

movements against society.

The appearance of autonomous movements, movements which reject the law

of the signifier all the more because they create a law for themselves,

has completely upset the political world. The confusion is total, since

the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to

the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the

logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the

relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It

is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected

with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of

desire, the motor car and the family heterosexuality are one and the

same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political

logic.

Here Hocquenghem perfectly expresses the way in which desire is bound to

a refusal of the future, a purely negative critique, and an

anti-political praxis. Politics cannot rationally express why the motor

car and the family are the same enemy of queerness. And yet, for us, it

is abundantly obvious why these, and literally every other apparatus of

modern society must be annihilated. Lacking the means to express this

destructive desire through politics, only an anti-politics can elaborate

a process by which queer desire can be materialized against the physical

arrangement of the social order. The car, the family, the school, the

prison, the boutique, the surveillance infrastructure: each an

expression of a civilization in the face of which our most potent desire

is its annihilation. For him, the undoing of civilization must be linked

to a movement based in the uncontrollability of desire.

Hocquenghem again:

They gay movement appears basically uncivilized, and it is not without

reason that many people see it as the end of reproduction and thus the

end of the species itself. There is no point in speculating whether the

class war might be replaced by a war of civilization, which would have

the advantage of adding a cultural and sexual dimension to the political

and economic struggle. Going to this extent would mean challenging the

very concept of civilization, and we must retreat with Fourier to the

notion of a struggle against civilization understood as the Oedipal

succession of generations. Civilization forms the interpretive grid

through which desire becomes cohesive energy. Wildcat movements among

workers, actions which take place outside the commonly accepted

political frameworks and which make no formal claims, not even for the

seizure of power, are part of the disintegration of that coherence. The

most honest leftists will cite the desire for a new society as evidence

of absence. It is already too much to believe that the “wild-catter” is

a future civilized person, as the child is a future adult. The gay

movement is a wildcat movement because it is not the signifier of what

might become a new form of social organization, a new stage in civilized

humanity, but a crack in what Fourier calls the “system of the falsity

of civilized loves”; it demonstrates that civilization is the trap into

which desire keeps falling…. The great fear of homosexuality is

translated into a fear that the succession of generations, on which

civilization is based, may stop. Homosexual desire is neither on the

side of death nor on the side of life: it is the killer of civilized

egos.

And here, long before Edelman ever put pen to page, is the vital link

between the fantasy of futurity, the construction of the coherent self,

and their intersection in reproductive futurism. To oppose reproductive

futurism, and the reproduction of the social order through the endless

succession of generations, is to signify the end of civilization as well

as the subjects which comprise it. This destruction is to be found in

the degeneration and disintegration of social structures into the queer

formations which exist in constant pursuit of jouissance and without a

care for the future. The proliferation of these queer autonomous groups

does not prefigure a better world; these groupings of desire can only

confront civilization as a negative, anti-political, wild force.

This finds its echo in Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor

Frankenstein”:

Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for

we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature

itself spills forth. If this is your path, as it is mine, let me offer

whatever solace you may find in this monstrous benediction: May you

discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it

nourish your rage.

Our queer position against civilization is not based on some notion of

naturalness, eternally linked as we are to signifying the outside of any

idealized natural order. Queers must always figure those types of

unregenerative, non-productive beings which have no place in a natural

order. Neither is our struggle to prove the legitimacy of, or attempt to

naturalize queerness. Nature itself is a disciplinary category of

civilization used to define and classify wild life. Instead, as Stryker

insists, we’ll ally ourselves with the ‘chaos and darkness’ from which

nature spills forth. This chaos and darkness, being the same

unintelligible force which Hocquenghem calls homosexual desire, which

Edelman calls the death drive. We locate ourselves in the spilling forth

of the same chaos which promises civilization’s undoing.

The Body and Language

In the same way that we’ve shown the indebtedness of Edelman’s critique

to Hocquenghem in regard to his refusal of politics and positivity, it

is equally important that we demonstrate the ways in which he also draws

on Hocquenghem’s critique of language through the lens of jouissance.

When Edelman criticizes the logic of intelligibility in politics, this

is actually a rather shallow reading of Hocquenghem’s deeper criticism

of language in general. For Guy, language is an apparatus within which

desire is trapped and which must always fail in its project of

representation. It is within this context that we can further explore

the relationship of these ideas to anti-civilizational thought.

In The Screwball Asses, Hocquenghem deploys jouissance both as what

escapes representation in language and also as the force which can

interrupt the domination of language over life. Hocquenghem begins the

essay with a small notice:

Let me begin with the admission that what follows is exclusively

addressed to those individuals with whom I cannot make love. For

everyone else, the festivity of bodies transforms speech into a servant

of the body, nothing else. It is not useless to specify this: we only

speak of sex in front of people with whom it does not take place or who

likewise admit to having no desire for us.

With this caveat, he insists on a fundamental incapacity of language to

capture the form of bodily struggle he argues for. Following him, our

struggle must also begin from this disjunction. We engage with language

insofar as we can deploy it in service of the body. We speak, we put

word to paper in order to send a wink to those with whom we have not yet

or cannot at present conspire in a practice of jouissance. For if sex is

unspeakable, that does not however exclude speaking from being a sexual

medium. For our co-conspirators, those with whom we’ve shared

unmentionable experiences, these words can only approach the real of our

project, can only serve as feeble reminders of a covenant we share in

the pursuit of wildness. For the rest, there is seduction.

Hocquenghem indicts all existing ‘radical’ discourses as party to this

fundamental disjunction between the body and any attempt to capture its

struggle within language:

Both for dialectical materialism and for psychoanalysis, the material is

the non-body. All struggles for the return of the body have been so

contaminated by the non-body that when they speak of the body they only

accentuate its exile. We forget that the content of speech is only the

container of our universe.

At several points throughout the text he implores his readers to break

from the tyranny of language, “to speak with the body rather than with

words, or to live our corporeality rather than speak of sexuality.” He

asks, “when will we be able to shatter the power of words by the

movement of our skins?”

This contradiction between the body and language is not unique to

Hocquenghem’s thought. We’ll return to Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban

and the Witch, wherein she historicizes this contradiction and situates

it in the process of the domestication of human beings. She argues that

“one of the preconditions for capitalist development was the process

that Michel Foucault defined as the ‘disciplining of the body,’ which in

my view consisted of an attempt by the state and church to transform the

individual’s powers into labor-power.”

She argues that this process of disciplining the body took the form of a

conflict between reason and the passions of the body:

The outcome is reminiscent of the medieval skirmishes between angels and

devils for the possession of the departing soul. But the conflict is now

staged within the person who is reconstructed as a battlefield, where

opposite elements clash for domination. On the one side, there are the

forces of Reason: parsimony, prudence, sense of responsibility,

self-control. On the other, the low instincts of the Body: lewdness,

idleness, systematic dissipation of one’s vital energies. The battle is

fought on many fronts because Reason must be vigilant against the

attacks of the carnal self, and prevent “the wisdom of the flesh” from

corrupting the powers of the mind. In the extreme case, the person

becomes a terrain for a war of all against all.

Others have described this ‘war of all against all’ as the fundamental

condition of an omnipresent civil war that is consistently raging,

permeating the social order and interrupting the myth of social peace.

This narrative is quite similar to a conception of queerness developed

by Hocquenghem and later elaborated by Edelman, which understands

queerness to be an ever-present violence, a potential which any body is

capable of. If we follow Federici here in understanding the conflict

between Reason (and its servant: language) and the Passion of the body,

we can situate our queerness as a partisan force within this battle.

Federici goes on:

This conflict between Reason and the Body, described by the philosophers

as a riotous confrontation between the better and the lower sorts… the

battle which 17^(th) century discourse on the person imagines unfolding

in the microcosm of the individual has arguably a foundation in the

reality of the time. It is an aspect of that broader process of social

reformation, whereby, in the age of reason, the rising bourgeoisie

attempted to remold the subordinate classes in conformity with the needs

of the developing capitalist economy… That battle against the body that

has become its historic mark… The reform of the body is at the core of

the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition “the ultimate

purpose of life,” instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction

of our needs, thus it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment

of life.

Here we are reminded of Hocquenghem’s explanation of jouissance as

“blissful enjoyment of the present.” Federici’s historicism temptingly

offers a historical-material structure for the whole of our critique.

The desperate struggle of bodies against the future and in pursuit of

jouissance is the same struggle which opposes capitalist development

from the beginning. The conquest of Reason over Passion corresponds to

the domination of the bourgeois order over the rebel body, because it is

precisely the same struggle, manifest in each and every body.

The body, emptied of its occult forces, could be caught in a system of

subjection, whereby its behavior could be calculated, organized,

technically thought and invested of power relations… The development of

the body into a work-machine, [was] one of the main tasks of primitive

accumulation…. Like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of

all broken up, so that it could relinquish its hidden treasures. For

while the body is the condition of the existence of labor-power, it is

also its limit, as the main element of resistance to its expenditure. It

was not sufficient then, to decide that in itself the body had no value.

The body had to die so that labor-power could live.

Federici describes how this disciplinary war was waged so as to separate

bodies from their capacity for jouissance, in order to commodify them as

labor-power.

By transforming labor into a commodity, capitalism causes workers to

submit their activity to an external order over which they have no

control and with which they cannot identify. Thus, labor process becomes

a ground of self-estrangement… This too leads to a sense of dissociation

from the body, which becomes reified, reduced to an object with which

the person ceases to be immediately identified.

It is this fundamental estrangement, located in the process of primitive

accumulation which she says forms the basis of our contemporary

alienation from our bodies, our terminal enslavement to abstraction and

language.

Federici explains that this disciplinary violence has always focused on

the eradication of non-productive ways of being:

The violence of the ruling class aimed at a radical transformation of

the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any form of

behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-discipline…

Nakedness was penalized, as were many other unproductive forms of

sexuality and sociality.

Here we see the tyranny of the Child traced back through time and

embedded in language itself. The assault upon the body by Reason and

Language has always been to eliminate all non-productive desires and

capacities. Reproductive futurism then becomes the framework through

which certain forms of social engagement are militarily enforced while

others are eradicated.

This militaristic and scientific approach to disciplining the body

functions through the body’s capture within language. Federici argues

that “in mechanical philosophy we perceive a new bourgeois spirit that

calculates, classifies, makes distinctions, and degrades the body only

in order to rationalize its faculties, aiming not just at intensifying

its subjection but at maximizing its social utility.” Here the

linguistic and discursive institutions of Identity and Sexuality

function alongside all other racializing and gendering apparatuses

encode alienated bodies with particular values and functions—values and

functions which serve to reproduce society in every body and every

instant. Federici argues that this is necessary for the regime of any

capitalist future.

From a capitalist viewpoint… here the future can be anticipated only

insofar as the regularity and immutability of the system is assumed;

that is, only insofar as it is assumed that the future will be like the

past, and no major change, no revolution, will upset the coordinates of

individual decision-making… The fixation of the body in space and time,

that is, the individual’s spatio-temporal identification, is an

essential condition for the regularity of the work-process.

She continues later:

Also from the point of view of the abstraction process that the

individual underwent in the transition to capitalism, we can see that

the development of the human machine was the main technological leap,

the main step in the development of the productive forces that took

place in the period of primitive accumulation. We can see, in other

words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the

clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.

If Federici is correct, if our very bodies have been destroyed and

re-made into work-machines, and if these machines are the original

machines which constitute the capitalist social order, then we must take

our very bodies as machines to be sabotaged; our very corporeality, as

Hocquenghem argues, must be the field of combat.

The battlefield is within each of us. The war of passion against reason,

beyond being an external struggle must also be a struggle we wage

against ourselves. We must struggle no less violently within ourselves

as individuals than we struggle against the external enemies who seek to

enforce the disciplinary regime of society’s future. In the list of

managers and police with whom we battle, we must include the managerial

and policing apparatuses which operate in our very being.

We can return to Hocquenghem in The Screwball Asses to be reminded that

“trying to destroy power is an even greater lure, especially if we

neglect to shake off this very particular form of power called

self-domination.” Starting from a critique of civilization, we can

understand this self-domination as a result of our domestication into

subjects. Locating language and symbolic thought as engines of this

domestication then as a consequence, our very capacity to think has been

colonized from birth onward through this process. As such, we must turn

to those forms of struggle which are not justified by Reason. We must

turn to that ineffable jouissance as a tool in combat against

domestication. Let’s turn again to the critique of domestication so that

we might employ their help in elaborating how we might break the forward

motion of capitalist time.

To Destroy Sexuality; To Destroy Domestication

In the previous section that deals more closely with Edelman’s work, we

cited Jacques Camatte in claiming that jouissance takes place as the

destruction of the domestication intrinsic to civilization. In order to

further elaborate Hocquenghem’s queer project against civilization,

we’ll explore the concept of domestication and what it could mean to

undo it.

Domestication, Oedipal to the core, is the process of the victory of our

fathers over our lives; the ways in which the social order laid down by

the dead continues to haunt the living. It is the residue of accumulated

memories, culture and relationships which have been transmitted to us

through the linear progression of time through the fantasy of the Child.

It is this investment of the horrors of the past into the materiality of

our present lives which ensures the perpetuation of civilization. To

quote Camatte again from “Against Domestication”:

What is to stop people from transforming all these crises and disasters,

which are themselves the result of the latest mutation of capital, into

a catastrophe for capital itself? The explanation for this is to be

found in the domestication of humanity, which comes about when capital

constitutes itself as a human community. The process starts out with the

fragmentation and destruction of human beings, and the final outcome is

that capital is anthropomorphized.

And so, within the ideological constraint of reproductive futurism,

revolt against civilization is unthinkable because capital has so

thoroughly colonized our very being, that to imagine our own survival is

to always already be thinking about the perpetuation of civilization

through the self-reproduction of capital. We have no community to fight

for, and no humanity to save, because both are already thoroughly

disintegrated and have been replaced with the community of capital and

its anthropomorphized subject: the civilized ego. To move on to

Camatte’s later essay “The Wandering of Humanity”:

Today the human being has been engulfed, not only in the determination

of class where he was trapped for centuries, but as a biological being.

It is a totality that has to be destroyed. Demystification is no longer

enough. The revolt of human beings threatened in the immediacy of their

daily lives goes beyond demystification. The problem is to create other

lives. This problem lies simultaneously outside the ancient discourse of

the workers movement and its old practice, and outside the critique that

considers this movement a simple ideology (and considers human beings an

ideological precipitate).

It is a harsh reality to acknowledge that the restructuring which we

have undergone through the process of domestication is more horrifying

than to merely shape us as subject. Capital reaches to our very biology,

the objective fact of our being in the world. Starting from there, we

must further acknowledge that a struggle against civilization must also

be a struggle against ourselves as we are, to destroy the structuring of

our bodies as vessels of the social order. Here we must seek out,

following Camatte’s previous insistence on jouissance, that series of

self-shattering measures which could constitute a project against

domestication. As Camatte puts it, “the human being is dead. The only

possibility for another human being to emerge is our struggle against

our domestication, our emergence from it.”

Camatte continues to elaborate in “Wandering”:

The phenomenon which emerges today does not in the least destroy the

negative evaluation of capital, but forces us to generalize it to the

class that was once antagonistic to it and carried within itself all the

positive elements of human development and today of humanity itself.

This phenomenon is the recomposition of a community and of human beings

by capital, reflecting human community like a mirror. The theory of the

looking glass could only arise when the human being became a tautology,

a reflection of capital. Within the world of the despotism of capital

neither a good nor an evil can be distinguished. Everything can be

condemned. Negating forces can only arise outside of capital. Since

capital has absorbed all the old contradictions, the revolutionary

movement has to reject the entire product of the development of class

societies. This is the crux of its struggle against domestication.

Here again, the projects of queer negativity and the struggle to destroy

domestication intersect. Capital’s capture of every positivity in

civilization mandates the purely negative project. And the tautology

wherein capital and human beings perfectly express one another

emphasizes the need for our project to, queerly, call into question our

domestication into the various social roles. As Camatte writes, “each

individual must be violent with him/herself in order to reject, as

outside themselves, the domestication of capital and all its comfortable

self-validating ‘explanations.’” It is for this reason that we concern

ourselves with the queer desire to locate subjectivity’s sutures and

tear them out.

In Hocquenghem’s work we find words that put so beautifully everything

we would want to, so we will quote at length from “To Destroy

Sexuality”:

Although the Capitalist order appears to be tolerant, it in fact has

always controlled life through its affective aspects, constraining it to

the dictates of its totalitarian organization based on exploitation,

private property, male dominance, profit, and profitability. It

exercises this control under all of its various guises: the family,

schools, the work place, the army, rules, discourse. It unfailingly

pursues its abject mission of castrating, oppressing, torturing, and

mangling the body, all the better to inscribe its laws upon our flesh,

to rivet into our unconscious its mechanisms for propagating slavery.

The capitalist state uses retention, stasis, scarification and neurosis

to impose its norms and models, imprint its characters, assign its

roles, promulgate its programs… It permeates our bodies, forcing its

roots of death deep into our smallest crevices. It takes over our

organs, robs us of our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures,

harnesses all of our ‘life’ productivity under its own paralyzing

administration. It turns each of us into… a stranger to his own desires.

The forces of capitalist occupation continually refine their system of

aggression, provocation, extortion so as to use it along with a massive

reinforcement of social terror (individual guilt) to repress, exclude

and neutralize all those practices of our will that don’t reproduce

those forms of domination. And so this thousand-year-old reign of

unhappy gratification, sacrifice, resignation, codified masochism and

death perpetuates itself. Here reigns castration, reducing the ‘subject’

to a guilt-ridden, neurotic, industrious being, little more than a

manual laborer.

This older order, reeking of rotting bodies, is indeed horrifying, but

it has forced us to direct the revolutionary struggle against capitalist

oppression there where it is most deeply rooted—in the living flesh of

our own body….

We can no longer stand by idly while we are robbed of our mouths, our

anuses, our sexual members, our guts, our veins… just so they can turn

the into parts for their ignominious machine which produces capital,

exploitation and the family.

We can no longer stand by idly while they control, regulate, and occupy

our mucous membranes, the pores of our skin, the entire sentient surface

of our body.

We can no longer stand by idly while they use our nervous system as a

relay in the system of capitalist, federal, patriarchal exploitation.

Nor while they use our brain as a means of punishment programmed by

ambient power.

We can no longer not ‘come’ or hold back our shit, our saliva, our

energy according to their laws with their minor, tolerated infractions.

We want to explode the frigid, inhibited, mortified body that capitalism

wants so desperately to make out of our living body…

Wanting the fundamental freedom to enter into these revolutionary

practices entails our escaping from the limits of our own ‘self.’ We

must turn the ‘subject’ within ourselves upside-down; escape from the

sedentary, from the civilized state and cross the spaces of a limitless

body; live in the willful mobility beyond sexuality, beyond the

territory and repertory of normality…

We’re not concerned with simply breaking down [the] official sexuality

as one would break down the condition of one’s imprisonment within any

structure; we want to destroy it, to get rid of it because in the final

analysis it functions as an infinitely repeating castration machine

designed to reproduce everywhere and in everyone the unquestioning

obedience of a slave…

What we want, what we desire, is to kick in the representations so that

we might discover just what our living body is.

We want to free, release, unfetter and relieve this living body so as to

free all of its energies, desires, passions crushed by our conscriptive

and programed social system.

We want to be able to exercise each of our vital functions experiencing

their full complement of pleasure.

We want to rediscover sensations as basic as the pleasure in breathing

that has been smothered by the forces of oppression and pollution; or

the pleasure in eating and digesting that has been interrupted by the

rhythm of profitability and the ersatz food it produces; or the pleasure

in shitting and sodomy that has been systematically assaulted by the

capitalist establishment’s opinion of the sphincter. It inscribes

directly upon this flesh its fundamental principles: the power lines of

exploitation, the neurosis of accumulation, the mystique of property and

propriety, etc. We want to rediscover the pleasure in shaking ourselves

joyously, without shame, not because of need or compensation, but just

for the sheer pleasure of shaking ourselves. We want to rediscover the

pleasures of vibrating, humming, speaking, walking, moving, expressing

ourselves, raving, singing—finding pleasure in our body in all ways

possible…

We seek to open our bodies to other bodies, to another body; to transmit

vibrations, to circulate energies, to arrange desires so that each is

free to play out its fantasies and ecstasies so that we might live

without guilt and without inhibiting all the sensual intra- and

interpersonal practices we need so our day-to-day reality won’t turn

into the slow agony that capitalism and bureaucracy project as a model

existence. We seek to rip out of ourselves the festering rumor of guilt

that for thousands of years has been at the root of all oppression…

We want to be rid of all roles and identities based on the phallus.

We want to be rid of sexual segregation. We want to be rid of the

categories of man and woman, gay and straight, possessor and possessed,

greater and lesser, master and slave. We want instead to be transsexual,

autonomous, mobile and multiple human beings with varying differences

who can interchange desires, gratifications, ecstasies, and tender

emotions without referring back to tables of surplus value or power

structures that aren’t already in the rules of the game.

Birds of Fire

To conclude our elaboration of queerness as wildness, as a madness

attacking the civilized social order, we’ll return briefly to Edelman’s

critique in No Future. In keeping with his academic field of cultural

criticism, he turns to a series of works of literature and film in order

to structure his argument. While we find most of this navel-gazing to

have absolutely no application outside of the academy, we’ll critically

engage with one such object of Edelman’s work: Alfred Hitchcock’s The

Birds.

In his engagement with Hitchcock’s classic horror film, Edelman argues

that the antagonists of the film, the birds, represent what he describes

as the future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive, which is

queerness, flying over the San Francisco Bay and interrupting various

manifestations of familial order and heteronormativity.

The choice of the children’s party for this first fully choreographed

attack suggests the extent to which the birds take aim at the social

structures of meaning that observances like the birthday party serve to

secure and enact: take aim, that is, not only at children and the

sacralization of childhood, but also at the very organization of meaning

around structures of subjectivity that celebrate, along with the day of

one’s birth, the ideology of reproductive necessity.

Edelman, following Hocquenghem, describes the way in which the birds

function against the hegemony of language, erratically singing and

screeching, warning of the immanence of their attack. This is not unlike

those ancient descriptions of ‘barbarians at the gates’ which depict

civilization’s enemies as being horrifyingly incoherent, waging war not

only against the material foundations of civilization, but also against

its tyranny of reason. Edelman describes Hitchcock’s birds: “The verses

they sing perversely veer from sense to nonsense, back and forth, with

no clear sense of direction, mixing narrative fragments that allude to a

failure of heterosexual domesticity.” He goes on:

We might suggest that the birds in Hitchcock’s film, by virtue of

fucking up—and with—the matrix of heterosexual mating, desublimate the

reproductive rites of the movie’s human lovebirds, about which, as about

the products of which, they don’t give a flying fuck. They gesture, that

is, toward the death drive that lives within reproductive futurism,

scorning domestication in the form of romance, which is always the

romance of the Child…

They come because coming is what they do, arbitrarily and unpredictably,

like the homosexuals Keyes condemns for promoting “a paradigm of human

sexuality divorced from family and procreation, and engaged in solely

for the sake of… sensual pleasure and gratification.” They come, that

is, to trace a connection, as directly as the crow flies, between

disorder in the family and the rupture, the radical loss of familiarity,

unleashed byjouissance.

Edelman works here to tie together, through the symbol of the birds, the

irrationality of queerness with the refusal of reproductive futurism.

For him, the birds represent the flooding forth of bodies taken by

jouissance, bodies without a care for the law or heteronormativity or

the mandates of reproductive futurism.

Insofar as the birds bear the burden of [queerness], which aims to

dissociate heteronormativity from its own implication in the drive, it

would, in fact, be more accurate to say that the meaning of

homosexuality is determined by what the film represents in them: the

violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the

unnatural access to jouissance, which find their perfect expression in

the slogan devised by Hitchcock himself for the movie’s promotion, “the

birds is coming.”

He describes the birds in a way not unlike the terror with which

servants of order will always describe resistance to such order: “more

and more birds, indistinguishable, all as similar to each other as

clones, alight as the visual antitypes to the reproductive future, that

the children as figures of increase themselves, should signify and

assure.” This moblike anonymity is the hallmark of the ways in which

states consistently describe their enemies. Whether foreign or domestic,

anti-state resistance is always cast as the faceless, indistinguishable,

animalistic mob: the black bloc, fantastic terrorists, irrational

rioters, sexual deviants—always the dark formless mass of the Other

functions to terrorize a social order predicated on recognition,

rationality and normalcy.

Edelman describes the birds as “the unacknowledged ghosts that always

haunt the social machinery and the unintelligibility against which no

discourse of knowledge prevails.” As enemies of society embedded within

it, we obviously find ourselves in this reading. As those whose desires

cannot possibly be captured within the fields of political

intelligibility, we must see the birds as symbolizing our own struggle.

A struggle that Edelman describes as waged against “the domestication,

the colonization, of the world by meaning.”

While he never cites it, it is abundantly obvious that in describing

this domestication of the world by meaning, Edelman is borrowing heavily

from Hocquenghem’s understanding of the body as colonized by language

through the process of domestication. Edelman here deploys the birds as

a metaphor for the bodily struggle within which Hocquenghem located

himself and his comrades, the same which we understand to be our own.

Edelman, one last time: “Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the

world because they so hate the world that will not accept them that

they, in turn, will accept nothing but the destruction of that world.”

Here we must understand ourselves as the birds or else the text offers

us nothing. Our project is to lay waste to the world, and so it cannot

base itself upon a tame survey of film and literature. No, if we are to

accept nothing less than the destruction of the world then we must

indict Edelman’s fields of study as being intimately tied to the

self-reproduction of that world. We must dispose of the baggage of art

and academy, but in doing so we must expropriate those dangerous kernels

of subversion which the academy only holds by having taken them from us

in the first place. If we are to take anything from Edelman and his

birds, it must be the conception of resistance as a storm-like mass, a

de-centralized swarm of bodies ceaselessly attacking their enemies.

Pursuant to a reading of the birds, our storm must be irrational,

incomprehensible, anonymous, mob-like, offensive, de-meaning,

incoherent, and unrelenting.

We can follow Halberstam again in critiquing Edelman’s apolitical

attachment to his field and in imagining another monstrous form such

resistance could take. Halberstam writes:

In my work on “alternative political imaginaries,” the alternative

embodies the suite of “other choices” that attend every political,

economic and aesthetic crisis and their resolutions. Queerness names the

other possibilities, the other potential outcomes, the non-linear and

non-inevitable trajectories that fan out from any given event and lead

to unpredictable futures. In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,

Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, social

historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker trace what they call “the

struggles for alternative ways of life” that accompanied and opposed the

rise of capitalism in the early seventeenth century. In stories about

piracy, dispossessed commoners and urban insurrections, Linebaugh and

Rediker detail the modes of colonial and national violence that brutally

stamped out all challenges to middle-class power and that cast

proletarian rebellion as disorganized, random and apolitical. Linebaugh

and Rediker emphasize instead the power of cooperation within the

anti-capitalist mob and they pay careful attention to the alternatives

that this “many headed hydra” of resistant groups imagined and pursued.

We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with the many

other heads of the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism…

We turn to a history of alternatives, contemporary moments of

alternative political struggle and high and low cultural productions of

a funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible queer negativity.

If we want to make the anti-social turn in queer theory, we must be

willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order

to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time,

to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite,

to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt,

assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to

make everyone a little less happy!

While we appreciate Halberstam’s attempt to situate the monstrosity of

queer negativity within Linebaugh and Rediker’s history of insurrection

and revolt, we must again criticize Halberstam’s partial critique. While

our resistance may very well take the form of a many-headed hydra, those

heads are not “alternative possibilities” or “political imaginaries.”

Nor are they modes of artistic expression.

If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is

that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any

alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not

a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather

a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better

future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer

negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do

with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily

struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of

jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an

alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the

ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear

our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild

enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule

of civilization.

Thankfully, the monstrous tendency we refer to is not something solely

trapped up in history books or pitifully represented in various cultural

productions. Rather, is a living, dynamic, queer tendency intrinsic to

and perpetually at war with the social order. We can see it in the fires

across the world, illuminating the reality that everywhere bodies are

refusing their enslavement to civilization’s future. We see the

monster’s shadow in the strikers in Montreal who refuse the

future-oriented appeasement offered by the State and whose attacks have

spilled over from a student strike toward social war. We see this also

in Seattle, where a mob smashed symbols of capital and law on this May

Day. We see it in San Francisco and Oakland where the dispossessed and

excluded converge and disperse with an erratic rhythm so as to lay siege

to police stations, attack yuppie establishments, burn cars and spread

havoc. In New York, we see bodies throwing themselves into the

metropolitan abyss so as to snarl and obstruct the unending flows.

Across the globe, wild bodies are finding one another and engaging in

the timeless conspiracy against the existent. In every nation, they

burn, they loot, they sabotage, they maim. The birds continue to fly

together, to tear and peck and shred the sinews of a social order they

detest.

Some beautiful expressions of this tendency toward wildness are to be

found in the actions and writings of individualist anarchists in the

territory dominated by the Chilean State. We’ll excerpt one particular

communique issued by some beautiful birds within the storm-like fight

being carried out there. This is from “The Revolt Continues Until Total

Liberation” by the Individualist Cell of Birds of Fire:

There they were, the voracious youth again, destroying everything,

erecting barricades, clashing with police, nothing could stop them…

There is fire and passion in their hearts, love and hatred in their

insides, courage and decision. The beauty of chaos has returned to grace

the streets, it is not only fire that adorns the asphalt, it is also the

energy of the youth, the abolition of the sexes, everyone in the

struggle…

To raze the school is possible today, like was done in… those places

intentionally lit ablaze by those beautiful pajarillas who understand

that this destruction is a great step towards the conquest of life…

The journey is intense and difficult, it always has been, when

individuals fed up with their miserable conditions organize and attack.

One cannot be afraid of those who organize only for one specific goal

although it is only to destroy, because at this point we know that to

build, we must destroy… And all the reasoning these petty politicians

supposedly have when they talk about the problem of education does

nothing for anyone, because the discontent grows and advances, although

the bureaucrats and businessmen almost always end up winning.

And they believe that to repress passion is a simple thing, that with a

little tear gas and a little water they will snuff it out, like any

other flame, so they will have to be reminded that they are wrong, again

and again, those idiots.

The night always illuminates our steps, just like free love allows us

unlimited bliss, to find us with the beautiful silence of obscurity, or

at the feet of the fresh rays of the rising sun; (rays which don’t

caress those awkward workers drooling over the bus windows and subway

glass), running into the heat of a barricade, it’s magic, like something

supreme, or can only God be supreme? We burn the churches with their

pedophile priests inside, we watch those cowardly abusers from the front

to spit in their faces… another day comes, but this is one of the

beautiful ones, because we will combine the sun that caresses us with

its heat with an emancipatory fire full of joy and hope…

Here are the barricades again, with those sensual forms we are drawn by

the fire…

The individual who moves toward the greatest happiness possible will

never stumble, her journey is unique and without equal, there is nothing

that can stop her, not the cops in red who beat her with sticks, not

morality imposing its limits, not the police infiltrators who dirty her

path, not the din of their sirens to silence her… imposing norms,

morals, discipline, gods and their idiotic doctrines, we always forget

society and its dominions, and cast ourselves naked into an encounter

with our inner beings…

“We feel alive when we shudder with the perfume of the flowers, with the

songs of the birds, with the crashing of the waves, the sound of the

wind, the silence of solitude,”[1] we feel alive when we tremble with

the heat of the fire, with the caress of chaos, with the nights of

revolt…

“We rushed into the chasm, to respond to the voices of our dead,”[2]

they who died fighting with weapons in their hands and immense golden

stars in their eyes, those who are immortal like punky Mauri, like

Claudia Lopez, who on any given night found themselves facing death so

gracefully. Yes, because those of us who choose to live an intense and

dangerous life, death receives us with open arms, caresses us and kisses

us…

Why don’t we fear death? Because “we are used to thinking that death is

nothing to us, because everything, good and bad, resides within

sensation and death is the deprivation of the senses. Death is nothing

to us because when we exist, death is absent and, when death is present,

then we no longer exist.”[3]

It’s true, we want everything, we dream of huge banquets and shun bread

and tea, we want grand orgies and reject monogamy. We believe in free

love because we know “that jealousy, and exclusive romance, conjugal

fidelity, kills off part of the self, impoverishes sentimental

personality, narrows analytical horizons, among other things. And

furthermore, in love as in almost everything else, it is only abundance

which annihilates jealousy and envy…”[4] We want to run together with

the animals in the fields and the forests, we want to bathe naked on the

beaches, rivers and lakes and not end up at a precinct for indecency.

“We reassert the right to live naked, to take off our clothes, to wander

naked, to join together among nudists without any concern of discovering

the body’s resistance to temperature, this is to affirm the right to the

disposition of individual corporeality…”[5]

The revolt is here, we must increase our participation, our generous

egoism needs to contribute, for now, to the struggle, to gather and

organize ourselves for specific ends such as destruction, enjoyment,

loving camaraderie, encounters with chaos, advancing towards the dawn of

the creative nothing, then returning to our hiding places, to rejoice

and dance with the birds, to nourish ourselves with the energy of the

trees, to feel the ocean breeze, to hear the lovely melody of the wind…

We have already said it and we’ll say it again: our revolution has

already begun, we make it from day to day, making free love, declaring

ourselves against every god and religion, deconstructing the dominating

language that they imposed on us, openly opposing any society, we make

it when we stop being men and women and become unique human beings.

To put it quantitatively: among boundless occupations, ours is the

search for total satisfaction, endless joy, pleasure, eternal happiness…

It is the hour of the social tragedy! We will destroy, laughing. We will

burn, laughing. We will kill, laughing. We will expropriate, laughing.

And society will fall. The fatherland will fall. The family will fall.

Everything will fall, since the free man has been born. The time to

drown the enemy in blood has arrived…[6]

[1] Emile Armand, “To Feel Alive”

[2] Renzo Novatore, “Toward the Creative Nothing”

[3] Epicurus

[4] Emile Armand, “Love Between Anarcho-Individualists”

[5] Emile Armand, “Nudism”

[6] Renzo Novatore, “Toward the Creative Nothing”

Contrast the words of these comrades with Hocquenghem’s depiction of

professional revolutionaries: “strangely enough, whenever we speak of

joy, professional revolutionaries only hear what churches or ideologies

have put there… the concept of joy is never brought up.”

It is easy enough here for us to allow the birds to speak for

themselves. Everything is apparent in their words: revolt inextricable

from joy, the pleasure and beauty of the struggle, the necessary

destruction of gendered and sexual roles, the refusal of any morality

and constraint on love and bodies, the intrinsic connection of pleasure

and happiness to destruction, the association with the death drive, the

insistence of jouissance, the refusal of any ideologues or politicians

who would seek to manage revolt.

This tendency is not unique to particular territory, whether of the

Chilean State or any other. Rather, everywhere that bodies conspire

together to revolt against their futures, there will be, insisting

against the possibility of a better future, we who take immediate

enjoyment in destruction, in feasting, orgy, running wild, and bathing

naked, in loving, hunting, dancing and laughter, and all the rest of

life.

Alongside them, we must insist that our struggle be all at once queer,

wild, destructive and joyous.

We’ll conclude with words that are taken from another communique claming

the arson of a bank in Santiago of Chile:[1]

This action gestated in the eternal hatred of a life rotted by a world

of adults, a boring life of cement and rules… in every time they

categorize us in men and in women, in every day of school, in every

punishment, in every childhood dream transformed into adult realism… in

each one fallen, each one murdered, in each and every particle of

bastard asphalt… Long live chaos, may chaos burn, may chaos smile on our

lips, and may all of us who are against every form of oppression, may we

every second of our daily lives laugh and dance in the ruins of the

cities of the world and of the burning universe and its blazing

caretakers… Fire to all the prisons! To all the families! To all the

sexual genders! To all authority and all the cities…

To Win All the Time

“Read what was never written,” runs a line in Hofmannsthal. The reader

one should think of here is the true historian. ~ Walter Benjamin,

omitted notes to the theses on history

Earlier, we made a passing reference to Edelman’s citation of Walter

Benjamin’s last writing, his theses “On the Concept of History.” Edelman

reveals little engagement with the theses, but a reading of them

alongside No Future reveals various links: a refusal of teleological

narratives, a critique of progress, a refusal to struggle in the name of

the future.

Despite the similarities, an engagement with the theses demands that we

break from the foregoing theory of futurelessness. We will seek to

demonstrate that in truth Edelman’s engagement with Benjamin’s concept

of history is like his perspective vis a vis the future: only at the

level of appearances, entirely missing out on what lurks out of sight.

If at times we have said that the future is bleak and empty, if at times

it seems that this is the entirety of what we mean when we say “no

future,” then these have been times when we spoke in terms of what

Benjamin calls empty, homogenous time. And it is quite clear that in

those terms, there is nothing to hope for and nothing positive in the

future. But this is not all there is to say on the matter. Benjamin

encourages us to take up a conception of time that assures not only the

fullness and heterogeneity of the past, but also that of the future.

At the end of an early draft of the theses, he makes note of an

inspiration that he works into the theses and then omits from the final

draft. He writes that the Jews inquired into the past in the same way

that the soothsayers inquired into the future—with an eye to learning

its secrets—and were forbidden from looking into the future, but that

the future did not therefore become “homogenous, empty time. For every

second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might

enter.” Let us proceed with this in mind.

To Face the Past

“On the Concept of History,” Benjamin’s last text, is his most important

if only because it functions as his ultimate critique of progressive

logic and the underlying premises of all progressive concepts of

revolution. Edelman, in his treatment of Benjamin’s critique, cites the

ninth thesis. We, like Edelman, will begin in the middle:

This is how the Angel of History must look. His face is turned towards

the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single

catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at

its feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole

what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise and has got

caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close

them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his

back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the

sky. What we call progress is this storm.

Of Benjamin’s various metaphors for understanding history, that of the

angel runs parallel to his reference of the saying that the historian is

“a prophet facing backwards.” The two different readings of this saying

parallel, in turn, his distinction between his concept of history and

the conformist one. He says that one way to read the saying is as a

description of the position taken by the historian of empathy who is

marked by despair and accedia, doomed to drown in his conformism to the

tides of history. A very different reading of the saying could describe

well the posture of the historian who, like the Angel of History, turns

his back to the future in order to set his sight on the past. He does

this in order to take hold of the true picture of the past that appears

momentarily and without warning in a moment of danger. For in another

parallel metaphor Benjamin describes “an occurrence of ball lightning

that runs across the whole horizon of the past,” illuminating moments

that had been up until that point left dark and mysterious. From the

juxtaposition of these metaphors we can gather that while on the one

hand progress may be a storm always blowing the angel away from a broken

world that he faces, frustrating his desire to stop and make it whole,

nevertheless this same storm produces the very flashes of light in which

a moment of history unexpectedly “present[s] itself… as a moment of

humanity.” He continues: “In this moment, time must be brought to a

standstill.”

It is this standstill, jetztzeit, which may also be translated as

now-time, that is at the heart of the theses. In the sixteenth he writes

that the true historian “cannot do without the notion of a present which

is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a

standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself

is writing history.”

For Benjamin, the concept of a causal chain of progress is a

smoothing-over, or reduction to a common denominator, of what is in

truth an eternal catastrophe. He points out that “the basic concept in

myth is the world as punishment.” This ancient concept has taken on a

more terrible modern form in “the eternity of punishment in hell,” which

“substitutes an eternity of torment for the eternity of a cycle.” It is

worth noting, however, that Benjamin does not straightforwardly claim

that hell is the reality of living in modern times. Rather, he describes

hellish punishment as akin to the way in which a student is held after

school, not allowed to run outside and play, forced to repeat the

Sisyphean task of writing lines by hand repeatedly, e.g. I will not

expose the ignorance of the faculty. It is no mistake that Benjamin

would depict hell as so reminiscent of the conformist historian’s

domain.

We might link Benjamin’s denial of progress with our own by pointing out

that progress is nothing but a daily catastrophe of life in the world of

the commodity. We can see this catastrophe around us everywhere: the

architecture of the cities, the physical infrastructure of the

multi-form prison, the endless apparatuses which exist to extract our

energy to turn it into dead labor, the monotonous agricultural

killing-fields, the ever-expanding ecological dead-zones. All processes

that have dominated, extracted, and paved over generations of the

living. Civilization’s homogenizing process is constantly intensifying

and accelerating. Technological advances and other progressive

developments are perpetually revolutionizing the armed disaster which

confronts us as the future.

It is clear that Benjamin’s view is similar when he describes history

and culture as the spoils carried by the rulers as they triumphantly

proceed, tramping upon the prostrate bodies of the oppressed. “A

historical materialist,” writes Benjamin, can only view these spoils

“with cautious detachment. For in every case these treasures have a

lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror…. The historical

materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of

transmission as far as possible.”

Like Benjamin and the angel, we would like to pause for a moment so

fair, awaken the dead and piece together what has been smashed. But what

blows us away from being able to do this is progress itself. It is as if

the very passage of time, or more accurately the manner of its passage,

has caught us up and distances us from the present moment itself.

Indeed, if there is only ever one time, then there is also a manner or

concept of time’s movement—progress—capable of blowing us away from

being present in it.

One might contend that Benjamin promotes quite the opposite: to turn

away from one’s time, as in the monastic tradition, in order to achieve

the resurrection he writes of. What he describes in certain terms,

however, is the turning of one’s back on the future, an act he places in

tandem with the destruction of historicism’s picture of history and the

conformism that dominates it. Benjamin writes that the “visionary gaze”

that requires one to turn away from the future makes “the historian’s

own time… far more distinctly present… than it is to the contemporaries

who ‘keep step with it.’” The key to how the backward-facing prophet is

so present in his own now is that he resurrects the past in the present

moment.

It is worth noting that Benjamin’s work cuts a sharp line through

Marxist thought, as he claims to hold to a concept that is true to

Marx’s life-work, while criticizing the way that Marxists have been made

into the tools of the ruling classes. Indeed, in light of Benjamin’s

critique of historicism for focusing on the famous figures of history

and overlooking the labors of the anonymous, one can begin to perceive

that Marx’s followers would in fact fall into conformist historicism by

definition. More specifically, Benjamin’s position is an utter dismissal

of the teleological narrative that contends that history and progress

move us inevitably toward paradise, a narrative which he pins especially

on Social Democracy.

For Benjamin, the conclusion of the movement of history through time is

not some inevitable utopia—capitalist, communist, or otherwise. Rather

than viewing the progression of civilization as an accumulation of gains

and reforms toward freedom and justice, history can be seen as the

continuous defeat of the exploited by their oppressors; the intensifying

alienation of beings and their re-construction into capital. History not

only serves to justify today’s rulers, but also to encode our memory

with a narrative that reads historical events as a necessary chain of

events along the path toward some future revolution or techno-utopia. He

describes this as “a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite

extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of

it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress.”

We must then understand Benjamin as heretical from a Marxist position,

which sees the victory of the bourgeoisie in centuries past as a crucial

step in accordance with the laws of history. He refuses the notion that

the rise of capitalism was necessary to develop the means of production

for the purposes of communism or liberation. More importantly, his

critique rejects the role of revolutionary as he who would seek to

accelerate the movement of history toward communism. For Benjamin, the

Marxist justifications for a whole range of horrors—the transitional

state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on—amount to little

more than a blind faith in the progression of time, a fetishization of

the very same storm which never ceases to drive us from paradise.

Analyzing the real implications of state communism in the time since, we

can undoubtedly recognize the gulags, the revolutionary police, the mass

murder at the hands of the state, the rapid industrialization and the

concomitant eco-devastation as some of the winds of this terrible storm.

In Michael Löwy’s book-length treatment of “On the Concept of History,”

Fire Alarm, he analyses the text thus:

Benjamin criticizes the essential article of faith of unimaginative,

reductionist Marxism common to the main strands of the left: the

quantitative accumulation of productive forces, of the gains of the

labor movement, of the number of party members and voters in a movement

of linear, irresistible progress.

This aspect of Benjamin’s criticism situates him in a kind of

correspondence with Jacques Camatte in turning away from Marxism and

arriving at a deeper critique of capitalism. In “The Wandering of

Humanity,” Camatte holds that “historical materialism is a glorification

of the wandering in which humanity has been engaged for more than a

century.” For Camatte, any ideology which argues for the “growth of

productive forces as the condition sine qua non for liberation” is an

aimless wandering away from the primitive anarchy which is destroyed by

capital’s hegemony. This wandering in Camatte’s thought is analogous to

Benjamin’s angel being unable to resist the thrust of the storm.

Benjamin’s thought also forshadows the anti-civilization positions of

Camatte and others by juxtaposing a lost paradise with a progress that

continually drives us away from the possibility of recovering what has

been lost.

Benjamin’s view is unconcerned with all the various historicist

conceptions of the past. But in comparing his rejection of grand

narratives with the postmodernists’ claim of doing the same, we agree

with Löwy that Benjamin’s “de-legitimation of the grand narrative of

western modernity, his deconstruction of the discourse of progress and

his plea for historical discontinuity are immeasurably far removed from

the postmodernists’ detached gaze on current society.” On the one hand,

Benjamin equips us to refuse any periodization that could allow for

modernity or post-anything. On the other, the specificity, spirit and

vigor of his words blast through time, present to us in a way that

today’s theorists, supposedly closer to us in time and ideas, utterly

lack even in their most furious assaults on the social order.

To Awaken the Dead

Benjamin’s second thesis on history puts forth that, if we recognize

that the past can be noted as present in such a way that refers to

redemption, then “there is a secret protocol [or appointment] between

the generations of the past and that of our own…. For it has been given

to us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic

power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled

lightly.” Here Benjamin begins to situate the centrality of the dead to

his project. In describing the idea of a weak messianic power, he speaks

of the ability of the living to somehow redeem the past. The way in

which the dead are present is as the “caress” of a “breath of… air,” as

an “echo,” or as a sister who one no longer recognizes. In other words,

the past is present and everywhere, touching us every moment and “in the

voices we hear,” but only suggestively, in and in spite of our own

inability to recognize it. But the possibility for redemption, the weak

messianic power, lies in the chance that we might.

In the intimate, ever-present opportunity he describes there is a

tremendous deal at stake. For, he writes in the fourth thesis, the

“refined and spiritual things” that live in the class struggle “as

confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude, and have effects

that reach far back into the past… constantly call into question every

victory, past and present, of the rulers.”

Later, turning to the historians he criticizes as tools of the ruling

classes, Benjamin makes it clear in his seventh thesis that their

resurrection of the past is an entirely different kind. The nature of

the sadness—rooted in an indolence of heart—that Flaubert described

feeling in his historical study of Carthage is clearer, Benjamin says,

when we remember that the historian’s empathy is always with the victor,

and thus with the present rulers. It is the kind of sadness, then, that

gathers to the loyal servant or minion in knowing that it is being used

for its ruler’s purposes.

Observe the difference between that one and “the chronicler, who

recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small,

thereby account[ing] for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened

is to be given as lost to history.” With this, Benjamin frames his

assertion that a full past befalls a redeemed humanity which in all of

its living moments is able to cite its presence. For Benjamin, this is

the task of the historical materialist: to cut through the process by

which historicism only accounts for great events and takes the side of

the victors over the vanquished, to account for absolutely everything.

The historical cutting-through takes place at the point when “the true

picture of the past” flies past or flees from us, at the point when one

may seize hold of an image of the past as it flashes up in a moment of

danger. The danger here is precisely that the image of the past, going

unnoticed, might disappear. It is the danger that the originator of the

image that passes through time as much as its recipient will “becom[e] a

tool of the ruling classes” if any present moment does not recognize

itself as intended in the image.

Benjamin further clarifies this threat in that “the only historian

capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is

firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if

he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.” How

are the dead threatened by the enemy? Nearby, Benjamin describes “a

conformism that is about to overpower” them and, parallel to the

metaphor of seizing the picture of the past, writes that each generation

must attempt to wrest this picture away from that clutch.

Benjamin’s haunting insistence that the dead are themselves somehow at

risk as much as we ourselves highlights how much is at stake in the

moment when the image of the past threatens to disappear. The enemy

drowns the dead and their struggles under its glimmering narrative,

unable to account for the truth. Historicism can spin any event into its

story, even (if not especially) as relates to class struggle and

revolution, but only by squashing them. The threat that faces the dead

is the same as that which faces us: if caught by conformism, we will all

be molded as nothing more than tools of the rulers’ story. This is

echoed in the twelfth thesis when he describes the erasure of the legacy

of Blanqui by the Social Democrats, saying that they “preferred to cast

the working class in the role of a redeemer of future generations, in

this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This

indoctrination made the working class forget its hatred, nourished by

the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated

grandchildren.”

Here we see the most obvious way that Edelman is informed by Benjamin’s

thought: his refusal to be motivated by the symbolic ideal of liberated

children, and yet we are simultaneously confronted with the inadequacy

of Edelman’s critique. Instead of an attitude of detached rejection

toward the future, what Benjamin confronts us with is the real hatred

against the rulers and the rule that seeks to have the dead as its pawns

in the present as much as it sought to do while they lived. The same

process that would have us live in sacrifice and enslavement in the name

of the future generations.

We can return again to the territory dominated by the Chilean State to

draw inspiration from the articulation of memory in the anarchist

struggles there. What follows is from a text dedicated to Mauricio

Morales, entitled “Memory as a Weapon,” from the Chilean anarchist

publication Germen, which beautifully illustrates a conception of

remembrance not unlike Benjamin’s:

To pierce the erasure of time, remembering and assuming the different

contexts and the unrepeatable idyllic and exactly equal conditions is a

direct and real support to the social war. To sharpen, expand, and make

evident the conflict against the powerful is extremely necessary and

possible in the present as well as in the past. Our combative history is

the rebellion of different exploited who decided to actively oppose the

established order, breaking free from the different forms of normalcy of

their time.

Memory; the past is our present, its thoughts have been ours, its

desires to attack are the same as ours today. We are talking about the

history of revolt for centuries, years, or a pair of painful months. Now

we are here remembering Mauri, comrade of so many fighters, but not only

is this memory individual, it is also the continuation of the urgent

need to oppose domination.…

To remember the struggle in the present is to glimpse which road we have

walked upon, to help understand where to place our next steps—this is to

use insurrectionary memory to replant ourselves tactically and

strategically in combat against the oppressive reality.

The redemption of comrades and combatants past and present is in our

hands, the names and lives of comrades like Mauri, Claudia, or Johnny

are in us and will not be forgotten, nor engulfed by the beast only to

later be vomited by some intellectual with dates of the revolt.

To remember that these are not abstract ideas like some game, but that

social war is actualized by comrades of flesh and bone through actions,

expressions, and decisions in moments of their lives is what is truly

potent and makes the combat carried out by them reproducible, in order

to really sharpen our present offense.

Memory is a weapon, but it is necessary to know how to aim and shoot at

power or else it is only a sterile act, trapped in history or emotion.

Insurrectionary memory is our weapon!

Dear punki Mauri: our best memory is to continue confronting the order

of those who fancy themselves masters of your life.

While the we can point to numerous global examples where one of power’s

innumerable murders was marked by not just the usual mourning and

visions of a better future but also an open upsurge of hatred, the

sequence of revolt in my own local situation can be traced to the

rioting that erupted after the murder of Oscar Grant at the hands of

transit police in Oakland, California. While the insurrection following

the murder of Alexis in Greece felt like something tragically removed

from my own daily life, the several riots in Oakland showed that such

explosion could emerge in my own context. While in the following days

and months, activists and politicians of all stripes attempted to

capitalize off of a re-writing of these riots, the words of participants

demonstrate a project of memory and hatred which evades capture in

politics. The following passage from the text “You Can’t Shoot Us All,”

a first-hand account of the Oscar Grant riots in Oakland by someone who

participated, serves as an example of this project:

When we realized that, in the eyes of the powerful, our lives are just

piles of bones waiting to be shattered, arteries and veins on the verge

of tearing open, hearts and lungs that stop beating and expanding at the

moment they pull the trigger, the only thing left to do was to come

together and make them tremble before us…

I wanted to break windows, to set fires, to strike fear into every cop

on the streets that night. I wanted to show the powerful that they, too,

would learn the meaning of violence, just as we have been forced to

learn it time and time again. They needed to understand that we don’t

forget, we needed to feel that we were still alive…

Later that night, as the cars were still burning, we talked with

friends, discussing ways to keep fighting, way to ensure that the memory

of the dead continues to haunt the living. In the following weeks, we

continued to fight in the streets. It was on those warm January nights,

evenings which now seem so distant, that I met some of the greatest

people I have ever known. Our friendships have created the foundations

of a network of struggle and formed basis for a different kind of

community…

I, identifying with a man whose photograph was not unlike my own

reflection, wondered if people who did not see themselves in Oscar Grant

at least saw in his image their friend, their neighbor, their classmate,

someone whose life was worth fighting over. I hoped that there were

white people who, after watching a video of a black man being murdered

by the police, would be angry enough to break windows. In time, I met

these people, because they fought alongside us, throwing bottles and

chunks of concrete, cursing the police and writing the names of the dead

along the walls of the city…

This system exists to erase memories, to evict us from our childhood

homes, to incarcerate our loved ones, to execute the fathers of children

too young to fully understand what happened. Our struggle has been an

effort to create memories that they can never take from us. Running

toward the sunset, we have found that the horizon only moves farther

away. We awake every morning to the same cycle of death and power that

we escaped in our dreams the night before. Yet we continue to trudge to

the ends of the earth, we continue to fight. It is when the air is

still, when all seems quiet, that we are planning our next move.

To Make History Explode

Benjamin:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in

which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a

conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will

clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of

emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against

fascism.

This, from the eighth thesis, ties in with his “Critique of Violence” in

which he lays out a broad critique of the legal system as a system of

violence that divests individuals of all violence. He illuminates the

link between the two texts when he writes in the critique that “the

critique of violence is the philosophy of its history”[2] because it

must look beyond just “what is close at hand” to attain a truly critical

approach. What is at stake for Benjamin in this critique is that a full

understanding of the development of violence can give insight into “the

breaking of this cycle… the suspension of law with all the forces on

which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore… the abolition

of state power.” Keep in mind, as we move from reading his philosophy of

the history of violence to his theses on the philosophy of history

itself, that both concern themselves with this same break.

The realization of Benjamin’s vision of state abolition is defined as a

break with a historical cycle in which violence creates law, preserves

law, and in which “either new forces or those earlier suppressed”

violently overthrow the existent law in order to “found a new law,

destined in its turn to decay.” The possibility of a break from the

whole cycle rests on the recognition that if the existing law can be

broken today, then an attack on law itself can soon be made; and that if

there is “violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence,” then

“revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence

by man, is possible.” Although the Critique also points to another, more

subtle task beyond this one, what we will keep in mind as we proceed is

this concept of revolutionary violence, since for him this is to call an

end to law and its violence.

From Benjamin’s omitted notes on history:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But

perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the

passengers on this train—namely the human race—to activate the emergency

brake.

Benjamin’s emergency brake is never expressed as something to wait for.

Indeed, to Benjamin it is the Social Democrats who treat their task as

infinite, ideal, and who treat time as “an anteroom, so to speak, in

which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation.”

On the contrary, he writes that “in reality, there is not a moment that

would not carry with it its revolutionary chance—provided only that it

is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new

resolution of a completely new problem.”

In the fourteenth thesis, Benjamin says that “what characterizes

revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that

they are about to make the continuum of history explode.” He describes

that on the first evening of the Paris Commune, revolutionaries stood

“at the foot of every clocktower [and] were firing on clock faces to

make the day stand still.”

An enmity toward time is important for us because the concept of

abstract, empty time seeks to domesticate us as slaves to progress. The

numerical clock-time represented by the hour functions to regiment and

dictate daily life while measuring our labor power in its exploitation

by capital. It is the structure of the futurity that forces us away from

the real of the now. This is why a friend recently reminds that one day

of insurrection is worth a thousand centuries of normality.

For Benjamin, the moments that interrupt the progression of empty

capitalist time are a kind of messianic time. Messianic time is the

unmeasurable duration which contains unlimited possibilities. It does

not exist in linear capacity, but instead exists as an interruption of

linear time. Messianic time exists in splinters which are diffused

through the empty fabric of capitalist time. We can recognize in these

splinters that negativity which is intrinsic to the social order; the

irrational now-time which threatens to suspend the reproductive drive of

the future, to interrupt the continuum of history.

Benjamin insists in his notes that anyone who “wishes to know what the

situation of a ‘redeemed humanity’ might actually be, what conditions

are required for the development of such a situation, and when this

development can be expected to occur, poses questions to which there are

no answers” (emphasis added). This kind of seeking for answers so common

in revolutionaries is futile by Benjamin’s account. Since each moment

contains its own unique revolutionary chance, to look for the general

conditions in which revolution can develop is to fall into conceiving of

time as homogenous and empty. The revolutionary chance itself is not

defined by its being a further development in a historical continuum but

is instead a cut or stoppage, a chance to blast a way out of the

continuum. Indeed, Benjamin makes quite explicit that this notion is at

odds with Marx’s followers who have misunderstood “classless society as

the endpoint of historical development.” He remarks to the contrary that

classless society must have “a genuinely messianic face” restored to it.

One way to contextualize interruption is to think through the strike.

This should also be interesting in light of recent attempts at

rekindling the flame of the revolutionary general strike, in relation to

which the discourse around violence has appeared again as a trap on all

sides.

While the model of the strike is explicitly referenced in the “Critique

of Violence,” it is absent—rather conspicuously—from the “Concept of

History.” In the former, he writes about the strike which appears in the

class struggle as a form of violence. He distinguishes between different

aspects. On the one hand is the strike as extortion—violence used by

labor as a means toward securing an end, which the state sanctions as a

legal right in order to “forestall violent actions [such as the burning

of factories] the state is afraid to oppose.” The revolutionary general

strike departs from the strike-as-extortion and becomes a crisis to

which the state understands it must respond with violent suppression. It

has to do this lest the strike find its way to the very heart of the

state. Because, in such a strike, “the state fears above all else that

function of violence which it is the object of this study to identify as

the only secure formulation of its critique.”

What then is this secure formulation of the critique of violence? It is

the critique of the state itself. Given that any strike is a kind of

interruption or stoppage, nevertheless it is generally understood that

there will be a return to work once a demand is met. In what Benjamin

calls the political general strike, a set of politicians take this

method beyond the demands particular to a workplace and apply it to a

demand for them (the politicians) to take power, at which point there

will be a return to work. All of this bears only the most superficial

resemblance to what Benjamin describes as the form of the strike that

takes place rooted “in the determination to resume only a wholly

transformed work, no longer enforced by the state.” In contrast to the

political general strike, this other “form of interruption of work,” the

proletarian general strike, is “pure means,” “nonviolent,” and

“anarchistic.”

The reason that these two forms are “antithetical in their relation to

violence” bears some further inquiry. To Benjamin the political general

strike is violent because it “causes only an external modification of

labor conditions,” which are in themselves violent, and has as its aim

the strengthening of state power, which is both violent and the arbiter

of violence. The proletarian general strike is nonviolent because it is

the abolition of the state—the real critique of violence put into

effect. And the “really effective critique” of violence “coincides with

the critique of all legal violence.”

Figured another way, the task of interruption requires us to locate the

clocktower that we could fire upon to stop the day. Homogenous time no

longer flows through the monolithic machines in the city centers. Now, a

range of technological advancements have diffused and integrated the

machinery of time into our very thoughts and rhythms. Everywhere we go,

we are surrounded by and permeated with devices which serve to manage

the regime of time. Where once a singular apparatus mediated our

relationship to time, its dictatorship is now imposed by an innumerable

array. A desire for interruption must now reckon with the countless

apparatuses that segment our memory and integrate our very being into

capitalist time. But rather than waste time lashing out against all

these clocks one after another, let us cut through to what underlies

them.

History’s servants promise us a shining future. Whether by means of

technological innovation, hard work and sacrifice, or the Revolution, we

are assured of a heaven-on-earth of light and crystal. But all of these

glimmering apparatuses can only serve to adorn the monumental pile of

wreckage in which we live. All around us, the carnage and corpses of our

ancestors form the architecture of our daily existence. Not only the

walls and freeways and shopping centers, but the smart phones,

pornography, surveillance and entertainment systems—all monuments to the

same enemy that has never ceased to be victorious. Capital, Leviathan,

civilization, society: so many names for the process which turns life

into an assemblage of death, which would integrate us as machines into a

grander machinery. Futurity is the logic that drives this regime of

subjection and assimilation, but is also the science which desecrates

our memory of those who also struggled; the treachery which turns their

struggles into so many more ideological cadavers. Where living beings

once struggled to be free from futurity’s domination of their lives, we

are told that they dutifully sacrificed themselves for society’s future.

We too are called upon to procreate and raise up children who might one

day live better lives than we. But just as we were born into the halls

of the dead, so too would our children be the stillborn janitors of

these halls, breathing circuits embedded in a massive cybernetic

cadaver. Ghosts call out to us: they ask that we tear apart the sutures

of this Frankenstein’s monster which they’ve come to constitute. They

call on us to cremate their remains and bury the ashes, to end the reign

of the dead over the living.

To Face the Dwarf

We will conclude in the same manner as Walter Benjamin begins his theses

on history:

There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it

could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that

would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire

and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large

table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was

transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at

chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One

can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet,

called ‘historical materialism,” is to win all the time. It can easily

be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which

today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.

History tells us that Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history were

never meant for a public readership. Instead they were written as

several copies of the same letter, addressed to his closest colleagues.

Through this dispatch, he sought to communicate what he knew to be vital

information to those he loved and conspired with.

In telling the parable of the dwarf and the automaton, he was reminding

his comrades that to bring about the real state of exception—to not only

defeat fascism, but to defeat the enemy all the time, present, past, and

future—they would have to understand philosoph y to be nothing but a

machine that was created to conceal something, to make moves at the

board under the guidance of a hidden genius. Where the Marxists take

Marx’s philosophy as the answer for how to win the class struggle, they

tragically mistake what it appears as for what it is intended to effect,

and they become lost. Because even when they believe they are winning,

they are in truth nothing but its pawns. The distinction is not about

what side one is playing, but on what level.

For every pretty theory that presents itself, study it only in the way

that a cat studies its prey: for the enjoyment of the hunt, to be sure,

but also so as to seize upon whatever unique revolutionary chance may

appear as in a flash of lightning. So that when that narrow gate opens,

you pounce without a moment’s hesitation. In the meantime, by all means,

enjoy the diversion of the theory’s lines and moves, but if you are to

avoid becoming its tool you must ever have in mind to shatter the system

of mirrors and confront the dwarf that has been pulling the strings all

along. Faced with this ugly little creature behind all the lines of play

you’ve enjoyed and suffered, able at last to read the lines of its face

and the dark of its eyes, as time stands still and the entirety of the

past falls to you, you will have to make a deeply ethical decision that

nothing in all the games before could prepare you for. The only decision

that truly matters.

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[1] In February 2012. See <waronsociety.noblogs.org/?p=3330>.

[2] “The philosophy of its history” here echoes the title of the theses

on history, alternatively translated “On the Philosophy of History.”