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Cheekily, this is NOT the full audiobook but the Intro- there is a link...but still yet to be found.

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Always Coming Home: A Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin | Full Audiobook

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TRG37: Always Coming Home - Ursula K, Le Guin

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TRG37: Always Coming Home - Ursula K, Le Guin

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A chunky one, so as much as we can manage in the time. Part 1 is 172 pages…so aim for that at least.

7.30pm Wednesday 29th July, Depot.

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TRG36: Technosymbiosis - Figuring (Out) Our relations to AI

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TRG36: Technosymbiosis - Figuring (Out) Our relations to AI

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Chapter 1 from Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (eds Browne, Cave, Drage, McInerney, 2023).

7.00pm, Depot 03/06/26

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N Katherine Hayles 'Technosymbiois - Figuring (Out) Our Relations to AI' 

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what if we misjudge AI as we did animal consciousness before?

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what if we misjudge AI as we did animal consciousness before?

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What if AI is already conscious? Sentience explained  | LSE Research

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1. https://illwill.com/end-of-technics

2. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

3. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n18/james-meek/computers-that-want-things

7.30, Depot, 08/04/26 > 15/04/26

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Artificial Intelligence, or the End of Technics • Ill Will

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Gabriel Azaïs on science, myth, and the sacralization of technics.

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1. HP Lovecraft, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'

2. Mathias Rollot & Chris Younés, 'An Introduction towards Ecosophical Metabolism Studies'

7.30, Depot, 03/02/26

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Policing the Crisis, Why the Policing Crisis led to Black Lives Matter. FREE EBOOK.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system.

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Appropriately lugubrious story-teller

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"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft / 2024 Recording + Subtitles

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7.30 Depot, 22/10/25

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The Ister is a 2004 documentary film directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross.

The film is loosely based on the works of philosopher Martin Heidegger, in particular the 1942 lecture course he delivered, Hölderlins Hymne "Der Ister", concerning a poem, Der Ister, by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

The film had its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004.

The Ister was inspired by a 1942 lecture course delivered by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, published in 1984 as Hölderlins Hymne "Der Ister". Heidegger's lecture course concerns a poem by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin about the Danube River.

The film The Ister travels upstream along the Danube toward its source, as several interviewees discuss Heidegger, Hölderlin, and philosophy. The film is also concerned with a number of other themes, including: time, poetry, technology, home, war, politics, myth, National Socialism, the Holocaust, the ancient Greek polis, Sophocles, , Agnes Bernauer, Edmund Husserl, the 1991 battle of Vukovar, and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

The Ister features extensive interviews with the French philosophers Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, as well as with the German film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Other interviews are conducted with a bridge engineer (Nemanja Calic), an amateur botanist (Tobias Maier), and a Romanian archaeologist ( Alexandru Suceveanu).

An extended interview with philosopher Werner Hamacher is also included as one of the "extra features" on the DVD.

The film travels upriver: from the Danube Delta, opening onto the Black Sea in Romania, to the source of the river in the Black Forest of southern Germany, moving along the way through the Histria (Sinoe) archaeological site, through Novi Sad in Serbia, Vukovar in Croatia, Budapest, Dunaföldvár, and Dunaújváros in Hungary, and Vienna and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria. Also featured are the Walhalla temple near Regensburg, the Befreiungshalle at Kelheim, the tomb of Agnes Bernauer, and the castle at Sigmaringen to which Marshal Pétain fled in 1945.

Notable places from Heidegger's own life which feature in the film include his birthplace in Meßkirch, his hut at Todtnauberg, and the lecture theatre at Freiburg University where he delivered his infamous Rectoratsrede ( rectorial address).

Eventually the film arrives at Donaueschingen, and at the Breg and the Brigach, the two tributaries whose confluence marks the point at which the river becomes known as the Danube. The film then travels upstream along the Breg, past Vöhrenbach and Furtwangen, in search of the "true" mountain source of the Danube.

The Ister is divided into five chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue:

Prologue. The myth of Prometheus, or The birth of technics. Bernard Stiegler tells the myth of Prometheus.

Chapter 1. Now come fire! "In which the philosopher Bernard Stiegler conjugates technology and time, and guides us from the mouth of the Danube to the city of Vukovar in Croatia."

Chapter 2. Here we wish to build. "In which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the question of politics and guides us through the Republic of Hungary."

Chapter 3. When the trial has passed. "In which philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe conducts us from the technopolis of Vienna to the depths of the concentration camp at Mauthausen, confronting Heidegger's most provocative statement concerning technology."

Chapter 4. The rock has need of cuts. "In which philosopher Bernard Stiegler returns to guide us deeper into the questions of mortality and history, as we emerge from Mauthausen to the Hall of Liberation in Germany."

Chapter 5. What that river does, no-one knows. "In which the German artist and director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg guides us through the upper Danube, to the source of the river and beyond."

Epilogue. Heidegger reads Hölderlin. Heidegger reads Hölderlin's hymn, "Der Ister."

Three excerpts from classical works feature in the film:

The Ister premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on 23 January 2004. It has won two awards:

Additionally, Robert Koehler, film critic for , listed The Ister as the second best film released theatrically in the United States in 2006.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently holds an 88% approval rating, based on 8 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. On Metacritic, the film currently holds a score of 75/100, based on 6 reviews.

Coloring Outside the Lines, by Michael Atkinson

The Ister: Between the Documentary and Heidegger's Lecture Course Politics, Geographies, and Rivers, by Babette Babich

A River Runs Through It, by Daniel Birnbaum

Draggin' the River, by Carloss James Chamberlin

The Ister, by Chris Chang, Film Comment, vol. 46, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2010), p. 82.

Killing the Gatekeeper, by Matthew Clayfield

The Duck and the Philosopher: Rhythms of Editing and Thinking between Bernard Stiegler and The Ister, by Patrick Crogan

The Ister: Cinema's Interruption, by Linda Daley

The Ister, by Cheryl Danieri-Ratcliffe

Heidegger, Technology and Time: Review of the Film The Ister, by Matthew Del Nevo

"The Ister," reviewed by Roy Elveton, German Studies Review 29 (2006): 480-481.

The Ister, by Gareth Evans

The Ister: Search for the Source, by Hamish Ford

The Ister, by Scott Foundas

Flow of Rich Philosophy, by Philippa Hawker

The Ister, by Philippa Hawker

The Ister, by Eric Henderson

Mystic River, by J. Hoberman

Philosophers on Celluloid: Sartre, Beauvoir, Heidegger, and the French Heideggerians, by Jonathan Judaken

Time and Tide (and Torrents of Discourse), by Peter Kemp

Incisions on the Rock, by Adam Kirsch

The Nonbiodegradable, by Dragan Kujundzic

A Journey Up the Danube, Philosophy Included, by Nathan Lee

Time and the River (and Heidegger), by Peter Monaghan

The Ister, by Deborah Nichols

From Scardanelli to Orfée, by Scott Nygren

L'homme sans qualités, by Gaël Pasquier (in French)

The Camera in the Water Closet, by Dominic Pettman

The Ister, by Jamie Russell

Against the Stream: Remarks on the Film The Ister, by Galili Shahar

The Ister, by Michael Sicinski

In Search of Heidegger, by Ruth Starkman

The Ister, by James van Maanen

"He Appears, However, Almost to Go Backwards": Impossibly Short Notes on The Ister, by Mike Wood

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The Ister is a 2004 documentary film directed by David Barison and Daniel Ross. The film is loosely based on the works of philosopher Martin Heidegger, in particular the 1942 lecture course he delivered, Hölderlins Hymne "Der Ister" , concerning a poem, Der Ister, by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

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1. A piece written by Timothy Morton published in e-flux:https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156375/subscendence/

2. A podcast by same TM for Sonic Actshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ99i760djU

3. If you have time and inclination – a section from the book on Hyperobjects – some of us read the section by Tim Morton some years ago – it starts on p.10 and I suggest reading (just) the Intro which ends on p.26. https://padlet.com/r_walker2/tsundoku-reading-group-zxd9jvtzwqi51syr/wish/lkROZPoww592QjMg but more if you want.

7.30, Depot, 02/04/25

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Our attempt to diagrammatically categorise TRG sessions 1 to 14 (March 2020 > Sept 2021). Pic a bit blurry, but colour coding worked out as: Green - ecology/climate, Purple - identity/race, Blue - new materialism/'ooo', Red - Marx.

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This essay is part of our rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called "Palestine Question." Essays will engage the colonial politics of Zionism, Palestinian resistance, perennial questions about loss and diaspora, identitarian entanglements with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and more. As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field's ambivalence toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But as a magazine preoccupied with the unruly mesh of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and historical-material analysis, we are decidedly unambivalent about our steadfast solidarity with Palestine and the diasporic geographies of Palestinians beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: "From the River to the Sea." -The Editors
The Future of Return
One must decipher the Zionist time regime to understand the logics of Palestinian resistance and what it has put forth (or brought backward). Since the Nakba, Palestinians have been caught in an ongoing present catastrophe that cannibalizes itself, reproducing a static temporality of enduring violence. This is an ongoing present that both obfuscates the past and colonizes the future. Claiming its dominance in the here and now, Zionism has abused Jewish biblical time-a fantastical past time-to assume the God-given right over Palestinian land and exercise continual domination over Palestinian labor. In doing so, the Palestinian past-present-predicated on testimony, oral history, and intergenerational memory-is subject to ongoing processes of sublation with Zionism's phantasmal interpretation of a biblical clock. "The colonist makes history," Frantz Fanon wrote, "his life is an epic, an odyssey."[1] The Nakba, as a lived reality, is accordingly reproduced so long as this time-regime reigns, asserting an extraction of time over Palestinian psychic and material life.

A temporal architecture produced by Zionism-one that is maintained as long as this regime of time persists-the Nakba's overbearing preeminence cannot be contained between particular days in 1948 or between "then" and "now." The catastrophe bleeds into any imagination of a Palestinian past, and as long as the Nakba is present, all temporalities will be read, interpreted, and imagined in relation to it. If we take remembering in the present to be an active construction of the past, history cannot be constructed without relationality to the Nakba. This begs us to recognize the Nakba as structuring settler-colonial violence and thus refusing singular definition. That violence is a machine fueled by extracted time and powered by the engine of History. As Rabea Eghbariah articulately put it:

"In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled."[2]

In addition to its most "abstract" and "material" forms, and the Nakba's encompassing genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing, maiming, subjugation, exile, and social-political fragmentation, it is also an insistence on the mass reproduction of annihilatory fascist technologies operating vampirically to feed off Palestinian time, which it extracts, steals, and re-invests. Zionism does not use Palestinian time, but exchanges its value.

This diagnosis of Zionist violence is not limited by historical confines, as the past under settler-colonialism is both anti-historical as well as infrastructural in its erection of a singular settler-colonial future. Meaning, with every single killing and act of maiming, Palestinian lives are terminated and shortened. When entire family lineages are erased, it means putting an end to an ancestral presence rendered obsolete. When lifeworlds and entire generations are incarcerated, captured time is allocated to another scheme-its exchange value is changed-by moving from one colonial temporality to a colonial-carceral one, living, or dying in a "parallel time."[3] When new military and surveillance technologies are trialed, or as Israel classifies them, "battle-tested" or "field-proven," their verified use value is exported and exchanged under the mark of their predicted efficiency tomorrow.[4]

With every speculative investment in fabricated televised lies, we lose minutes, hours, days, and lifetimes, seeking to negate fallacies-reproducing a debt frozen in a dialectical deficit. We pay Israel our time as long as its time regime reigns, and we are indebted to it and by it beyond this present moment into a future to which access is concealed. This is why Palestinian militant resistance must be appraised as this paragon's temporal, ontological, and non-dialectical rupture. Not the riddance of debt through payment, but its abolishment altogether.

Formulating fascism as a multi-temporal historical process against conventional formulations that postulate it as a moment of exception, Alberto Toscano writes about fascism as a "return":

"The intensely superstructural, at times even fantastical, character of our present's fascistic traits would seem to warrant expanding one's focus beyond capital's strategies to shore up its social domination under conditions of crisis. [...] Fascist movements capture, divert, and regiment surplus social energies - unrealized wishes for a better life, memories of precapitalist lifeways, and unproductive and excessive desire."[5]

Zionism, as such, cannibalizes these desires: excessive desires, desires of a "better life" by and for European Jewry in pre- and post-war temporalities, alongside desires of performing domination. It functions through the return of the biblical, archaic, or mythic-Israel is founded as the rightful present return of the biblical kingdom of Bnei Yisrael. It is a fascistic return that Zionism rides, a vehicle for the mass mobilization of psychic and libidinal dreams of European Jewry that swallows other non-European Jewish desires, that only gets heightened through the futuristic historicization of postwar Europe. Zionism's temporal structure-or form-is innately fascistic and not only so in its current state, but throughout many of its myriad historical interpretations and manifestations. The genocide we witness today in Gaza is not a state of exception but one that requires to be read and understood as embedded within the fascistic historical structure of Zionism that always sought the termination and repression of Palestinians through various technological, necropolitical, and psychosocial arrangements. Palestinians were never meant to survive, let alone return or even have the psychic breadth to think of militant resistance to reclaim their lives and lands.

Palestinian return, however, functions through the expression of what is presently repressed: there are no archaic or mythic desires or pasts, but a materially extracted, exported, demonized, marginalized, incarcerated, contained, and maimed real presence under domination with a desire for it to be undone. The return is from the present to a different present. It is a negative return that is repressed by a fascistic return. It is an uncaptured and unregimented surplus desire that does have a material structure to support it and a colonial past-present from which it springs. It is indeed revealing how Zionism abstracts and then manipulates supposedly emancipatory political terminologies such as "Jewish indigeneity" to Palestine or the "Jewish right of return," which grants Israeli citizenship to anyone who has Jewish ancestry, anywhere at any given moment, in the place of Palestinians who are reproduced as those in a state of displacement in Palestine. Like other forms of fascism, Zionism persuades both the liberals and the conservatives; it is both feminine and masculine[6]; republican and democratic; its settlements are both socialist (kibbutz) and capitalist (start-up nation). It instrumentalizes all forms of discourse, no matter how contradictory or oppositional they might be, to serve one singular purpose: Jewish supremacy in Palestine, settler colonization, and military capital.

"Palestinian return is not an act of reversal, but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility."

Where, then, do we begin? From which point do we narrate? To begin in 1948 is a political choice, not a historical one.[7] Since the declaration of the inception of the Zionist time regime, the Palestinian refugees internally displaced within Palestine, and those expelled to the outside, have been demanding a return to their homes and lands. Oftentimes in English, it is articulated through the framework of "The Palestinian Right of Return." However, the Arabic phrase is wearier when using a rights-based framework, and instead, it proposes other compelling ways of approaching return. In standard Arabic, it is referenced as haqq al-'awdah (حق العودة). Haqq is Arabic for right, but it also means justice, "that which is right or just," or for our purposes, "the justice of return." Haqq also means "truth" or "reality" - what is true, the Real, against what is fictional or mythical. Appealingly, in colloquial Palestinian Arabic, haqq also means "price" or "cost." The cost of return. This notion of return neither seeks nor promises the absolute permanent return of all those dispossessed, exiled, and banished, but the open-ended possibility of returning for those who choose to do so. It is the haqq, or justice principle, to choose how to live instead of being incapacitated and forced solely to subsist or survive.

This indeterminate notion of a return evades purity and rejects totality: it involves those who want to return to their ancestral lands and occupied homes; to re-establish their presence; reunite with their families, and live amongst their communities, as well as the others who no longer wish to establish their lives in Palestine, for they have roots and desires invested elsewhere. And yet, they still yearn to have the keys (beyond metaphor) to their motherland. These two groups are not at odds: they both have a future-oriented desire, a productive and generative one. Not a negative desire for something they lack, but an affirmative desire for open-endedness and possibility. This is why Palestinian return is not an act of reversal as such-the relapse to a time prior to exile and dispossession-but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility. It is the redemption of the past in the present and the future, not its abandonment, forgetting, or re-insertion. In other words, return produces possibility and fractures the apparatus that polices our imagination and our life. It is the opening to the future as endless uncaptured time, and the abolition of what we owe; the reparation of what we are owed, our "debts", the cost of return. It is for this reason that we must see the 7th of October as the superfluous rupture of Zionist time and the re-insertion of Palestinian political subjectivity. On that day, as on many other days within the Palestinian revolutionary tradition, the militarized and besieging walls-in their material and psychic manifestations-could no longer contain the people of Gaza and their desires to return, to break free.

We must not mistake Palestinian return as something that will occur in the future. Rather, it occurs and has been occurring throughout this present moment to enable a future-a future that escapes the economic speculation of racial capitalism into an indeterminate future that isn't yet molded, one that could be retrieved, that could be emancipated from colonial financialization. With every shattered fence in Gaza, bombarded checkpoint in Jerusalem, clandestine escape from Tulkarm, surreptitious break out of the Gilboa prison, stealthy act of smuggling out of Jenin, and annual activations of Iqrith or Bir'im-physical, literal returns to places of dispossession despite military, legal and carceral prohibitions-we have been returning time and again, accumulating negative spells of time, no matter how short or fleeting they are, as returned beings. Some returns are spectacular revolutionary moments, others are conspicuous and modest in imagination, but they all bring us closer to liberation, feeding into one another. These moments accumulate in the negative, because we count them in reverse, we count them down.[8] Not from the point they begin, but towards the instance of their conclusion, awaiting their expiration time. We count them by the number of breaths we take until we are yet again captured, until we are detained, or shot, martyred, as if awaiting our renewed exile. "Death over indignity."[9] We count them as beings whose freedom is future-oriented, as Palestinians who materially imagine a life in Palestine that is otherwise, and who remember the past not with depoliticized sentimentality, but as fuel for the imagination of the day of return. And so we are simply out of sync. These stockpiled moments await our cue to reappear eventually at the moment when a collective return is performed-when their sum is powerful enough to demolish the time limit, between fantasy and concrete fulfillment. It is then, when collective return is performed, that we no longer need to count because time will be on our side. Then, soon, we will live in a time that is ours.
Return of the Repressed
In Arabic, al-'awda (fem. verbal noun) is the colloquial reference for return: The Return. ' Awda is always spoken with a definite article al- that precedes it. It is not any return but The Return, the only return, the return that needs no prefixes or suffixes to specify its reference. Assuredly, there is simply one return: the return to Palestine. In its verbal form, ' aada, it means [he] returned; came back; went back. 'Awdah or ' awdon also means to begin anew; to begin after an end; to go to the beginning.

If return is an act done retroactively toward a beginning, somewhere, sometime-a zero or a negative value, yet always forward-facing-there must always be an excess. With every act of return, there is a surplus, for each time is different. Each time, something either spills or escapes capture. It is fundamentally repetitive but never identical, always subjective. This is why surplus, that excess we spoke of, is at the crux of Palestinian return. In a strictly military sense, surplus is the Palestinian rockets fired back at Israel's settlements, made out of the unexploded Israeli munition that reaches Gaza. It is also the recycled material waste of exploded airstrikes repurposed to build low-tech guerilla weaponry. In a psychic sense, it is the repetition of the appearance of the unconscious after decades of subjugation. The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free.

The ​​quandary many leftist psychoanalysts and so-called materialists find themselves in when they embark on their surgical attempts to diagnose October 7th is their inability to fathom the psychic opening that day has enabled. They often confront a challenge in recognizing the generative or productive affect produced by anticolonial counterviolence for collective psychic formation in the midst of a moment of revolutionary disruption. Revolutionary counterviolence is not a necessary evil or an inevitable inconvenience: it is formative. In the case of Palestine, this does not exclusively apply to the Palestinians in Gaza but to the very aporia of being Palestinian. As Abdaljawad Omar writes, "Is it not curious, one might ask, that the very sympathy shown to Palestinians appears directly proportional to their perceived inability to confront the uniform machinery of settler colonialism?"[10] What underlies many such "non-violent" surgical ventures, whether conscious or not, is an attempt to put decolonization to the test: how can decolonization manifest itself without disrespecting the colonial enterprise, they ask, while they implore hermetically sealed structures of sustained colonial terror, which inevitably reduce all decolonizing efforts to nothing less than abolition and rupture of the structures' non-penetrability.

How can a people whose modern life is defined by dispossession, dehumanization, death, destruction, starvation, besiegement, mass incarceration, mutilation, and maiming, whose oppression is supported by the world's cruelest military powers, imagine a material beyond? How can the same people who have been besieged for seventeen years by one of the world's most technologically advanced and sophisticated necropolitical apparatuses actively break free using low-tech machinery made out of garbage? Dig a hole out of prison with a spoon? Through a sustained practice of resistance, how can a zealous commitment to liberation refuse to become but rhetorical anaphora?

"The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free."

Since October 7th, these questions are being answered daily through images, no matter how life closes down on the people of Gaza. Through Al-Aqsa Flood, the repression of time collapsed into a transformative event with a future in sight. It materialized an imago of what liberation looks like, and how it can be achieved. The image of a bulldozer tearing down the Israeli fence containing Gaza is an image that shatters the psychic impasse-one inflicted by absolute besiegement-and restores our orientation towards the horizon concealed behind the wall. This image has long been the subject of our dreams. "What if I walked right through the wall?" She asked her mother. "I jumped so high I landed on the other side and visited my aunt," he recollected. "I was driving to work, and I just kept driving until I found myself back in Majdal."[11] It is indeed a parallel reality within which Palestinians live. An image in which a group of Gazans transgressed the fence that had contained their lives and dreams, in their flip flops, without a checkpoint in sight, while they simply walked into the lands from which they were expelled. It is a psychic image. It is a double, dialectical image: the event takes place while the Israeli settler-colonial apparatus remains the order of the day, and it does not occur after its abolition. The event of return does not take place after the fact, in a 'post'-temporality where the Zionist regime no longer exists. Instead, the act springs from within the time of its reign, cracking its walls and fracturing its frame. The two images contain two opposing forces, two antagonistic temporalities, and two states of consciousness. Slipping out and spilling into the colonial matrix, this excess is what fuels return.

Many other images persist, though not always of a technological quality; images that are not fixed in a frame. Amongst the most important images is that of the recuperation of land as a sight and site of struggle instead of a reserve for containment. It is the deadly image of the command of a battlefield where the colonizing army is at last face-to-face with the population it colonizes, forcing the perpetrator out of their command room. The battle is no longer solely mediated through Zionist bombs of annihilation, only returned as surplus rockets. The colonized summons the colonizer, demanding him to witness his own wrath of colonization and the fury of anticolonial resistance. The colonized summoned the colonizer to see him face-to-face, without the mediation of surveillance cameras and lethal drones. The return of the repressed in Israeli consciousness is to be faced both visually and psychically with what your entire existence and material presence in Palestine eradicates and represses.

Otherwise repressed, Palestinians return through a besieging wall-which conveniently prohibits the colonizer from ever seeing the refugees she herself has displaced. Their return turns the allegedly peaceful, segregated settlement into a site of confrontation with what the colonizer is now forced to see. The repressed returns in this instance of the fracture, when the violently enforced architecture of repression, also designed to keep the Zionist psyche contented, crumbles. The repressed returns through Palestinian radical expenditure of (liberatory) psychic and physical matter that rearranges the machinations of repression.

Fanon had a close understanding of how, unconsciously, the colonized repeatedly imagines the moment of their freedom. Such psychic returns are not coincidental, nor do they burst out of nothing. They are the stimulus of the labor of dreaming. These dreams and desires are stored in our muscles like hidden building blocks-a stenography of sorts that formulates itself through the very conditions of the repressive reality. "The dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping [above the wall], swimming [near the shores of Akka], running [in the streets of Jaffa], and climbing [the trees of Birzeit]. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning."[12] This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured. They are not only the theater that represents the bullets and batons marked on the skin of the colonized, printed on our psychic tissue. No, they are the schemes and imaginations of the struggle that awaits. They are unlike other repressed matter in the unconscious but simply "Not-Yet-Conscious."[13]

"This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured"

The return of the repressed is the spillage of our psychic matter in the hours before "nine in the evening" and after "six in the morning." It's what we actively pursue with a kind of militant hope we are bound with because Our continued existence has been depending on it. While Zionism's ideal arrangement consists of keeping our repression exiled and dormant, or, as Haytham el-Wardany describes it, in a "coma." Palestinians have been choosing to sleep and dream, rendering every moment of revolutionary "failure" a time of militant wishes.[14] In his attempts to define the state of a political "coma," particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, el-Wardany asks, "If revolution is awakening-a long-awaited aberration that follows a deep mass lethargy-then is not sleep a return to dispossession? A synonym for failure? The failure to reshape reality? The inability to alter the circumstances of life? Defeat in the battle to redefine the self?"[15]

Theorizing sleep as a generative realm that concedes revolutionary failure, el-Wardany defines sleep not as the result of failure, nor its cause, but "the moment of defeat's acceptance." Palestinians have been subjugated, maimed, and subject to a structure that is in its very essence exilic, repressing and banishing our psychic matter to be buried deep in our unconscious. Zionism works to further push Palestinians into accepting failure-not only in our sleep, between nine in the evening and six in the morning, where we admit it to ourselves, but also between six in the morning and nine in the evening. Yet a psychic embedment plagues the wakeful hours, as we daydream of the moment of liberation, searching for it in the now. Palestinian militants remind us consistently to beware of the psychological war that Israel wages, the "war of the soul."[16] However, Israel's failure-that it fails to admit-is that the state of political coma it has been subjecting us to cannot be forced totally onto us: the repressed have been returning time and again despite all colonial machinations and machinery.

This is why we must locate Al-Aqsa Flood within a revolutionary tradition of Palestinian resistance and a psychic paragon of colonized subjectivity.

"History does not wait for the sleepers to wake; it is written by the wakeful alone. What, from those hours of sleep, is worth the history books taking notice of and setting down? Surplus hours of no benefit or purpose; and yet these hours do not wither and fade away like pointless superfluity but grow in number, night after night, to become a strange assemblage."[17]
The Labor of Return
Some of the besieged Gazans who returned on the 7th of October already knew the land on the other side of the fence in spite of their decades-long uprooting. They knew how to navigate the industrialized wilderness and the boxy settlements they crossed. Knowing, however, does not mean familiarity, nor does it mean disalienation. The land has been made alien to them, and they alien to it. The land has changed, and they were made strangers. It is through their labor and debt, however, that they claim the future.

Writing about the experience of "black worldlessness," particularly in the context of post-apartheid Southern Africa, Panashe Chigumadzi describes the reality of Black people's presence in their native land as akin to being "a pariah in the land of your birth."[18] Speaking from a materialist position, Chigumadzi pivots towards the Black majority's labor exploitation in a land almost fully propertied by the South African white minority, describing it as "the spiritually and psychically disorienting paradox of exile at home" - living with a "double consciousness." This schismatic double consciousness is a result of existing as a supposedly emancipated postcolonial subject in a capitalist nation-state structure, where one remains shackled by the chains of the market. "Exile at home," which is one way to describe the state of the subjects of settler colonialism, then ceases to be an exclusively geopolitical category. This state is a psychic-materialist one. Although the contexts differ ontologically, this racialized experience of capitalist alienation reverberates across colonized societies. It is the experience of Palestinians in their lands.

The people of Gaza's knowledge of the land behind the fence comes not from their memories but from the repetition of their labor. They know these lands because, after waiting for months and sometimes years to obtain work permits, they are allowed to cross the besieging walls to work these lands. Again, Palestinian time and labor are paid as a debt: we wait for permits to work the lands from which we are exiled; we wait on checkpoints to cross from one reserve to another. Our extracted and exploited time becomes the infrastructure of material labor with which the colonial enterprise is structured.[19] Those laborers move through militarized Israeli checkpoints to become the farmers of Israeli agricultural plantations, and the workers who build the settlements atop the ruins of their ancestral villages. They know these lands because they work them; they are alienated from these lands because they work them. Their hands change the soil and turn soil and subsoil with ruins of memories into sanitized a-historical structures. It is with their hands that these lands are shaped, and it is with their hands that they know, and with their eyes that they see. What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one's relation to land alien.

"What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one's relation to land alien."

Palestinians displaced in Palestine are constituent parts of the settler-colonial regime that alienates them from their lands and stretches their labor across colonial time, but Gazans who "cross" work in particularly dire circumstances. They are surveilled, militarily administered, and overtly exploited, and they endure this to be able to offer their families under siege a better life paid for with nearly unpaid labor. How can one call this act of crossing a return if it is allowed by the same regime that exiles? Gazans' authorized work access will always be adversarial to the principle of return, bound up with the sole condition of alienation. This is why return can never be exclusively understood through geographical terms, forcing us to implore its psychic and materialist cost. Yet, it is this knowing, manifested through extracted labor and exchanged debt, that maintains material access to the future. If they had not known the lands; if they did not see what was beyond the wall, how else would they have returned?
The Image of Return
"Go, Mahdi, Go,

Oh, people, these are our occupied lands.

Our lands, oh people, these are our lands.

Our occupied lands, oh people,

these are our occupied lands.

Oh people, our occupied lands.

We have returned to our lands, oh, people.

Our occupied lands, oh, people.

Our occupied lands, oh, people.

We have returned, oh people, after eighty years.

We have returned to our occupied lands.

Our occupied lands.

Our lands,

Our lands,

Our lands, oh people.

Beer el Sabe', oh god, Beer el Sabe'

Beer el Sabe', our homeland

Beer el Sabe', our homeland

Beer el Sabe' oh my homeland,

it is within you where the falcon sang.

We returned to our occupied lands."[20]

-A Gazan man returned, October 7, 2023.

Like religious rites, these words were uttered on the 7th of October. They stimulate an instinctive association with the poetic, but they were the intuitive words of a Gazan man at the moment of his entry out of Gaza: at his moment of return. "Go, Mahdi, Go," the Gazan man calls to another ahead of him. Is Mahdi the one who paved the way? Is he just ahead? It could be that he was only faster -resist your urge to assign messianic meaning to the name Mahdi.[21] The Gazan man's words reach us through his mobile phone. He pants, his voice cracks, muffled, he cries, reiterating: "These are our occupied lands, these are our occupied lands." Around him, a flock of Gazans appeared to be scattering, seizing the moment to roam without limits, while others kneeled to kiss the soil that birthed them. The Gazan man walked through the alien, emptied wilderness that was once the land upon which his ancestral village and those of many others stood. "We returned after eighty years, Beer el Sabe'" he whimpered, referring to the historically largest Palestinian city in the Naqab desert surrounding Gaza, captured and occupied in 1948, which he witnessed from a distance. "Beer el Sabe' oh my homeland, it is within you where the falcon sang," the Palestinian man pronounced, articulating a renewed assertion of political subjectivity. The falcon sang, and we heard the call.

"Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? "

This is an image of return. It is a difficult image, but nonetheless a beautiful one. How can one find beauty in an image produced, manufactured, and contextualized within brutality? If violence is what materially defines our lives, don't we deserve to have beauty in our realities saturated by it? Amid images transfused and reproduced within the grays of concrete debris of bombarded homes and incarcerating walls, the browns of exploded sewage pipes, and yellows and muted whites of pillaged lands, is the only red we are able to capture one of blood, and the neons of phosphorous mechanical rain? How can an image of return be beautiful when it goes against all that is sublime, against sublimation in principle, when it is an image made in excess, like the waste it contains? Surplus images, pixelated, poor, impoverished, and limited in color-images of return transmit signals that surpass canonical regulations of beauty. An image that can never be framed because whatever it contains spills, escapes definition, and lends itself to be captured by those who uphold the conditions of its grotesqueness. In poor attempts to embarrass us for finding beauty in this liberatory moment, English and Hebrew captions read "Terrorists Break In", while Arabic voices scream, We have been set free!Tainting our cheers and pushing us aside, their rhetorical violence produces yet another racial spectacle.

An orphaned boy standing atop the ruination of all that birthed him sings to the sea; two girls who had just buried their siblings kiss their maimed kittens; fathers who never got to see the day their kids return from school utter poetry at the sight of death; and mothers, before they bury their own, attend to those left without family. These are all images of quotidian life under colonization that Palestine has been forcing us to reckon with since the inception of the Zionist time regime. These images escape canonical and moral definitions altogether because they capture all that is absurd and unfathomable about the tenacity of Palestinians in the face of their oppressor. But this same tenacity shouldn't remain comfortable in the eyes of our non-witnessing spectators. Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? Are images of a generation of young men, who were never allowed the sky above their heads-when they are finally flying, claiming it as theirs-not images of the unimaginable? Or that of a bulldozer imported to demolish Palestinian homes finally repurposed to break out of cages? Colonized legibility will always remain a regime of oppression. Some phrases and words resist all attempts at translation, and a lineage of images will never be seen for what it is. When Palestinians try to engage with those who insist on determining our fate, Gaza is described as an "open-air prison." Yet when we speak between ourselves, Gaza is colloquially referred to as al-ard al-moharrarah, the freed land, the liberated land (الارض المحررة). Wonderful are the images of those who went under to become one with the land. Here they are, repurposing surplus colonial architecture to become architects of freedom, rendering Zionist occupation tunnels into anticolonial guerilla subsoils.[22] Tender are the images of farmers stepping with their bare feet and those of workers riding their motorcycles back into the lands that oppress them. These are all the images of return. They possess a different matter of the unfathomable, the paradoxical, and the impossible.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth". Pages 14

[2] Eghbariah, Rabea. "The 'Harvard Law Review' Refused to Run This Piece about Genocide in Gaza." The Nation, 22 Nov. 2023, www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/.

[3] Walid Daqqa, Parallel Time, 2006. From a letter that he wrote in Arabic that was smuggled out of prison at the beginning of his twentieth year of incarceration.

[4] Russek, Sam. "Israel Arms the World's Autocrats-with Weapons Tested on Palestinians." The New Republic, 28 Nov. 2023, newrepublic.com/article/177074/israel-arms-worlds-autocratswith-weapons-tested-palestinians.

[5] Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. United Kingdom, Verso, 2023. P. 4.

[6] See Massad, Joseph. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2006. He discussed libidinal and sexed investments in relation to Euro-feminized Jewish diasporic unconscious and Zionist production of a phallocentric Jewish nation.

[7] Ghassan Kanafani marked the 1936 revolts in Palestine as the political beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement against the British colonial government and Zionist settlement (see: Thawrat 36-39 fi Filastin [The 1936-39 Revolts in Palestine]). Alternatively, feminist anticolonial Palestinian activist and organizer Tarab Abdul Hadi, traced the national Palestinian decolonial women's movement back to the 1929 Revolts in Palestine. Edward Said also wrote about the difference between "origin" and "beginning", with the former relating to myth, religion and the divine, while the latter emerges as a secular and human notion (see: Said, Edward W.. Beginnings: Intention and Method. United Kingdom, Granta Books, 2012.) More contemporary Palestine historians trace the beginning of Zionist project and the struggle against it back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. (Thank you Laura and Ghalya.)

[8] Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, 2021.

[9] الموت ولا المذلّة

[10] Abdaljawad, Omar. "Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine: A Reply to Adam Shatz." Mondoweiss, 14 Nov. 2023, mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/.

[11] These are not real quotes, but they are derived from countless conversations with Palestinians who dream of return, or dream through return. The Dream (1987 film) by Mohammad Malas is a project that materializes a visual rendering of many such dreamers.

[12] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. Page 15. All that is in brackets was added and does not appear in the original text.

[13] Bloch, Ernst, et al. The principle of hope. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1986. Page 201-202.

[14] Haytham el-Wardany, The Book of Sleep (Transl. Robin Moger, Seagull Books, 2020), first published in Arabic as Kitab Al Nawm (Al Karma Publishers, Cairo, 2017).

[16] الحرب النفسيّة.

[18] Chigumadzi, Panashe. "The Cry of Black Worldlessness." Africa Is a Country, 10 Dec. 2021, africasacountry.com/2021/10/the-cry-of-black-worldlessness.

[19] Ferreira Da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. Germany, MIT Press, 2022.

[20] The video was published on Al-Quds Al-Bawsala's (القدس البوصلة) Instagram and Telegram accounts, October 7, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyGfsZnIiDa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[21] Al Mahdi (The Guided).

[22] During Israel's military occupation and settlement within Gaza that lasted until 2005, the IDF built tunnels below residential neighborhoods to spy on, and neutralize Palestinian resistance fighters. These same tunnels were abandoned when Israel was pushed out of Gaza, and re-activated and expanded by Palestinians.

Adam HajYahia is an independent researcher, writer, and curator from Palestine.

This essay is part of our rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called "Palestine Question." Essays will engage the colonial politics of Zionism, Palestinian resistance, perennial questions about loss and diaspora, identitarian entanglements with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and more. As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field's ambivalence toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But as a magazine preoccupied with the unruly mesh of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and historical-material analysis, we are decidedly unambivalent about our steadfast solidarity with Palestine and the diasporic geographies of Palestinians beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: "From the River to the Sea." -The Editors
The Future of Return
One must decipher the Zionist time regime to understand the logics of Palestinian resistance and what it has put forth (or brought backward). Since the Nakba, Palestinians have been caught in an ongoing present catastrophe that cannibalizes itself, reproducing a static temporality of enduring violence. This is an ongoing present that both obfuscates the past and colonizes the future. Claiming its dominance in the here and now, Zionism has abused Jewish biblical time-a fantastical past time-to assume the God-given right over Palestinian land and exercise continual domination over Palestinian labor. In doing so, the Palestinian past-present-predicated on testimony, oral history, and intergenerational memory-is subject to ongoing processes of sublation with Zionism's phantasmal interpretation of a biblical clock. "The colonist makes history," Frantz Fanon wrote, "his life is an epic, an odyssey."[1] The Nakba, as a lived reality, is accordingly reproduced so long as this time-regime reigns, asserting an extraction of time over Palestinian psychic and material life.

A temporal architecture produced by Zionism-one that is maintained as long as this regime of time persists-the Nakba's overbearing preeminence cannot be contained between particular days in 1948 or between "then" and "now." The catastrophe bleeds into any imagination of a Palestinian past, and as long as the Nakba is present, all temporalities will be read, interpreted, and imagined in relation to it. If we take remembering in the present to be an active construction of the past, history cannot be constructed without relationality to the Nakba. This begs us to recognize the Nakba as structuring settler-colonial violence and thus refusing singular definition. That violence is a machine fueled by extracted time and powered by the engine of History. As Rabea Eghbariah articulately put it:

"In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled."[2]

In addition to its most "abstract" and "material" forms, and the Nakba's encompassing genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing, maiming, subjugation, exile, and social-political fragmentation, it is also an insistence on the mass reproduction of annihilatory fascist technologies operating vampirically to feed off Palestinian time, which it extracts, steals, and re-invests. Zionism does not use Palestinian time, but exchanges its value.

This diagnosis of Zionist violence is not limited by historical confines, as the past under settler-colonialism is both anti-historical as well as infrastructural in its erection of a singular settler-colonial future. Meaning, with every single killing and act of maiming, Palestinian lives are terminated and shortened. When entire family lineages are erased, it means putting an end to an ancestral presence rendered obsolete. When lifeworlds and entire generations are incarcerated, captured time is allocated to another scheme-its exchange value is changed-by moving from one colonial temporality to a colonial-carceral one, living, or dying in a "parallel time."[3] When new military and surveillance technologies are trialed, or as Israel classifies them, "battle-tested" or "field-proven," their verified use value is exported and exchanged under the mark of their predicted efficiency tomorrow.[4]

With every speculative investment in fabricated televised lies, we lose minutes, hours, days, and lifetimes, seeking to negate fallacies-reproducing a debt frozen in a dialectical deficit. We pay Israel our time as long as its time regime reigns, and we are indebted to it and by it beyond this present moment into a future to which access is concealed. This is why Palestinian militant resistance must be appraised as this paragon's temporal, ontological, and non-dialectical rupture. Not the riddance of debt through payment, but its abolishment altogether.

Formulating fascism as a multi-temporal historical process against conventional formulations that postulate it as a moment of exception, Alberto Toscano writes about fascism as a "return":

"The intensely superstructural, at times even fantastical, character of our present's fascistic traits would seem to warrant expanding one's focus beyond capital's strategies to shore up its social domination under conditions of crisis. [...] Fascist movements capture, divert, and regiment surplus social energies - unrealized wishes for a better life, memories of precapitalist lifeways, and unproductive and excessive desire."[5]

Zionism, as such, cannibalizes these desires: excessive desires, desires of a "better life" by and for European Jewry in pre- and post-war temporalities, alongside desires of performing domination. It functions through the return of the biblical, archaic, or mythic-Israel is founded as the rightful present return of the biblical kingdom of Bnei Yisrael. It is a fascistic return that Zionism rides, a vehicle for the mass mobilization of psychic and libidinal dreams of European Jewry that swallows other non-European Jewish desires, that only gets heightened through the futuristic historicization of postwar Europe. Zionism's temporal structure-or form-is innately fascistic and not only so in its current state, but throughout many of its myriad historical interpretations and manifestations. The genocide we witness today in Gaza is not a state of exception but one that requires to be read and understood as embedded within the fascistic historical structure of Zionism that always sought the termination and repression of Palestinians through various technological, necropolitical, and psychosocial arrangements. Palestinians were never meant to survive, let alone return or even have the psychic breadth to think of militant resistance to reclaim their lives and lands.

Palestinian return, however, functions through the expression of what is presently repressed: there are no archaic or mythic desires or pasts, but a materially extracted, exported, demonized, marginalized, incarcerated, contained, and maimed real presence under domination with a desire for it to be undone. The return is from the present to a different present. It is a negative return that is repressed by a fascistic return. It is an uncaptured and unregimented surplus desire that does have a material structure to support it and a colonial past-present from which it springs. It is indeed revealing how Zionism abstracts and then manipulates supposedly emancipatory political terminologies such as "Jewish indigeneity" to Palestine or the "Jewish right of return," which grants Israeli citizenship to anyone who has Jewish ancestry, anywhere at any given moment, in the place of Palestinians who are reproduced as those in a state of displacement in Palestine. Like other forms of fascism, Zionism persuades both the liberals and the conservatives; it is both feminine and masculine[6]; republican and democratic; its settlements are both socialist (kibbutz) and capitalist (start-up nation). It instrumentalizes all forms of discourse, no matter how contradictory or oppositional they might be, to serve one singular purpose: Jewish supremacy in Palestine, settler colonization, and military capital.

"Palestinian return is not an act of reversal, but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility."

Where, then, do we begin? From which point do we narrate? To begin in 1948 is a political choice, not a historical one.[7] Since the declaration of the inception of the Zionist time regime, the Palestinian refugees internally displaced within Palestine, and those expelled to the outside, have been demanding a return to their homes and lands. Oftentimes in English, it is articulated through the framework of "The Palestinian Right of Return." However, the Arabic phrase is wearier when using a rights-based framework, and instead, it proposes other compelling ways of approaching return. In standard Arabic, it is referenced as haqq al-'awdah (حق العودة). Haqq is Arabic for right, but it also means justice, "that which is right or just," or for our purposes, "the justice of return." Haqq also means "truth" or "reality" - what is true, the Real, against what is fictional or mythical. Appealingly, in colloquial Palestinian Arabic, haqq also means "price" or "cost." The cost of return. This notion of return neither seeks nor promises the absolute permanent return of all those dispossessed, exiled, and banished, but the open-ended possibility of returning for those who choose to do so. It is the haqq, or justice principle, to choose how to live instead of being incapacitated and forced solely to subsist or survive.

This indeterminate notion of a return evades purity and rejects totality: it involves those who want to return to their ancestral lands and occupied homes; to re-establish their presence; reunite with their families, and live amongst their communities, as well as the others who no longer wish to establish their lives in Palestine, for they have roots and desires invested elsewhere. And yet, they still yearn to have the keys (beyond metaphor) to their motherland. These two groups are not at odds: they both have a future-oriented desire, a productive and generative one. Not a negative desire for something they lack, but an affirmative desire for open-endedness and possibility. This is why Palestinian return is not an act of reversal as such-the relapse to a time prior to exile and dispossession-but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility. It is the redemption of the past in the present and the future, not its abandonment, forgetting, or re-insertion. In other words, return produces possibility and fractures the apparatus that polices our imagination and our life. It is the opening to the future as endless uncaptured time, and the abolition of what we owe; the reparation of what we are owed, our "debts", the cost of return. It is for this reason that we must see the 7th of October as the superfluous rupture of Zionist time and the re-insertion of Palestinian political subjectivity. On that day, as on many other days within the Palestinian revolutionary tradition, the militarized and besieging walls-in their material and psychic manifestations-could no longer contain the people of Gaza and their desires to return, to break free.

We must not mistake Palestinian return as something that will occur in the future. Rather, it occurs and has been occurring throughout this present moment to enable a future-a future that escapes the economic speculation of racial capitalism into an indeterminate future that isn't yet molded, one that could be retrieved, that could be emancipated from colonial financialization. With every shattered fence in Gaza, bombarded checkpoint in Jerusalem, clandestine escape from Tulkarm, surreptitious break out of the Gilboa prison, stealthy act of smuggling out of Jenin, and annual activations of Iqrith or Bir'im-physical, literal returns to places of dispossession despite military, legal and carceral prohibitions-we have been returning time and again, accumulating negative spells of time, no matter how short or fleeting they are, as returned beings. Some returns are spectacular revolutionary moments, others are conspicuous and modest in imagination, but they all bring us closer to liberation, feeding into one another. These moments accumulate in the negative, because we count them in reverse, we count them down.[8] Not from the point they begin, but towards the instance of their conclusion, awaiting their expiration time. We count them by the number of breaths we take until we are yet again captured, until we are detained, or shot, martyred, as if awaiting our renewed exile. "Death over indignity."[9] We count them as beings whose freedom is future-oriented, as Palestinians who materially imagine a life in Palestine that is otherwise, and who remember the past not with depoliticized sentimentality, but as fuel for the imagination of the day of return. And so we are simply out of sync. These stockpiled moments await our cue to reappear eventually at the moment when a collective return is performed-when their sum is powerful enough to demolish the time limit, between fantasy and concrete fulfillment. It is then, when collective return is performed, that we no longer need to count because time will be on our side. Then, soon, we will live in a time that is ours.
Return of the Repressed
In Arabic, al-'awda (fem. verbal noun) is the colloquial reference for return: The Return. ' Awda is always spoken with a definite article al- that precedes it. It is not any return but The Return, the only return, the return that needs no prefixes or suffixes to specify its reference. Assuredly, there is simply one return: the return to Palestine. In its verbal form, ' aada, it means [he] returned; came back; went back. 'Awdah or ' awdon also means to begin anew; to begin after an end; to go to the beginning.

If return is an act done retroactively toward a beginning, somewhere, sometime-a zero or a negative value, yet always forward-facing-there must always be an excess. With every act of return, there is a surplus, for each time is different. Each time, something either spills or escapes capture. It is fundamentally repetitive but never identical, always subjective. This is why surplus, that excess we spoke of, is at the crux of Palestinian return. In a strictly military sense, surplus is the Palestinian rockets fired back at Israel's settlements, made out of the unexploded Israeli munition that reaches Gaza. It is also the recycled material waste of exploded airstrikes repurposed to build low-tech guerilla weaponry. In a psychic sense, it is the repetition of the appearance of the unconscious after decades of subjugation. The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free.

The ​​quandary many leftist psychoanalysts and so-called materialists find themselves in when they embark on their surgical attempts to diagnose October 7th is their inability to fathom the psychic opening that day has enabled. They often confront a challenge in recognizing the generative or productive affect produced by anticolonial counterviolence for collective psychic formation in the midst of a moment of revolutionary disruption. Revolutionary counterviolence is not a necessary evil or an inevitable inconvenience: it is formative. In the case of Palestine, this does not exclusively apply to the Palestinians in Gaza but to the very aporia of being Palestinian. As Abdaljawad Omar writes, "Is it not curious, one might ask, that the very sympathy shown to Palestinians appears directly proportional to their perceived inability to confront the uniform machinery of settler colonialism?"[10] What underlies many such "non-violent" surgical ventures, whether conscious or not, is an attempt to put decolonization to the test: how can decolonization manifest itself without disrespecting the colonial enterprise, they ask, while they implore hermetically sealed structures of sustained colonial terror, which inevitably reduce all decolonizing efforts to nothing less than abolition and rupture of the structures' non-penetrability.

How can a people whose modern life is defined by dispossession, dehumanization, death, destruction, starvation, besiegement, mass incarceration, mutilation, and maiming, whose oppression is supported by the world's cruelest military powers, imagine a material beyond? How can the same people who have been besieged for seventeen years by one of the world's most technologically advanced and sophisticated necropolitical apparatuses actively break free using low-tech machinery made out of garbage? Dig a hole out of prison with a spoon? Through a sustained practice of resistance, how can a zealous commitment to liberation refuse to become but rhetorical anaphora?

"The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free."

Since October 7th, these questions are being answered daily through images, no matter how life closes down on the people of Gaza. Through Al-Aqsa Flood, the repression of time collapsed into a transformative event with a future in sight. It materialized an imago of what liberation looks like, and how it can be achieved. The image of a bulldozer tearing down the Israeli fence containing Gaza is an image that shatters the psychic impasse-one inflicted by absolute besiegement-and restores our orientation towards the horizon concealed behind the wall. This image has long been the subject of our dreams. "What if I walked right through the wall?" She asked her mother. "I jumped so high I landed on the other side and visited my aunt," he recollected. "I was driving to work, and I just kept driving until I found myself back in Majdal."[11] It is indeed a parallel reality within which Palestinians live. An image in which a group of Gazans transgressed the fence that had contained their lives and dreams, in their flip flops, without a checkpoint in sight, while they simply walked into the lands from which they were expelled. It is a psychic image. It is a double, dialectical image: the event takes place while the Israeli settler-colonial apparatus remains the order of the day, and it does not occur after its abolition. The event of return does not take place after the fact, in a 'post'-temporality where the Zionist regime no longer exists. Instead, the act springs from within the time of its reign, cracking its walls and fracturing its frame. The two images contain two opposing forces, two antagonistic temporalities, and two states of consciousness. Slipping out and spilling into the colonial matrix, this excess is what fuels return.

Many other images persist, though not always of a technological quality; images that are not fixed in a frame. Amongst the most important images is that of the recuperation of land as a sight and site of struggle instead of a reserve for containment. It is the deadly image of the command of a battlefield where the colonizing army is at last face-to-face with the population it colonizes, forcing the perpetrator out of their command room. The battle is no longer solely mediated through Zionist bombs of annihilation, only returned as surplus rockets. The colonized summons the colonizer, demanding him to witness his own wrath of colonization and the fury of anticolonial resistance. The colonized summoned the colonizer to see him face-to-face, without the mediation of surveillance cameras and lethal drones. The return of the repressed in Israeli consciousness is to be faced both visually and psychically with what your entire existence and material presence in Palestine eradicates and represses.

Otherwise repressed, Palestinians return through a besieging wall-which conveniently prohibits the colonizer from ever seeing the refugees she herself has displaced. Their return turns the allegedly peaceful, segregated settlement into a site of confrontation with what the colonizer is now forced to see. The repressed returns in this instance of the fracture, when the violently enforced architecture of repression, also designed to keep the Zionist psyche contented, crumbles. The repressed returns through Palestinian radical expenditure of (liberatory) psychic and physical matter that rearranges the machinations of repression.

Fanon had a close understanding of how, unconsciously, the colonized repeatedly imagines the moment of their freedom. Such psychic returns are not coincidental, nor do they burst out of nothing. They are the stimulus of the labor of dreaming. These dreams and desires are stored in our muscles like hidden building blocks-a stenography of sorts that formulates itself through the very conditions of the repressive reality. "The dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping [above the wall], swimming [near the shores of Akka], running [in the streets of Jaffa], and climbing [the trees of Birzeit]. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning."[12] This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured. They are not only the theater that represents the bullets and batons marked on the skin of the colonized, printed on our psychic tissue. No, they are the schemes and imaginations of the struggle that awaits. They are unlike other repressed matter in the unconscious but simply "Not-Yet-Conscious."[13]

"This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured"

The return of the repressed is the spillage of our psychic matter in the hours before "nine in the evening" and after "six in the morning." It's what we actively pursue with a kind of militant hope we are bound with because Our continued existence has been depending on it. While Zionism's ideal arrangement consists of keeping our repression exiled and dormant, or, as Haytham el-Wardany describes it, in a "coma." Palestinians have been choosing to sleep and dream, rendering every moment of revolutionary "failure" a time of militant wishes.[14] In his attempts to define the state of a political "coma," particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, el-Wardany asks, "If revolution is awakening-a long-awaited aberration that follows a deep mass lethargy-then is not sleep a return to dispossession? A synonym for failure? The failure to reshape reality? The inability to alter the circumstances of life? Defeat in the battle to redefine the self?"[15]

Theorizing sleep as a generative realm that concedes revolutionary failure, el-Wardany defines sleep not as the result of failure, nor its cause, but "the moment of defeat's acceptance." Palestinians have been subjugated, maimed, and subject to a structure that is in its very essence exilic, repressing and banishing our psychic matter to be buried deep in our unconscious. Zionism works to further push Palestinians into accepting failure-not only in our sleep, between nine in the evening and six in the morning, where we admit it to ourselves, but also between six in the morning and nine in the evening. Yet a psychic embedment plagues the wakeful hours, as we daydream of the moment of liberation, searching for it in the now. Palestinian militants remind us consistently to beware of the psychological war that Israel wages, the "war of the soul."[16] However, Israel's failure-that it fails to admit-is that the state of political coma it has been subjecting us to cannot be forced totally onto us: the repressed have been returning time and again despite all colonial machinations and machinery.

This is why we must locate Al-Aqsa Flood within a revolutionary tradition of Palestinian resistance and a psychic paragon of colonized subjectivity.

"History does not wait for the sleepers to wake; it is written by the wakeful alone. What, from those hours of sleep, is worth the history books taking notice of and setting down? Surplus hours of no benefit or purpose; and yet these hours do not wither and fade away like pointless superfluity but grow in number, night after night, to become a strange assemblage."[17]
The Labor of Return
Some of the besieged Gazans who returned on the 7th of October already knew the land on the other side of the fence in spite of their decades-long uprooting. They knew how to navigate the industrialized wilderness and the boxy settlements they crossed. Knowing, however, does not mean familiarity, nor does it mean disalienation. The land has been made alien to them, and they alien to it. The land has changed, and they were made strangers. It is through their labor and debt, however, that they claim the future.

Writing about the experience of "black worldlessness," particularly in the context of post-apartheid Southern Africa, Panashe Chigumadzi describes the reality of Black people's presence in their native land as akin to being "a pariah in the land of your birth."[18] Speaking from a materialist position, Chigumadzi pivots towards the Black majority's labor exploitation in a land almost fully propertied by the South African white minority, describing it as "the spiritually and psychically disorienting paradox of exile at home" - living with a "double consciousness." This schismatic double consciousness is a result of existing as a supposedly emancipated postcolonial subject in a capitalist nation-state structure, where one remains shackled by the chains of the market. "Exile at home," which is one way to describe the state of the subjects of settler colonialism, then ceases to be an exclusively geopolitical category. This state is a psychic-materialist one. Although the contexts differ ontologically, this racialized experience of capitalist alienation reverberates across colonized societies. It is the experience of Palestinians in their lands.

The people of Gaza's knowledge of the land behind the fence comes not from their memories but from the repetition of their labor. They know these lands because, after waiting for months and sometimes years to obtain work permits, they are allowed to cross the besieging walls to work these lands. Again, Palestinian time and labor are paid as a debt: we wait for permits to work the lands from which we are exiled; we wait on checkpoints to cross from one reserve to another. Our extracted and exploited time becomes the infrastructure of material labor with which the colonial enterprise is structured.[19] Those laborers move through militarized Israeli checkpoints to become the farmers of Israeli agricultural plantations, and the workers who build the settlements atop the ruins of their ancestral villages. They know these lands because they work them; they are alienated from these lands because they work them. Their hands change the soil and turn soil and subsoil with ruins of memories into sanitized a-historical structures. It is with their hands that these lands are shaped, and it is with their hands that they know, and with their eyes that they see. What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one's relation to land alien.

"What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one's relation to land alien."

Palestinians displaced in Palestine are constituent parts of the settler-colonial regime that alienates them from their lands and stretches their labor across colonial time, but Gazans who "cross" work in particularly dire circumstances. They are surveilled, militarily administered, and overtly exploited, and they endure this to be able to offer their families under siege a better life paid for with nearly unpaid labor. How can one call this act of crossing a return if it is allowed by the same regime that exiles? Gazans' authorized work access will always be adversarial to the principle of return, bound up with the sole condition of alienation. This is why return can never be exclusively understood through geographical terms, forcing us to implore its psychic and materialist cost. Yet, it is this knowing, manifested through extracted labor and exchanged debt, that maintains material access to the future. If they had not known the lands; if they did not see what was beyond the wall, how else would they have returned?
The Image of Return
"Go, Mahdi, Go,

Oh, people, these are our occupied lands.

Our lands, oh people, these are our lands.

Our occupied lands, oh people,

these are our occupied lands.

Oh people, our occupied lands.

We have returned to our lands, oh, people.

Our occupied lands, oh, people.

Our occupied lands, oh, people.

We have returned, oh people, after eighty years.

We have returned to our occupied lands.

Our occupied lands.

Our lands,

Our lands,

Our lands, oh people.

Beer el Sabe', oh god, Beer el Sabe'

Beer el Sabe', our homeland

Beer el Sabe', our homeland

Beer el Sabe' oh my homeland,

it is within you where the falcon sang.

We returned to our occupied lands."[20]

-A Gazan man returned, October 7, 2023.

Like religious rites, these words were uttered on the 7th of October. They stimulate an instinctive association with the poetic, but they were the intuitive words of a Gazan man at the moment of his entry out of Gaza: at his moment of return. "Go, Mahdi, Go," the Gazan man calls to another ahead of him. Is Mahdi the one who paved the way? Is he just ahead? It could be that he was only faster -resist your urge to assign messianic meaning to the name Mahdi.[21] The Gazan man's words reach us through his mobile phone. He pants, his voice cracks, muffled, he cries, reiterating: "These are our occupied lands, these are our occupied lands." Around him, a flock of Gazans appeared to be scattering, seizing the moment to roam without limits, while others kneeled to kiss the soil that birthed them. The Gazan man walked through the alien, emptied wilderness that was once the land upon which his ancestral village and those of many others stood. "We returned after eighty years, Beer el Sabe'" he whimpered, referring to the historically largest Palestinian city in the Naqab desert surrounding Gaza, captured and occupied in 1948, which he witnessed from a distance. "Beer el Sabe' oh my homeland, it is within you where the falcon sang," the Palestinian man pronounced, articulating a renewed assertion of political subjectivity. The falcon sang, and we heard the call.

"Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? "

This is an image of return. It is a difficult image, but nonetheless a beautiful one. How can one find beauty in an image produced, manufactured, and contextualized within brutality? If violence is what materially defines our lives, don't we deserve to have beauty in our realities saturated by it? Amid images transfused and reproduced within the grays of concrete debris of bombarded homes and incarcerating walls, the browns of exploded sewage pipes, and yellows and muted whites of pillaged lands, is the only red we are able to capture one of blood, and the neons of phosphorous mechanical rain? How can an image of return be beautiful when it goes against all that is sublime, against sublimation in principle, when it is an image made in excess, like the waste it contains? Surplus images, pixelated, poor, impoverished, and limited in color-images of return transmit signals that surpass canonical regulations of beauty. An image that can never be framed because whatever it contains spills, escapes definition, and lends itself to be captured by those who uphold the conditions of its grotesqueness. In poor attempts to embarrass us for finding beauty in this liberatory moment, English and Hebrew captions read "Terrorists Break In", while Arabic voices scream, We have been set free!Tainting our cheers and pushing us aside, their rhetorical violence produces yet another racial spectacle.

An orphaned boy standing atop the ruination of all that birthed him sings to the sea; two girls who had just buried their siblings kiss their maimed kittens; fathers who never got to see the day their kids return from school utter poetry at the sight of death; and mothers, before they bury their own, attend to those left without family. These are all images of quotidian life under colonization that Palestine has been forcing us to reckon with since the inception of the Zionist time regime. These images escape canonical and moral definitions altogether because they capture all that is absurd and unfathomable about the tenacity of Palestinians in the face of their oppressor. But this same tenacity shouldn't remain comfortable in the eyes of our non-witnessing spectators. Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? Are images of a generation of young men, who were never allowed the sky above their heads-when they are finally flying, claiming it as theirs-not images of the unimaginable? Or that of a bulldozer imported to demolish Palestinian homes finally repurposed to break out of cages? Colonized legibility will always remain a regime of oppression. Some phrases and words resist all attempts at translation, and a lineage of images will never be seen for what it is. When Palestinians try to engage with those who insist on determining our fate, Gaza is described as an "open-air prison." Yet when we speak between ourselves, Gaza is colloquially referred to as al-ard al-moharrarah, the freed land, the liberated land (الارض المحررة). Wonderful are the images of those who went under to become one with the land. Here they are, repurposing surplus colonial architecture to become architects of freedom, rendering Zionist occupation tunnels into anticolonial guerilla subsoils.[22] Tender are the images of farmers stepping with their bare feet and those of workers riding their motorcycles back into the lands that oppress them. These are all the images of return. They possess a different matter of the unfathomable, the paradoxical, and the impossible.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth". Pages 14

[2] Eghbariah, Rabea. "The 'Harvard Law Review' Refused to Run This Piece about Genocide in Gaza." The Nation, 22 Nov. 2023, www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/.

[3] Walid Daqqa, Parallel Time, 2006. From a letter that he wrote in Arabic that was smuggled out of prison at the beginning of his twentieth year of incarceration.

[4] Russek, Sam. "Israel Arms the World's Autocrats-with Weapons Tested on Palestinians." The New Republic, 28 Nov. 2023, newrepublic.com/article/177074/israel-arms-worlds-autocratswith-weapons-tested-palestinians.

[5] Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. United Kingdom, Verso, 2023. P. 4.

[6] See Massad, Joseph. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2006. He discussed libidinal and sexed investments in relation to Euro-feminized Jewish diasporic unconscious and Zionist production of a phallocentric Jewish nation.

[7] Ghassan Kanafani marked the 1936 revolts in Palestine as the political beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement against the British colonial government and Zionist settlement (see: Thawrat 36-39 fi Filastin [The 1936-39 Revolts in Palestine]). Alternatively, feminist anticolonial Palestinian activist and organizer Tarab Abdul Hadi, traced the national Palestinian decolonial women's movement back to the 1929 Revolts in Palestine. Edward Said also wrote about the difference between "origin" and "beginning", with the former relating to myth, religion and the divine, while the latter emerges as a secular and human notion (see: Said, Edward W.. Beginnings: Intention and Method. United Kingdom, Granta Books, 2012.) More contemporary Palestine historians trace the beginning of Zionist project and the struggle against it back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. (Thank you Laura and Ghalya.)

[8] Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, 2021.

[9] الموت ولا المذلّة

[10] Abdaljawad, Omar. "Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine: A Reply to Adam Shatz." Mondoweiss, 14 Nov. 2023, mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/.

[11] These are not real quotes, but they are derived from countless conversations with Palestinians who dream of return, or dream through return. The Dream (1987 film) by Mohammad Malas is a project that materializes a visual rendering of many such dreamers.

[12] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. Page 15. All that is in brackets was added and does not appear in the original text.

[13] Bloch, Ernst, et al. The principle of hope. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1986. Page 201-202.

[14] Haytham el-Wardany, The Book of Sleep (Transl. Robin Moger, Seagull Books, 2020), first published in Arabic as Kitab Al Nawm (Al Karma Publishers, Cairo, 2017).

[16] الحرب النفسيّة.

[18] Chigumadzi, Panashe. "The Cry of Black Worldlessness." Africa Is a Country, 10 Dec. 2021, africasacountry.com/2021/10/the-cry-of-black-worldlessness.

[19] Ferreira Da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. Germany, MIT Press, 2022.

[20] The video was published on Al-Quds Al-Bawsala's (القدس البوصلة) Instagram and Telegram accounts, October 7, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyGfsZnIiDa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[21] Al Mahdi (The Guided).

[22] During Israel's military occupation and settlement within Gaza that lasted until 2005, the IDF built tunnels below residential neighborhoods to spy on, and neutralize Palestinian resistance fighters. These same tunnels were abandoned when Israel was pushed out of Gaza, and re-activated and expanded by Palestinians.

Adam HajYahia is an independent researcher, writer, and curator from Palestine.

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The repressed ruptures of Zionist time Adam HajYahia

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TRG31: Speaking of Home - An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine 

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TRG31: Speaking of Home - An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine 

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This TRG meeting centres on 3 psycho-analytically informed texts on Israel/Palestine, which it is hoped will productively relate to each other.

Firstly, there is an hour long conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian). See above.

Secondly there's an article by Adam Hajyahia titled 'The Principle of Return -The repressed ruptures of Zionist time', taken from the on-line magazine P&RAPRAXIS.

Link here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-principle-of-return

Lastly there is a video of Jacqueline Rose reading her piece “Edward Said: After the Last Word,” at the 2024 Palestinian Festival of Literature.

Instagram link here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD7y1cPS9I6/?igsh=MTlwOTV5ZmZjbmtxag%3D%3D

7pm Friday 31st January, 2025

The Depot

ADAM HAJYAHIA

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Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine | ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

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With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian) engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.

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TRG30: Reza Negarestani - Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

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TRG30: Reza Negarestani - Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

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A whole book! (or as much as can be managed)

7pm Wednesday 27th November, 2024

The Depot

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TRG29: Franco 'Bifo' Beradi - A Thousand Little Machines ('From Irony to Hyperbole' section)

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TRG29: Franco 'Bifo' Beradi - A Thousand Little Machines ('From Irony to Hyperbole' section)

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7pm Wednesday 31st July, 2024. The Depot. (tbc)

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TRG28: Félix Guattari - The Three Ecologies 

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TRG28: Félix Guattari - The Three Ecologies 

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Apologies for belated posting of the next reading

7pm, Friday 31st May, 2024

Depot Cinema, Lewes.

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TRG27: Sylvia Wynter - Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Liketo Be "Black"  chapter 2 of ‘National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America’ edited by Antonio Gomez-Moriana, Mercedes Duran-Cogan (2001). 

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TRG27: Sylvia Wynter - Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Liketo Be "Black"  chapter 2 of ‘National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America’ edited by Antonio Gomez-Moriana, Mercedes Duran-Cogan (2001). 

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P&C’s 34 Firle Crescent, Lewes

7pm, Tuesday 23rd April, 2024

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TRG26: Giorgio Agamben's  'Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life' 

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TRG26: Giorgio Agamben's  'Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life' 

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Introduction & pt1 - The Logic of Sovereignty s1. The Paradox of Sovereignty (pp1-29)

The Depot

7pm Tuesday 5th March 2024.

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TRG25: Annual Review & Proposed Future Readings

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TRG25: Annual Review & Proposed Future Readings

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MA’s

31/01/24

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Judith Butler - chapter 3 from The Force of Non-violence (2020)

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Judith Butler - chapter 3 from The Force of Non-violence (2020)

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Butler & Tarí, in context of Oct 7th & destruction of Gaza.

2pm Sunday 26th November, Rick's gaff, Bton

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A continuation of the Chorus/Cacophony readings, with a focus on Mark Abel's 'Is Music a Language?' (from MA and in previous pt1 zip)) and extracts from Michel Serres' 'The Five Senses' (from Mick and attached as new zip).

7pm Friday 13th October,
Depot probably (tbc)

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A selection of short texts (2 page-ish) on the theme of sound/silence/noise/music.

7pm Wed 30th Aug, Depot (tbc)

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TRG22: ‘The Age of Disruption’ (pt1) - Bernard Stiegler

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TRG22: ‘The Age of Disruption’ (pt1) - Bernard Stiegler

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Up to p67
7pm, Friday 21st July
Depot Cinema Garden (hopefully)

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TRG21 Politics of Aesthetics - editor’s preface and intro only.

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TRG21: The Politics of Aesthetics -Jacques Rancière

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TRG21: The Politics of Aesthetics -Jacques Rancière

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Venue: tbc
Date: 7pm Wed 14th June

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Jacques Rancière The Politics of Aesthetics

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venue: P&C's garden
8pm, Wed 29th June, 2022
https://illwill.com/kinocene-ethics

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Thomas Nail's Theory of the Earth, recently published with Stanford University Press, forms the capstone of his six-volume series on the philosophy of movement. Whereas the previous volumes offered a wide-ranging theory of matter in motion in Western and Near Eastern thought and history, from Lucretius to Marx, Theory of the Earth embeds this work in a deeper material history of the cosmos, here interpreted through "kinetic patterns of diffusion evolving with everything else in the universe." Nail invites us to imagine a reciprocal transformation of philosophy and cosmology: on the one hand, philosophy appears at once as a material and cosmic activity, one among many profligate techniques of kinetic expenditure; at the same time, the cosmos itself becomes, in a deeper sense, philosophical - that is, "capable of philosophy."

Naturally, such a transformation would first require that philosophy (but also science, politics, and the arts) abandon many of the Western fictions it has tenaciously guarded at its center. Chief among these is the belief in a stable and predictable earth - a dangerous and culpable illusion that, according to Nail, lies at the root of "all contemporary global crises." This presupposition of stability and stasis underwrites the triumphalist self-understanding of Western civilization as a "progressive realization of fixed forms," a narrative that has justified the domination of man over nature, form over matter, domestication over migration and nomadism, and so on. By eliding the primacy of motion and expenditure, the architecture of progress and development has reaped wanton destruction across the globe. Only today, confronted by a dramatically unruly and tumultuous planet, are we finally forced to confront the arrogant blindness of this posture.

Among the many striking provocations that accompany Nail's materialist cosmology of motion, we find a new attack on "conservationist" approaches to ecological crisis. As its title suggests, "Kinocene Ethics" (the final chapter of Theory of the Earth) proposes a profound ethical recalibration based on an overturning of the relation between life and death. From a kinetic point of view, Nail argues, "life is capable of vastly more expenditure if it is allowed to live out its death and help the rest of the earth to do the same." When taken to its conclusions, this insight leads to a new practical centrality of death over life, at the same time as it signals a transvaluation of both terms: "Life is no longer about accumulation and preservation, but expenditure, and death is no longer an end state, but the process of expenditure itself." The result is a new ethical and political crossroads: "We can either become what we are (expending animals), or we can act as if our purpose is to conserve, accumulate, and instrumentalize life. The latter tends to produce extinction, the former to extend life." If we hope to outlive the nightmare of capitalist society, perhaps we must first learn to die well.

-Ill Will, April 2022
Part of a new series called Worlds Apart, exploring cosmology, ecology, science fiction, and the ends of capitalist society.
[My aim in Theory of the Earth is to introduce a] shift in perspective...from a theory of a static or stable earth, viewed through the narrow lens of human history in the Holocene, to a much more mobile and experimental earth, tending toward patterns of optimal kinetic dissipation.

The earth is not a passive object or stage for human activity, nor is it a benevolent subjective agent of life (Gaia). If anything, the earth is a process of expenditure and death - more like Python than Gaia.

Human animals do not live on the earth. They are the earth. Technically, even the earth itself is not of the earth. It is a branch of a massive cosmic dendritic flow, of which humans are one tiny experimental capillary seeking out optimal kinetic expenditure into the cool darkness of space. The duration of our life on this planet is related to how well we help our planet and the cosmos expend itself. The biosphere has tried five different capillary paths so far, each ending in mass extinction - like river tributaries that dried out in the sun before making it to the ocean, or the tentatively stepped leaders of a lightning strike abandoned for another direction.

There is a double meaning to the Kinocene. On the one hand, it is a planetary epoch defined by the increasing geological mobility of various strata in broader circulation than ever before. However, despite this burst of temporary mobility for some parts of the planet, the Kinocene has led to a net decrease in total planetary expenditure and mobility. This is because it has destroyed much of the most efficient dissipative system on the planet: the biosphere. I call this tendency "Kinocene extinction."

On the other hand, the Kinocene is also the geological epoch in which climate change has forced us to confront our entanglement in cosmic energy expenditure. The Kinocene could, therefore, be the epoch in which global humanity actually rediscovers its place in the energetic nature of things.

Human animals are not at the top of a cosmic hierarchy, but at the bottom of a river delta. We are not unique in our ability to help or hinder the optimal expenditure of matter in motion, but we are distinct in our capacity, at the current historical juncture, to correct an error in our own practical relation to the earth and cosmos. Instead of struggling against death, expenditure, and the motion of the cosmos, we can embrace it and learn to share generously and reciprocally with the rest of nature.

However small our contribution may seem on the grand scale, humans, at this point, can either increase or decrease the metabolic dissipation of motion in the cosmos. We can hasten our extinction by trying to preserve ourselves, or we can survive by dying well, along with the rest of matter on its journey into the cool ( psychros). I call this change in behavior "Kinocene expenditure."

In [what follows], I look at each side of the Kinocene in turn: first, looking at the history of human ecocide and its net effect on planetary expenditure; and second, looking in detail at the ethical practices that tend to increase planetary expenditure.

Kinocene Extinction
A brief history of ecocide
Ecocide is the destruction and reduction of energetic dissipation on the earth. It is also a kinocide because it produces a generalized slowing down of planetary dissipation. Each trophic level (mineral, atmospheric, vegetal, animal) is part of an energetic pyramid, with higher total energies below (mineral) and faster rates of expenditure on top (animal).

The higher you go on the pyramid, the more the organization of matter is in flux. This is why the earth has had five mass plant and animal extinctions already. When a lower-level event - such as solar flares, meteor assaults from the Milky Way, super volcanoes, changes in atmospheric carbon, or changes in phytomass occurs, everything above that on the pyramid is also radically and systematically affected, through a series of feedback loops. Certain groups of humans have now directly and indirectly affected the kinetic patterns of the earth at every trophic level.

Since phytomass (the biomass of plants) accounts for 80% of total biomass, it also accounts for 80% of the total energetic value of planetary biomass. One gigaton of carbon, for example, is 1 × 1021 joules of energy. We can, therefore, see a clear and dramatic net decline in planetary expenditure directly related to the decline just in stored phytomass alone - which, as we have seen, is only around 1% of plant energy expenditure. See, again, figure 15.1.

Every major social formation in Near Eastern and Western history expanded its scope and speed of circulation through the kinetic expulsion of human and nonhuman migrant populations. As far back as the Neolithic, some humans were expanding agriculture by expelling nomads, wild plants, and animals into forced migration - ultimately deforesting and depleting the Fertile Crescent. In the ancient world, the Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires built themselves on the backs of "barbarian" slaves who were forced into migration from other areas in order to mine fuels, fight resource wars, and build the infrastructure of empire.

Today the fossil-fuel-using classes and their scientists talk about our epoch as one of "human" geological agency - as if all humans played an equal role in the disaster. In fact, in every major age of Western history, it has been a proportionally small group of powerful consumers that forced the rest of the planet to destroy the biosphere and one another through enslavement, migration, and genocide.

The data on this is clear: the history of phytomass destruction is directly correlated to the history of energy consumption by the fossil-fuel-using classes, the rise of capitalism, and colonialism. We can see in Figure 15.2 that the sharp rise in human energy expenditure is inversely related to the sharp decline in biomass in Figure 15.1.

Together, Figures 15.1 and 15.2 reveal a clear image of the decline in the capacity for planetary kinetic expenditure connected to the rise in human energy use, which required ecological destruction.

A geology of the present

One incredible consequence of the massive terraforming project of capitalist globalization is that it has resulted in one of the most mobile geological strata of all time. Humans have always been geological agents, but to varying degrees. All the patterns of motion from throughout the earth's history (centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic) are thus still present today, but in a new mixture.
A new minerality
Many human groups have thrown a wide range of different minerals into circulation in the form of vehicles (cars, trains, planes, boats), living bodies (humans, animals, plants), and space debris (rocket parts, satellites) across the surface, the sky, and space. Capitalists have dug minerals out of the earth, turned them into technologies, and moved them all over the world in a massive metastable geological stratum. Bones, especially those of farm animals, now compose an entire fossil mineral record. There is also a sedimentary layer of plastic and petroleum products buried below our feet and coursing through our bodies. There are more than 500,000 pieces of debris, traveling at speeds of up to 17,500 mph, orbiting the earth. This is a new, highly mobile mineral stratum.

A new atmosphere

A new phytosphere

Climate change is not only destroying plant life; it is forcing it into migration. Plants are the first economic migrants. They, like the industrial proletariat, were seen by early English capitalists as unproductive, idle, squanderers of energy. The primitive accumulation or forced expulsion of peasants and indigenous people from their land went hand in hand with the forced expulsion of biodiverse plants and animals. The rise of mass industrial agriculture was both an ecological and a human genocide at the same time. The invention of the capitalist plantation was an enslavement of the ecosystem and of black and brown human beings at the same time.

Plants, like numerous indigenous people, migrants, and refugees, are now in forced migration. Capitalists ship plants around the world as food and fuel. They even burn their dead bodies as fossil fuel. A new phytosphere of "power- plants" and " plant-ations" is replacing the kinetic structure of vegetal life with smokestacks that release carbon but do not absorb it again.
A new animality
Contemporary animality has suffered a similar fate. Various human groups have destroyed more than 80% of wild land and sea mammal biomass, leaving only the most "productive" domesticated animals, locked into the factory farm: the Plantationocene. Wild animals, like plants, are being forced to migrate north to avoid rising temperatures and tides - or die. The bodily morphologies and organs of animals that are meant to increase kinetic expenditure are now being bred and sculpted into "productive" meat machines. As the elasticity of the human animal expands across the globe, the elasticity of wild animals is contracting into extinction.
Beyond anthropocentric energetics
Here is the problem: all the "increased" planetary mobility of this new geology is only an increase relative to human history and scale. Relative to human history and human energy use, there is certainly a dramatic increase in planetary and even energetic mobility. But humans are not the only mobile users of energy. They make up only .01% of the biosphere, .0000000000082% of the earth, and an unfathomably small percentage of the cosmos.

From the broader and more inclusive perspective of cosmic and terrestrial expenditure, human energy use/ecocide is causing a net reduction in motion and energy expenditure on the earth as a whole. The current global consumption of energy by some humans more than others, including the relatively minor increases in mineral, atmospheric, vegetal, and animal motion caused by climate change, is incredibly tiny compared to total planetary expenditure, which dwarfs human energy use by several orders of magnitude. In the figure below, human expenditure is not even visible on the graph of planetary expenditure (see Figure 15.3). This does not mean, however, that the consequences of ecocide have been negligible.

Ecological energetics, ecological systems theory, energy accounting, embodied energy theory, and thermodynamics have done extremely important work to help put together the big picture of planetary energy use. Unfortunately, when it comes to thinking about human energy expenditure, energy scientists have entirely misinterpreted the ethical and philosophical consequences of their data. For example, physicists have interpreted the history of increasing energy consumption by certain groups of humans to mean that human animals are smart and energetically more "efficient" than nature. They treat human beings as evolutionarily, socially, cognitively, and technologically more advanced than other animals because of the sheer quantity of energy they expend. This is a terrible mistake.

Fossil fuel capitalism is understood by some to be the highest form of human social organization because it allows for the largest possible consumption of energy. Many physicists and economists even describe capitalist economics as following directly from the laws of thermodynamics. Political liberalism is understood to be the highest form of political government because it maximizes the free energetic movement of all people toward increasing collective efficiency, productivity, consumption, and social-technological progress. What energy theorists fail to mention is that, at the same time, liberal governments have committed some of the most egregious human and ecological atrocities - and in just the past thirty years! Air pollution alone, coming disproportionately from liberal capitalist countries, is the cause of seven million deaths every year now and rising, largely killing people in developing countries. Is this the "success" to be reaped from liberal capitalist energy expenditure?

Even Georges Bataille, the great philosopher of expenditure, was deeply anthropocentric in his analysis of human expenditure. This led him in the wrong direction, toward the valorization of warfare, human sacrifice, and, implicitly, capitalist destruction. Humans are unique, for Bataille, because they expend the most energy and do so consciously. Religion is Bataille's name for the uniquely human awareness of our cosmic destiny to maximize entropy. But Bataille was triply wrong: 1) humans, as we showed in the previous chapter, do not (by far) expend the most energy (trees do); 2) other living and non-living material processes have made active mistakes that have caused mass extinctions, and humans are thus not unique in their destruction or salvation of the cosmos; and 3) the historical tendency of the cosmos so far is not to merely increase entropy, which will happen no matter what we do, but to increase the rate of kinetic expenditure - which is a unique challenge faced by all of nature.

Due to these three errors, Bataille and others have ignored the declining rate of the earth's total expenditure due to ecocide. This has allowed them to come to shortsighted, dangerous, and anthropocentric conclusions.

The historical tendency of nature to dissipate motion and energy is valid not for each aspect of nature in isolation, but only together, as entwined regions of an indeterminately changing and open whole. Humans are the cosmos continued by other experimental means to increase the expenditure of the planet and the cosmos, but not alone. There is thus absolutely no reason, other than pure anthropocentrism, for chaos and complexity theorists to treat humans as "successful" expenders of energy independent of their net effect on the planet and cosmos.

Energy theorists have understood the situation completely upside down. Biologists, on the other hand, understand well that each time an organism consumes energy, it expends an average 90% of that energy as waste. Each trophic level lives on the one below and expends nine-tenths of what it consumes each time, retaining only around 10% for what consumes it next. What organisms store as biomass is only a tiny fraction of a fraction of what life expends. Life tends to expend energy because the material cosmos does so more broadly. Nature loves to waste and to share its waste as much as possible. This is something our bodies "know" how to do. However, we tend not to consider it a real form of knowledge.

Unfortunately, most physicists and energy scholars are mostly interested in counting the tiny bit of energy or motion that is conserved and stored. Thus, ancient trees, at only 1% efficiency, are seen as grossly inefficient. Humans, at 16-20%, are understood to be better, and fossil fuels, at 30%, are considered ultra-efficient. Western culture and science have valorized efficiency, accumulation, and productivity under the assumption that nature and matter must be inefficient and stupid - thus requiring development and plantations to reach their true energetic potential. Kinetic expenditure is seen as an expression of the inferiority of the cosmos and evidence of the extraordinary superiority of human energy accumulation. We alone, with reason as our guide, can become efficient users of what nature so rapidly wastes. This is completely backward.

Notions of energy efficiency and environmental conservation are symptomatic of this same flawed framework, and we should alter them accordingly. Humans alone, in this model, are thought to be the unique consumers and conservers of nature. This is the prevailing definition of the Anthropocene, even though history and ecological energetics clearly show that numerous earth processes were destructive and restorative millions of years before humans.

When organisms and systems of all kinds suddenly begin to draw on a new dense energy source, there tends to be a period of extreme experimentation. What are the relative limits of how quickly and intensely organisms can consume energy without damaging the kinetic patterns that support them? Nature does not proceed along an a priori path to the fastest expenditure of energy, nor along a purely random one either. Nature experiments. Its first attempts are often destructive, as in the great die-off at the end of the Archean Eon caused by cyanobacteria expending too much energy in the form of oxygen. Certain human beings have also learned how to unlock relatively large amounts of energy from fossils, causing vast ecocide.

What is to be done? In the next section, I would like to argue for a dramatic change in perspective and ethical practice, away from this humancentered energetics. A different Kinocene is possible: a Kinocene not of extinction, but of expenditure.

Kinocene Expenditure

Expenditure is a defining feature of the cosmos as we know it. Kinetic expenditure is the tendency of matter in motion to spread out from higher concentrations to lower ones. It is a movement of death that occasionally makes life so that life may know death as well. The Kinocene extinction, as I described it above, is not the same as death. Extinction is the death of death. It is the loss of life's ability to die. In this final section, I would like to argue that what is needed more than ever today is an ethics of expenditure.
The ethics of death
The ethical valorization of life above death has wholly misunderstood the much larger cosmic situation in which our life occurs. Life is a kinetic byproduct of non-living matter's movement toward increasing expenditure. The material meaning of life is to help improve the expenditure of the universe. The tendency of life is thus to die well together with others. An ethics of life, however, will not help us respond ethically to most of the earth and the universe - which are not alive. Furthermore, since we lack complete knowledge and control of even just our unconstructible planet, it is foolhardy to assume that we know or could know how to manage it, let alone the universe, properly, for the sake of life. And in fact, in the case of most of Western civilization, it has already been demonstrated that we do not know how to do that.

Death is different. Our bodies materially know how to expend energy and to die by wasting most of the energy they consume. Instead of trying to manage the world, they give themselves slowly and generously over to death. That is, they give themselves over to the rest of the world to consume and expend as best it can, without a pre-given plan for how to increase its rate of expenditure. In other words, the path toward increasing expenditure cannot be constructed in advance of our dying and living together as we go.

The ethics of kinetic expenditure is a complete inversion of the ethics of life. However, it is not a simple inversion. The inversion changes the relationship from one of increasing accumulation and instrumentalization to one of loss and generosity. Death is not an unfortunate part of life; instead, life is a part of death that reproduces itself - not in order to live but in order to die and help others die.

I do not mean to suggest with this ethical theory that the cosmos should die and that humans and other beings should help it. That would be a naturalistic fallacy. There is no such thing as an absolute should, anywhere in nature. The kinetic ethics of expenditure has a strictly hypothetical structure: if you want to survive and thrive in this particular universe as it has tended so far, then the best chance is to go with the flow of increasing your collective rate of expenditure.

Even this does not guarantee anything. Nothing controls nature, not even nature, which is continually experimenting, just like a bolt of lightning. A meteor can strike, or numerous organisms can cause mass extinctions. And perhaps some fossil fuel CEOs would rather live their individual lives in luxury at the expense of the long-term survival of the human species. But if the rest of us want to survive so our kind can expend itself with others into the future, then we have to quit our addiction to fossil fuels and abolish capitalism.

If we want to live and persist on the earth as one of its animals, then we have to give our lives generously back to the earth and help it hasten its dissipation. By undermining the efficiency of terrestrial expenditure (by biomass destruction, etc.), the fossil-fuel-using classes are not allowing the earth to die, nor to live so that it can die. The fossil-fuel-using classes are destroying the conditions of everyone's expenditure. They are accumulating energy to use in the name of life. The paradox is that the instrumentalization and preservation of life are now resulting in extinction.

The problem is not that too much of the biosphere is dying, but that not enough of it is dying in the form of energy dissipation. Life is capable of vastly more expenditure if it is allowed to live out its death and help the rest of the earth to do the same.

Again, this ethical inversion of life and death is not whimsy or polemic. Placing death first changes our orientation, toward both life and death, entirely. Life and death take on wholly new meanings. Life is no longer about accumulation and preservation, but expenditure, and death is no longer an end state, but the process of expenditure itself.

If 6 trillion trees were still alive on this planet today, the earth would be expending twice as much energy as it is currently. The fossil-fuel-using classes are selfishly holding back the earth from its collective dissipation-its generous waste back to the cosmos. Whether we like it or not, we are directly participating in a larger cosmic drama. The cost of ignoring it and trying to hoard our own life will quite likely be our extinction. Perhaps the next round of post-extinction species will go with the flow instead of swimming against it, as certain human groups have - insisting that fighting against the current of nature is "knowledge" and "progress."

The gift that the Western fossil classes can give back is to surrender their arrogant belief that they know more about nature than it does. They can sacrifice homo economicus. They can generously give back their death, without purpose, without expectation of an instrumental return on their investment.

The question is not whether total human energy use is increasing or decreasing, but rather whether the rate of terrestrial and cosmic expenditure is doing so. Mere quantitative increases in human energy, above a certain level, are the cause of the current decline in the rate of expenditure. The destruction begins first for nonhuman life, then spreads to populations affected by extraction, and, eventually, affects the biosphere as a whole.

Against conservation

This is a counterintuitive and challenging notion: the survival of the biosphere and of human animals is not the primary meaning of their material, kinetic, and historical existence. The continued survival of life, this tiny portion of nature, is an aftereffect of cosmic and planetary expenditure. Life survives, strives, and reproduces, not directly for itself or its own utility, growth, expansion, and progressive evolution, but for the sake of something else entirely: the expenditure and death of the cosmos. The emergence and evolution of life with all its kinetic morphologies is not directly for the sake of development. Life is a gift given to the organism to intensify the expenditure of the cosmos and itself. By dying well, it gets to live well.

Conservation and accumulation are not the aim of life but are, rather, the consequences of death and expenditure. We preserve only to expend the more. This inversion is not a "new instrumentalism" that merely uses life "for" expenditure. Expenditure itself has no purpose or utility precisely because it is not a reinvestment with a necessary guarantee or with any equality of exchange. Death may give back the aftereffect of life, or it may not, depending on the greater relational experiment. One organism's gift of death does not decide what will receive the gift of life in return. This is a significant reversal that flips Western thinking on its head.

The gift of death thus has a dual meaning: life gives itself over to the cosmos in death, but death (non-living matter) gives itself, as a gift of life in cosmic reciprocity. Reciprocity is never an equal exchange, because the cosmos tends to move toward increasing rates and diverse forms of expenditure: toward death. There is no symmetrical balance. At the end of the universe, there is not necessarily homogeneous heat death, because matter is fundamentally in pedetic motion.

The cosmos, by giving itself the gift of death, also gives itself the gift of life by possibly contracting back on itself, reversing entropy, and producing a big crunch and another big bang. But since each life and death of the cosmos is related to its prior expansions and contractions through the initial and final states of quantum indeterminacy, the relation remains asymmetrical and indeterminate. The cosmos is relational but not determined, proportional, or symmetrical. The life and death of a cosmos thus mirror the life and death of all cosmoi in ongoing cycles of creation and destruction.

Thinking about ethics in terms of expenditure, however, is not a merely formal change in interpretation that leads us to the same practical activity of conservation. The logical conclusions of conservation ethics - such as population management, the preservation of wildlife at the expense of Third-World lives, the "voluntary human extinction project" of human sterilization, and the reduction of human activity to mere survival - do not follow from the ethics of expenditure. The Kinocene ethics of expenditure is quite different from the conservationist logic. The logic of conservation is a logic of renunciation, asceticism, and negation.

Life is one of the most profligate expenders and consumers of energy per mass that we know of - at a rate per area that is many times greater than that of the sun itself! Trees, for example, show us precisely what they think of the idea of conservation, consuming yottajoules of energy just to excrete 99% of it out again. Trees "conserve" 1% - just enough to preserve themselves so that they can keep wasting. Naturalism is not consistent with conservation.

Capitalism and anthropocentrism are destroying the planet, and we ought to stop them if we want to survive. However, the logic of conservation follows the same instrumental logic as capitalist bio- and anthropocentrism, only directed toward other ends. The results of deep ecological, NeoMalthusian anti-humanism have been and will be devastating for women and people of color around the world.

Instead of doing what we think trees do (conservation), we should (if we want to survive) be doing what they and our own bodies are truly doing. Trees are all wasting themselves into the world in acts of generosity, only taking what is given back to them, in reciprocity, to squander it again. It is hard to let go of the drive to manage and construct nature toward what we imagine is a better goal, or what we believe is consistent with the benevolence of Gaia. However, that is what the ethics of kinetic expenditure asks of us.

In Greek mythology, Python, the dying serpent, was the voice of Gaia. The critical idea here is that the truth of the earth is spoken and known through the act of dissipation (the rotting serpent Python). Like the priestesses of Delphi, we have to listen to the earth and follow its lead if we want to survive.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity in this context means giving as much as we can in expenditure and taking back what nature gives in return. Conservation is the tiny aftereffect of this more primary kinetic process, which saves just enough to keep on expending. This means that reciprocity is fundamentally collective, or held in common. It means that a kinetic ethics for the Kinocene is about dying or expending well together. It means that everything on the earth should waste or throw into circulation as much as it can, but not so much that it undermines the larger capacity of the earth and others to do the same. Everything on the earth, living and non-living, helps the rest of us to dissipate well together. That is the generosity of death, which gives the gift of life.

Reciprocity means giving to others so that they can again give to yet others - not destroying the conditions of giving. Reciprocity means taking what nature gives, not refusing it, or destroying the conditions of the giving. It is a cruel irony that the very stuff of life, carbon, has now become the great herald of extinction: the death of death.
Against capitalism
Capitalist economics is premised, in direct contrast to this kinetic reciprocity, on the fundamentally false notion of equality of exchange: equivalence. Note that in nature, there is no such thing. Nature is neither identical to itself at any point nor identical between points of itself, if for no other reason than because of spatiotemporal difference. Matter always flows asymmetrically, entropically, and in metastable patterns of increasing disequilibrium. Equivalence and equilibrium are, physically speaking, violations of the historical tendency of the universe, which is to dissipate and spread out kinetically.

By acting as if equivalence, equilibrium, identity, and exchange were real aspects of nature, economics and capitalist economics, in particular, have significantly damaged the earth's capacity to increase its rate of expenditure. When one acts as if nature moves in one way, when in fact it moves in another, massive disruptions in those motions occur. Capitalist constructivists have acted as if they could invent or construct a set of rules on top of nature and live in their own reality. They are like someone swimming upstream who insists that that's the easiest, most natural way.

By acting as if a commodity were strictly identical to its exchange value (how much money someone exchanges for it), capitalist economics has failed to consider the environmental impacts of deforestation, pollution, and climate change. It has also ignored the human implications of social devalorization (in such forms as racism, sexism, and classism) as integral and constitutive aspects of the economic process. These aspects have no value in capitalist economics.
Compost ethics
Composting works by a different ethos. It is the expenditure of expenditure. In this sense, it is the gift of death: the opposite of capitalist utility and accumulation. Composting shares used and wasted matter with mineral, atmospheric, vegetal, fungi, and animal others, to be used and expended again and again. Each compost cycle further degrades and dissipates energy as it increases the capacity of the earth for further degradation.

For example, the composting of garden and food scraps allows for the creation of new fungi and bacteria. Once they break the compost down, it is returned to the soil to increase the symbiotic relationships among fungi, bacteria, and plants in the ground. Humans then eat a portion of the compost that becomes food. They burn most of it into the air as heat when they move, and their solid waste can return to the earth to be broken down again by bacteria.

The problem is that when we bury our "trash" in landfills, it actually slows down or even arrests the composting process. The invention of nonbiodegradable petroleum products is the modern expression of our fear of death and our quest for immortality. We will not even let our waste die. Landfills deny the gift of death and, thus, the gift of life. They prevent expenditure by preventing the expenditure of expenditure.

Compost is not about conservation; it is about waste, shared among a wide community of consumers who thoroughly and efficiently, and faster, break down and expend the energy of the waste back to the cosmos, as heat loss into space. Recycling and reusing is not conservation; it is a way to extract and expend and share matter with the earth more generously, so that we can all die and dissipate well together.

As the ocean stores more heat, it begins to swell by thermal expansion, causing sea-level rise, increasing erosion, and increased nitrogen and thus further increasing temperature in a terrible feedback loop. Eventually, as in every historical greenhouse age, the cycle will run its course and reach a new metastable state. But if we want to live through the process, we need to start composting much more, much faster. This effectively means that we need to facilitate an increased rate of expenditure for existing waste, not conserve it.
Diversity
Social and ecological diversity both increase the rate of kinetic expenditure. Old climax-stage forests are the largest dissipative systems on the planet because they are the most diverse. In old, diverse forest and jungle ecosystems, each organism lives from the waste products of others. The more ways of living there are, the more ways there are to consume and expend different energy sources: thus the very rapid intensity of expenditure. No single organism can use all energy sources, so nature requires an army of specialized levels, relations, and singular techniques in order to capture and fully degrade and dissipate 99% of all incoming solar energy.

However, high rates of energy expenditure, as in climax ecosystems, should not be confused with "high" total energy consumption, as with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use, for example, does not necessarily require or create social or cultural diversity. Choosing between different kinds of commodities is not the same as social or ecological diversity. Where fossil fuel energy expenditure is the largest in quantity, we see some of the highest gender, race, and class disparities in wealth and education.

Humans are natural, and thus human diversity is part of ecological diversity. Technologies created by humans are also natural and, therefore, also part of environmental diversity. Human plasticity is at the same time social, technological, and ecological. The more kinds of people and technologies there are, living in the more diverse ways, the more thoroughly we will be able to degrade and expend planetary energy. However, this is true only as long as some of these ways do not reduce the capacity of others (living and non-living) for diverse dissipation.

Human diversity is also like a dendritic lightning strike that tries out living in different ways, in different places, with different techniques, cultures, and technologies. The more forms of thinking, doing, and being there are, the more varied the methods of energetic expenditure. Just as there is no one organism or way to extract energy in an ecosystem, there is no one human social ecology either.

If humans want to survive, they need to increase the rate of long-term planetary expenditure. To do that, they will need a plurality of techniques that respond to the singularities of their geography. In other words, humans need to multiply their values, habits, technologies, and cultures with and as part of ecological diversity more broadly.

Rural and indigenous women are particularly vulnerable to ecological destruction because they depend on forests and common lands for food, fodder, water, and building materials. For many women, destroying their forests is equivalent to killing them and their families. When crops fail, it is women and girls who are disproportionally affected by famine.

In addition, the institutions and habits of patriarchy, by restricting what everyone, but especially women, is allowed to do with their bodies and lives, homogenize a range of gendered and sexual diversity and ways of expending energy.

The subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering that takes place in many countries looks like poverty to capitalists because it has little or no monetary value on the world market. However, by using, expending, and composting on traditional lands, indigenous people support higher rates of ecological and planetary expenditure.

If we want to find new sources of compostable energy, we need to support as many different ways of living as we can that do not destroy the possibility of this "kinetic pluralism" itself. The reduction of ecological diversity also destroys human ways of living, speaking, and knowing. Fossil fuel migrants are forced out of their homes to make way for plantation agriculture and energy extraction and, at the same time, are forced into the fossil fuel economies of Western receiving countries. There is thus a double destruction of human and ecological diversity, and a double decrease in planetary expenditure, as sustainable human/natural ecologies and the people who live in them are forced to migrate and reproduce fossil fuel societies.

Social domination, from a kinetic and thermodynamic perspective, is a reduction of the human ability to experiment freely with new and different ways of expenditure. There is nothing in nature (no great chain of being) that justifies the social domination of others. In nature there is only the tendency to allow increasing experiments in motion and expenditure that do not undermine further experiments toward increasing expenditure.
Metabolic communism
The ethics of expenditure in the Kinocene also entails a new relationship with the "commons." Historically, humans have understood the commons to be the common pool of resources to be managed collectively. Under capitalism, these resources were directly appropriated through primitive accumulation (by theft, murder, colonialism, extraction, and privatization). Although quite different, both of these approaches to the commons have understood the commons to be a "pool of resources" for human use (whether managed, conserved, or devastated).

The kinetic theory of the earth requires a much deeper and broader approach to the commons. If we want to survive, we need a materialist commons, where we treat each main pattern of the earth's motion as a commons for the others. Together, all the earth's material processes are sympoietic with one another and thus "manage" one another and themselves as commons for others. We need a reciprocal commons, in which each body becomes the commons of others, to be directed together toward increasing expenditure. Thus, instead of "the commons," we should be thinking about the kinetic process of "commoning" as the making and remaking of a material (and not just multi species) commons that we are continually expending, composting, and transforming.

This new commons, or what I am calling "kinetic communism," would be based not on conservation but on expenditure. What if we all managed and shared one another's food and waste not for the sake of hoarding, rationing, or saving it but for the sake of wasting it into space? Conservation is only a tiny and temporary stage required to sustain the most optimal expenditures our planet can support.

This is not only a terrestrial task but a cosmic one. The metabolic commons is also a cosmic commons in which the sun, solar system, and broader universe participate directly in self-degradation. The cosmos is a commons for itself in order to unravel itself. The earth is a commons used by the sun to degrade its energy, while the sun is a commons for the earth to expend back into space.

There is no single "best" way to manage our commons. The more ways we try together and the more we allow new material evolutions to experiment, the more likely we are to optimally expend energy. The more tributaries of a river, the more rapid its diffusion. Furthermore, since the earth is always changing, so too should our strategies for diffusion. Kinetic or metabolic communism is the process of preserving the commons just enough to optimize its expenditure and increase its processes of differentiation. Nature continually struggles to become other than it is, in order to expend itself faster.

Kinetic communism would entail the practical collective metabolic management of the whole planetary form of motion. Kinetic communism is nothing other than the practical and commonsense joint management of the threefold (natural, human, and social) metabolic and material process in such a way as to avoid destroying its own conditions for collective planetary expenditure.

If this kinetic ethics had to be put into three memorable and straightforward ethical imperatives, in the fashion of Epicurus, here is what they would be:

If we want to survive, then our best chance is to follow these guiding maxims:

Across the material spectrum, these are the conditions under which increased planetary expenditure takes place.

I am sure people will misunderstand this ethics of expenditure, so let me try to clarify two points:

1. I am not deriving a universal "ought" from a naturalistic "is." The ethics of expenditure is strictly hypothetical and experimental: " if we want to survive, then our best chance is to try to increase collective planetary expenditure."

2. I am also not saying that all human ethical practices can be explained by or reduced to the ethics of expenditure. Human ethical practices are not unimportant or irrelevant in the face of cosmic and planetary processes; quite the opposite. Human ethics are part of nature and its processes - something we often forget. Increasing natural diversity also means increasing the diversity of human values, ethics, and ways of being. The ethics of expenditure is thus not meant to resolve every ethical dispute among humans. It aims to situate human ethical activity itself in nature, in order to curb our present problem of rampant human-centric behavior and constructivism.

The ethics of kinetic expenditure is not a universal ethical ground but a hypothetical ethical ground. It allows us to say not only that capitalism is descriptively wrong about nature, but also that it is unethical (assuming that we want to survive), because it leads to the reduction of planetary expenditure (including the reduction of human and ecological diversity and flourishing).

Furthermore, the ethics of expenditure relates to the material conditions of all human society as such. If we even want to have humanistic ethics in the first place, there must be humans alive to practice it. Thus, implicit in all humanist ethics is the assumption of planetary existence and survival. In short: If we want human ethics, then we need to be alive and survive, and if we're going to survive, then we need to try to increase planetary expenditure (with all that entails). Kinocene ethics, then, is perhaps a "metaethics."

I am not interested in valorizing death over life or nature over humans in a way that would reduce everything to merely meaningless natural processes - thus undermining social critique and human ethics. I am trying to bring naturalism and humanism back together in order to avoid the false dichotomy between human values and valueless nature. Human ethics does not occur in a constructivist vacuum but under specific natural and historical conditions that are directly relevant to our living, and living well. This is what I have tried to show.

Theory of the Earth is available through Stanford University Press.

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Thomas Nail's Theory of the Earth, recently published with Stanford University Press, forms the capstone of his six-volume series on the philosophy of movement.

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TRG20: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk

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TRG20: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk

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venue: Lewes Arms
date: 7pm Wed 26th April 2023

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TRG19: Children of the Days - Eduardo Galeano

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TRG19: Children of the Days - Eduardo Galeano

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venue: Depot
7pm, Tues 7th March, 2023

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Galeano, Eduardo - Children of the Days_ A Calendar of Human History (2013, Nation Books)

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Eduardo Galeano reads from Children of the Days

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Eduardo Galeano in Conversation: Children of the Days

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TRG18: 2nd 'movement' of "Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity - A Conference of Butterflies" & "Mad About Justice" video from Yve Lomax

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TRG18: 2nd 'movement' of "Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity - A Conference of Butterflies" & "Mad About Justice" video from Yve Lomax

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http://16beavergroup.org/palestine/

https://vimeo.com/730411538

zoom link here: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/79826009289?pwd=OKF2oCoECyURak0eyfSsorRkbvhjkW.1
passcode TRG18
8pm, Wed 16th November, 2022

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Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity
A Conference of Butterflies

Sunday May 23rd 2021

First Movement
66 min.
- Reem Shadid
A.Y.A.
Munir Fasheh
Rolando Vazquez
Walter Mignolo
Valiana Aguilar
Mahmoud Al-Shaer

Second Movement
78 min.
- Mays Albaik
Nazan Ustundag
Sabu Kohso
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Judith Butler

Third Movement
- Lamia Abukhadra
Peter Makhlouf
Havin Guneser
Silvia Federici
Sherene Seikaly
62 min.

Fourth Movement
77min
- Salem Shamia
Amira Silmi
Decolonize This Place
Andrew Ross
Michael Rakowitz
Marz Saffore
Amin Husain
Nitasha Dhillon

Fifth Movement
87 min.
- R.D.G.
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Samera Esmeir
Robin D.G. Kelley
Manolo Callahan

Postscript
25 min.
Iain Boal
Anjalika Sagar
Adania Shibli
Amira Silmi
Alita
and friends

additional contributions by:

MPA, Simon Leung, Oraib Toukan, Alan Smart, Peter Linebaugh

Call / Invitation / Convocation
We convene this modest, virtual conference as first and foremost an act of solidarity.

We would like to gather together, affirm, and renew our commitments to ending the conditions of occupation and apartheid imposed on Palestinians.

Second, we would like to convene this conference in this moment of rupture - between the growing awareness globally of the structural racism and violence being committed against Palestinians by Israel since its inception and paradoxically the growing sense of impunity and immunity with which it is able to continue committing crimes of international law, human rights, and whatever settled norms or international agreements.

Third, in this moment, despite the immense killing of civilians in Gaza and the bombing of civilian infrastructures and buildings, despite the violence of the Israeli military and police against protestors in all parts of Palestine, we see the unprecedented linking of struggles of Palestinians within 1948 Palestine, within the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, a Gaza under siege, and among communities of refugees both within and outside Palestine.

Sensing that we are on the precipice between catastrophe and a planetary Intifada, we are reaching out to a community of thinkers both within and outside Palestine who we find to be doing critical work, to share thoughts, questions, positions on what this very vulnerable moment may call for and open to? We are not searching for what is to be done, as much as what is to be asked? With whom? And which are the questions that may open further the paths of struggles and converging of struggles?

How do we end the complicity and hold accountable those institutions which continue to support the mass incarceration, segregation, control and destruction of Palestinian Life? What does solidarity with Justice and Freedom in Palestine look like in affinity and convergence to other struggles in our midst: Feminist struggles, struggles of indigenous communities across the planet, struggles for Black Life, for abolition of police, prisons, and the carceral state?

How to situate the struggles in Palestine within the wider struggles for ecological and environmental justice, for commons and communal control and care of our means of reproduction, subsistence? How to conjoin Palestine to other struggles and communities fighting for self-determination and exploring modes and processes of decolonization?

What does solidarity in the intersectionality and transversality of these movements look like? How to name it? How do we act and further mobilize in consort? Which tools to build further a planetary movement that confronts the incredible violence of racial, surveillance and disaster capitalism, while respecting difference and the singularity of each place, context, history, community?

Following this upcoming Saturday's global day of action, we would like to host this virtual conference as a critical moment to think together about what solidarity looks like today for, in, through, with Palestine in the horizon of planetary unrest, warming, uprising.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity A Conference of Butterflies Sunday May 23rd 2021 First Movement 66 min. - Reem Shadid A.Y.A. Munir Fasheh Rolando Vazquez Walter Mignolo Valiana Aguilar Mahmoud Al-Shaer Second Movement 78 min. - Mays Albaik Nazan Ustundag Sabu Kohso Franco "Bifo" Berardi Judith Butler Third Movement - Lamia Abukhadra Peter Makhlouf Havin Guneser Silvia Federici Sherene Seikaly 62 min.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity
A Conference of Butterflies

Sunday May 23rd 2021

First Movement
66 min.
- Reem Shadid
A.Y.A.
Munir Fasheh
Rolando Vazquez
Walter Mignolo
Valiana Aguilar
Mahmoud Al-Shaer

Second Movement
78 min.
- Mays Albaik
Nazan Ustundag
Sabu Kohso
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Judith Butler

Third Movement
- Lamia Abukhadra
Peter Makhlouf
Havin Guneser
Silvia Federici
Sherene Seikaly
62 min.

Fourth Movement
77min
- Salem Shamia
Amira Silmi
Decolonize This Place
Andrew Ross
Michael Rakowitz
Marz Saffore
Amin Husain
Nitasha Dhillon

Fifth Movement
87 min.
- R.D.G.
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Samera Esmeir
Robin D.G. Kelley
Manolo Callahan

Postscript
25 min.
Iain Boal
Anjalika Sagar
Adania Shibli
Amira Silmi
Alita
and friends

additional contributions by:

MPA, Simon Leung, Oraib Toukan, Alan Smart, Peter Linebaugh

Call / Invitation / Convocation
We convene this modest, virtual conference as first and foremost an act of solidarity.

We would like to gather together, affirm, and renew our commitments to ending the conditions of occupation and apartheid imposed on Palestinians.

Second, we would like to convene this conference in this moment of rupture - between the growing awareness globally of the structural racism and violence being committed against Palestinians by Israel since its inception and paradoxically the growing sense of impunity and immunity with which it is able to continue committing crimes of international law, human rights, and whatever settled norms or international agreements.

Third, in this moment, despite the immense killing of civilians in Gaza and the bombing of civilian infrastructures and buildings, despite the violence of the Israeli military and police against protestors in all parts of Palestine, we see the unprecedented linking of struggles of Palestinians within 1948 Palestine, within the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, a Gaza under siege, and among communities of refugees both within and outside Palestine.

Sensing that we are on the precipice between catastrophe and a planetary Intifada, we are reaching out to a community of thinkers both within and outside Palestine who we find to be doing critical work, to share thoughts, questions, positions on what this very vulnerable moment may call for and open to? We are not searching for what is to be done, as much as what is to be asked? With whom? And which are the questions that may open further the paths of struggles and converging of struggles?

How do we end the complicity and hold accountable those institutions which continue to support the mass incarceration, segregation, control and destruction of Palestinian Life? What does solidarity with Justice and Freedom in Palestine look like in affinity and convergence to other struggles in our midst: Feminist struggles, struggles of indigenous communities across the planet, struggles for Black Life, for abolition of police, prisons, and the carceral state?

How to situate the struggles in Palestine within the wider struggles for ecological and environmental justice, for commons and communal control and care of our means of reproduction, subsistence? How to conjoin Palestine to other struggles and communities fighting for self-determination and exploring modes and processes of decolonization?

What does solidarity in the intersectionality and transversality of these movements look like? How to name it? How do we act and further mobilize in consort? Which tools to build further a planetary movement that confronts the incredible violence of racial, surveillance and disaster capitalism, while respecting difference and the singularity of each place, context, history, community?

Following this upcoming Saturday's global day of action, we would like to host this virtual conference as a critical moment to think together about what solidarity looks like today for, in, through, with Palestine in the horizon of planetary unrest, warming, uprising.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Palestine: Reimagining Solidarity A Conference of Butterflies Sunday May 23rd 2021 First Movement 66 min. - Reem Shadid A.Y.A. Munir Fasheh Rolando Vazquez Walter Mignolo Valiana Aguilar Mahmoud Al-Shaer Second Movement 78 min. - Mays Albaik Nazan Ustundag Sabu Kohso Franco "Bifo" Berardi Judith Butler Third Movement - Lamia Abukhadra Peter Makhlouf Havin Guneser Silvia Federici Sherene Seikaly 62 min.

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Short film by the philosopher artist Yve Lomax

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TRG16: Bennett V Buchanan pt2 - 8pm Wed 20th April (MA's - 2 Keere St)

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TRG16: Bennett V Buchanan pt2 - 8pm Wed 20th April (MA's - 2 Keere St)

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TRG16: Bennett V Buchanan - 7pm Wed 13th April (34 Firle Cres or zoom tbd)

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TRG16: Bennett V Buchanan - 7pm Wed 13th April (34 Firle Cres or zoom tbd)

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Preface and chapter 1 of Jane Bennett's 'Vibrant Matter - A Political Ecology of Things'.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1870991/a26b5857085491b8a7ad5366abe9e2dc.pdf?15207498851520749885)

v

Chapter 4 (and chapter 2 if inclined) of Ian Buchanan's 'Assemblage Theory & Method - An Introduction & Guide'.

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TR13: reconvened (general under-the-weather/too much work/not had time to read vibe)

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TR13: reconvened (general under-the-weather/too much work/not had time to read vibe)

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8pm Wednesday 25th August
Keston Sutherland + supplementary reading
How complex is a lemon?' - Stephen Mulhall (LRB Vol. 40 No. 18, 27th Sept 2018) - review/critique of Harman's 'OOO - A New Theory of Everything'.

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TRG15: The demon in the diagram: towards a theory of evolving diagrammatic embodiment. Matthew Ritchie (in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol 20, No 3)

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TRG15: The demon in the diagram: towards a theory of evolving diagrammatic embodiment. Matthew Ritchie (in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol 20, No 3)

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8pm Wednesday 16th February 2022. Venue tbd

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TRG14b:'Immanence: A Life', chapter 1 from What is Philosophy? by Deleuze

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TRG14b:'Immanence: A Life', chapter 1 from What is Philosophy? by Deleuze

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8pm Wednesday 29th September, P&C's garden.

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8pm Wednesday 29th September, P&C's garden.

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TRG13: The Consolations of New Materialism - Keston Sutherland                                 in Thinking Art: Materialisms, Labours, Forms - Peter Osborne (ed) 

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TRG13: The Consolations of New Materialism - Keston Sutherland                                 in Thinking Art: Materialisms, Labours, Forms - Peter Osborne (ed) 

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8pm Wednesday 18th August (venue tbc)

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CRMEP books

The first in the series of free ebooks from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

Volume 1 (2019)

Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image - Aspects of Marx's Capital Today

Edited by Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez and Eric-John Russell

Contributors: Éric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Boris Buden, Sara. R. Farris, John Kraniauskas, Elena Louisa Lange, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Peter Osborne, Eric-John Russell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Keston Sutherland

Drawn from a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, these essays from a range of internationally established contributors offer readers a snapshot of debates about the book's current relevance across a variety of fields and contexts. The volume approaches Marx's Capital as an exemplary text in the continuation of the tradition of post-Kantian European Philosophy through transdisciplinary practices of critique and concept construction. The essays are grouped into four sections: Value-Form, Ontology & Politics; Capitalism, Feminism and Social Reproduction; Freedom, Democracy and War; The Poetics of Capital/Capital. Each section is accompanied by an image from the 2008 film by Alexander Kluge, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital.

This book is available as a free ebook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

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CRMEP books - Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) - Kingston University London

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The first in the series of free ebooks from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. Edited by Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez and Eric-John Russell Contributors: Éric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Boris Buden, Sara. R.

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TRG12: (half) The Mushroom At The End Of The World - Anna Tsing 

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TRG12: (half) The Mushroom At The End Of The World - Anna Tsing 

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8pm, Wednesday 26th May

TRG12b: pt2 (second half-ish) 8pm, Wed 21st July (real world P&Cs)

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Isabelle Stengers - The Earth Won't Let Itself Be Watched (from the  Critical Zones Catalogue). To be discussed on a Red Ramble...

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E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops

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Rankine -

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Rankine -

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Rankine -

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Claudia Rankine - Don't Let Me Be Lonely

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Ben Lerner · Diary_ On Disliking Poetry · LRB 17 June 2015

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Rob's pick

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A Politics for Alienation

Laboria Cuboniks

Zero

0x00

Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.

0x01

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.

0x02

Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.

0x03

The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction.

0x04

Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism–because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself–and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.

Interrupt

0x05

The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. Whilst capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it.

0x06

Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of twenty-first century feminism–from the remnants of postmodern identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism–struggles to adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.

0x07

We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age–from sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of online images–the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world. Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from–and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends.

0x08

The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world’s poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages that have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition responsively.

Trap

0x09

XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so little. Without the labour of large-scale, collective social organisation, declaring one’s desire for global change is nothing more than wishful thinking. On the other hand, melancholy–so endemic to the left–teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species to be wept over and that blips of negation are the best we can hope for. At its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude, and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which too often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia, and–under the guise of being realistic–relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates.

0x0A

We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the few–a violent particularity of exclusivity–ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin.

0x0B

A sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps) admirably expanded thresholds of ‘tolerance’, too often we are told to seek solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being ‘born’ this way, as if offering an excuse with nature’s blessing. All the while, the heteronormative centre chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and queer politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and doubt. The ‘given’ is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty, whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature’s shrine cracked, and new histories–bristling with futures–escaped the old order of ‘sex’. The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. The time has now come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won.

0x0C

If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation. Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate. These puritanical politics of shame–which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies–leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.

0x0D

What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’, ‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up. The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires.

Parity

0x0E

Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. ‘Gender abolitionism’ is not code for the eradication of what are currently considered ‘gendered’ traits from the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster–the notion of what is ‘gendered’ sticks disproportionately to the feminine. But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in seeing the sexuate diversity of the world reduced. Let a hundred sexes bloom! ‘Gender abolitionism’ is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. ‘Race abolitionism’ expands into a similar formula–that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than than the color of one’s eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent, denaturalized form: you’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited.

0x0F

Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects–the abolition of class, gender, and race–hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars–namely Eurocentric universalism–whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even–especially–when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this).

0x10

From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of purity. Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise self-reflection so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political bodies and something that can be appropriated against the numerous oppressions that transect with gender and sexuality. The universal is no blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose XF as a platform. The very process of construction is therefore understood to be a negentropic, iterative, and continual refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to emerge as an ‘invisible hand’ from apparent spontaneity; or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford.

Adjust

0x11

Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. ‘Nature’–understood here, as the unbounded arena of science–is all there is. And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and the non-scaleable; the libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and Nature as an un-remakeable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.

0x12

This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim.

Carry

0x13

The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the visual in today’s online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation. But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past. Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality.

0x14

Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ and reciprocally, how a ‘we’ can be articulated. With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy–the coordinated writing of space.

0x15

From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere–the way of the commune–or bearing its burdens manyfold–the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.

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From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of hormones–who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes–is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market pharmacies it let loose–together with a publicly accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow–was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from ‘gatekeeping’ institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of ‘gender hacking’ is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software–constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine?

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From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or top-down impositions of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers.

Overflow

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XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with ‘waiting’. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic parasite–one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery?

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Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics–a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps.

0x1A

Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!

If nature is unjust, change nature!

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Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks

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Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map.

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The 'Spinoza Week" continues with its Deleuzian terminology to address the philosophy of Spinoza. The "scream" evoked in the title refers indeed to the concept of philosophical scream that Deleuze invents to define a phrase written or pronounced by a philosopher that contains the essence of his life work. The scream has to be understood in two senses here (at least, that is the way I interpret it): the absolute, almost physical, necessity for a philosopher to "scream" this phrase, and the trouble caused within the normative way of thinking by this same phrase. In the case of Spinoza, according to Deleuze, this scream is expressed in the Proposition II of the Part III of the Ethics:

However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that he can explain all its functions; nor need I call attention to the fact that many actions are observed in the lower animals, which far transcend human sagacity, and that somnambulists do many things in their sleep, which they would not venture to do when awake: these instances are enough to show, that the body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which the mind wonders at.
Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it.

According to Deleuze again, the approach of the body (and therefore of individuals) for what it can do rather than what it is, is the main difference between an ethical philosophy and a moralist one. One has to understand that Spinoza does not consider an individual as the scheme for which a soul would be hosted by a body, as I explained in the last article, each body is an assemblage of substance, and the chemistry that make us think should be considered as a very similar process than the one that makes us run, dance or...walk on a tight rope. Just like we need to forget the idea of the soul being hosted within the vessel body, we need to stop thinking of the body as a set of organs contained within an epidermic enclosure that prevents them from "escaping". We are an assemblage of substance, of matter that the bios (life) is holding together for a while. This matter, just like any other in the world is subjected to movements of speed and slowness. The way we compose these internal movements with the ones that surround us precisely defines our relation to the world. A cross reading of Deleuze's classes allows a better understanding of this way of thinking, himself being a Spinozist even when he is not talking about him! In his seminar about Cinema: The Movement Imag e in 1981, he talks about the movement of matter in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. (My translation. Original French transcript at the end of the article):

What is moving ? Matte ris moving. What does that mean, to move then ? It means to pass from one form to another. Form does not get transform, it is matter that goes from one form to another. That is a continuous idea in Plato's work: it is not the small that becomes big, that is not the cold that becomes hot. But when water gets hotter, a fluid matter, water goes from one form to another, from the cold form to the hot form, it is not the cold that becomes hot.

Forms themselves are immobile or they have movements in thoughts, but the finite movement consists in a matter that passes from one form to another. A horse gallops, you have two forms: [...] the horse's form at the maximum of its muscular contraction and the one at the maxim of its muscular development. You will then say that gallop is the operation for which the "horse-matter" ("matière cheval"), the horse's body in its mobility does not cease to go from form A to form B and from form B to form A.

What Spinoza means by expressing our ignorance about what a body can do is, of course, not an absolute. We know some of the things that a body can do based on the second degree of knowledge that we all experience on a daily basis (we would not be able to move at all otherwise), we might even have a small glimpse at what the third degree of knowledge might be (read the last article for more explanations about the degrees of knowledge); however we can never achieve a perfect understanding of the world according to this same third degree of knowledge and will therefore never fully know what a body can do. Our ability to gain control and decisiveness over the movement of the matter assemblage (again that concerns what we simply call "the intellect" just as well) that we are constitute the only way to acquire a broader knowledge about the capacities of the body and thus, increasing our power ( potentia) and therefore our joy.

I have now placed my conceptual tools in front of me for the two last articles (I suppose that the first episode of the week was also a form of Spinozist application) in which will try to use them to elaborate a sort of "applied Spinozism" that might help us a creators to express a materialist and immanent vision of the world.

Appendix: Original French transcript of Gilles Deleuze's class at the Universite de Vincennes ( November 10th 1981):

Bon qu'est ce qui se meut ? qu'est ce qui est en mouvement ? c'est la matière, ce qui se meut c'est la matière. Qu'est que cela veut dire se mouvoir alors ? c'est passer d'une forme à une autre. Ce n'est pas la forme qui se transforme c'est la matière qui passe d'une forme à une autre. C'est une idée constante ça chez Platon, ce n'est pas le petit qui devient grand, ce n'est pas le froid qui devient chaud. Mais quand l'eau s'échauffe, une matière fluide l'eau, passe d'une forme à une autre, de la forme du froid à la forme du chaud, ce n'est pas le froid qui devient chaud.

Les formes en elles même, elles sont immobiles ou bien elles ont des mouvements de pure pensée, mais le mouvement fini c'est celui d'une matière qui passe d'une forme à une autre. Un cheval galope, c'est qu'en effet vous avez deux formes : vous pouvez distinguer une forme d'un cheval et le dessinateur l'autre, la forme du cheval au maximum de sa contraction et la forme du cheval de sa contraction musculaire - et la forme du cheval au maximum de son développement musculaire. Et vous direz que le galop c'est l'opération par laquelle la "matière cheval", le corps du cheval avec sa mobilité ne cesse de passe de la forme A à la forme B et de la forme B à la forme A .

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# SPINOZA /// Episode 5: The Spinozist "Scream": What can a Body do? - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE

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The 'Spinoza Week" continues with its Deleuzian terminology to address the philosophy of Spinoza. The "scream" evoked in the title refers indeed to the concept of philosophical scream that Deleuze invents to define a phrase written or pronounced by a philosopher that contains the essence of his life work.

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C For Corporeal_Is it all right to urinate in front of animals_Vincent Despret

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back to it with a short story

8pm 11th Nov 2020 (zoom)

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It's proposed that TRG6 takes a more thematic approach to texts in considering a range of material on the Build Back Better/Claim The Future (John McDonnell's preferred term) theme of 'Life After Covid-19' - with 'after' referring to its inception and not its end!

Key 'starter' text is the Bruno Latour paper, and its concluding 'workshop' questions which we'll seek to address, with a view to producing a written (and diagrammatic?) outcome which might then function as a policy statement or other document for adoption/use by Lewes CLP (perhaps).

Other texts below may inform our discussion. Please add.

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where to land after the pandemic - Latour

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This was Rob's suggestion- but not sure if this is the place for this resource?

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Plan C is an organisation of people who are politically active in their workplaces and communities. We work together to support each other, amplify our

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TRG5.5: The Undercommons; fugitive planning and Black Study. Stefano Harney & Fred Moten

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TRG5.5: The Undercommons; fugitive planning and Black Study. Stefano Harney & Fred Moten

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Latour paper on-line.

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What protective measures can you think of so we don't go back to the pre-crisis production model?

The first lesson the coronavirus has taught us is also the most astounding: we have actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect. To every ecologist's argument about changing our ways of life, there was always the opposing argument about the irreversible force of the "train of progress" that nothing could derail "because of globalisation", they would say. And yet it is precisely its globalised character that makes this infamous development so fragile, so likely to do the opposite and come to a screeching halt.

It is actually not just the multinationals, or the trade partnerships, or the internet or the tour operators that globalise the planet. Every entity on this same planet has its very own way of hooking up with each other and all the other elements that compose the collective at a given moment. This is true for the CO2 that is warming the atmosphere globally by spreading through the air and migrating birds carrying new kinds of flu; but it is also true for-we learn at our peril once again-the coronavirus that has the capacity to link "all humans" by passing by way of our apparently inoffensive droplets from coughing. Germs are super-globalisers: when it is a matter of resocialising billions of people, the germs make short work of it!

Hence the incredible discovery: already in the world economic system there was, hidden from us all, a bright red alarm button with a nice big stainless-steel handle that the heads of state could pull, one after the other, to instantly stop the "train of progress" with all the brakes squealing. If in January the demand to make a 90 degree turn to land on the Earth seemed like a gentle illusion, now it becomes much more realistic: every car driver knows that to have any chance of making a sudden turn of the wheel to get out of trouble (without heading into the landscape), it is better to have slowed down a bit first...

Unfortunately, it is not only the ecologists who see, in this sudden pause in the globalised system of production, a great opportunity to move ahead with their programme for landing on Earth. There's also the globalisers, who since the middle of the 20th century invented the idea of escaping our planetary limits. They too see here a great opportunity to break even more radically with the remaining obstacles in the way of their escape from Earth. A wonderful prospect for them: extract themselves from the rest of the welfare state, from the safety net for the poorest, from what remains of regulations against pollution, and, even more cynically, get rid of all these supernumeraries cluttering up the planet.

But let's not forget the hypothesis that these globalisers are conscious of the ecological mutation, and all their efforts for the past fifty years consist in both denying the importance of climate change and also avoiding its consequences by building fortified bastions of privilege, which are necessarily inaccessible to all those who are going to have to be left in the lurch. They are not so naïve as to believe the great modernist dream of the universal distribution of the "fruits of progress", but what is new is their willingness to not even give the impression of believing in it. These are the ones proclaiming every day on "Fox News" and who govern all the climate-sceptical states on the planet, from Moscow to Brasilia, and New Delhi to Washington via London.

What makes the current situation so dangerous is not just the dead piling up every day at an increasing rate, it is the universal suspension of an economic system that gives those who want to go much further in the flight away from the planetary world a marvellous occasion to "put all the cards on the table". One must not forget that what makes these globalisers so dangerous, is that they have to know they have lost, that the denial of ecological mutation cannot go on forever, that there is no chance of reconciling their "development" with the various planetary envelopes in which one way or another the economy has to be inserted. This is what makes them ready to try anything to secure, one last time, the conditions that are going to allow them to last a little bit longer and to shelter them along with their children. This putting on of the brakes, this "stopping of the world", this unexpected pause, gives them an opportunity to flee more quickly and further than they could ever have imagined. At the moment, they are the revolutionaries.

It is at this point that we have to act. If opportunities are arising for them, the same is true for us. If everything has stopped, and all cards can be put on the table, they can be turned, selected, triaged, rejected for ever, or indeed, accelerated forwards. Now is the time for the annual stock-take. When common sense asks us to "start production up again as quickly as possible", we have to shout back, "Absolutely not!" The last thing to do is repeat the exact same thing we were doing before.

For example, a Dutch florist was on television the other day, weeping because he had to trash tonnes of tulips that we ready for shipping. Without customers, he couldn't air-freight them around the world. Of course, we cannot but feel for him; and it is right he is recompensed. But then the camera tracked back onto the tulips that he was growing without soil under artificial light before sending them off from Schiphol airport, on air-freighters with kerosene raining down, which makes one wonder: "Is it really useful to prolong this way of producing and selling these types of flowers?"

One thing leads to another, and if we all began on a personal basis to ask such questions on all aspects of our production system, we would become efficient "globalisation interrupters", just as effective, in our millions, as the infamous coronavirus as it goes about globalising the planet in its own way. What the virus gets from banal droplets from coughing going from one mouth to another-the halting of the world economy-we can also begin to imagine via our little insignificant gestures put end to end, that is, the halting of the system of production. As we ask these kinds of questions, each of us is onto the task of thinking up protective measures, but not just against the virus, but against every element of the mode of production that we "don't" want to see coming back.

So, it is no longer a matter of a system of production picking up again or being curbed, but one of getting away from production as the overriding principle of our relationship to the world. More than revolution, this is dissolution, pixel by pixel. Pierre Charbonnier demonstrated it: after a hundred years of socialism limited just to the "redistribution" of the benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a socialism that contests "production itself". Injustice is not just about the redistribution of the fruits of progress, but about the very manner in which the planet is "made fruitful". This does not mean de-growth, or living off love alone or fresh water. It means learning to select each segment of this so-called irreversible system, putting a question mark over each of its supposed indispensable connections, and then testing in more and more detail what is desirable and what has ceased to be so.

Hence the primary importance for using this time of imposed isolation in order to "describe", initially one by one, then as a group, what we are attached to; what we are ready to give up; the chains we are ready to reconstruct and those that, in our behaviour, we have decided to interrupt. As for the globalisers, they seem to have a very clear idea what they want to see coming back post-crisis: the same but worse, fossil fuel industries and giant cruise ships as a bonus. It is up to us to confront them with a counter-inventory. If in a month or two, millions of humans are capable of learning how to "social distance" at the blow of a whistle, to space themselves for greater solidarity, to stay home so as not to overload the hospitals, then it is easy to imagine the power of transformation that these new "protective measures" have against bringing back business as usual, or worse, against another battering from those who want to escape from terrestrial attraction forever.

Because I am always obsessed with wanting to link an argument to practical exercises, I would like to invite readers to try to answer a little auto-descriptive questionnaire. It will be all the more useful if it can relate to actually lived personal experience. It is not a matter of expressing an opinion, but of describing and researching. Only afterwards, if we tabulate the responses and compose the landscape created by their intersections, will we be able to discover some form of political expression-but this time one that is embodied and situated in a real world.
A contribution by Bruno Latour (Translated from French by Stephen Muecke).

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What protective measures can you think of so we don't go back to the pre-crisis production model? The first lesson the coronavirus has taught us is also the most astounding: we have actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect.

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"We must work collectively to demand a bold solution to this crisis. An economic system serving the one percent has taken us to the brink; now a Green New Deal can set us free."

- Aliya Yule, co-founder

Labour for a Green New Deal envisions a prosperous, socialist, zero-carbon society as the alternative to our current world ridden with political, economic and ecological crises. A Green New Deal will transform the economy through unprecedented investment in technology, infrastructure and people.

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Join the grassroots campaign for Labour to adopt a transformative Green New Deal.

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Documentary film on the Lucas Plan of 1976. This free, condensed 30 min version of the longer doc is for use in meetings and workshops, and consists of material where Lucas workers outline and reflect on key aspects of their plan. Full doc website here:  http://theplandocumentary.com/
Also see: http://lucasplan.org.uk/

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THE PLAN is a two-part film essay Part 1 (120mins) Part 2 (90mins). It tells the story of the Lucas workers alternative plan in the context of its time and in relation to the challenges we face today. The two parts are suitable for screening together, with an intermission, or on separate occasions. 
 
This 30min film has been made for use in meetings. It consists of material from the film essay, where Lucas workers outline and reflect on key aspects of their plan.

“An urgent and gripping piece of work, reflecting on the dark consequences of capitalism on society and proposing an encouraging alternative for a troubling present.”  London Film Festival  
                                                                                                 
“See it, promote it and discuss it. If we want to transform society, this is a good place to start.” Ken Loach

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'Claim the Future' speech - John McDonnell

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'Claim the Future' speech - John McDonnell

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Below is the full text of the speech delivered by Labour MP John McDonnell at the launch event of 'Claim the Future' on Wednesday evening.
Let me welcome you all to this launch of our new project we've called "Claim the Future". Thanks for joining us. I'll try and briefly explain the background and purpose of this project before I introduce a panel of my friends to speak this evening. And thanks to our speakers who are coming to us from New Zealand, India, New York, and London.

We are living in a time like few others. A traumatic period both for the many that have directly, too often tragically, suffered loss and harm from the Coronavirus outbreak. But it's also a period of potentially dramatic economic and political upheaval as people lose their jobs, sink into debt and the underlying principles of how our economies operate are being forcibly challenged.

When people are faced with uncertainty and insecurity like this, there is a natural tendency to want to cling to the past, to wish for things to return to what was 'normal'. That's why the slogan 'Build Back Better' has had an attractive appeal. And it's also why it has been so readily co-opted by Conservatives like Johnson. But it's interesting that the crisis that we are going through has largely bucked this trend. Polling is demonstrating that most people do not want to go back to the way we were. They want to build better but not back. It's because the 'normal' that existed for so many was far from good enough.

The pre-pandemic normal for most was the product of ten years of austerity. A decade in which our essential public services, like the NHS and social care, were deprived of the resources they desperately needed. And a decade of year on year of wages cut and frozen and work increasingly insecure, stressed and under pressure. The grotesque neoliberal mismanagement of our economy left our public services so ill prepared to cope with the virus. It left so many people incapable of avoiding immediate financial hardship when the pandemic struck. So it's completely understandable that people do not want to return to the insecurity and the precariousness of that past normality.

Of course, the vast bulk of our attention is naturally focused on coping with, surviving and getting through the pandemic. At the back of the collective mind though is that nagging thought that Coronavirus is not the only threat we face. And for all the frightening scale of hurt and damage it is causing, Covid pales into relative insignificance besides the existential risk of climate catastrophe we now face. That's why we can't allow a return to normal. We can't let establishment political leaders and their corporate and media allies take us back. Because they will put us all at risk again.

So, we must claim the future. We have to ask and answer the questions about what lives we want to live, what communities we want to live in and what future there should be for our planet. If we don't others will. And it will be the establishment politicians and their corporate controllers that will answer these questions for us.

I heard that wonderful writer and campaigner, Arundhati Roy, describe the pandemic as a portal through which we can step into a new future. That is what this project is all about. It's about releasing our collective imagination to consider what that new future could be, but more importantly it's about networking that thinking with the action and activists working to secure the change we desire.

There are some who are arguing that this is not the time to be promoting new ideas or policies about the way we manage our economy or organise our society. It's best to simply criticise the performance of the Tories here and the status quo elsewhere. When asked "if you don't like what Johnson is doing, what would you do?" the response has been from some not to say or say very little, on the grounds that the election is a long way off. I completely understand that. There will be a time for constructing a manifesto later. But there is a positive role for many of us to play in instigating a constructive discussion about the society we want to create and some of the policy ideas possible to lay the foundations of that new society.

If there is at least one lesson I have urged people to take from the horrendous defeat Labour experienced in 2019, it's that ideas and policy programmes must be set in an overall narrative, a narrative of the vision of the society you aim to create. And you need time to bed them in and convince people of the role these policies will play within that overall narrative and to achieve the vision of that society. I also have to say that at a time when so many are recognising the need for change, if progressives do not seize this opportunity, the question has to be if not now when will it ever be the right time.

I'll take you through the work we have undertaken in preparation for this project and our ideas on the process from here. I want to thank the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation for the support it has provided to enable me to bring together a small team who over the last couple of months have drafted a series of policy position papers on some of the most pressing economic issues facing our society. They range from climate change to finance capital to, taxation, public services, public ownership and many others. The team has brought together for each topic a range of expert policy researchers and progressive think tanks, and activist campaigns to peer review the papers and to throw in ideas for both policy development and the campaigning needed to secure the policy.

It's been quite an exhilarating listening project. Just listening to the buzz of well thought through and grounded ideas and importantly to the incredibly creative and, so often, courageous campaigners in the various fields has just set me alight at times. Our intention is to release the individual papers over the next couple of months for discussion and to convene online meetings to launch and explore their ideas and plan support for actions.

We will aim to put the various proposals from these individual papers together in the early Autumn hopefully as an alternative economic strategy for discussion and campaigning. The most important role is to link the development and promotion of new thinking with the campaigning and action on the ground. Welcome to the concept of praxis.

This is a sizeable and challenging project to pull off. And we might fall flat on our faces. But the political climate is too serious not to try. My underlying fear is a repeat of what happened after the Banking Crash in 2008, when the Left left a vacuum that the right readily filled. The result was ten years of brutal austerity that we know didn't just cause hardship but cost many, many lives. A recession that we could be facing now is also often the breeding ground not just for the right but for the far right. That's why we need this project to work.

The first part of our listening project was to listen to the way people had learnt from the pandemic experience about the values they held and the values which they felt should underly our society in the future. What came across was just how much we care for one another and how much we need one another. Basic values of humanity and solidarity that should underpin how we live together. People have described the scale of the challenges we face in every field if we are to build the economy and society we need. The policy papers we will be releasing over the next three months will address many of these key issues. But there are some immediate issues that need to be addressed urgently.

Next Sunday (26 July) marks the 75th anniversary of the Attlee government taking office. In the ruins of the Second World War, with debt far higher than today, they didn't offer a meal deal, they founded the NHS, created the welfare state, built council homes and nationalised one-third of industry. They claimed the future, and so must we. The time has come to complete the unfinished business of the Attlee government. Thanks largely to the underfunding by successive Tory governments and the ownership of much of our care service being in the hands of hedge funds, venture capitalists and backed by private equity sucking resources from the sector, our care services have been stretched to the absolute limit. With another spike in the virus highly possible, it's time now to act decisively and create the caring services we need. We need the urgent nationalisation of care to establish the National Care Service alongside the NHS. Only in this way will we be able to secure the standard of care we wish for our elderly and disabled and ensure that the care workforce is properly supported and rewarded.

Other urgent issues have to be addressed. The precarity facing workers has been exposed as the furlough ends and unemployment soars. Even before the pandemic, the economy was stagnant and wages no higher than a decade ago. That's why we need an immediate minimum income guarantee. But we also need to deal with the escalating mountain of personal debt. We will be bringing forward radical proposals to tackle the debt crisis. We will also support all those campaigners and experts who are demonstrating the same scale of determination, radical policymaking and resourcing to tackle climate change.

Just to conclude before I introduce my friends whom I have asked to speak this evening, let me say this. This is a pivotal moment in history. Over the last few years populist politics, led by charlatan politicians, backed by corporate wealth, took hold here and in the United States. The pandemic has exposed that type of politics and those politicians for what they are - bombastic, dangerous incompetents. People have paid for the likes of Johnson and Trump with their lives and many more now with their jobs and livelihoods.

But the pandemic has also revealed how our current economic system also fails us. It is putting us at risk of an even greater catastrophe of climate change. Our project aims to help ensure that lessons are learnt from the pandemic that can be carried forward to enable us to tackle the fundamental threat of climate change. That we contribute to creating an unstoppable climate of opinion. We've been working with dozens of different activists and campaign groups to claim the future, to give confidence to others, to open up a political door that post election defeat timidity may be preventing some from walking through at the moment. I hope that having listened to our speakers tonight you will join our network for action we are launching tonight to do this. We cannot go back, we must claim the future.

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"Build better but not back" - John McDonnell's full speech - LabourList

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Below is the full text of the speech delivered by Labour MP John McDonnell at the launch event of 'Claim the Future' on Wednesday evening. Let me welcome you all to this launch of our new project we've called "Claim the Future". Thanks for joining us.

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Dr. Robin D'Angelo discusses White Fragility

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Dr. Robin D'Angelo discusses White Fragility

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up for critical discussion

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Dr. Robin DiAngelo discusses 'White Fragility'

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Mobilising Whiteness to Re-open America 

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Mobilising Whiteness to Re-open America 

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

This podcast is white man approved!!

I joke, but this podcast has really helped me understand and empathise with people who face challenges like racism and sexism in everyday life, and how a person's identity and the abuse they face can, well, intersect. I imagine I'm not exactly the target audience, and I don't want to overstep, but I look forward to each episode to be challenged and grow from the discussions that arise from Kimberlé Crenshaw and her amazing guests.

Brilliant Podcast

Informative, passionate and so important.

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‎Intersectionality Matters! on Apple Podcasts

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

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from Scene on Radio. Produced and hosted by John Biewen, Scene on Radio comes from the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and is distributed by PRX.Season 2, the Peabody-nominated Seeing White

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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Paul Gilroy: There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack

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Paul Gilroy: There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack

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This classic book is a powerful indictment of contemporary attitudes to race. By accusing British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously, Paul Gilroy caused immediate uproar when this book was first published in 1987.

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Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau, 1754. Seems to go by different titles - there's a pdf here:

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Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau, 1754. Seems to go by different titles - there's a pdf here:

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Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality: First Part

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Rousseau's famous work on the social origins of the human personality.

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TRG5: Mistaken Identity: Race & Class in the Age of Trump, by Asad Haider

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TRG5: Mistaken Identity: Race & Class in the Age of Trump, by Asad Haider

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Can't find a pdf, but readily available as e-book or in print (both 40% off) from the fabulous Verso Books. Thanks to Rob for pointing me to it. Paul

8pm 29th July 2020 (zoom)

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Race and Class in the Age of Trump

A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle

Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history's most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common ground, there is little agreement. To escape this deadlock, Asad Haider turns to the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing on the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure.

Weaving together autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, theoretical exegesis, and protest reportage, Mistaken Identity is a passionate call for a new practice of politics beyond colorblind chauvinism and "the ideology of race."

"Asad Haider offers a clarifying and frank assessment of the left's evacuation of class from our identity debates, as well as a powerful defense of political solidarity across hierarchies of race. Drawing on the radical legacy of anti-racist movements-from the Black Panthers to the Combahee River Collective- Mistaken Identity puts forward a powerful vision of collection action, that should offer hope and inspiration to a new generation of activists."

"Asad Haider renews the critique of identity politics for the contemporary Left. Drawing on the work of British cultural studies, black feminism, and theories of the subject (and subjection), Haider writes in an open and persuasive prose to show how identity is always partial and ambivalent, deflecting from the larger racial ideologies while reproducing its terms. This is a fresh and timely book, thoughtful and provocative."

" Mistaken Identity will inspire some, piss off others, and compel all of us to reconsider how we fight back. A bold, fresh, and radical critique of so-called "identity politics," this book deserves a wide reading-especially now, when liberal multiculturalism, the "renaturalization" of capitalism, and a resurgent bourgeois black nationalism draped in radical language forecloses the possibility of revolutionary solidarity. Asad Haider proclaims another universality is possible, and it's probably not what you think."

"Reviving what has become a deeply unfashionable anti-racist standpoint, Asad Haider indicts the complicity of "identity politics" from the left. For him, the dissident mentalities and meticulous historical methods of open-ended, ecumenical commitment to radical social transformation are still valid. This spiky little book shows how opposition might be salvaged from an ocean of pessimism and despair."

" Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider considers a more nuanced and multifaceted debate about identity politics, one that critiques the mass-media version while being cognizant of the larger threat posed by the identity politics being trafficked from the White House....Haider demonstrates that being of two minds-or even of three, four or five-does not necessarily imply confusion, but a complex worldview whose seemingly disparate parts are seeking integration. "

"Asad Haider offers a devastating and constructive critique of what is commonly understood as "identity politics," while still maintaining the centrality race, racism and racist oppression in capitalism."

"Pithy, smart and readable, Mistaken Identity is a wonderful book for our time. Notwithstanding his critique of identity, there is a compelling authenticity to Haider's voice, making him someone one wants to think with about shaping a left vision today."

" Mistaken Identity is a refreshing and timely answer to the rupturing status quo that flows within the popular movements of our day. Haider's critique of liberal identity politics cuts through the fog that has been raised by opportunists who seek to divide popular movements. His insurgent universality could become a potentially useful way of thinking through the identity politics that seek to divide rather than reconstitute our movements into a larger program with demands for a better world for all of us."

"Lucid, compact, and fiercely polemical, Asad Haider's book Mistaken Identity identifies a desperate need for greater political solidarities and broader coalitions at a time when left political movements are governed largely by the logic of 'staying in your lane,' which poses a significant barrier to mass organizing in the United States."

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Race and Class in the Age of Trump A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history's most contentious debates.

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Planet of the Humans (2019) - discussion 8pm 17th June 2020 (zoom)

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FfA commentary also includes lots of links to critical reviews challenging accuracy of the doc, and a considered reflection on their reasons for having it available to view on their site.

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Save

A Note from Films For Action (Last Updated 5/26): Since the film was taken down from Youtube we have replaced the video with a mirrored version.
While we believe the film is worthy of a good critique, we don't support the campaign to have the film removed from Youtube, and we definitely don't support abusing copyright law (in a clear case of 'fair use') to accomplish that goal.
Please join us in promoting critical engagement with the film. Our full statement is below:

When Planet of the Humans first came out, we added it to the site before watching it because we trusted Michael Moore's track record of releasing quality films that are factually accurate. After we watched it, we had issues with the film but assumed it was factually accurate, since Michael knows his films will be rigorously fact-checked.

While the film makes many important points, we are disheartened and dismayed to report that the film is also full of misinformation ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) - so much so that for half a day (on April 24th) we removed the film from the site.

When Josh Fox first contacted us to discuss the problems with the film, we were initially convinced by his argument to "retract" the film, as a journalist would do for a misleading article. Ultimately, we decided to put it back up because we believe media literacy, critique and debate is the best solution to the issues with the film.

Taking the film down turns the issue into a rather messy debate about censorship and only half a day proved our gut feelings on this was correct. We say messy because the film is officially hosted by Youtube. We're not the distributor, as Fox incorrectly claimed. We're an independent publisher that holds itself responsible to the 5 principles of journalism. Not promoting misleading info (as we can best discern) is a basic responsibility of publishers that value accuracy.

However, we quickly realized that taking the film down in the context of Josh's retraction campaign was only going to create headlines, generate more interest in the film, and possibly lead people to think we're trying to ' cover up the truth,' giving the film more power and mystique than it deserves.

Nothing drives interest and curiosity in something more than reports that activists are trying to get the film "banned" or taken down, and we don't want to contribute to that.

Since Films For Action was founded in 2006, we've believed that media-literacy and critical engagement with all media is the best antidote to misinformation.

To us, that means acknowledging the film's merits ( 1, 2, 3, 4) as well as its significant flaws. It's not obvious which parts of the film are misleading simply from watching it. Reading reviews and critiques of the film is pretty much required.

If you're short on time, we recommend reading the top 3-6 reviews below, plus our commentary below the reviews.

Reviews
(Media Literacy Note: We should apply our critical thinking skills to these reviews as much as the film. To us, this means giving credit to an author's good points while taking stock of any weak points, but not allowing the weak points to discredit the good points, or allow the good points to let us mentally gloss over or excuse the weak points. We should evaluate each argument on its own merits. We should also be wary of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. If we liked the film, we may scan reviews for objections but quickly find reasons to dismiss fair arguments while focusing on the weakest arguments, giving us a reason to dismiss the review entirely. Likewise, if we find ourselves critical of the film, we may gloss over or accept weak arguments uncritically while failing to acknowledge the film's merits. Ultimately, we don't see reviews as a means to prove or disprove whether the film is good or bad. We see them as a media literacy exercise through which we can learn more about all the issues the film brings up. We've learned a ton from reading the reviews below. Clicking on many of the links in the reviews (including many of the links we've sourced below) have sent us on all sorts of rabbit-hole journeys of knowledge discovery. If we all embrace this spirit of curiosity, the journey is sure to be time well spent.)
1. Review of Planet of the Humans: What They Get Right and the Environmentalists Get Wrong - Paul Fenn

2. 'A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement': Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal - Bill McKibben

3. Michael Moore's environment film a slap in the face on Earth Day - Cathy Cowan Becker

4. Let's Just Have a Think... a 30-minute video review by Just Have a Think.

5. Triggered: "Planet of the Humans" & A Call for Emotional Intelligence - the Good Grief Network

6. Richard Heinberg's Review (Richard is one of the "good guys" featured in the film. We've long held a lot of respect for him. If you value a diversity of perspectives in your media diet, his voice is an important one)

A Missed Opportunity - Rebel Bass

Bill Mckibben and a Call to Hold People in Their Fullness - Tim Hjersted

Connect the dots - Why we still need the green new deal plan for 100% clean energy (podcast)

The Solar Nerd's Review

6 Reasons Why "Planet of the Humans" is a Disaster of Misinformation - Ben Wehrman

Skepticism Is Healthy, but POTH is Toxic - Vote to Survive

POTH, a weak documentary on sustainable energy - Thijs Ten Brinck

This review of Biomass (it is indeed awful)

Films For Action's 12 Thoughts about Planet Of The Humans (a remixed version of this statement)

"Damn Dirty Humans!": 'Planet Of The Humans' And Progressive Denial - John Halstead

The Great Giving Up (and The Film that Made It Worse) - Ketan Joshi

5/12 Michael Moore's old fact-checker has responded to the film:

The fact that this film requires so much additional reading to avoid being misinformed is a good illustration of how good propaganda works: Too many people either don't have time to fact check or won't take the time, and so the misinformation sticks while the finer points get lost.

However, the film offers an excellent media literacy exercise for those willing to engage with it on that level - in terms of how documentaries have the power to enlighten or deceive, depending on how the medium is wielded, and in terms of using the film as a springboard to learn more about the issues it tackles. We've personally learned a lot about renewable energy in the last week, from reading reviews of the film, so I can give the film kudos for that.

We hope everyone reading this chooses to take the media literacy journey with us.

Ultimately, the film raises a discussion that we absolutely need to be having. Even though it messes up quite a few details along the way, I think Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore are sincere when they say they want this film to help the environmental movement move forward.

Personally, we're still digesting the film, but here are some thoughts we have so far:

*1. We still need to transition to 100% renewable energy. There is no other option. But the delusion that we need to dispel (which the film gets right) is the idea that renewables can power our industrial civilization as is, and that these technologies are entirely 'green' when they are themselves still harmful.

They are far less harmful and more sustainable than fossil fuels, and therefore we need to get to 100% renewables as fast as possible, but scaling up these energy sources to meet the energy demands of our current civilization will be impossible and highly damaging to the planet if we go on thinking the raw materials for these things are infinite.

We need to power-down our civilization. Renewables + dramatically reduced consumption of energy and resources is the solution - not simply renewables alone, and our capitalist/consumer society has not grasped that reality.

We believe that is the most important takeaway from the film - but it's pretty unfortunate that the film makes some pretty erroneous claims along the way (like when Ozzie Zehner says, "You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place, instead of playing pretend.").

Again, read the top 4 reviews abovefor more on that. We avoided repeating what's in those reviews for brevity.

*2. Green capitalist co-opting of environmental groups is a serious problem. This has been a critique within the environmental movement for a long time, hence the ever-lasting tension between mainstream groups and the groups that always seem to get far less attention, including in this film.

*3. Despite the film's flaws, the film is asking us to come to terms with some difficult realities which we have yet to face: namely, that sustaining our infinite growth, industrial civilization on renewables is neither desirable nor possible, yet that is exactly what green capitalists are intent on pursuing.

We need to Power Down. We need Economic Degrowth. (Click the links!)

Instead of 'growing the economy' forever - which amounts to ecological devastation of the planet year after year for the sake of 'profit' - we should focus on growing everything that actually matters in reality: biodiversity, wilderness restoration, healthy soils, air and water, human happiness and wellbeing, social trust, and meaning in our lives.

*4. At what point are we going to decide, politically, that we ought to share the last remaining bits of wilderness on Earth with the rest of the community of life? At what point are we going to stop bulldozing the wilderness at the edges of every city and say enough is enough? For this reason, we think small-scale, decentralized solar & wind energy should be pursued over large-scale, centralized projects. This means we'd be putting solar and wind on rooftops in the cities and already "developed" land, allowing us to leave more land untouched.

*5. Overpopulation - it's complicated. It's true we can't keep growing forever, in the same way we can't keep consuming the Earth forever, but in high-consumption countries, populations are already declining, and in areas where populations are still growing, the "impact on Earth" is still low compared to the impact of "rich" nations. The truth is, pinning our problems on population lets industrial capitalism off the hook - what Daniel Quinn called the culture of maximum harm.

*6. The film never once mentions permaculture? As the editor of this site, I'm aware of hundreds of positive ideas, solutions and experiments in new ways of living all around the world, which are essentially answers to the filmmakers' despairing question, "where do we go from here?" It's painful to think about how all this positive knowledge is still not getting the attention it deserves while this FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) is getting the global spotlight.

*7. The film has created a heightened awareness of our energy and consumption problems. This is an opportunity for us to point people towards the best solutions, knowledge and resources that can guide us in the right direction. A few sites that come to mind: Energy Reality. The Post Growth Encyclopedia. Transition Network. Resilience. This library. What else?

*8. It's true, we'll never have ecological sustainability without limits to growth.

Even More Reviews

How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right? - George Monbiot

A ReHeated Mess of Lazy, Old Myths - Ketan Joshi

Michael Moore's 'Planet of the Humans' documentary peddles dangerous climate denial - Dana Nuccitelli

Moore's Boorish Planet of The Humans: An Annotated Collection - A Siegel

EcoEquity's Review (on why the bad stuff ruins the film as a whole, despite its good points)
Bill McKibben's first response
Director Jeff Gibbs' response to Bill McKibben (published April 30th)

The Important Debate Planet of the Humans Misses - Kate Aronoff

Michael Moore, Filmmakers Respond to Criticism of Planet Of The Humans - The Hill Interview

Planet of the Humans backlash - Yves Engler

Setting the Record Straight About Renewable Energy - World Resources Institute

Want to discuss the film with us? Feel free to get in touch here or on Twitter.

Want to know more about us? Check our About page.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

No matter what you thought of the film, perhaps there is one thing we can all agree on:

Our industrial civilization (predicated on infinite growth and built upon a once-in-a-lifetime supply of cheap fossil fuels) cannot be sustained.

We're like a plane 10,000 feet in the air and our engines are about to blow out. How can we make a controlled descent? How can we power-down our civilization to thrive at vastly lower consumption and energy levels?
Here are 20 films that tell me "it's not all hopeless."
To be clear, if saving civilization as it exists was the goal, then it's true, the future is looking bleak.

But for billions around the world, civilization, as it exists, is the problem and is not worth saving. Just ask any of the indigenous cultures who are still resisting the bulldozers of our civilization's daily expansion, for a little ' big picture' perspective on that.

Our task is to imagine and design an ecological civilization that can thrive at vastly lower energy and consumption levels - a civilization based not on the old paradigm of "sustainable development" but on ecological regeneration - where the human presence on the Earth generates higher and higher levels of biodiversity and ecological health.
These films point us in the direction we need to go.
More Commentary

*4/29 Despite the film's scathing critique of mainstream environmental groups, the filmmakers have been surprisingly conciliatory in their post-release discussion. As Michael Moore said in a podcast, "We're not coming after you, we need you." And as Jeff Gibbs echoed in an interview with Rising: "We don't attack any environmental leaders. We need our environmental leaders. We're just in the wrong story." It's a bit sad though that tons of people watching the film are probably not taking the same, compassionate stance.

*When we listen to the filmmakers speak about what they hope people will get from the film, we agree with their meta-level conclusions (that we need to question our economic addiction to growth, to reduce our consumption, to challenge capitalist greenwashing, and to realize renewables aren't going to save us, at least without making some other major changes). When Gibbs talks about us being in "the wrong story," we couldn't agree more.

* Jeff Gibbs said in the interview with Rising that he doesn't believe in or argue for "population control" of any kind. Since we agree with Bill McKibben that we should avoid "bad faith" assumptions and arguments, we'd say that charges of the film promoting "ecofascism" fall into this category.

*As Cornell West has said, we don't believe in canceling anybody. We believe we're all brothers and sisters. We wrote a guide to compassionate activism because we don't believe love and compassion are luxuries. They are essential to human survival. While we may find ourselves in disagreement, it's important to recognize that we're all on the same team - yes, even the people who oppose us - they're just parts of our family who are tragically bound up "in the wrong story" - the story that sees us as separate from nature and each other.

*5/7 This is how the right-wing site Breitbart is writing about the film:

"Moore has backed the most powerful, brutally honest and important documentary of his career. It's also by far his bravest because it not only confronts the modern left's greatest shibboleth - "clean" energy - but it does indeed offer a great deal of succour to Moore's avowed enemy President Donald Trump.

It might even help Trump clinch the next presidential election for it undermines the entire basis of the Green New Deal being pushed in one form or another by his opponents. Renewable energy, the documentary makes abundantly clear, is not the solution to the problem - but an even bigger problem than the one it is supposedly solving."

"Renewable energy, it tells us, is not clean energy but dirty energy because it does tremendous damage to the environment. The people who make money out of it are the worst kind of crony-capitalists. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise is either an idiotic dupe or a wicked liar.

Though I've written about this myself in countless Breitbart columns, I'm a conservative writer largely preaching to the choir. Coming from two ardent leftists, on the other hand, and aimed at least in part at a leftist audience, the message of Planet of the Humans is dynamite."

5/13 Podcast: "Why We Still Need the Green New Deal Plan for 100% Clean Energy: In response to the Michael Moore film Planet of Humans, Stanford Professor Mark Z Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer who is one of the architects of the energy transition plan foundational to the Green New Deal discusses the current state of solar, wind, hydro-electric and more to move usrapidly from fossil fuel dependent energy to 100% Renewable Energy (with 2030 as the target for an 80% transition)- in conversation with Alison Rose Levy."

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Save A Note from Films For Action (Last Updated 5/26): Since the film was taken down from Youtube we have replaced the video with a mirrored version. While we believe the film is worthy of a good critique, we don't support the campaign to have the film removed from Youtube, and we definitely don't support abusing copyright law (in a clear case of 'fair use') to accomplish that goal.

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Article on video installation by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg recently shown at the RA Eco Visionaries exhibition

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An artist's 3-D recreation of the immense mammal probes the paradox of efforts to bring such animals back in the lab

smithsonianmag.com

He first appears as a crude collection of 3-D pixels-or voxels. Soon, he looks like a conglomeration of blocks morphing into the shape of an animal. Gradually, his image evolves until he becomes a sharp representation of a northern white rhino, grunting and squealing as he might in a grassy African or Asian field. There comes a moment-just a moment-when the viewer's eyes meet his. Then, the 3-D creature vanishes, just like his sub-species, which due to human poaching is disappearing into extinction.

The Substitute, a digitally projected artwork, was produced by British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and a Dutch museum, the Cube Design Museum, commissioned the work, and Cooper Hewitt recently displayed it as part of the exhibition "Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial." The work is now newly acquired into the Cooper Hewitt collections.

The last male northern white rhino, Sudan, died in 2018, and the two surviving females are too old to reproduce. Scientists have used sperm from Sudan and another male that died earlier to fertilize two eggs from the females, Fatu and Najin, who now reside at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The hope is that the breed can be revived after the fertilized eggs are implanted in a southern white rhino to gestate.

"I just was really struck by this paradox that somehow we were getting so excited about the possibility of creating intelligence in whatever form. And yet we completely neglect the life that already exists," says Ginsberg. "The idea that we could be able to control an A.I. to me seems kind of suspicious. We're unable to control ourselves. . . . When it comes to killing something as extraordinary as northern white rhinos for their horns, we're all implicated in this, even if we feel very distant." Ginsberg also wonders what errors in reproduction may arise as humans recreate life artificially.

The Substitute reflects this uneasy paradox. Within the work's two-minute time frame, "there's a moment of affection and tenderness for this thing coming to life before you," Ginsberg says. "But then it's gone-and it's not the real deal." The rhino appears not on the savanna amidst woodlands or grasslands where members of its sub-species typically have grazed, but in a plain white box. Just as a lab creation would, he lacks any natural context. While a real male northern white rhinoceros weighs 5,000 pounds, this one, of course, weighs nothing. It is ephemeral, unreal.

Ginsberg, who has been trained in architecture and interactive design, is a London-based artist who often uses modern science to draw attention to questions raised by new scientific developments. Typically, her work highlights a wide spectrum of issues. Among them are conservation, artificial intelligence, biodiversity, exobiology and evolution. She was the lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology in 2014. Synthetic Aesthetics, which is the scientific practice of redesigning living matter to make it more useful to mankind, activates passion in Ginsberg. She urges caution in these kinds of projects and illustrates her concerns with artworks that point to troubling outcomes.

"Ultimately what we saw in the exhibition was just incredibly moving," says Cooper Hewitt curator Andrea Lipps. She describes The Substitute as "wildly successful" for communicating something both intellectually imperative but also triggering emotion, "which I think is what makes it resonate with anyone who comes in and watches it." After seeing it herself, she realized that "it was one particular piece that everyone would talk about with everyone."

When Lipps brought her three-year-old daughter and six-year-old son to see it, she was surprised by the differences in their reactions. Both saw a certain reality: Her daughter was frightened and confused by the authentic nature of the rhino image, but her son wanted to hug the animal.

She, too, notes the paradox. "Why are we fixated on spending resources and time and effort on de-extinction projects when . . .we couldn't keep the natural creature alive in the first place. And why would we value that kind of technological copy, if you will, more than we did the real rhino?"

Rather than bombarding viewers with facts and figures about the northern white rhino, Ginsberg believes sparking an emotional response is more effective, and thus, her artificial rhino conjures passions that a lecture would not elicit.

Like Ginsberg, Lipps questions the reality of an animal born through DNA experimentation in a laboratory far from the wild. "How much of what an animal is, do we understand to be just that information, and how much of it is much more environmental and much more contextual?" she wonders.

Over its two-minute lifetime, the faux rhino adapts "to his environment and moves around," Lipps says. "His form and his sound become more lifelike, but ultimately, he is coming to life without any natural context and in this completely digital form. He's totally artificial; he doesn't really exist; and so it lends provocation and communicates with all of us about what is. Is that life?"

The rhino's image, its sounds, and its behavior are based on 23 hours of video footage showing the last herd of northern white rhinos, which included Sudan, the last male. The video was made by a Czech scientist named Richard Policht. The rhino in The Substitute is not an exact copy of any rhino member of the herd but represents a composite image.

He acts, appears and sounds real, as any real rhino probably would. However, appearing in a sterile white box, it lacks the context and herd experience that shapes a rhino's behavior, much as a lab-created, captive rhino would carry the proper DNA without having any of the experiences that color the life of a rhino in the wild.

Lipps believes biotechnology is "important, and it's good that we have these explorations. But it's also important that we just call into question what our goals and our aims are for all of it. . . . Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. We really need to be rigorous in how we are questioning ourselves and these technologies as we continue having the ability to undertake them."

Ginsberg encourages humans to focus on the effects of choices available in the modern world. For example, she says, "Our increasingly urban lives afford modern-day conveniences like ordering takeout in plastic containers. . . . Ask yourself: What have I excluded in that choice and did I actually care about it?" At London's Royal College of Art, Ginsberg's 2018 Ph.D. project, Better, explored visions of a "better" future and how they affect what designers choose to create. She argues that "better ideas" such as environmentally problematic plastic bottles and energy-saving lightbulbs, create new problems as they solve old ones. She also contends that consumers and scientists must ask better questions to reach more successful solutions. She is well-known for her lectures on these topics, and her other works include an installation, also seen at Cooper Hewitt's Triennial that presented scents from flowers that are now extinct. This project uses gene sequences to create scented enzymes.

Her attention to the concept of "better" plays a role in The Substitute. Ginsberg raises the question of whether an artificially created rhinoceros would be better and have a greater right to live than those who preceded it and lost their lives to greedy humans.

Ginsberg has won the World Technology Award for design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012, and the Dezeen Changemaker Award in 2019. Twice, her work has been nominated for Designs of the Year. Her art has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Beijing's National Museum of China, Paris's Centre Pompidou, and London's Royal Academy of Arts, and her works are more permanently housed in museums and private collections. She has built a growing audience through lectures shared via TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba, and the New Yorker TechFest.

The Mill, which has studios in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bangalore and Berlin, provided animation for this project, and Dr. Andrea Banino at DeepMind, an international company that develops useful forms of artificial intelligence, provided the experimental data to set the rhino's paths. After each two-minute episode, the rhino reappears and follows another of the three programmed paths.

The Substitute is currently not on view at the Cooper Hewitt. In 2020, the artwork will be exhibited at in Liverpool, with an opening on March 20 and on view through June 14, at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh April 24 through June 14, 2020, and at Ark Des Stockholm, October through December.

About Alice George

Alice L. George, Ph.D., is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she has authored or co-authored seven books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.

Read more from this author | Follow @Alicelgeorge

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The Northern White Rhino Went Extinct, but for Two Minutes at a Time, the Animal Makes a Digital Comeback

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smithsonianmag.com He first appears as a crude collection of 3-D pixels-or voxels. Soon, he looks like a conglomeration of blocks morphing into the shape of an animal. Gradually, his image evolves until he becomes a sharp representation of a northern white rhino, grunting and squealing as he might in a grassy African or Asian field.

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George Monbiot's critique of  Planet of the Humans

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George Monbiot's critique of  Planet of the Humans

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George Monbiot on Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans

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The Uses of Disaster (Disaster Communism)

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Climate change is here. In the midst of the storm, an opportunity arises to break with capitalism and its vicious inequality. Let's seize it while we can. The alternatives are unthinkable.

"What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters?" asks Rebecca Solnit in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell. Examining human responses to earthquakes, fires, explosions, terrorist attacks, and hurricanes over the last century, Solnit asserts that the commonplace idea that disasters reveal the worst in human nature is misguided. Instead, she shows how we can see in many such events "an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive," a purposeful hope that galvanizes what she calls "disaster communities." When the prevailing social order temporarily fails, a host of "extraordinary communities," constituted through collectivity and mutual aid, spring up in response. (Solnit's examples include Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985.) For fleeting moments, we forget social differences and help each other. Alas, when the disaster has passed, these communities subside. In the terms of A Paradise, the "great contemporary task" we face is the prevention of that subsidence, "the recovery of this closeness and purpose without crisis or pressure." Given the calamity of our warming planet, this task becomes ever more urgent. How do we dismantle the social orders that make disasters so disastrous, while at the same time making ordinary the extraordinary human behavior they elicit?

Solnit's argument rings true even if one is less optimistic than she about the inherent value of community. In the hells of the present, we find the tools we need to build other worlds, as well as tantalizing glimpses of something often thought impossible. This is not cause for celebration, nor even optimism. But it is cause for hope.

For this hope to be realized, however, we must go beyond Solnit's empirical focus on what happens in response to specific disaster-events and grasp the character of the capitalist disaster. This is not simply a series of punctuated dates and place names-Katrina and Harvey and Irma, 1755 and 1906 and 1985-but an ongoing condition. For many, the ordinary is a disaster. Any coherent response to such continuous disaster will likewise have to be widespread and durable in order to succeed. Building paradise in hell is not enough: we must work against hell and go beyond it. More than disaster communities, we need disaster communism.

Assuredly, in calling for disaster communism, we are not suggesting that the occurrence of more and more frequent eco-social nightmares will somehow inevitably produce ever riper conditions for communism. We cannot adopt the perverse fatalism of "the worse, the better," nor wait for some final hurricane to blow away the old order. Rather, we are noting that even the largest-scale and most terrifying of these extraordinary disasters can interrupt the ordinary disaster that is, most of the time, too large to fully comprehend. These are moments of interruption that, while horrific for human life, might also spell disaster for capitalism.

Disaster communism is not divorced from existing struggles. Rather, it emphasizes the revolutionary process of developing our collective capacity to endure and flourish: a movement within, against, and beyond this ongoing capitalist disaster. How can the numerous projects creating mini-paradises in hell cohere into something more than ephemeral communities? "Disaster communism" adds a clarifying epithet to the already long-ongoing political project that pits itself against the state and capital and overflows their bounds. It orients the movement of a collective power that, while rendered palpable during extraordinary disasters, was there all along, especially in places and among groups who have been experiencing the situation of ordinary disaster for hundreds of years. Climate change throws the skills central to those struggles into stark relief.

Disaster Capitalism, Capital as Disaster

The geographer Neil Smith convincingly argued that there's no such thing as a natural disaster. Naming disasters "natural" occludes the fact that they are just as much the product of political and social divisions as they are of climatic or geological forces. If an earthquake destroys the poorly constructed and badly maintained low-income housing in a town but leaves the well-built homes of the rich standing, blaming nature merely lets states, developers, and slumlords (not to mention the capitalist economy that produces such inequality in the first place) off the hook. Disasters are always co-productions in which natural forces such as plate tectonics and weather systems work together with social, political, and economic forces.

The way in which extraordinary disasters play out, then, cannot be separated from the ordinary disaster conditions in which they occur. It was the category 4 Hurricane Maria that devastated the US colony of Puerto Rico, leaving residents without fresh water: a disastrous event. But to abandon the narrative here obscures the fact that, prior to the hurricane, "99.5 percent of Puerto Rico's population was served by community water systems in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act," while "69.4 percent of people on the island were served by water sources that violated SDWA's health standards," according to a Natural Resources Defense Council report. Nor should such devastating events eclipse slower-moving disasters such as that of Flint, Michigan, where decades of neglect and industrial pollution of the surrounding Flint River and Great Lakes have similarly left working class, majority Black and Latinx communities without clean water. Easily overlooked because they lack the spectacular power of a hurricane or earthquake, such drawn-out disasters blur the boundary betweendisaster-as-event and disaster-as-condition. What comes as a sudden and unexpected jolt for many is for others a matter of everyday reality intensified.

"Building paradise in hell is not enough: we must work against hell and go beyond it. More than disaster communities, we need disaster communism."

Climate change significantly increases the frequency and severity of both slow- and fast-moving disaster. Global warming means an increased amount of energy circulating in the atmosphere and ocean surfaces. For example, when warm oceans create low-pressure cells, thermal energy, under the influence of the Earth's rotation, is converted into the kinetic energy characteristic of swirling hurricanes and tropical storms. Warmer temperatures give rise to more energy, which has to be expressed somehow. (Energy cannot be destroyed: it can only change form.) The physics of this process are fiendishly complex and difficult to model, yet it is possible to make forecasts. The latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests climate change will disrupt food and water supplies, damage homes and infrastructure, and bring droughts and floods, heat waves and hurricanes, storm surges and wildfires. Advances in attribution science and knowledge gleaned from the single degree Celsius of global warming already in effect have made it possible to quantify the contribution of climate change to individual extreme weather events. We can now link global warming to calamities such as the European heat wave of 2003 and the Russian heat wave of 2010, which each killed tens of thousands of people, not to mention countless storms, floods, and other weather events.

That climate change is itself human-made (or rather, capitalism-made) further underscores the impossibility of separating disastrous events from disastrous conditions. The relationship between the two runs both ways: conditions give rise to events which, in turn, further entrench conditions. The goal of the nation-state during and in the immediate aftermath of extraordinary disasters is usually to impose order rather than to assist survivors, and for this reason disaster events generally exacerbate the underlying disaster of capitalism. In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the army was sent in. Between 50 and 500 survivors were killed, and self-organized search, rescue, and firefighting efforts were disrupted. The state's attempts to manage disaster showed themselves to be a disordering force, destroying bottom-up forms of self-organization. A similar repressive focus on "looters" (i.e. survivors) marked the US state's response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. On September 4, 2005, on Danziger Bridge, seven police officers opened fire on a group of Black people attempting to flee the flooded city, killing two and seriously injuring four more. The murder of Black survivors seeking safety illustrates the means by which the state seeks to foreclose the emancipatory possibilities that might appear during such disasters. In such situations, the state seeks nothing more than a return to disastrous normality for poor, migrant, and Black people. Such actions are contrary to the recommendations of even mainstream sociologists of disaster. In the 1960s, for example, the military strategist-turned-sociologist Charles Fritz argued trenchantly that the stereotype of widespread antisocial individualism and aggression flourishing during disasters was not grounded in reality. He also astutely noted that the distinction between disasters and normality can "conveniently overlook the many sources of stress, strain, conflict, and dissatisfaction that are imbedded [sic] in the nature of everyday life."

The disastrous machinations of state and capital do not stop at localized and punctual events, however, but scale from the neighborhood to the planet. As writers such as Naomi Klein and Todd Miller have demonstrated, extraordinary disasters are used to prolong, renew, and extend the ordinary disasters of austerity, privatization, militarization, policing, and borders. This is disaster capitalism: a vicious cycle in which ordinary disaster conditions exacerbate extraordinary disaster events, in turn intensifying the original conditions. Disastrous events allow the state to implement what Klein calls the "shock doctrine." This process involves redeveloping destroyed housing, energy, and distribution infrastructures to neoliberal standards; pricing the poor out of electricity or clean water; forcing them to relocate to locations even more vulnerable to climate change; and incarcerating them when they resist or try to cross borders to escape this untenable situation. In the months following Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico has experienced further privatization, worsening labor conditions, and the arrival of green colonialists: supposed do-gooders like Elon Musk hiding their latest hyper-capitalist ventures behind the thinnest veneer of environmental recovery. The story in Flint is similar, right down to Musk's offers to solve its infrastructural issues.

Forces acting in the interests of state and capital come in a number of shapes, of course. Activists from the Common Ground Collective providing emergency relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were intensively harassed not only by racist cops but also by armed white locals who seized the opportunity to roleplay a postapocalyptic end-times scenario, with the tacit approval, and sometimes active facilitation, of the police.

Survival Pending Revolution

What the study of disastrous events and disastrous conditions teaches us is that climate change is not simply an unintended consequence of capitalist production but a crisis of social reproduction (a term referring to the self-perpetuating social structures that enable daily and generational survival while at the same time maintaining inequality). Acknowledging this does not just give us a new angle on the problem, but also points to a source of hope. It is important to remember that the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and the colonized are not shaped by disaster alone. They involve, at every turn, forms of survival and persistence, often in the form of knowledges and skills passed from generation to generation. As the Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte insists, while indigenous peoples are quite familiar with disaster in the form of hundreds of years of attempted colonial domination, over those hundreds of years they have developed the skills to resist and survive ordinary and extraordinary disasters. The Marxist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici, meanwhile, has shown how capitalism has long endeavored, unsuccessfully, to violently eradicate all forms of non-capitalist survival. In her 2001 essay "Women, Globalization, and the International Women's Movement," she argues that "if the destruction of our means of subsistence is indispensable for the survival of capitalist relations, this must be our terrain of struggle."

Such struggle occurred in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, when landowners and real estate speculators saw an opportunity to finally evict people they'd been wanting to get rid of for a long time. Their attempts to tear down housing that was providing low rental returns and replace it with expensive high-rise condos is a clear example of disaster capitalism at work. Yet working class residents fought back with great success. Thousands of tenants marched on the National Palace, demanding the government take possession of damaged homes from their propertied landlords for eventual sale back to their tenants. In response, some 7,000 properties were seized. Here, then, we see that extraordinary disasters don't simply create space for the state and capital to entrench their power, but for resistance to these very forms: a "shock doctrine of the left," to adopt Graham Jones' phrase. The ordinary disaster that is capitalism can in fact be interrupted by these incidents that, while horrific for human life, also spell momentary ruin forcapitalism. In a 1988 essay titled "The Uses of an Earthquake," Harry Cleaver suggests this is particularly likely in the breakdown of administrative capacity and government authority following extraordinary disasters. This breakdown is perhaps even more likely in places where governance is reliant on surveillance, smart data, and information technologies.

"What comes as a sudden and unexpected jolt for many is for others a matter of everyday reality intensified."

Cleaver also notes the importance of histories of collective organizing in neighborhoods affected by the earthquake. Survivors had organizational links, a culture of mutual aid, and expectations of solidarity. Tenants knew that they had each other's backs because of their past relationships with one another. This point is crucial, for it allows us to understand disaster community, not simply as a spontaneous response to extraordinary disasters, but rather as the coming to the fore of everyday struggles for survival and subterranean practices of mutual aid. Their experience of organizing against the ordinary disasters of capitalism left residents well equipped to deal with an extraordinary disaster.

Indeed, preexisting relations of support have been most effective in sustaining communities in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Centros de Apoyo Mutuo is a decentralized mutual aid network drawing on established groups, centers, and practices, which has distributed food, cleaned up debris, and rebuilt the island's infrastructure. It has done so faster, and with greater attention to residents' needs, than networks of international aid and logistics. Through a kind of bricolage or "art of making do with what is at hand," mutual aid centers demonstrate that nonspecialists can quickly pick up and share tools and skills for survival. In doing so, they also create new forms of solidarity and collective life that go beyond survival.

"Those storms have swept by, and they've destroyed many things," says Ricchi, a member of the US-based network Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. "By knocking out the energy grid, and cutting access to food and water, they left the island of Borikén [the Indigenous Taíno name for Puerto Rico] dark. But in that darkness countless Boricuas have awoke, and they stay awake late and get up early again, doing the work of reproducing life."

That life isn't just mundane: groups organize parties, dancing lessons, and collective cooking sessions, so that communal horizons might open beyond despair.

In a conventional and narrowly economic sense there is scarcity in these situations, albeit scarcity challenged by an abundance of social links. Yet extraordinary disasters can also push us to recognize that scarcity is a social relation rather than a simple fact of number: the way goods and resources are distributed determines who can use them. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a "scarcity" of tools was overcome, not through the production or acquisition of more, but through new organization. Tool libraries were set up as alternatives to the individualized, commodified social relations that dominate capitalist society. They show us that we should not be too hasty to associate climate change with increased scarcity.

Disaster Migration

Communities are often defined by their containment within a specific geographic place, and those we have cited above certainly fit this bill: they respond to extraordinary disasters at the sites of those disasters. Yet climate change, of course, forces people from place to place, so that organizing against its disastrous effects also requires broader communities of solidarity. The number of people currently classed as "forced displaced" currently stands, by UN figures, at 68.5 million. The quickening of this wave of displacement is impossible to ignore. By 2050 there are forecast to be 200 million people who will be "environmentally displaced": forced to move because of the disasters, both ordinary and extraordinary, that a warming world brings. This, to hammer home the point, is 1 out of 50 people in the world.

Currently, many people are displaced internally, with only a small fraction traveling to Europe, North America, or Australia. However, as the climate destabilizes and conditions worsen, many of the places currently serving as refuges will become uninhabitable. Traveling to higher latitude zones and crossing the borders of the richer nations which occupy them will thus become ever more essential to people. Living there makes one less vulnerable to disastrous events, not least because rich nation-states remain better equipped-at least financially-to mitigate them. The trend towards global movement north will likely intensify efforts to defend these zones: the astonishingly self-described "military-environmental-industrial complex" is already plotting new forms of violence to defend borders. Communal efforts to combat such violence will form some of the most important struggles against climate disaster.

As we write, several Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the US are under blockade, as part of a nationwide attempt to disrupt their roundup and deportation operations. In the UK, campaigners have successfully pushed back the government's attempts to extend immigration enforcement into schools as part of its "hostile environment" policy. In Glasgow in the 1990s, a buddy scheme pairing recent migrants with locals was so successful that working class communities turned out to obstruct dawn raids aiming to deport their new friends and neighbors. To our mind, these, too, are disaster communities, and they are no less important than those in post-'85 Mexico City and post-Katrina New Orleans.

These disaster communities, then, are glimpses of hope: microcosms of a world formed otherwise. Social reproduction orchestrated not through waged labor, commodities, private property, and all their associated violence, but through care, solidarity, and the passion for freedom. The ordinary, they insist, is not a given.

Paradise Against Hell

This hope is vital, yet all too often hope kills us. We need more than microcosms, not least because such experiments can be valuable for capital too. Here it's important to note that capital is not homogenous: what is good for some capitalists is bad for others, and what is bad for individual capitalists over a short period of time may be good for capital in the long run. Thus, while disaster communities might spell bad news for some capitalists and state actors, others will look to mine them for value. As Ashley Dawson reminds us, the US Department of Homeland Security praised the anarchist-influenced relief efforts of Occupy Sandy after the 2012 hurricane swept through New York. In doing so well what state and market forces could not do, Occupy's projects kept social life going, giving these forces something to recapture once the status quo ante was restored. And they did so at no direct cost to the state.

Such an account is partial, of course, and misses the pedagogic value of disaster communities. At its most powerful, this value is simultaneously negative and positive: the resounding "yes" to those other ways of living screams "no" to the ordinary disaster of capital. The social reproduction fostered is a change of direction: an attempt to reproduce ourselves otherwise, and to resist a return to business as usual that would leave our bodies and our ecosystem exhausted.

We see this clearly in many of the disaster communities that spring up in response to borders. As Harsha Walia so brilliantly demonstrates in Undoing Border Imperialism, these do not simply help people mitigate the violence of the border, but resist the very concept of the border itself, as succinctly put in the widely heard demand for No Borders. Indeed, this very phrase conjures up the simultaneous affirmation and negation we insist upon: opposing a facet of this world while describing features of the next. This is an operation against, as well as in, hell.

Such negation will undoubtedly need to go beyond the coziness associated with dominant notions of community. When faced with those racist cops and vigilantes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Common Ground Collective engaged in armed self-defense inspired by the Black Panthers and other radical groups. Nor will the conflicts only exist externally: the CGC also had to deal with supporters who seemed more interested in catastrophe tourism than their relief efforts. Disaster communities will not be free from the welter of violence that constitutes everyday disaster: misogyny, white supremacy, classism, ableism, racism, and numerous intersecting forms of oppression will, sadly, leak into their organizing. Disaster communities will have to learn how to resolve things otherwise, mobilizing social tools and accountability processes many activists are already developing today.

Paradise Beyond Hell

Capitalism is comfortable with community. All too often, the term is used to label the resilience capitalism itself needs to survive ordinary and extraordinary disaster. Community names collectivity stripped of all transformative power.

We cannot abandon the concept of community altogether: such a proposal would be unhelpfully idealistic, given the term's widespread use. But to refer to disaster communities such as those discussed above merely as "communities" is to deny their potential, binding them to a present in which they are forever admirable, but never transformative.

And so we insist on communism.

Where communism is frequently premised on the material abundance created by capitalist production, disaster communism is grounded in the collective abundance of disaster communities. It is a seizing of the means of social reproduction. We cannot expect, of course, that each and every outcome will be immediately communist (private property was not abolished in those communities in Mexico City in 1985, for example). Our use of the term signals the extensive ambition and operation of a movement beyond specific manifestations and outcomes, its spread across space, and its continued existence beyond extraordinary disasters. It names the ambition to ground nothing less than the whole world in the abundance found in the social reproduction of the disaster community. As such, it fulfills the definition of communism that Marx gives us: "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."

The communism of disaster communism, then, is a transgressive and transformative mobilization without which the unfolding catastrophe of global warming cannot and will not be stopped. It is simultaneously an undoing of the manifold structural injustices which perpetuate and draw strength from disaster, and an enactment of the widespread collective capacity to endure and flourish on a rapidly changing planet. It is hugely ambitious, requiring redistribution of resources at several scales; reparations for colonialism and slavery; expropriation of private property for Indigenous peoples; and the abolition of fossil fuels, among other monumental projects. We are, clearly, not there yet. But as Ernst Bloch noted, that "not-yet" is also in our present. In the collective responses to disaster, we find that many of the tools for constructing that new world already exist. When Solnit talks of that emotion "graver than happiness" which animates people in the wake of disaster, she catches "a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become." Amidst the ruins, within the terrible opening of the interruption, pitched against the conditions that produce and seek to capitalize upon that interruption, we are close to complete change, to the generalization of the knowledge that everything-and everyone-might yet be transformed. In other words, in the collective response to disaster, we glimpse a real movement which could yet abolish the present state of things.

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Climate change is here. In the midst of the storm, an opportunity arises to break with capitalism and its vicious inequality. Let's seize it while we can. The alternatives are unthinkable. "What is this feeling that crops up during so many disasters?" asks Rebecca Solnit in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell.

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The Head, The Hand, and Matter: New Materialisms and the Politics of Knowledge

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The Head, The Hand, and Matter: New Materialisms and the Politics of Knowledge

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Paul Rekret

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The Head, The Hand, and Matter: New Materialisms and the Politics of Knowledge

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This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent 'material turn' in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. 'New materialist' theories are premised upon transcending

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Meehan Crist talk for the LRB on the ethics of having children in the context of climate crisis

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'I knew only that I had to survive,' Jane Lazarre writes about the process of giving birth.

I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command ... pushing with all my might, I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours with my next child - the certainty that I was dying.

'To let the baby out,' Maggie Nelson writes, 'you have to be willing to go to pieces.' 'Just this is miraculous,' Carole Maso writes. 'That I ploughed without illusion towards death. Even as I gave life.' Not everyone describes birth as an encounter with death: there are ecstatic births, orgasmic births, traumatic births, and what would be traumatic for one may not be for another. How we make sense of such experiences has always depended on the contingencies of biology as well as those of time and place, gender, class and race.

For those in industrialised countries where reproductive care is more readily - if by no means universally - available, having biological children has come to be seen as a matter of choice. Although women have been practising methods of contraception since long before the introduction of the pill, it's relatively new that having a child should be thought of as a choice. At the same time, advances in assisted reproduction technologies have made the possibility of becoming a parent more widely available, at least to those with the resources to take advantage of such technologies. The mechanics of gestation and birth have been transformed by in vitro fertilisation and egg-freezing techniques: today a pregnant person may be hetero or queer, without a partner or with many partners. They may be a surrogate gestating a foetus for friends or for paying customers. They may be a trans man or identify as non-binary.

Recently, in Sweden, for the first time a baby was born to a woman whose pregnancy was made possible by transplanting her mother's uterus into her body - the baby gestated in the same womb that had gestated the baby's mother. In 2018, in Brazil, for the first time a baby was born to a woman who had received a uterus from a deceased donor, a feat repeated in North America last June, giving reproductive hope to trans women who want to carry children of their own. So far, at least, it seems that a womb is still necessary to bring a baby into being, though researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have successfully brought premature lambs to term in an artificial womb. The apparatus - somewhat unfortunately known as a 'biobag' - is basically a plastic bag with one tube carrying amniotic fluid in and another carrying it out. Human testing is still a few years away at least, but in the future some version is likely to be used with late-term human foetuses. This could be an early step towards a more complex artificial womb capable of handling human foetuses at an even earlier stage, something that might have been welcomed by Shulamith Firestone, who called for the 'freeing of women from the tyranny of their biology by every means possible'.

If we live long enough, we are unlikely to die without having at least considered what it means to bring a new life into being. Whether or not you have children, whether you want to have a child, or dread it, or both, whether you feel confident in your desire never to procreate or find that you are not able to procreate, at some point before you reach the end you will have navigated the question of whether or not to be a biological parent. If you are reading this sentence, it is almost certain that at some point, perhaps as you are making toast in your pyjamas, or taking a bus to work while looking out at the grey right angles of a city block, or dancing barefoot, or lying awake at night with the pillow too hot against your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of 'self' knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won't. Or you will feel - with rage, or sorrow, or relief - that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.

O ne​ evening last year, the Democratic member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was chopping vegetables in her kitchen while speaking to her millions of Instagram followers via livestream: 'Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don't turn this ship around,' she said, looking up from a chopping-board littered with squash peel. 'There's a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult.' Her hands fluttered to the hem of her sweater, then to the waistband of her trousers, which she absentmindedly adjusted. 'And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should ...' she took a moment to get the wording right: 'Is it OK to still have children?' Her comment spawned a flurry of pieces on why you should or should not procreate. But the thorny question of whether it is OK to have children - a question about what we owe one another and what we owe the unborn - remains. As Ocasio-Cortez put it, there's 'just this basic moral question: like, what do we do?'

It seems increasingly clear that we are living in a time of radical destabilisation of life on Earth which complicates the act of bearing children in ways that society has yet to grapple with. We lack the language to talk to one another about the fact that a child born today will live on a planet hotter than it has ever been since human civilisation developed. The mind baulks. Language fails. How do we talk about having children when we keep hearing that even if global emissions dropped to zero tomorrow some amount of global heating is already locked in for at least a decade, as a result of the amount of carbon we have already released into the atmosphere? Or when it's possible that we have already passed tipping points, with effects that researchers don't yet understand?

We know enough to know that people are living with the effects of global heating right now. We know that climate risk and the worst effects of ecological disaster are unevenly distributed across race, class and gender, and among industrialised and developing countries - for many people, conditions tantamount to the end of the world have already arrived. We know that to avoid the devastation of vulnerable communities and to avert the risks of mass starvation, civilisational collapse and species extinction, we need to decarbonise the global economy. The faster the better. And it's not just carbon. Human activity is causing catastrophic soil degradation, chemical pollution and ecological collapse. We are witness to a staggering loss of biological diversity. Extinctions. Microplastics. Bee colonies. Dead zones. Every biological mother on the planet has DDT in her breast milk.

The polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question. With her careful rhetorical shift from the intimate 'should I' to the more theoretical 'Is it OK to still have a child?' Ocasio-Cortez conjured the paradox of scale that haunts any consideration of the ethics of childbearing in a time of planet-wide catastrophe. Having a child is at once the most intimate, irrational thing a person can do, prompted by desires so deep we hardly know where to look for their wellsprings, and an unavoidably political act that increasingly requires one to confront not only the complex biopolitics of pregnancy and birth, but also the intersecting legacies of colonialism, racism and patriarchy, all while trying to wrap one's head around the relationship between the impossible extremes of the personal and the global.

A recent article in Outside magazine called 'I Got a Vasectomy because of Climate Change' begins: 'I've always struggled to combine the idea of personal responsibility with the overwhelming need for human society to address the threat posed by climate change.' 'Want to fight climate change?' a Guardian headline from 2017 reads. 'Have fewer children.' The piece discusses a widely cited paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered 'a broad range of individual lifestyle choices' and came up with recommendations for four 'high impact' actions which had 'the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions'. These were, in ascending order of impact: eating a plant-based diet, taking one fewer transatlantic round trip by plane per year, living without a car, and having one fewer child. According to their calculations, having one fewer child would lead to emissions savings more than 24 times greater than the next option, not having a car. A US family that chooses to have one fewer child would, they write, 'provide the same level of emissions reductions as 684 teenagers who choose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their lives'. Cue candy-coloured graphs in the mainstream media with icons for a cow, a plane, a car and a baby, their emissions impact bars rising like tiny condo towers, illustrating what you can do to help 'solve' climate change.

I find this framing troubling. Most obviously, it shifts responsibility for global emissions from systemic actors like fossil fuel companies and governments onto individuals. By doing so, it gives corporations a pass while placing moral responsibility on people who live within systems where they are not free to make carbon-neutral choices. It accepts as inevitable the neoliberal order that has driven the climate crisis, and insists that our responses to this crisis take place within the same system. You can reduce your carbon footprint by eating less meat, but you can't buy carbon-neutral food. If you live in a city with poor public transport, you may have to drive to work. I am reminded of the journalist who tried to live without contributing to the destruction of the rainforests, so tried to avoid products like paper towels or plastics linked to deforestation. But despite her best efforts, she simply wasn't able to manage it. What's more, this framing ignores the fact that people living in different parts of the world have very different per capita emissions, and that overconsumption in the Global North means that children born in the Global South will feel the effects of the climate crisis with far greater force. Even the assumption that getting pregnant is a choice gives this whole conversation a decidedly Western flavour, ignoring the realities of baby-making in much of the world.

And as other researchers have pointed out, the maths don't even work. The total share of moral responsibility is overdetermined, because for any given generation, 'every preceding generation is 100 per cent responsible for that generation's emissions.' You are 100 per cent at fault for every subsequent generation's emissions, but so is every subsequent generation; so why, come to think of it, shouldn't you just blame your own parents, who are also 100 per cent at fault, for choosing to have you in the first place? This is the logic of the personal carbon footprint: you cast a shadow on the planet that it is your moral duty to minimise. If you extend that logic to the question of whether it's OK to have a child, it's hard to see how the answer could be anything other than 'no'.

When I look at those candy-coloured graphs with cows and planes and babies, I see a glaring category error. Not having a child is not the same as choosing not to have a car or to eat a plant-based diet. Having a child isn't merely one consumer choice among many. More than twenty years ago, in Maybe One, Bill McKibben preached a neo-Malthusian sermon to his fellow affluent Americans about limiting damage to the planet by making the only child 'a cultural norm'. McKibben and his wife have one child, and, he writes, 'what eventually made up our minds was largely simple desire.' As if there has ever been anything 'simple' about desire. 'Like most, though certainly not all, people,' he wrote, 'we felt some need deeper than deep to raise and nurture a child. Anything else may simply be justification.'

Today, our desires are conditioned by a baffling confluence of forces: the cultural fantasy of free consumer choice, a sense of personal responsibility for global phenomena, the pressures of precarious economic circumstances, and the terrors of ecological collapse. Some people say they don't want to bring a child into a devastated world, or they don't want to harm the planet, or don't want their child to suffer in a degraded future. And then there is the moral imperative to erase that carbon footprint, which has as much to do with care for the environment and other people as with relieving the misplaced burden of moral responsibility. In wealthy, industrialised nations, we are told to be better, greener consumers. But do we have meaningful choices? What would it look like if we did?

Recently, the logic of the carbon footprint has become tangled up with ideas about global human population in alarming ways. The idea that 'unchecked' population growth heralds disaster is most often traced back to Malthus, who warned in the late 18th century that 'the power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.' In An Essay on the Principle of Population, he observed that when food production increased, the standard of living temporarily went up, which led to population growth, and to the standard of living dropping again. In other words, humans tend to use abundant resources to create more humans rather than to improve standards of living. In time, he argued, the population would grow until there wasn't enough food to support everyone. Only the strong would survive. Malthusian thinking led scientists, economists, policymakers and indeed whole populations to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting, for example, in China's one-child policy, and forced sterilisation programmes around the world. In Puerto Rico between 1936 and 1968, the US government cited rising rates of poverty and unemployment as justification for the decision to sterilise nearly 35 per cent of women of childbearing age.

In 1968, The Population Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control measures. 'We must have population control at home,' the Ehrlichs wrote, 'hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail ... the birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate, or mankind will breed itself into oblivion.' As the feminist scholar Sarah Franklin has pointed out, even Shulamith Firestone took demographers at their word, describing the issue of global population as 'a genuine ecological problem which no number of fancy arguments and bogey statistics can erase'. The Ehrlichs' most dire predictions did not come to pass, because the new technologies of the Green Revolution, including grain hybrids, irrigation systems, fertilisers and pesticides, enabled a massive surge in global food production, but Malthusian thinking has never really disappeared. In 2012, reports from Uzbekistan revealed the forced sterilisation of women with two - or in some cases three - children, as part of an effort to keep population down. HIV-positive women have been subject to forced sterilisation, particularly in countries with high HIV rates, such as Chile, Namibia and South Africa. In Japan sterilisation is still required of trans people seeking legal recognition. After Hurricane Katrina, one Louisiana state representative proposed paying people who receive state assistance $1000 if they agreed to be sterilised. He cited budgetary concerns and the likelihood of more frequent hurricanes.

In November 2019, in a statement published in the journal BioScience, more than 11,000 scientists working in fields other than climate science declared a climate emergency: 'The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected ... It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.' The authors outlined six broad 'steps' that could be taken immediately. Their concerns followed a report from 1992, and another from 2017 known as 'the second notice' that warned of impending ecological disaster and highlighted the pressures of 'unrestrained population growth'. The lead author of both the 2017 and 2019 reports, an ecologist named William Ripple, told Business Insider that 'if an individual is concerned about climate change, three things to consider include: one, reducing the use of fossil fuels; two, eating mostly a plant-based diet; and three, having fewer children.'

E cological​ limits are real. Without trees, everybody dies. Without fresh water, everybody dies. Since 1960, the global population has more than doubled while the renewable supply of fresh water has fallen; it is also distributed unevenly, and much of it is wasted, polluted and unsustainably managed - today nearly half the global population is affected by chronic water stress or scarcity, which will only worsen. People in North Africa and the Middle East will be hardest hit, then those in South Africa, Pakistan, and large swathes of China and India. Meanwhile, the total amount of land used to grow food has remained about the same, which means the amount of cropland per person on the planet has dropped by at least half. Constant production and unsustainable agricultural practices have led to worsening soil quality, which means the food we produce has fewer nutrients, and the soil itself is continuing to erode as a result of poor human management and increasing extreme weather. Fertiliser, one of the boons of the Green Revolution, increases crop yields (though not essential nutrients), but requires massive inputs of non-renewable resources including fossil fuels and minerals like phosphorus, which is essential to life on Earth. While phosphorus can be recycled, it is currently being depleted at accelerating rates. There are fears that we will soon reach 'peak phosphorus', and about the possibility of shortages owing to geopolitical instability in the places it is mined, such as Morocco and China.

There are currently about 7.8 billion people on the planet, and demographers predict that number will rise to roughly 10.9 billion by the end of the century. In Staying with the Trouble, the radical feminist icon Donna Haraway suggests the increase in global population expected over the 21st century will 'make demands that cannot be borne without immense damage to human and nonhuman beings,' and argues for 'personal, intimate decisions to make flourishing and generous lives ... without making more babies'. Here, and in a collection co-edited with Adele E. Clarke called Making Kin Not Population (2018), Haraway imagines an ecotopia of collective, non-racist, non-coercive 'kinnovation'. 'Maybe,' she writes, 'the human people of this planet can again be numbered two or three billion or so ... over a couple of hundred years from now.' The most generous reading of Haraway is that she values life above all else, that she envisions a world in which thriving and interconnected ecosystems are valued above any single species. But this utopia is hard to imagine without also thinking about the bloody path that would lead to it. 'I was horrified,' Jenny Turner wrote in the LRB (31 May 2017). 'How can a planet lose seven or eight billion humans "over a couple of hundred years" without events of indiscriminate devastation? When people start thinking about getting rid of other people, which sorts of people does history suggest are usually got rid of first?'

This same arithmetic feeds the ecofascist fantasies that course through the online Deep Green right and helped incite mass shooters in Texas and New Zealand. In these darker visions of the future, racial purity will save the planet. Closed borders. Veganism. Drastically reduced technology. Ecofascist death squads. This is an ideology of death that claims to be on the side of life. 'What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat?' Pentti Linkola, a Finnish polemicist of ecofascism, asks. 'When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.' Who is seen as 'extra' is decided by those holding the axe. Having children is to be tightly restricted. 'Birthgiving must be licensed,' he writes. 'To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality.' Deep ecology and the Third Reich serve as inspiration.

Haraway and Linkola would each be horrified to be associated with the other, but they share a core value of radical care for the natural world. As the anarchist and social theorist Murray Bookchin pointed out in the mid-1990s, 'it would be foolhardy to ignore the tendency of antihumanism (particularly trends like sociobiology, Malthusianism and deep ecology) to feed into the politically charged social Darwinism that is very much abroad today.' Since he wrote these words, we have seen a global surge in white nationalism and fascist ideologies. The racial politics of any proposal for a less peopled world cannot be ignored.

Listen closely to rights-based strategies to reduce carbon emissions through increased access to contraception and family planning. These strategies almost always involve black and brown women in developing countries having fewer babies. There is, of course, an unmet need for reproductive care and birth control in these countries, but we should be deeply sceptical of climate solutions that place the burden of solving the problem on women's bodies, particularly the bodies of poor black and brown women, while demanding very little of those who actually caused the problem. Such approaches aren't just ahistorical; in terms of global emissions they make no practical sense. Developing nations generally have much lower emissions per capita than the countries where such proposals tend to originate.

Increasing access to birth control for women in the Global South with the aim of reducing global emissions all but jettisons the possibility of reproductive justice, which supports every woman's right to choose how many children she wants to have. Liberal feminists and reproductive rights advocates speak of the right to family planning, seeing the right not to have children as a form of resistance against the cultural demand to reproduce, while more radical feminisms try to include people whose biological and cultural reproduction has been discouraged by the same systems that support reproduction by others. 'Not-making-babies is never much related to the objective of building counterpower,' Sophie Lewis writes in a response to Haraway published in Viewpoint Magazine. 'Even if universal flourishing is easier to imagine when fewer humans are in the picture, desiring fewer humans is a terrible starting-point for any politics that hopes to include, let alone centre, those of us for whom making babies has often represented a real form of resistance.' A feminism informed by the climate crisis would do well to follow the lead of SisterSong and black feminists who coined the term 'reproductive justice' by focusing on the right to raise children in a healthy environment. Some have suggested we should be fighting for the right to have a carbon-neutral child.

There are no 'good' programmes for global population control, not just because it is anti-feminist, racist and anti-human, but because it is impossible to put an upper limit on how many people are too many for the planet. Any attempt to calculate Earth's so-called 'carrying capacity' is highly controversial, because the relationship between population and environment relies on a complex interplay of forces - institutions, markets, technology and patterns of consumption - that is not well understood. In other words, it isn't just the total number of humans that matters, but the way humans organise to use the available resources. Today, by most metrics, we're doing terribly. The systems we have are utterly incapable of meeting the needs of the global population. According to the UN, 820 million people are suffering from hunger and hundreds of thousands of people die of starvation every year. At the same time, the US Department of Agriculture estimates that in the US alone, between 30 and 40 per cent of food is wasted; calories are dumped from various points along the supply chain into landfill, along with the energy, water and labour required to produce them. Population limits do exist: resources are finite, and we could be closer than we think to some boundaries we don't want to cross. But it's dangerous to assume that we know what those limits are, and to start curbing births accordingly. If placing the responsibility for the climate crisis on individuals is wrongheaded, placing it on humanity in general is barbarous.

The least bad option might be to focus on environmental efforts - on decarbonisation, for example - and leave global population alone. Since the 1960s the rate of population growth has been slowing, and demographers now predict that by the end of this century, for the first time in human history, the world's population will stop growing. This is largely a result of falling fertility rates. The huge increase in the number of humans on the planet in recent decades, it turns out, isn't the result of people having babies, but of their living longer. Today, roughly half the people in the world live in countries with 'below replacement' fertility rates. Women in these countries - the list includes the US, Japan, European countries, much of Latin America and parts of India - have, on average, fewer than two children. Breaking with Malthusian reasoning, many people are trying to maintain a high standard of living rather than creating more humans. At the same time, it seems that the chemical revolution that produced pesticides has also resulted in a dramatic drop in male fertility. We are all ingesting chemicals that mess with human hormones, and in the last forty years sperm counts around the world have dropped by 50 per cent. If this trend continues, it's possible that humans will be incapable of unassisted reproduction within decades. At this particular moment in history, the ecological health of the planet may be endangered less by the number of babies born than by the export of a culture of overconsumption.

In some liberal democracies, the growing global population is seen as an existential threat to humanity, while falling national birth rates are seen as a domestic crisis. 'Can a progressive, reproductive-freedom-embracing society survive over time?' the historian Trent MacNamara asked in the Atlantic. 'Or is it doomed to a slow, comfortable death?' The concern is that fewer babies means a diminishing supply of workers who will struggle to bankroll a heavily indebted welfare state, where, as MacNamara dispassionately put it, 'citizens confront periodic eruptions of nativism.' Many countries already rely on immigration to keep up the supply of workers that's necessary to an economy predicated on growth. But even immigrants who come from high-fertility countries adapt within a generation or two to cultural norms and have fewer kids. So the demand for immigrant workers stays high.

Ecofascists put the Earth's 'carrying capacity' at a half a billion. Haraway's utopian vision puts it at two or three billion. A recent paper in Nature Sustainability put the limit at seven billion, arguing that beyond this figure it is hard to sustain a 'high quality of life'. But even if we could agree on a number, it would take generations to reduce global population - if it were even possible - and we need to cut carbon emissions now. Even ecofascist genocide wouldn't move fast enough. The Second World War killed between two and three per cent of the world's population. Getting from eight billion to three billion people would mean doing away with more than 60 per cent of the human population. If we act now to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, there is the chance of a better outcome for more people; if we act now to reduce global population, we have to ask, what 'humanity' are we preserving?

I n​ recent years, some people concerned about the climate crisis - including Bill McKibben and the computer scientist Benjamin Kuipers - have been considering the relevance of an AI thought experiment in which an artificial intelligence is given the goal of maximising the production of paper clips. Like most of today's AI, it will act with singular focus to achieve its goal - it won't be turned from the task. In time, this AI diverts more and more of the powers of the planet towards making paper clips, to the point that people become alarmed and try to turn it off, but they can't because this is a super-smart AI that has made itself smarter, not because it values intelligence, but because being smarter helps it achieve its goal of maximising paper clip production, so it finds a way to ensure we can't turn it off (because then how would it keep making paper clips?). At some point it decides that keeping humans alive is detrimental to its goal, because humans need resources, and in fact humans are resources, and all these resources could be used to make more paper clips. With utter indifference, then, to the existence of humanity, it turns more and more of everything into paper clips, until the world as we know it is reduced to one giant pile of paper clips. This thought experiment, known as the 'paper clip maximiser', first proposed by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, is a pretty good metaphor for a global socioeconomic system that values the production of profit above all else. In a sense, we're living in an experiment in which fossil fuel companies, whose goal is to maximise profit, have become an existential threat to humanity.

Before I gave the lecture on which this piece is based I was contacted by a group called BP or Not BP? They informed me that I would be speaking in an auditorium at the British Museum called the 'BP Lecture Theatre' and that there was an active campaign to end oil sponsorship of the museum. It made me wonder: what is BP doing in a museum anyway? The question is worth exploring, because BP's corporate sponsorship of the arts is part of a plan that affects us all. Early last year, BP launched a global PR campaign under the rubric 'possibilities everywhere', which paints the company as committed to a cleaner, greener future. One advert features a young woman cheerily popping open an umbrella to deal with 'unpredictable' weather on her way to work in a clothing boutique, followed by shots of a gleaming, floating solar panel array while a reassuring female voiceover explains that 'BP is partnering with Lightsource, Europe's largest solar company.' Another ad begins with an alarm clock going off and a baby lying in a crib, mother's arms reaching in, then a montage of a family's busy morning, as another soothing female voice says, 'Welcome to our busy world, where we all want more energy, with less carbon footprint.' Just last month, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest American trade group for oil and gas, representing more than six hundred corporations, including BP America, launched 'Energy for Progress', a 'seven-figure' campaign aimed at convincing the public that the fossil fuel industry is - after decades of spending billions of dollars on disinformation and political lobbying to successfully stall climate action - a good-faith partner in the fight against climate change. If you've seen any of these ads (they've been hard to avoid), you'd be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is now a core component of BP's business strategy. You might think that the fossil fuel industry is investing heavily in a greener future. You would be wrong.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), which keeps tabs on all the major players in the industry, released a report in January which shows that renewable energy and carbon capture technologies currently represent just under 1 per cent of the industry's investments. BP does slightly better than some of its competitors, with clean energy amounting to about 3 per cent of the company's total capital expenditure. Environmentalist groups have long accused the fossil fuel industry of 'greenwashing', and it is indisputable that the PR campaigns grossly misrepresent what these companies actually do, and what internal documents confirm they plan to continue doing far into the future: extracting and selling increasing amounts of fossil fuels. BP's own report on 'Major Projects 2019' states that in 2017 and 2018 it started 13 major oil and gas projects, which will 'make a huge contribution to the 900,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of new production'.

BP, to be fair, has been working on renewable energy for decades - it just can't figure out how to make these technologies profitable. As its outgoing CEO Bob Dudley (who retired in February) told Axios in 2018, 'if someone said here's $10 billion (£7.6 billion), go invest it in these new energy technologies, for the good of our shareholders we're not confident enough to be able to do that yet.' Which is sort of the point: if the interests of shareholders - maximising profit - come into conflict with the public good, profit will always win. The problem isn't just BP, it's structural. BP is legally obliged to act in its shareholders' interests.

In a sense, we can see embodied in fossil fuel companies the problem both Haraway and Linkola are trying to solve: how to circumvent the suicidal logic of the profit motive. While Haraway and Linkola choose different kinds of antihumanism, fossil fuel companies have no choice: under modern capitalism and corporate law they have to choose profit. The one thing that differentiates these companies from the paper clip maximiser is that they can't also do away with humanity altogether: oil companies need workers and consumers. So the profit motive is driving them towards their own destruction. This is not to say it would be good for humans if these companies ceased to exist tomorrow. We depend on the energy they provide for food, clean water, light and so much more. But the fact remains that BP's incredibly lucrative business model and the products it sells are fundamentally at odds with human survival on this planet, and the company has spent billions of dollars to make us believe otherwise.

The legal charity ClientEarth filed a complaint in December arguing that BP's new global ad campaign is misleading consumers. One lawyer described it as a 'smokescreen'. But the most accurate description is propaganda. We have spent our whole lives being bombarded with the message that fossil fuels are good, that they are necessary for 'progress'. Fossil fuel companies can't keep doing business without public support, or at least acquiescence, and they know it. This is what the industry refers to as the 'social licence' to operate.

On her podcast, Drilled, the climate journalist Amy Westervelt tells the story of Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who helped create modern PR and wrote the propaganda playbook for the fossil fuel industry. Lee said the thing companies need to worry about most is getting the public on their side. He learned this while rehabilitating the reputation of John D. Rockefeller after the Ludlow Massacre, in which striking coal workers and their families were gunned down at a mine Rockefeller owned. Lee helped turn Rockefeller from 'a man routinely described as the most hated man in America into a kindly philanthropist who was widely admired'. Lee also worked on propaganda efforts during the First World War. As Westervelt explains, the experience taught him that if you can pool together enough resources, you can wage a multi-front, 'all-out psychological war that's impossible to beat'. After the war, Lee worked with the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which later became ExxonMobil, to form the American Petroleum Institute, the organisation now spending billions of dollars on that new PR campaign. And it's not just ads. The fossil fuel industry has been running outreach programmes in American schools since at least the 1960s.

These companies have also worked hard to avoid being held accountable for the climate crisis. In fact, it was BP that popularised the idea of the personal carbon footprint. They introduced it in a 2005 US media campaign that cost more than $100 million per year, deflecting responsibility for combating climate change onto the individual consumer. BP even created an online calculator you could use to work out your own footprint. Since then, 'carbon calculators' have proliferated. On the BP Education Services webpage, the part of its website targeted at schoolchildren, there is a 'carbon footprint toolkit' that includes 'an interactive activity on the topic of carbon footprints, and how energy use and climate change are connected', as well as a tool to calculate the carbon footprint of your school. In other words, the narrative that you, personally, are responsible for the climate crisis has been carefully crafted and drilled into you by the fossil fuel industry.

Fossil fuel companies are also astonishingly good at imagining the future. An internal document written for Royal Dutch Shell twenty years ago, 'Group Scenarios 1998-2020', sketched out two possible scenarios for the future, one of which seems eerily familiar:

Following the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the US government and fossil fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done. A social reaction to the use of fossil fuels grows, and individuals become 'vigilante environmentalists' in the same way, a generation earlier, they had become fiercely anti-tobacco. Direct-action campaigns against companies escalate. Young consumers, especially, demand action.

As the climate journalist Emily Atkin writes, 'Shell not only knew about the massive harm its business model posed to life on Earth. Shell knew, for decades, how the harm their products caused could change the political, legal and cultural landscape.' 'They're not scared,' she writes. 'They're prepared.'

As the Shell document has it, 'reputation is key to success': in the future it imagined, corporations will have to respond to climate change with exactly the kind of propaganda that we're seeing today. They will need to convince people, the document says, that they are 'making the world a "better place" by spreading market capitalism, encouraging political pluralism, providing employment, and modelling cultural diversity and environmental concern wherever they go'.

Today, in a real world that looks a lot like Shell's imagined scenario, fossil fuel companies are trying to appear serious about addressing the climate crisis while planning for a future of increased demand. In 2018, BP announced it would try to make enough carbon emissions reductions to 'ensure that as our business grows, our carbon footprint does not'. Last month, its new CEO, Bernard Looney (yes, that's his name), made a surprising announcement. He said that the company would stop 'corporate reputation advertising' as part of a new pledge to become a net zero company by 2050, and that the money being spent on the 'possibilities everywhere' campaign would be redirected 'to promote net zero policies, ideas, actions, collaborations and its own net zero ambition'. BP says it will, among other things, aim for a 50 per cent cut in the carbon emissions of the products it sells, increase investments in non-oil and gas companies 'over time', and 'more actively advocate for policies supporting net zero', including carbon pricing. This is an unprecedented announcement from a Big Oil company. But 2050 is a long way off, and the plan lacks details, though Looney says announcements in September will help. BP has made big promises in the past, most famously when it tried to rebrand itself as 'Beyond Petroleum' in 2000. That effort fizzled when the company couldn't make a profit on renewables and went back to business as usual. Climate experts and advocates have responded to this latest announcement with deep scepticism. As the Harvard researcher Geoffrey Supran wrote to me, 'BP's track record offers reason for concern that this "net zero" announcement may be yet another veil of propaganda that wins them social and political capital but fails to deliver action commensurate with the problem.'

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry continues to oppose the regulation of methane, to block carbon taxes and fund climate deniers, all while touting the Earth-saving possibilities of carbon capture technologies that have never gone beyond expensive pilot schemes and are unusable on a large scale. This is where corporate sponsorship of institutions like the British Museum comes into play. What BP is buying - the social licence to operate - is far more valuable than the funding it offers.

In recent years, under pressure from divestment movements, cultural institutions have begun to back away from fossil fuel sponsorship. The Tate, the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company have all ended sponsorship deals with BP. And last month the Guardian became the first major newspaper in the world to ban fossil fuel ads. 'Our decision,' a statement issued on 29 January reads, 'is based on the decades-long efforts by many in that industry to prevent meaningful climate action by governments around the world.' BP's relationship with the British Museum will be up for review next year. It is an opportunity for the museum to show leadership by ending the sponsorship deal.

I have​ spent more time than I'd like to admit scrolling through posts by people who have made the decision not to have children because of the climate crisis. These posts radiate varying degrees of fear, despair, political commitment, solidarity, anxiety, and a care for and delight in already existing children. 'I always imagined myself having children,' one person writes.

However I have felt incredibly hopeless for our future for many years because of the interaction [ sic] of governments on climate change ... I love kids and feel deeply saddened by this, but I would not willingly want to bring a child into a world I see will be plagued by disaster, ruin, famine & wars ... total destruction. I am terrified for what our planet will be in just a few years.

'The science is clear,' someone else writes. 'We are about to witness the destruction of everything we love because of the climate crisis. I feel incapable of welcoming an innocent human being into this world knowing the facts.' Such fatalism worries climate scientists, many of whom are struggling to convey the profound risks they see inscribed on the planet and in their data, while also making it clear that scientific probability is not prediction. None of the scenarios that scientists have outlined is inevitable - they are more or less likely depending on what we do today. This is not to say that there is a linear path along which every carbon molecule counts: the climate system is a stochastic, chaotic system with tipping points that scientists may not recognise even as they are crossed. No one knows what happens when this much carbon gets dumped into the Earth's atmosphere in such a short amount of time. Even the effects of the carbon already released remains unknown. According to one widely cited study, there is a 13 per cent chance that 1.5ºC warming by the end of the century is already inevitable, which leaves an 87 per cent chance that it is not. Depending on your disposition, you may interpret this as good news, or terrible news.

I am hesitant even to mention uncertainty in the same breath as climate science, because of the way climate deniers and obstructionists, especially those funded by the fossil fuel industry, have latched onto it as a reason to delay action. But I think it is worth trying to wrap our heads around climate science as best we can. It is unlike most other sciences, which tend to proceed by making predictions about the way natural phenomena work, then running experiments to test the strength of those predictions. A scientific law will accurately predict an outcome, given certain initial conditions: where a stone will land if launched with a certain force at a certain angle; the colour of your unborn child's eyes. But there is no other Earth on which to run experiments. So climate scientists build models using known physical laws, then test and improve them with data. A climate model is, as the scientist and astronaut Piers Sellers put it in the New Yorke r, theory written in code.

These models are constantly being updated to reflect new findings that might accelerate, slow or complicate trajectories. They are also missing processes that researchers still aren't even aware of: scientists have struggled to model carbon cycle feedbacks, for example, and there could be some devastating surprises there. Then there is the speed with which fossil fuels have been extracted and burned over the past 150 years, which has resulted in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increasing at an astonishing rate. Geological records show that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere have caused 'extreme warming events' and massive ecological upheaval in the past. During the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when carbon levels spiked and temperatures increased by as much as 8ºC, it took between ten and twenty thousand years for temperatures to peak. And that is considered extremely rapid. The current rate of change is unprecedented.

'I watch climate change happen every day on a computer,' the climate scientist Kate Marvel said recently,

on a fake planet that I can do experiments on. But climate change doesn't happen on a fake planet; it happens on our planet, in the world that we've built. You can't put Bashar al-Assad in a climate model. You can't put the legacy of colonialism in a climate model. The drying trend we've seen in the Levant region interacts with the world we've actually built. Climate change is ... not something you can remove from the complexities of human society.

Those complexities may alter the nature and the extent of catastrophe. All of which means that the consequences of the heating climate are extremely difficult to predict. Pessimism may be warranted; fatalism is not. The future is not written. The real choice we face is not whether to eat meat or how many children to have, but how to make profound and rapid structural changes, without which no personal choices will matter. As one climate scientist recently put it to me: 'Fuck hope.' She is pregnant with her second child.

W hen​ my son was born, language left. This was the way it felt, during the hours of hard labour, when I went inward, away from the world outside. I stopped thinking in sentences, then lost phrases, then words. Eventually, it was like being at the bottom of a deep, dark well, hearing voices drift down, but being unable, or perhaps unmoved, to respond. It wasn't frightening. I was simply elsewhere, and too profoundly busy to bother with all that far-off noise. I remember, at one point, being distinctly aware of my mind - the conscious everyday mind that talks to itself and to other people, the self where language is loud - floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access. I was two selves at once. A double consciousness. If I had to, I knew I could still speak to the people around me, but it seemed so silly and small up there. I let it go.

Later, I remember being exhausted, and looking out at a grey sky, and understanding that time had passed and there was a storm. I thought I could not push again. And then I did. And again. And again. Then there was a moment I can only describe as 'coming to' - that's what it felt like, that I had blacked out and was waking into the room, flooding back into myself, and my son had arrived.

The first time I read a story of birth that described it as an encounter with death, I remember thinking, that's not how it was at all - I was not willing to go to pieces. I had work to do. But then, the overwhelming demand to let the baby out was not separable from the feeling that I had entered into something much larger than myself, and that my sense of self was unravelling, and that the only way out was through. Maybe that's what it feels like to go to pieces. You have to risk life to give life.

I can understand why some people might see having a child as a turn towards death - a fatal complicity with the death spiral of global fossil capitalism. But, for me, having a child has been a commitment to life, and a commitment to the possibilities of a human future on this warming planet. It means giving up claims to moral purity, not because nothing matters, but because things do. 'Staying open and willing is difficult,' Louise Erdrich writes. 'Very often in labour one must fight the instinct to resist pain and instead embrace it, move towards it, work with what hurts the most.'

It is increasingly delusional to believe that global heating will be kept under 2ºC. And even if we managed to keep it below 1.5ºC, the target set by the signatories of the Paris Agreement, almost all of which are currently blowing past their unenforceable emissions-reduction commitments, we will still see wrenching ecological and social disruptions. The climate we have right now - in which people are facing devastating crop failures, fires, floods and water shortages; in which fisheries are collapsing and pollinators are disappearing from increasingly silent springs; and in which millions of people are being forced from their homes in what is already the largest human migration since the last Ice Age - is the best climate for human flourishing we're likely to see in our lifetimes. Everything is going to change. Even the most optimistic scenarios are fraught with uncertainty and potential catastrophe, but also the possibility of a renewed sense of futurity.

Before I got pregnant, my partner and I tried to parse the ethics of having a child at such a time. What was the risk to the world, to the child, to us? Was it worth taking, and was the alternative a better or worse kind of risk? In the end, not having a child didn't seem, for us, like a powerful or particularly meaningful response to the realities of a changing climate, but a way of allowing the toxic logic of the carbon footprint to shape our sense of what was possible.

'Two, maximum,' Prince Harry assured the readers of British Vogue, following the calculus that says only replace yourself and add no more. Only one, Bill McKibben implored, the planet needs us to be fewer. None, Donna Haraway said, urging us to imagine bonds beyond the biological, as we are already far too many. None for you, the ecofascists say, or you, or you, or you. This is the moral logic of the carbon footprint at work, winnowing us to death.

I believe in the possibility of human flourishing on this planet while also acknowledging the profound barriers already in place, and the profound risks - which are not shared equally - posed by ecological catastrophe. Some may find this naive, but the alternatives can only guarantee a barbarous future. I have to believe there are ways that children today might learn to live lives with some joy in the midst of whatever is to come. This is not to say that you should have a biological child. I rather think the point is that no one should tell anyone else whether or not they should procreate. One does not have to give birth to believe in the possibility of a human future.

'Is it OK to still have a child?' This seems to be the wrong question in a world where our lives are intertwined, complicit and interdependent in ways we are just beginning to understand. It runs the risk of mistaking agency for power at a moment when the stakes are extremely high. As climate scientists wrote in Nature in November, evidence is mounting that climate tipping points are more likely to occur, and to occur at lower levels of global heating, than previously thought. If it is human nature to burn through this planet's resources as we have for the past 150 years, then we're done; if it is human systems that do this, then we've got a chance. Modern human civilisation hasn't yet actually tried to exist sustainably on this planet: we rarely break free from the binary thinking that pits humans against the rest of nature.

The future will always be more terrible and wonderful than any of us can possibly imagine. What will the climate crisis look like in ten years, twenty years, fifty years? We don't know. How fast can we achieve global decarbonisation? We don't know. This uncertainty both inspires dread and allows for the possibility of hope. Not the false hope that global economies driven by fossil fuels will be able to keep chugging along as they have for too long already, or that the comforts, excesses and relative safeties of industrialised nations will be preserved, but hope for the possibility of human flourishing in unprecedented and as yet unimaginable circumstances.

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Meehan Crist · Is it OK to have a child? · LRB 23 February 2020

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'I knew only that I had to survive,' Jane Lazarre writes about the process of giving birth. I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command ...

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Podcast from Post Carbon Institute: 'Where Michael Moore Is Censored by the Left and Promoted by the Right…'

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April 29, 2020

Paying attention to the buzz around Planet of the Humans, the new film by Michael Moore, is like standing in the middle of a three-ring circus. In ring #1 are the filmmakers, who raise critical questions about how renewable sources can power industrial society, but do so with questionable facts and mean-spirited attacks. In ring #2 are the left-wing enviros, who are barfing out lazy accusations of ecofascism and doing all they can to avoid addressing the film's legitimate questions about population and consumption. In ring #3 are the oil-soaked, right-wing libertarians who think this film will help them keep earning and burning their way to the bank at the end of Armageddon Road. Asher, Rob, and Jason grapple with the cacophony, hash out the good and bad of the film and the response to it, and argue for an honest, messy-middle approach to the transition away from fossil fuels.

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Episode 24: Banana Town: Where Michael Moore Is Censored by the Left and Promoted by the Right

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April 29, 2020 Paying attention to the buzz around Planet of the Humans, the new film by Michael Moore, is like standing in the middle of a three-ring circus. In ring #1 are the filmmakers, who raise critical questions about how renewable sources can power industrial society, but do so with questionable facts and mean-spirited ...

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Graham Harman and Slavoj Zizek: talk and debate: On Object Oriented Ontology

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In Conversation with Verso

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Timothy Morton in Conversation with Verso books

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Michael Lewis writing for Newcastle University Philosophy Blog for Staff and Students

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March 2020

It's important in times of crisis, that we not forget to think. And indeed, this apparently exceptional moment has given rise to thought among contemporary philosophers, in particular those in the continental tradition, for whom this event confirms or nuances or reminds them of certain things they've been thinking about for quite a while now, or it reminds them of moments from their tradition which suddenly stand out as relevant and significant in thinking what is going on today.

So here is a selection of fascinating debates on the matter, that have appeared in the press, largely online, over the last few weeks, and it constitutes a great example of the vitality of philosophy and the way in which it can be deployed constantly to reconceptualise events that are happening to us, either frequently or only from time to time, as they seem to be today in particular.

We start with an excerpt on the plague and the way power (disciplinary power) was exerted in times of plague, by one of the philosophers who coined the notion of 'biopolitics', which is to say the application of law to (biological) life, and that means political power governing and controlling life, which according to some was by no means always the case - since the place of life, mere life, bare survival, the reproduction of physical, biological life, was understood in Aristotle and thus ancient Greece to be the home (the oikos) and not the city (the polis): life and death, health and disease were taken to be private matters, matters for private life; not public life, civic life, the life of the citizen, the (for Aristotle) truly human life.

http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/?fbclid=IwAR3PxeG8wd9R3biaz4Y3kwVOQHFyKFFyGoCesn6rq13NC2M2PZapI0svqPA :

Michel Foucault
From "Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison", translated by A. Sheridan, pp. 195-228. Vintage Books, 1995.
(in collaboration with the Journal "Antinomie", https://antinomie.it/)

The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, ﬁsh and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the "crows", who can be left to die: these are "people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject ofﬁces". It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is ﬁxed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.

Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: "A considerable body of militia, commanded by good ofﬁcers and men of substance", guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, "as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion". At each of the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they "observe their actions". Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them "in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death"; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: "In this way he will ﬁnd out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed." Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the dead.

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the "lock up", the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears "the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition": a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the ofﬁce of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note "to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates". The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it.

Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room "the furniture and goods" are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, "in the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as they left that they did not have on entering". Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a ﬁxed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical ﬁgure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary ﬁction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the ﬁgure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his "true" name, his "true" place, his "true" body, his "true" disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of "contagions", of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.
Giorgio Agamben The Invention of an Epidemic
If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Conﬁnement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensiﬁcation and a ramiﬁcation of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great conﬁnement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The ﬁrst is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The ﬁrst is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may deﬁne ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion.

___________

(Published in Italian on Quodlibet, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia)

26/02/2020

Faced with the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus, we should begin from the declaration issued by the National Research Council (CNR), which states not only that "there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy", but also that "the infection, according to the epidemiologic data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes mild/moderate symptoms (a sort of influenza) in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15% of cases a pneumonia may develop, but one with a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. It has been estimated that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy".
If this is the real situation, why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic, thus provoking an authentic state of exception with serious limitations on movement and a suspension of daily life in entire regions?

Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response. First and foremost, what is once again manifest is the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government. The legislative decree immediately approved by the government "for hygiene and public safety reasons" actually produces an authentic militarization "of the municipalities and areas with the presence of at least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of transmission is unknown, or in which there is at least one case that is not ascribable to a person who recently returned from an area already affected by the virus". Such a vague and undetermined definition will make it possible to rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, as it's almost impossible that other such cases will not appear elsewhere. Let's consider the serious limitations of freedom the decree contains: a) a prohibition against any individuals leaving the affected municipality or area; b) a prohibition against anyone from outside accessing the affected municipality or area; c) the suspension of events or initiatives of any nature and of any form of gatherings in public or private places, including those of a cultural, recreational, sporting and religious nature, including enclosed spaces if they are open to the public; d) the closure of kindergartens, childcare services and schools of all levels, as well as the attendance of school, higher education activities and professional courses, except for distance learning; e) the closure to the public of museums and other cultural institutions and spaces as listed in article 101 of the code of cultural and landscape heritage, pursuant to Legislative Decree 22 January 2004, no. 42. All regulations on free access to those institutions and spaces are also suspended; f) suspension of all educational trips both in Italy and abroad; g) suspension of all public examination procedures and all activities of public offices, without prejudice to the provision of essential and public utility services; h) the enforcement of quarantine measures and active surveillance of individuals who have had close contacts with confirmed cases of infection.

The disproportionate reaction to what according to the CNR is something not too different from the normal flus that affect us every year is quite blatant. It is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation.
Jean-Luc Nancy

The other no less disturbing factor is the state of fear that in recent years has evidently spread among individual consciences and that translates into an authentic need for situations of collective panic for which the epidemic provides once again the ideal pretext. Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitations of freedom imposed by governments are accepted in the name of a desire for safety that was created by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.

______________

(Published in Italian on "Antinomie", https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/27/eccezione-virale/

27/02/2020

Giorgio Agamben, an old friend, argues that the coronavirus is hardly different from a normal flu. He forgets that for the "normal" flu there is a vaccine that has been proven effective. And even that needs to be readapted to viral mutations year after year. Despite this, the "normal" flu always kills several people, while coronavirus, against which there is no vaccine, is evidently capable of causing far higher levels of mortality. The difference (according to sources of the same type as those Agamben uses) is about 1 to 30: it does not seem an insignificant difference to me.

Giorgio states that governments take advantage of all sorts of pretexts to continuously establish states of exception. But he fails to note that the exception is indeed becoming the rule in a world where technical interconnections of all kinds (movement, transfers of every type, impregnation or spread of substances, and so on) are reaching a hitherto unknown intensity that is growing at the same rate as the population. Even in rich countries this increase in population entails a longer life expectancy, hence an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk.

We must be careful not to hit the wrong target: an entire civilization is in question, there is no doubt about it. There is a sort of viral exception - biological, computer-scientific, cultural - which is pandemic. Governments are nothing more than grim executioners, and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary manoeuvre than a political reflection.
Roberto Esposito Cured to the Bitter End
I mentioned that Giorgio is an old friend. And I apologize for bringing up a personal recollection, but I am not abandoning a register of general reflection by doing so. Almost thirty years ago doctors decided I needed a heart transplant. Giorgio was one of the very few who advised me not to listen to them. If I had followed his advice, I would have probably died soon enough. It is possible to make a mistake. Giorgio is nevertheless a spirit of such finesse and kindness that one may define him - without the slightest irony - as exceptional.

____________

(Published in Italian on Antinomie, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/)

28/02/2020

In this text by Nancy I find all the traits that have always characterized him - in particular an intellectual generosity I was personally affected by in the past, drawing immense inspiration from his thinking, especially in my work on communities. What interrupted our dialogue at one point was Nancy's sharp opposition to the paradigm of biopolitics, to which he has always opposed, as in this text, the relevance of technological apparatus - as if the two things were necessarily in contrast. While in fact even the term "viral" itself points to a biopolitical contamination between different languages - political, social, medical and technological - united by the same immune syndrome, meant as a polarity semantically opposed to the lexicon of communitas. Though Derrida himself used the category of immunisation extensively, Nancy's refusal to confront himself with the paradigm of biopolitics was probably influenced by the dystonia with regard to Foucault that he inherited from Derrida. In any case, we are talking about three of the most important contemporary philosophers.
Riposte by Jean-Luc Nancy to Roberto Esposito (through email to Sergio Benvenuto):
It remains a fact that anyone with eyes to see cannot deny the constant deployment of biopolitics. From the intervention of biotechnology on domains that were once considered exclusively natural, like birth and death, to bioterrorism, the management of immigration and more or less serious epidemics, all political conflicts today have the relation between politics and biological life at their core. But this reference to Foucault in itself should lead us to not losing sight of the historically differentiated character of biopolitical phenomena. One thing is claiming, as Foucault does, that in the last two and half centuries politics and biology have progressively formed an ever tighter knot, with problematic and sometimes tragic results. Another is to assimilate incomparable incidents and experiences. I would personally avoid making any sort of comparison between maximum security prisons and a two-week quarantine in the Po Lowlands. From the legal point of view, of course, emergency decreeing, long since applied even to cases like this one, in which it is not absolutely necessary, pushes politics towards procedures of exception that may in the long run undermine the balance of power in favour of the executive branch. But to talk of risks to democracy in this case seems to me an exaggeration to say the least. I think that we should try to separate levels and distinguish between long-running processes and recent events. With regard to the former, politics and medicine have been tied in mutual implications for at least three centuries, something that has ultimately transformed both. On the one hand this has led to a process of medicalization of politics, which, seemingly unburdened of any ideological limitations, shows itself as more and more dedicated to "curing" its citizens from risks it is often responsible for emphasizing. On the other we witness a politicization of medicine, invested with tasks of social control that do not belong to it - which explains the extremely heterogeneous assessments virologists are making on the nature and gravity of the coronavirus. Both these tendencies deform politics compared to its classic profile. Also because its objectives no longer comprehend single individuals or social classes, but segments of population differentiated according to health, age, gender or even ethnic group.

But once again, with regard to absolutely legitimate concerns, it is necessary not to lose our sense of proportion. It seems to me that what is happening in Italy today, with the chaotic and rather grotesque overlapping of national and regional prerogatives, has more the character of a breakdown of public authorities than that of a dramatic totalitarian grip.

"Dear Robert, neither "biology" nor "politics" are precisely determined terms today. I would actually say the contrary. That's why I have no use for their assemblage.
Sergio Benvenuto Welcome to Seclusion
Best regards, Jean-Luc"

2-III-2020

(Published in Italian on Antinomie, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/03/05/benvenuto-in-clausura/)

I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist, yet the idea has formed in my mind that - though over seventy, and hence among the most vulnerable - I have little to fear from the coronavirus for my health. " For mine", for mere reasons of probability, like when I fly on a plane: it could crash, but it's highly unlikely. In fact, so far only around 3000[1] people worldwide have died as a consequence of the virus. Practically nothing compared to the 80,000 killed by common flus in 2019. Those who have died in Italy from the epidemic (over 50 at the moment of writing[2]) are probably less than those killed in car accidents plus worker fatalities. In short, I am not so much scared of contagion, but I'm more concerned about the economic backlash for a country like mine, in constant decline since 1990s. After all, poverty kills too.

But I also know that my relative disregard, though rationally based, is civically reprehensible: were I a good citizen I should behave as if I were panic-stricken. Because everything that's being done in Italy (closing schools, stadiums, museums, theatres and so on) has a purely preventive function, it only slows down the spread of the virus. It plays on large numbers, but appeals to each particular being.

The panic that has stricken Italy (but not only, all over the world people are talking about nothing else) was basically a political choice - or a biopolitical one, as Roberto Esposito stresses - established first and foremost by the World Health Organization. Because today, in an era when the great democracies are producing grotesque leaderships, it's the great supranational organizations like the WHO - and the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the other central banks, and so on - that (fortunately) take the real decisions, thus partly redressing the neo-fascist whims of today's democracies. Tedros Adhanom, the Ethiopian who is Director General of the WHO, has clearly stated the need for prevention: he knows that for the time being Covid-19 is not causing disasters and that maybe in the end it could turn out to have been nothing more than an insidious influenza. But it could also turn into what the so-called "Spanish" flu became in 1918: the latter infected a third of the planet's population causing something between 20 and 50 million deaths, more victims than all military casualties during the First World War. In other words, what's really frightening Is not what we know, but what we do not know about the virus, and there's very little we do know about it. We are getting to know it day by day and so it creates the anxiety - by no means irrational - of the unknown.

Note that in the case of the "Spanish" flu political power acted in exactly the opposite way as it is doing today: it concealed the epidemic, because in most cases the countries involved were at war. It was named the "Spanish" flu simply because at the time it was only in Spain, which was not at war, that the media talked about it (but apparently the flu originated in the United States). Political power today (which is, I stress once more, increasingly supranational in economics too) has chosen the strategy of panic, so as to encourage people to isolate the virus. And indeed, the isolation of the infected still remains, after centuries, the best strategy to suppress incurable epidemics. Leprosy was contained in Europe - as Foucault too stresses - precisely by isolating lepers as much as possible, often relegating them to faraway islands, like Molokai in Hawaii, where various movies have been filmed.

In August 2011 I was in New York when it was about to be hit by Hurricane Irene, which had already devastated the Antilles. I was struck by the way experts and politicians on the media all gave frankly quite cataclysmic messages to citizens: "it will be a complete disaster - the refrain was - because New Yorkers couldn't care less, they're snobs". But it turned out that they followed the guidelines scrupulously (even I vacated my garden respecting the precepts) and Irene crossed New York causing no damage. So, did those experts and politicians get it all wrong, or did they have a bit of fun terrifying the population of New York? No, a disaster was avoided. In some cases, spreading terror can be wiser than taking things "philosophically".

Let's imagine that Italy as a whole - from the media to government officials - had opted for the "Spanish" strategy, deciding not to take any precautions and allowing Covid-19 to spread across the country like a normal flu. Every other country, including other European states, would have immediately isolated Italy, considering the whole country a hotbed: something that would have caused far greater economic damage than the considerable one Italy is enduring now. When others are scared - for example the Israelis and Qataris, who have prohibited Italians from entering their countries - we're better off being scared too. Sometimes being scared is an act of courage.

Let's imagine that, once allowed to spread at will 20 million Italians caught the virus: if it's true, as the earliest calculations indicate, that COVID-19 is deadly for 2% of those infected, this would have led to the death of around 400,000 Italians, mainly senior citizens. A hypothesis many do not consider entirely negative, because it would allow our old-age pensions system to breathe: Why not trim down a few oldies in a country that's ageing by the minute? is what they think without saying it. But I don't think public opinion would have accepted 400,000 deaths. The oppositions would have risen up, the government would have been ousted by popular acclaim and the far-right leader Salvini would have won the elections with at least 60% of the popular vote. In short, the precautionary measures that have been taken, however painful - especially because of the economic damage - are the lesser evil.

The measures taken in Italy are not therefore, as one of my favourite philosophers, Giorgio Agamben, argues, the result of the despotic instinct of the ruling classes, who are viscerally passionate about the "state of exception". Thinking that the measures adopted in China, South Korea, Italy and so on are the consequence of a conspiracy means falling into what other philosophers have called "conspiratorial theories of history". I would call them paranoiac interpretations of history, like the millions who believe 9/11 was a CIA plot. My domestic worker, a very good-natured woman, is convinced that the epidemic was schemed by the "Arabs", by which I suppose she means the Muslims. Whether we're influenced by our small parish or by Carl Schmitt, whether ignorant or extremely learned, many of us need to make up our own plague-spreaders.

I am often surprised how often many philosophers need to be reminded of something that, paraphrasing Hamlet, sounds like: There are more politics in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When I say I'm convinced that this epidemic will produce far greater economic calamities (a crisis like in 2008?) than medical ones, I place myself within an optimistic perspective, which could be disproved in the next days.

And as from tomorrow, I too, though chuckling somewhat, will try to be a good citizen. I will avoid certain public places, I won't shake hands of persons I'll meet. I live in Rome, and I will not visit friends in the North and I will discourage them from coming to see me[3].

After all, the effects of this epidemic will strengthen a tendency that would have in any case prevailed, and of which "working remotely" or "wfh", working from home and avoiding the office, is only one aspect. It will be less and less common for us to wake up in the morning and board public or private vehicles to reach the workplace; more and more we will work on our computers from our homes, which will also become our offices. And thanks to the Amazon and Netflix revolutions, we will no longer need to go out to do the shopping or to theatres to see movies, nor to buy books in bookshops: stores and bookshops (alas) will disappear and everything will be done from home. Life will become "hearthed" or "homeized" (we already need to start thinking up neologisms). Schools too will disappear: with the use of devices like Skype, students will be able to attend their teachers' lessons from home. This generalized seclusion caused by the epidemic (or rather, by attempts to prevent it) will become our habitual way of life.

1] The figure has increased to 3652. Until now there are 107,000 ascertained cases and 61,000 recoveries (8 March 2020)[editors' update]

[2] The number of fatalities in Italy has risen to 250 (8 March 2020) [editors' update]
The Community of the Forsaken: A Response to Agamben and Nancy Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan
[3] A resolution made obsolete by the government ordinance effectively sealing off part of Northern Italy (8 March 2020). [editors' update]

08/03/2020

(in collaboration with the Journal "Antinomie", https://antinomie.it/)

India has for long been full of exceptional peoples, making meaningless the notion of "state of exception" or of "extending" it. Brahmins are exceptional for they alone can command the rituals that run the social order and they cannot be touched by the lower caste peoples (let alone desired) for fear of ritualistic pollution. In modern times this involves separate public toilets for them, in some instances. The Dalits, the lowest castes peoples too cannot be touched by the upper castes, let alone desired, because they are considered the most 'polluting'. As we can see, the exception of the Brahmin is unlike the exclusion of the Dalit. One of the Dalit castes named "Pariah" was turned into a 'paradigm' by Arendt, which unfortunately lightened the reality of their suffering. In 1896, when the bubonic plague entered Bombay, the British colonial administration tried to combat the spread of the disease using the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897. However, caste barriers, including the demand by the upper castes to have separate hospitals and their refusal to receive medical assistance from the lower caste peoples among the medical personnel, added to causes of the deaths of more than ten million people in India.

The spread of coronavirus[1], which has infected more than 100,000 people according to official figures, reveals what we wonder about ourselves today-are we worth saving, and at what cost? On the one hand there are the conspiracy theories which include "bioweapons" and a global project to bring down migration. On the other hand, there are troublesome misunderstandings, including the belief that COVID-19 is something propagated through "corona beer", and the racist commentaries on the Chinese people. But of an even greater concern is that, at this con-juncture of the death of god and birth of mechanical god, we have been persisting in a crisis about the "worth" of man. It can be seen in the responses to the crises of climate, technological 'exuberance', and coronavirus.

Earlier, man gained his worth through various theo-technologies. For example, one could imagine that the creator and creature were the determinations of something prior, say "being", where the former was infinite and the latter finite. In such a division one could think of god as the infinite man and man as the finite god. In the name of the infinite man the finite gods gave the ends to themselves. Today, we are entrusting the machine with the determination of ends, so that its domain can be called techno-theology.

It is in this peculiar con-juncture that one must consider Giorgio Agamben's recent remark that the containment measures against COVID-19 are being used as an "exception" to allow an extraordinary expansion of the governmental powers of imposing extraordinary restrictions on our freedoms. That is, the measures taken by most states and at considerable delay, to prevent the spread of a virus that can potentially kill at least one percent of the human population, could implement the next level of "exception". Agamben asks us to choose between "the exception" and the regular while his concern is with the regularization of exception.[2] Jean-Luc Nancy has since responded to this objection by observing that there are only exceptions today, that is, everything we once considered regular is broken-through[3]. Deleuze in his final text would refer to that which calls to us at the end of all the games of regularities and exceptions as " a life";[4] that is, one is seized by responsibility when one is confronted with an individual life which is in the seizure of death. Death and responsibility go together.

Then let us attend to the non-exceptionality of exceptions. Until the late 1800s, pregnant women admitted in hospitals tended to die in large numbers after giving birth due to puerperal fever, or post-partum infections. At a certain moment, an Austrian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis realized that it was because the hands of medical workers carried pathogens from one autopsy to the next patient, or from one woman's womb to the next's, causing infections and death. The solution proposed by Semmelweis was to wash hands after each contact. For this he was treated as an exception and ostracized by the medical community. He died in a mental asylum suffering from septicemia, which resulted possibly from the beating of the guards. Indeed, there are unending senses of exceptions. In Semmelweis' case, the very technique for combating infection was the exception. In Politics, Aristotle discussed the case of the exceptional man, such as the one who could sing better than the chorus, who would be ostracized for being a god amongst men.

There is not one paradigm of exception. The pathway of one microbial pathology is different from that of another. For example, the staphylococci live within human bodies without causing any difficulties, although they trigger infections when our immune system response is "excessive". At the extreme of non-pathological relations, the chloroplasts in plant cells and the mitochondria in the cells of our bodies are ancient, well-settled cohabitations between different species. Above all, viruses and bacteria do not "intend" to kill their host, for it is not always in their "interest"[5] to destroy that through which alone they could survive. In the long term-of millions of years of nature's time-"everything learns to live with each other", or at least obtain equilibria with one another for long periods. This is the biologist's sense of nature's temporality.
Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan (philosophers based in the subcontinent).
In recent years, due in part to farming practices, micro-organisms which used to live apart came together and started exchanging genetic material, sometimes just fragments of DNA and RNA. When these organisms made the "jump" to human beings, disasters sometimes began for us. Our immune systems find these new entrants shocking and then tend to overplay their resources by developing inflammations and fevers which often kill both us and the micro-organisms. Etymologically "virus"[6] is related to poison. It is poison in the sense that by the time a certain new virus finds a negotiated settlement with human animals we will be long gone. That is, everything can be thought in the model of the "pharmakon" (both poison and cure) if we take nature's time. However, the distinction between medicine and poison in most instances pertains to the time of humans, the uncanny animal. What is termed "biopolitics" takes a stand from the assumption of the nature's temporality, and thus neglects what is disaster in the view of our interest in - our responsibility for - "a life", that is, the lives of everyone in danger of dying from contracting the virus.

Here lies the crux of the problem: we have been able to determine the "interests" of our immune systems by constituting exceptions in nature, including through the Semmelweis method of hand washing and vaccinations. Our kind of animal does not have biological epochs at its disposal in order to perfect each intervention. Hence, we too, like nature, make coding errors and mutations in nature, responding to each and every exigency in ways we best can. As Nancy noted, man as this technical-exception-maker who is uncanny to himself was thought from very early on by Sophocles in his ode to man. Correspondingly, unlike nature's time, humans are concerned with this moment, which must be led to the next moment with the feeling that we are the forsaken: those who are cursed to ask after "the why" of their being but without having the means to ask it. Or, as Nancy qualified it in a personal correspondence, " forsaken by nothing". The power of this "forsakenness" is unlike the abandonments constituted by the absence of particular things with respect to each other. This forsakenness demands, as we found with Deleuze, that we attend to each life as precious, while knowing at the same time that in the communities of the forsaken we can experience the call of the forsaken individual life which we alone can attend to. Elsewhere, we have called the experience of this call of the forsaken, and the possible emergence of its community from out of metaphysics and hypophysics, "anastasis".[7]

[1] Coincidently, the name of the virus 'corona' means 'crown', the metonymy of sovereignty.

[2] Which of course has been perceived as a non-choice by most governments since 2001 in order to securitize all social relations in the name of terrorism. The tendency notable in these cases is that the securitization of the state is proportionate to corporatization of nearly all state functions.

[3] See Jean-Luc Nancy, L'Intrus ( Paris: Galilée, 2000).

[4] See Gilles Deleuze, "L'immanence: une vie", in Philosophie 47 (1995).

[5] It is ridiculous to attribute an interest to a micro-organism, and the clarifications could take much more space than this intervention allows. At the same time, today it is impossible to determine the "interest of man".

[6] We should note that "viruses" exist on the critical line between living and non-living.
The virtues of the virus
[7] In Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics, foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

14/03/2020

It is difficult to resist the temptation of analogy when trying to make sense of the proportions of the pandemic event. In the reflections that accompany its uncontrolled spread, Covid 19 has become a sort of generalized metaphor, almost the symbolic precipitate of the human condition in post-modernity. What happened forty years ago, with HIV, is repeating itself today. The pandemic appears as a sort of experimentum crucis, able to test hypotheses that go from politics to the effects of globalization, to the transformation of communication at the time of the internet - reaching the heights of the finest metaphysical speculation. The isolation, the mistrust and suspicion the virus causes, make it alternatively "populist" and "sovereignist". The emergency measures it forces upon us seem to universalize the "state of exception" that the present has inherited from the political theology of the twentieth century, confirming Foucault's thesis that modern sovereign power is biopolitical (a power that is articulated in the production, management and administration of "life"). Also, because of the fundamental anonymity characterizing it, the virus seems to share the same immaterial quality that grounds the dominion of financial capitalism. Because of how contagious it is, it can be easily compared to the prereflexive and "viral" nature of online communication. Last but not least, the virus signals our eternal human condition. In case we have forgotten that we are mortal, finite, contingent, lacking, ontological wanting, etc., the virus is here to remind us, forcing us to meditate and correct our distraction, that of compulsive consumers. These considerations are legitimate. They are, in fact, perfectly justified. This is, however, also their defect. If they make sense, it is precisely because they reduce what is unknown to what is known. They use the virus as intuitive proof that responds - to speak in phenomenological terms - to an expectation that is theoretical. For the critical insight that is being developed around the virus, Covid 19 is rather the name of a science fiction film used to certify previous knowledge.

However, if it is true that the virus displays the characteristic of an event (it would be difficult to deny this), then it must also possess its "virtue". Events are such not because they "happen" or, at least, not only because of this. Events are not "facts". Unlike simple facts, events possess a "virtue", a force, a property, a vis, that is, they do something. For this reason, an event is always traumatic to the point we may say that if there is no trauma there is no event, that if there is no trauma, literally nothing has happened. What exactly do events do? Events produce transformations that prior to their taking place were not even possible. In fact, they only begin to be "after" the event has taken place. In short, an event is such because it generates "real" possibility. One must bear in mind that here "possible" merely means doable. Possibility means being able to do something. Possibility is nothing abstract, it is not the free imagination of other worlds that are better than this one. Remaining on a pragmatic level, without indulging in metaphysics, possibility is only "potency" and potency is nothing more than action, determined activity. The "virtue" of an event thus consists in rendering operational methods possible, methods that "before" were simply impossible, unthinkable. It follows that an event can only be thought of starting from the future it generates (and not from the past), because it transforms, because it creates that which is real, and with it possibility. Common sense is therefore right when an event is thought of as an "opportunity" to "make a virtue of necessity".

We are too close to the Covid 19 event to be able to catch a glimpse of the future it bears, our fear is human, and this makes us unreliable witnesses. However, some signs of the shift in paradigm that this virus is generating are already visible, and they display an unexpected sense. The most striking is probably the sudden disappearance of the ideology linked to "walls". The virus has come at a time when the planet seemed to converge towards the shared belief that the only response to the "threats" posed by globalization consists in redefining guarded borders and strong identities. Populism hates books, but it dogmatically believes in the primacy of "culture", understood in an anthropological sense. The kind of community it promotes is, in fact, historical, romantic and traditional. This community is local by definition, its sworn enemy is the frigid abstraction of cosmopolitanism. What is even more alien in the eyes of populism is nature, which is nothing other than a resource to be exploited for the well-being of the community (one need only think of Bolsonaro and the deforestation in the Amazon, of Trump and his indifference to global warming, of Salvini's hatred for Greta...). Populists never doubt the idea that humanity is "exceptional". On the contrary, it is an article of faith. I might add that if a populist kisses the cross, it is because this act theologically confirms this exception. In a matter of days, and with an incredible speed, the virus has forced us all, willingly or not, to take upon ourselves - with everyday actions (wash your hands...) - the destiny of the global community, and, what is more, the destiny of the community of man with nature. Our culturalist and anthropocentric prejudice was not overcome by the slow and almost always ineffective action of education: a cough was enough to make it suddenly impossible to evade the responsibility that each individual has towards all living beings for the simple fact of (still...) being part of this world, and of wanting to be part of it...

With the objective force of trauma, the virus shows that the whole is always implied in the part, that "everything is, in certain sense, in everything" and that in nature there are no autonomous regions that constitute an exception. In nature there is no "dominion within another", as Spinoza wrote, ridiculing the "spirit's" claims to superiority over "matter". The virus's monism is wild and its immanence cruel. If culture de-solidarizes, if it erects barriers and constructs genres, if it defines gradations in the participation in the notion of humanity, tracing horrible borders between "us" and the "barbarians", the virus connects, and forces us to search for common solutions. Nobody, at a time like this, can think it is possible to save oneself on one's own, nor is it possible to do this without involving nature in this process. It is said that the epidemic is leading to the creation of red zones, domestic seclusion, the militarization of territories. This is indeed the case. Here, however, the wall has a completely different meaning compared to the walls the rich build to keep out the poor. A wall is being erected for the other, whoever she or he may be. In times like these "thy neighbour" is radically reduced to the dimension of "anyone". A wall, in all its forms, including the one metre separating the people standing in bars, is erected to substitute handshakes, now impossible, with that "anyone". It is a means to communicate, not the sign of exclusion. This is confirmed by the fact that the fascist rhetoric has not been able to appropriate these walls and use them to say how right they were about their proposals for segregation. In the face of the immense power of this virus, the fascists have had to put away, at least momentarily, their most effective weapon.

We are too close to the event also to be able to evaluate the effects it will have on the political sphere. There is one fact, however, that must be noted. The virus seems to restore the primacy that once belonged to the political. Classical thought used a metaphor to convey this primacy, the image of a ship's pilot navigating through stormy seas. Thinkers of the past were realists, they knew that there were no safe harbours to enter and end one's journey. Navigation, they said, is necessary, life is not. The "element" washing the political is a kind of nature in which fortune, chance and risk play an ineradicable role. Political "virtue", in fact, consisted in testing the force of this element, governing it with cunning intelligence ( metis) and resilience. The political is such precisely because it renounces the "human, all too human" illusion that it is possible to appropriate the force of natural elements, an illusion which, on the contrary, constitutes the metaphysical dream of "modern" humanity, which has conceived of the relationship with nature as a war of the spirit against brute matter. Political primacy means governing nature, not dominating it. Also, to explicit the fully "political" nature of this government, it is important to recall the formula so dear to Plato: kata dynamin, as much as it is possible for a human. Undoubtedly it is precisely the hypothesis of dominion that is ridiculed by a cough in Wuhan, a cough that makes it necessary to apply the pragmatic intelligence of a ship's pilot to govern, as much as possible, the spontaneity of a process unfolding against our intentions. Covid 19 also possesses this virtue: it commands politics to take on its specific responsibility, it returns the primacy that politics had delusionally left to other sovereign spheres, becoming subordinate to them, declaring its own powerlessness and limiting itself to playing an exclusively technical role. Following Wuhan the agenda can only be set by politics, which must navigate through the stormy seas of a progressive and apparently unstoppable contagion (indeed the Greeks described political virtue as being "cybernetic", that is, nautical). Indeed what until a few weeks ago seemed to be an unrealistic claim has now become a watchword. Politics must have precedence over the economy. It is the latter that must yield to the needs of the Prince who cares about the destiny of his crew.

Finally, the virus invites us to meditate. I do not think, however, that the object of this meditation is the contingency of being and the precarious nature of human affairs. We certainly do not need Covid 19 to reflect on our fragility. This anxiety has never really disappeared (despite what the journalist in their studios keep saying, when they pontificate about how thanks to the virus humanity, made stupid by the media, so by them, has finally "rediscovered" its ontological insecurity). The virus rather articulates existence, ours and that of others, as "destiny". Suddenly we feel we are being dragged by something that is overpowering, which grows in the silence of our organs, ignoring our will. Is freedom compromised to such an extent? This idea of freedom is certainly mediocre if it conflicts with the inevitability of what takes place. Among the virtues of the virus, we must also mention its ability to generate a more sober idea of freedom: the freedom achieved in doing something about what destiny does to us. To be free is to do what must be done in a specific situation. This is not philosophical abstraction. We see it embodies in the efforts that people make, the earnestness and dedication with which thousands of people work daily to slow the spread of the infection.
Translator's Note: Giorgio Agamben asked me to translate this brief essay, which serves as an indirect response to the controversy surrounding his article about the response to coronavirus in Italy (see for the original Italian piece and for an English translation).
Agamben's response:

TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 2020 ~ ADAM KOTSKO
Slavoj Ži MONITOR AND PUNISH? YES, PLEASE! Ž ek responds to the whole debate (before Agamben will have made his 'clarifications'):
Fear is a poor advisor, but it causes many things to appear that one pretended not to see. The problem is not to give opinions on the gravity of the disease, but to ask about the ethical and political consequences of the epidemic. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything - the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions - to the danger of getting sick. Bare life - and the danger of losing it - is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings, as in the plague described in Alessandro Manzoni's novel, are now seen solely as possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter. The dead - our dead - do not have a right to a funeral and it is not clear what will happen to the bodies of our loved ones. Our neighbor has been cancelled and it is curious that churches remain silent on the subject. What do human relationships become in a country that habituates itself to live in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society that has no value other than survival?

The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don't seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called "reasons of security" and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.

It is not surprising that for the virus one speaks of war. The emergency measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. But a war with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most absurd of wars. It is, in reality, a civil war. The enemy is not outside, it is within us.

What is worrisome is not so much or not only the present, but what comes after. Just as wars have left as a legacy to peace a series of inauspicious technologies, from barbed wire to nuclear power plants, so it is also very likely that one will seek to continue even after the health emergency experiments that governments did not manage to bring to reality before: closing universities and schools and doing lessons only online, putting a stop once and for all to meeting together and speaking for political or cultural reasons and exchanging only digital messages with each other, wherever possible substituting machines for every contact - every contagion - between human beings.

BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

16

Many liberal and Leftist commentators have noted how the coronavirus epidemic serves to justify and legitimize measures of control and regulation of the people that had been till now unthinkable in a Western democratic society. Is the total lockdown of Italy not a totalitarian's wet dream come true? No wonder that (at least the way it looks now) China, which had already widely practiced modes of digitalized social control, proved to be best equipped for coping with catastrophic epidemics. Does this mean that, at least in some aspects, China is our future? Are we approaching a global state of exception? Have Giorgio Agamben's analyses gained new actuality?

It is not surprising that Agamben himself drew this conclusion: he reacted to the coronavirus epidemic in a radically different way from the majority of commentators. He deplored the "frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus" which is just another version of flu, and asked: "Why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire regions?"

Agamben sees the main reason for this "disproportionate response" in "the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm." The imposed measures allow the government to seriously limit our freedoms by executive decree: " It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year. /.../ We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation." The second reason is "the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic,for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext."

Agamben is describing an important aspect of the functioning of state control in ongoing epidemics. But there are questions that remain open: why would state power be interested in promoting such a panic, which is accompanied by distrust in state power ("they are helpless, they are not doing enough...") and which disturbs the smooth reproduction of capital? Is it really in the interest of capital and state power to trigger a global economic crisis in order to reinvigorate their reign? Are the clear signs that not just ordinary people, but also state power itself is in panic, fully aware of not being able to control the situation - are these signs really just a stratagem?

Agamben's reaction is the extreme form of a widespread Leftist stance of reading the "exaggerated panic" caused by the spread of the virus as a mixture of power exercise of social control and elements of outright racism ("blame nature or China"). However, such a social interpretation doesn't make the reality of the threat disappear. Does this reality compel us to effectively curtail our freedoms? Quarantines and similar measures, of course, limit our freedom, and new Assanges are needed here to bring out their possible misuses. But the threat of viral infection also gave a tremendous boost to new forms of local and global solidarity, plus it made clear the need for control over power itself. People are right to hold state power responsible: you have the power, now show what you can do! The challenge that Europe faces is to prove that what China did can be done in a more transparent and democratic way:

"China introduced measures that Western Europe and the USA are unlikely to tolerate, perhaps to their own detriment. Put bluntly, it is a mistake to reflexively interpret all forms of sensing and modelling as 'surveillance' and active governance as 'social control'. We need a different and more nuanced vocabulary of intervention."[1]

Everything hinges on this "more nuanced vocabulary": the measures necessitated by an epidemic should not be automatically reduced to the usual paradigm of surveillance and control propagated by thinkers like Foucault. What I fear today more than the measures applied by China (and Italy and...) is that they apply these measures in a way that will not work to contain the epidemic, while authorities will manipulate and conceal the true data.

Both alt-right and fake Left refuse to accept the full reality of the epidemic, each watering it down in an exercise of social-constructivist reduction, i.e., denouncing it on behalf of its social meaning. Trump and his partisans repeatedly insist that the epidemic is a plot by Democrats and China to make him lose the upcoming elections, while some on the Left denounce the measures proposed by the state and health apparatuses as tainted by xenophobia and, therefore, insist on shaking hands, etc. Such a stance misses the paradox: not to shake hands and to go into isolation when needed IS today's form of solidarity.

Who, today, will be able to afford shaking hands and embracing? The privileged. Boccaccio's Decameron is composed of stories told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the plague which afflicted the city. The financial elite will withdraw into secluded zones and amuse themselves there telling stories in the Decameron style. (The ultra-rich are already flocking with private planes to exclusive small islands in the Caribbean.) We, ordinary people, who will have to live with viruses, are bombarded by the endlessly repeated formula "No panic!"... and then we get all the data that cannot but trigger a panic. The situation resembles the one I remember from my youth in a Communist country: when government officials assured the public that there was no reason to panic, we all took these assurances as clear signs that they were themselves in a panic.

But panic is not a proper way to confront a real threat. When we react in a panic, we do not take the threat too seriously; we, on the contrary, trivialize it. Just think of how ridiculous the excessive buying of toilet paper rolls is: as if having enough toilet paper would matter in the midst of a deadly epidemic... So, what would be an appropriate reaction to the coronavirus epidemic? What should we learn and what should we do to confront it seriously?

When I suggested that the coronavirus epidemic may give a new boost of life to Communism, my claim was, as expected, ridiculed. Although it looks that a strong approach to the crisis by the Chinese state worked - at least it worked much better than what is going on now in Italy -, the old authoritarian logic of Communists in power also clearly demonstrated its limitations. One of them was that the fear of bringing bad news to those in power (and to the public) outweighs actual results. This was the reason why those who first reported on a new virus were arrested, and there are reports that a similar thing is going on now:

"The pressure to get China back to work after the coronavirus shutdown is resurrecting an old temptation: doctoring data so it shows senior officials what they want to see. This phenomenon is playing out in Zhejiang province, an industrial hub on the east coast, in the form of electricity usage. At least three cities there have given local factories targets to hit for power consumption because they're using the data to show a resurgence in production, according to people familiar with the matter. That's prompted some businesses to run machinery even as their plants remain empty, the people said."

We can also guess what will follow when those in power note this cheating: local managers will be accused of sabotage and severely punished, thus reproducing the vicious cycle of distrust... A Chinese Julian Assange will be needed here to expose to the public this concealed side of how China is coping with the epidemic. So, if this is not the Communism I have in mind, what do I mean by Communism? To get it, it suffices to read the public declarations of WHO. Here is a recent one:

"WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that although public health authorities across the globe have the ability to successfully combat the spread of the virus, the organization is concerned that in some countries the level of political commitment does not match the threat level. 'This is not a drill. This is not the time to give up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops. Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades. Now is the time to act on those plans,' Tedros said. 'This epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government.'"

One might add that such a comprehensive approach should reach well beyond the machinery of single governments: it should encompass the local mobilization of people outside state control as well as strong and efficient international coordination and collaboration. If thousands are hospitalized for respiratory problems, a vastly increased number of respiratory machines will be needed, and to get them, the state should directly intervene in the same way as it intervenes in conditions of war when thousands of guns are needed. And it should rely on the cooperation with other states. As in a military campaign, information should be shared and plans fully coordinated - THIS is all I mean by "Communism" needed today, or, as Will Hutton put it: "Now, one form of unregulated, free-market globalization with its propensity for crises and pandemics is certainly dying. But another form that recognizes interdependence and the primacy of evidence-based collective action is being born." What now still predominates is the stance of "every country for itself": "there are national bans on exports of key products such as medical supplies, with countries falling back on their own analysis of the crisis amid localised shortages and haphazard, primitive approaches to containment."

The coronavirus epidemic does not signal just the limit of market globalization, it also signals the even more fatal limit of nationalist populism, which insists on full state sovereignty. It's over with "America (or whoever) first!" since America can be saved only through global coordination and collaboration. I am not a utopian here; I don't appeal to an idealized solidarity between people. On the contrary, the present crisis demonstrates clearly how global solidarity and cooperation is in the interest of the survival of all and each of us, how it is the only rationally egotistic thing to do. And it's not just coronavirus: China itself suffered a gigantic swine flu months ago, and it is now threatened by the prospect of a locust invasion. Plus, as Owen Jones noted, the climate crisis kills many more people around the world than coronavirus, but there is no panic about this...

From a cynical vitalist standpoint, one would be tempted to see the coronavirus as a beneficial infection, which allows humanity to get rid of the old, weak and ill, like pulling out a half-rotten weed, and thus contributes to global health. The broad Communist approach I am advocating is the only way for us to really leave behind such a primitive vitalist standpoint. Signs of curtailing unconditional solidarity are already discernible in ongoing debates, as in the following note about the role of the "three wise men" if the epidemic takes a more catastrophic turn in the UK: "NHS patients could be denied lifesaving care during a severe coronavirus outbreak in Britain if intensive care units are struggling to cope, senior doctors have warned. Under a so-called 'three wise men' protocol, three senior consultants in each hospital would be forced to make decisions on rationing care such as ventilators and beds, in the event hospitals were overwhelmed with patients." What criteria will the "three wise men" rely on? Sacrifice the weakest and eldest? And will this situation not open up the space for immense corruption? Do such procedures not indicate that we are getting ready to enact the most brutal logic of the survival of the fittest? So, again, the ultimate choice is either this or some kind of reinvented Communism.

But things go much deeper than that. What I find especially annoying is how, when our media announce some closure or cancellation, they as a rule add a fixed temporal limitation: the "schools will be closed till April 4" formula. The big expectation is that, after the peak which should arrive fast, things would return to normal. In this sense, I was already informed that a university symposium is just postponed to September... The catch is that, even when life eventually returns to normal, it will not be the same normal we were used to before the outbreak: things we were used to as part of our daily life will no longer be taken for granted; we'll have to learn to live a much more fragile life with constant threats lurking just behind the corner.

For this reason, we can expect that viral epidemics will affect our most elementary interactions with other people and objects around, inclusive of our own bodies: avoid touching things which may be (invisibly) "dirty," do not touch hooks, do not seat on public toilets or on benches in public places, avoid embracing others and shaking their hands... And even be careful about how you control your own body and your spontaneous gestures: do not touch your nose or rub your eyes - in short, do not play with yourself. So, it's not only the state and other agencies that will control us; we should learn to control and discipline ourselves! Maybe, only virtual reality will be considered safe, and moving freely in an open space will be reserved for the islands owned by the ultra-rich.

But even here, at the level of virtual reality and the internet, we should remind ourselves that, in the last decades, the terms "virus" and "viral" were mostly used to designate digital viruses which were infecting our web-space and of which we were not aware, at least not until their destructive power (say, of destroying our data or our hard-drive) was unleashed. What we see now is a massive return to the original literal meaning of the term: viral infections work hand in hand in both dimensions, real and virtual.

So, we'll have to change our entire stance toward life, toward our existence as living beings among other forms of life. In other words, if we understand "philosophy" as the name for our basic orientation in life, we'll have to experience a true philosophical revolution. Maybe we can learn something about our reactions to the coronavirus epidemic from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who, in her On Death and Dying, proposed the famous scheme of the five stages of how we react upon learning that we have a terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact: "This can't be happening, not to me."); anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact: "How can this happen to me?"); b (the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact: "Just let me live to see my children graduate."); depression (libidinal disinvestment: "I'm going to die, so why bother with anything?"); acceptance ("I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it."). Later, Kübler-Ross applied these stages to any form of catastrophic personal loss (joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction), and also emphasized that they do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are all five stages experienced by all patients.

One can discern the same five stages whenever a society is confronted with some traumatic break. Let's take the threat of ecological catastrophe: first, we tend to deny it (it's just paranoia, what happens are the usual oscillations in weather patterns); then comes anger (at big corporations which pollute our environment, at the government which ignores the dangers) followed by bargaining (if we recycle our waste, we can buy some time; plus, there are good sides to it also: we can grow vegetables of Greenland, ships will be able to transport goods from China to the US much faster on the northern route, new fertile land is becoming available in northern Siberia due to the melting of permafrost...), depression (it's too late, we're doomed...), and, finally, acceptance: we are dealing with a serious threat and we'll have to change our entire way of life!

The same holds for the growing threat of digital control over our lives: first, we tend to deny it (it's an exaggeration, a Leftist paranoia, no agency can control our daily activity...), then we explode in anger (at big companies and secret state agencies who know us better than we know ourselves and use this knowledge to control and manipulate us), which is followed by bargaining (authorities have the right to search for terrorists, but not to infringe upon our privacy...), depression (it's too late, our privacy is lost, the time of personal freedoms is over), and, finally, acceptance: digital control is a threat to our freedom; we should make the public aware of all its dimensions and engage in fighting it!

Even in the domain of politics, the same holds for those who are traumatized by Trump's presidency: first, there was denial (don't worry, Trump is just posturing, nothing will really change if he takes power), followed by anger (at the dark forces which enabled him to take power, at the populists who support him and pose a threat to our moral substance...), bargaining (all is not yet lost, maybe Trump can be contained, let's just tolerate some of his excesses...), depression (we are on the path to Fascism, democracy is lost in the US), and acceptance: there is a new political regime in the US, the good old days of American democracy are over, let's face the danger and calmly plan how we can overcome Trump's populism...

In medieval times, the population of an affected town reacted to the signs of the plague in a similar way: first denial, then anger (at our sinful lives for which we are punished, or even at the cruel God who allowed it), then bargaining (it's not so bad, let's just avoid those who are ill...), then depression (our life is over...), then, interestingly, orgies (since our lives are over, let's get out of it all the pleasures still possible - drinking, sex...), and, finally, acceptance: here we are, let's just behave as much as possible as if normal life goes on...
Notes:
And is this not also how we are dealing with the coronavirus epidemic that exploded at the end of 2019? First, there was a denial (nothing serious is going on, some irresponsible individuals are just spreading panic); then, anger (usually in a racist or anti-state form: the dirty Chinese are guilty, our state is not efficient...); next comes bargaining (OK, there are some victims, but it's less serious than SARS, and we can limit the damage...); if this doesn't work, depression arises (let's not kid ourselves, we are all doomed). But what would acceptance look like here? It is a strange fact that the epidemic displays a feature common with the latest round of social protests (in France, in Hong Kong...): they don't explode and then pass away; rather, they stay here and just persist, bringing permanent fear and fragility to our lives. But this acceptance can take two directions. It can mean just the re-normalization of illness: OK, people will be dying, but life will go on, maybe there will be even some good side effects... Or acceptance can (and should) propel us to mobilize ourselves without panic and illusions, to act in collective solidarity.

What we should accept, what we should reconcile ourselves with, is that there is a sub-layer of life, the undead, stupidly repetitive, pre-sexual life of viruses, which always was here and which will always be with us as a dark shadow, posing a threat to our very survival, exploding when we least expect it. And at an even more general level, viral epidemics remind us of the ultimate contingency and meaninglessness of our lives: no matter how magnificent spiritual edifices we, humanity, bring out, a stupid natural contingency like a virus or an asteroid can end it all... Not to mention the lesson of ecology which is that we, humanity, may also unknowingly contribute to this end.

To make this point clearer, let me shamelessly quote a popular definition: viruses are "any of various infectious agents, usually ultramicroscopic, that consist of nucleic acid, either RNA or DNA, within a case of protein: they infect animals, plants, and bacteria and reproduce only within living cells: viruses are considered as being non-living chemical units or sometimes as living organisms." This oscillation between life and death is crucial: viruses are neither alive nor dead in the usual sense of these terms. They are the living dead: a virus is alive due to its drive to replicate, but it is a kind of zero-level life, a biological caricature not so much of death-drive as of life at its most stupid level of repetition and multiplication. However, viruses are not an elementary form of life out of which more complex forms developed. They are purely parasitic; they replicate themselves through infecting more developed organisms (when a virus infects us, humans, we simply serve as its copying machine). It is in this coincidence of the opposites - elementary and parasitic - that resides the mystery of viruses: they are a case of what Schelling called " der nie aufhebbare Rest, " a remainder of the lowest form of life that emerges as a product of malfunctioning of higher mechanisms of multiplication and continues to haunt (infect) them, a remainder which cannot ever be re-integrated as the subordinate moment of a higher level of life.

Here we encounter what Hegel calls "speculative judgment," an assertion of the identity of the highest and the lowest. Hegel's best-known example is "Spirit is a bone" from his analysis of phrenology in Phenomenology of Spirit, and our example should be "Spirit is a virus." Is human spirit also not some kind of virus that parasitizes of the human animal, exploits it for its own self-reproduction, and sometimes threatening to destroy it? And, insofar as the medium of spirit is language, we should not forget that, at its most elementary level, language is also something mechanic, a matter of rules we have to learn and follow.

Richard Dawkins claimed that memes are "viruses of the mind," parasitic entities which "colonize" the human mind, using it as a means to multiply themselves. It is an idea whose originator was none other than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is usually perceived as a much less interesting author than Dostoyevsky - a hopelessly outdated realist for whom there is basically no place in modernity, in contrast to Dostoyevsky's existential anguish. Perhaps, however, the time has come to fully rehabilitate Tolstoy, his unique theory of art and humanity in general, in which we find echoes of Dawkins's notion of memes. "A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages"[2] - is this passage from Dennett not pure Tolstoy? The basic category of Tolstoy's anthropology is infection: a human subject is a passive empty medium infected by affect-laden cultural elements that, like contagious bacilli, spread from one individual to another. And Tolstoy goes here to the end: he does not oppose to this spread of affective infections a true spiritual autonomy; he does not propose a heroic vision of educating oneself to be a mature autonomous ethical subject by way of getting rid of infectious bacilli. The only struggle is the struggle between good and bad infections: Christianity itself is an infection, if - for Tolstoy - a good one.

Maybe, this is the most disturbing thing we can learn from the ongoing viral epidemic: when nature is attacking us with viruses, it is in a way sending our own message back to us. The message is: what you did to me, I am now doing to you.

[1] Benjamin Bratton, personal communication.

[2] Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, London: penguin Books 2004, p. 173.

A Lacanian psycho-analytic viewpoint on the virus, one among several:

A World in Quarantine?

The COVID-19 is a new name of the real, that which from the start does not have a whole sense, since we do not know exactly what it is and, although we try to compare it with previous things (other coronaviruses), there is always an unknown remainder left. This is what anguishes us and the spring of collective panic. For the moment, it is a single signifier - COVID 19 or Coronavirus - that is missing the second part: the full story that would explain it, locate it and thus put it "under control". We are still constructing that story, not without difficulties, since in the midst of the crisis the narrative is full of fakes, partial data, sometimes accurate alerts, other times disproportionate ones. When the story progresses and we get to know who it really is, how it works and how we can prevent it, panic will fall... until the next unknown.

The consequences are, therefore, somewhat unpredictable, but some can be advanced: the world is increasingly quarantined; some are placed on it by medical prescription and others by prevention or panic, or even by modus vivendi. Some companies begin to notice it in the rise of their stocks: Zoom, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon or Slack. All of them allow teleworking or home entertainment. Those who depend on direct or on-site supplies or labor are falling. Capitalism, as always, finds a benefit out of any crisis.

For some time now we have all been a little quarantined, protected in the TV series and on social networks, removed from the contact with each other, the social phobia that Freud spoke of a century ago. Even a basic need such as eating does not require us to leave the home fort, for this we have the deliveries and their booming platforms.

A new digital gap seems to be drawn between those who can resist the virus, isolated in their homes, and those who have no choice but to face it hand-to-hand. The paradox is that many of those who can more easily protect themselves from the hostile enemy by subtracting the body, through their digital avatars, are those who later on (after the exception time) will be able to pay for face-to-face care (teachers who speak to them , doctors who explore them, people who take care of them). Others will be left only with virtual care (remote learning, telecare, digital diagnostics) which is cheaper and more universalizable.

Soon, body to body contact, face-to-face interaction in healthy conditions will be a luxury that many will not be able to access. COVID-19 (and as the viral joke says, number 20 and those that will come after it) has come to remind us of our fragility, now that we had begun to believe that we were absolute masters of our own destiny, believers in the limitless power of technology. The truth is that we still inhabit a body.

Published in La Vanguardia, on Friday 12th March 2020.

By José R. Ubieto| March 15th, 2020| COVID-19 / 2020 #3

http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/miasma/ :

MIASMA

We don't so often speak of miasmas now, but they once explained all kinds of illnesses the causes of which were not quite clear. Miasmas were invisible vaporous emanations, or "bad air" from decaying organic matter on those foreign parts of moorlands or urban areas. A miasma has never been detected. Whilst miasmic explanations of disease held sway for centuries, we have other theories about the spread of disease now, and so we don't take miasmas to be a material reality. None the less, the expression remains.

Lacan mentions miasmas in the second chapter of Seminar XI in talking about causes, and which Jacques-Alain Miller takes up in his 1988 seminar Cause et consentement, with the emphasis of a separation of cause and effect, with a cut, stumbling block, distance, deviation, or hole in continuity there, this is what Miller draws from Lacan. Those things where a continuity sustains, such as gravity, may be known as a law except in so far as distance may take its effect there, such as the gravitational pull of the moon effecting the tides.

"...miasmas are the cause of fever-... there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval." This is how Lacan describes the miasma - that cause of fever which is characterised by a hole, by an effect of something oscillating in the interval between cause and effect.

It seems to me that miasma could be one name of something which may be apparent in our experience, in our clinic, now, in the suffering which the coronavirus brings aside from any material infection. Miasmas could be understood in some regard in the manner of something else which fell out of scientific use - the gaze. Being that which is not the seeing or being seen, not that which can be traced in a continuity, but that which evades, drops out of the laws of visibility, a cause, not a law. And which we attend to in our clinical work, localising, dissipating, distancing, there are any number of ways of working with what can be so distressing in an experience of the gaze.

It seems that in this time of the virus, beyond the microscopic droplets of infected airbourne material which may or may not reach us, there is an atmosphere. A thickening of the air with what is not there, marked by a hole between cause and effect, a miasma, experienced as both foreign and intimate to the body, outside and in. Aside from the practical measures we may take to care for ourselves and others against the material of the virus, and which is not the realm of psychoanalysis, we work with something which was not necessarily of so obvious before, which perhaps miasma names.

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI. Ed. J.-A. Miller, trans A. Sheridan, (Norton: New York/London, 1978), p. 22

Jacques-Alain Miller, Cause et consentement, lesson of 3rd February 1988, delivered at the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII (unpublished).

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XI, op. cit., p. 22

By Alasdair Duncan| March 15th, 2020| COVID-19 / 2020 #2

http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/the-day-the-earth-stood-still/ :

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Virus is a pure force, the real without borders or limits. It must be taken at its most radical at the time of impact: terror without terrorist, identity or objective. The name Lacan gave to this nameless real had to therefore be in the negative: "it doesn't work". It doesn't work for it is situated as external to failure to enter any form of collaboration with the symbolic, to strike a deal, to be tamed, to submit to instructions and to immunisation. Maurice Blanchot, who has written on psychoanalysis, described the "mythical cell" of cancer as "the refusal to respond" wherein analysts can find an indication of the location of the real. He continues: "here is a cell that doesn't hear the command, that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic. [...] it destroys the very idea of a program and wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs [...] and, from this perspective, is a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate, through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power".[1]

Let's have no illusions about it. The force of the viral cell that has swept the world for over a month now, has no equivalent except for the primary signifier that leaves the mark of language on the body prior to any sense effect. Blanchot clearly places the cell outside the universal, paternal order. This has not stopped prevented us from acknowledging our powerlessness in continuing our attempt to humanise the viral cell by calculating the algorithm of mortality and the statistics of increase of deaths from country to country. In effect, scientists and politicians have made the lethal cell believable.

To approach the primary mark of language on the body, Lacan went beyond the literary and paternal solutions and pointed to the saint. Who is the saint? It is the one whose body remains external to seductions of meaning, and to authority built on it, and who renews his affliction with the real every time he encounters corporeal trauma. The saint embodies part of the waste attributed to him and embraces the real. He even, in some incomprehensible way, loves the real albeit we would have to distinguish love of the real from loving one's delusion or one's symptom such as the woman. Saints have always shown a bizarre love for a person that in Latin, per-sonnare, signifies a body present through sound, voice. Saints were never chumps of the powerful, religious or secular alike, or indeed of the capitalist bosses. Francis of Assisi was an anomaly and a deviation in Church ranks which only accentuates the singularity of "it doesn't work" for a speaking being. In the eyes of Pope Innocent III, Francis brought the shameless, opulent Benedicts to their knees and, in effect, refreshed the relation to the causa Dei. The saint, as Lacan approached him, incarnates the trashitas, rather than caritas, which amounts to assuming a place on the map drawn up by the real that undermines political programs and displaces the capitalist interest in all pursuing wealth into anarchic variants of social concern.

It is interesting to learn that some scientists, like Dr John Ashton and Paul Hunter, support this orientation towards the social dimension. But there are also those whose interest oscillates between the genetic history of the SARS CoV19 and the possibility of calculating statistically the end of humanity. The history of the viral pathogen shows us it is an effect of 11,000 years of mutations that lead back to one, supposed origin. Geneticists concede that the viral spreads of past decades are mutative examples of genetic sequence variations, in this case RNA and not DNA, that recently (pig's, bird's, bovine flus), turned out to be less harmful to humans than the one we are currently dealing with. It goes all the way back nowhere else than to the animal kingdom where bats and pangolins are the main carriers and culprits.

The lures of science have not stopped those who feel the impact of the epidemic from taking steps and compiling food supplies as well as bales of toilet paper to ensure their safety when panic reaches the stage of the somatic reactions requiring anal hygiene. Everyone is puzzled, yet everyone knows. With the World Health Organisation declaring CoV 19 a world pandemic, we have now entered the stage of political strategy. Donald Trump for one went on to cancelling all flights to the EU, which surprised many. The space for political phenomena of this kind is only emerging now, as Blanchot anticipated. After the initial impact, and a gradual reconciliation by the WHO in cooperation with various governments that deaths will spiral, we are on the road to write another chapter on the unconscious and its politics. It is in this sense that Freud, not knowing what he was doing, and Jung when he was still an analyst, approached American with a declaration they were bringing a plague. The virus of the unconscious, prior to any semantic mutation, is indefensible because we are all subject to ignorance in the face of forza del destino of the primary signifier. Which is why Lacan called it a "bearer of infinity" with a potential of inflicting anyone who comes into contact with it. Making the virus believable in this way puts it in the position of the not-all, -"x Φx. Every time someone comes to analysis, he brings a virus he does not want to hear or to know anything about it.

Political strategies vary at present. On the continent schools, universities, public gathering museums, restaurants, cinemas, theatres are gradually being shut. In the EU, there is a lockdown on flights en masse, and sport and seminar events are cancelled for at least a month. The level of isolation is growing which makes us all more connected. This resembles a state of war and goes well beyond the hysteric's demand being alternately refused and following the master command. Instead we are dealing with the socio-economic rupture of pandemonic and diachronic proportions. For many, British government acts too slow. Isolation means economic disruption which in the face of Brexit should be delayed as long as possible. But the delay also reveals the trait of a modern political leader who flees the scene of disaster to hide in the delusion of getting on with business as usual. What will awake those leaders? This does not look like an encounter with the real but a strategy to delay, hold back, and reason: prudence in the face of a hiccup. Is panic and turmoil ( émoi), where Lacan situated the little real, a, that shakes the system, the only way to set things into motion? The virus virility is still not recognised as a political phenomenon.

Professor Dr John Ashton was very critical about the political strategy of Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer[2]. He has only been in the job since January this year and his career was in pharmaceuticals and biology. Dr Ashton called Boris Johnson's position on Coronavirus "a disgrace", and reproached people in charge for allowing biologists and pharmacists to dominate the whole issue. What it ignores is the social dimension and the lack of expertise how to organise social groups and communities in the event of pandemic. Dr Ashton was equally critical, which was supported by a more moderate academic Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia, of the new proposal of "herd immunity" calling it a "fantasy narrative". As he plainly put it, herd immunity is not only unethical but allows the virus to run wild across society and communities until mortality rate goes above 60%. Only then would the virus be assimilated and turn into home flu, a domesticated Other. Apparently, this already happened in the past in Tahiti when its population was decimated after Captain Cook left them. From the Lacanian perspective this proposal amounts to forcing to create a community of saints through a trait of incorporation of the Other's jouissance. Needless to say, this approach would be a complete reversal of the immigration policy whereby a foreigner has for millennia been the carrier of diseases which led to border closures and internal isolation. To introduce isolation due to the viral threat, one must be in close proximity to suffering within social community. Otherwise it's a Stalinist tyranny, as Dr Ashton remarked.

A community of saints does not exist, let's add. The nearest to it, a community of analysts, does not believe in the common good but in the not-all the traumatic real, different for every member of the community. An attempt to tame and domesticate the real of the virus for all would serve as a demonstration of failure to symbolise it and to make it domicile. A prospective loss of millions of lives appears not to deter the British politicians to drop the idea at the very moment it emerged. If you can't defeat it, submit to it, even bring it on. A friend shared with me a memory of an interview in which Johnson envisaged building beaches where sharks keep watch. Nietzsche's motto "live dangerously and build your houses under Vesuvius" smacks of politics of masochism when espoused by a national government. The UK answer to the threat is politics of delay and avoidance. It reveals a trait of ignorance linked to letting the death drive run wild or to being already dead. It is no surprise that Lacan approached death as imaginary and put life on the side of the real that fails and thus pushes, urges us to seek new signifiers that apply to groups and communities. It could work, as Lacan showed in "British Psychiatry and the War".

On the day when the earth is slowing down and coming to a standstill, British politicians revert to the position of their colonial masters watching impassively the course of events and misleading population, so that there is no economic disruption. Hence the refusal to collaborate with colleagues from the continent to introduce measures to suspend for the time being institutions, organisations, including corporations. We are getting closer to the point of sacrifice to keep things in order in accordance with what people voted for.

[1] M. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 86-7.

[2] Professors J. Ashton and P. Hunter were interviewed by Matt Frei on LBC Radio on Saturday 14 March 2020.

By Bogdan Wolf| March 17th, 2020| COVID-19 2020 / #6

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March 2020 It's important in times of crisis, that we not forget to think. And indeed, this apparently exceptional moment has given rise to thought among contemporary philosophers, in particular those in the continental tradition, for whom this event confirms or nuances or reminds them of certain things they've been thinking about for quite a while now, or it reminds them of moments from their tradition which suddenly stand out as relevant and significant in thinking what is going on today.

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Response to Covid-19 Crisis: To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

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Slavoz Žižek Vs Covid-19
8pm 20th May 2020 (zoom)

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Audiobook

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Tim Morton
8pm 22nd April 2020 (zoom)

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Collection of essays edited by Prof Martin Parker

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Bristol University Press and Policy Press

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Uncorrected pre-publication pdf proof of 'Life After Covid-19'.

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Uncorrected pre-publication pdf proof of 'Life After Covid-19'.

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Short video poem by Sasha Zik

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Not out until 22/09/20, but looks really interesting...

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Not out until 22/09/20, but looks really interesting...

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The Politics of Interdependence

We are in the midst of a global crisis of care. How do we get out of it?

The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care--childcare, healthcare, elder care--to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.

The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.

The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.

" The Care Manifesto is a radiant invitation to transform our economy and society, a roadmap for how we can emerge from overlapping crises and weave a new social fabric. The ethic of universal care is an antidote to the spiralling carelessness that our current system shows towards people and the planet. The authors understand that care is not a commodity: it's a practice, a core value, and an organizing principle on which a new politics can and must be built."

"Finally a 'care manifesto' that shows how powerful caring can and should be in changing global practices and institutions and in transforming our world! No longer a private concern nor the exclusive preoccupation of moralists speculating about the essential feminine, care is given by this text in the form of a bracing critique of neo-liberal profit-making. The Care Manifesto charts a path toward the transformation of kinship, the gendered division of labor, ecological activism, and secures the principles of interdependence that should guide progressive transnational institutions. The Care Collective writes with a compelling clarity, a capacity for reflection in the midst of urgent times, and remind us that care brings with it a complex history and a promising future. As they note, among the meanings of the Old English caru, are care, concern, anxiety, sorrow, grief, trouble - all terms that resonate with our times. Care implicates our lives in each others lives, mapping and animating a politics of promise for our times."

"A call to action for global progressives"

"Why do we live in a world that rewards the uncaring, the care-free and the care-less? How long can we tolerate such a state? Not long according to this vital, urgent and compelling book about why radical change is needed. The manifesto not only critiques uncaring governments and corporations, but also offers an alternative. There is one and we desperately need it."

"An inspiring and revolutionary call for an economy and society based on caring for the earth and each other ... rings with both freshness and familiarity, moral clarity and political necessity. It's wonderful."

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The Politics of Interdependence We are in the midst of a global crisis of care. How do we get out of it? The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care--childcare, healthcare, elder care--to care for the natural world.

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Mark Fisher
8pm 4th March 2020, 34FC (P&C's)