relation of exception

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life

"in his final years foucault seemed to orient this analysis according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the study of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the state assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. . . in one of his last writings, foucault argues that the modern western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks of real 'political 'double bind,' constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power.'"

"at once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. when its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of state power and emancipation from it. everything happens as if, along with the disciplinary process by which state power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power. these processes - which in many ways oppose and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other - nevertheless converge insofar as both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity."

"there is no rule that is applicable to chaos. order must be established for juridical order to make sense. a regular situation must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective. all law is 'situational law.' the sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality. he has the monopoly over the final decision. therein consists the essence of state sovereignty, which must therefore be properly juridically defined not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the monopoly to decide. . . the decision reveals the essence of state authority most clearly. here the decision must be distinguished from the juridical regulation, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves itself not to need law to create law. . . the exception is more interesting than the regular case. the latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything. . .  when one really wants to study the general, one need only look around for a real exception. it brings everything to light more clearly than the general itself. after a while, one becomes disgusted with the endless talk about the general - there are exceptions. if they cannot be explained, then neither can the general be explained. usually the difficulty is not noticed, since the general is thought about not with passion but only with comfortable superficiality. the exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion." - carl schmitt

"the exception is an element in law that transcends positive law in the form of its suspension. the exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology. while the latter affirms and predicates determinate qualities of god, negative (or mystical) theology, with its 'neither... nor...,' negates and suspends the attribution to god of any predicate whatsoever. yet negative theology is not outside theology and can actually be shown to function as the principle grounding the possibility in general of anything like a theology. only because it has been negatively presupposed as what subsists outside any possible predicate can divinity become the subject of a predication. analagously, only because its validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the normal case as the realm of its own validity."

"it has often been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside. gilles deleuze and felix guattari were thus able to write, 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing;' and, concerning the 'great confinement' described by foucault in his madness and civilization, maurice blanchot spoke of society's attempt to 'confine the outside,' that is, to constitute it in an 'interiority of expectation or of exception.' confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself.' the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is, however, even more complex. here what is outside is included not simply by means of the juridical order's validity - by letting the juridical order, that is, withdraw from the exception and abandon it. the exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. the particular 'force' of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority. we shall give the name relation of exception to the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion."

"the paradox here is that a single utterance in no way distinguished from others of its kind is isolated from them precisely insofar as it belongs to them. if the syntagm 'i love you' is uttered as an example of a performative speech act, then this syntagm both cannot be understood as in a normal context and yet still must be treated as a real utterance in order for it to be taken as an example. what this example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it (in the case of a linguistic syntagm, the example thus shows its own signifying and, in this way, suspends its own meaning). if one now asks if the rule applies to the example, the answer is not easy, since the rule applies to the example only as to a normal case and obviously not as to an example. the example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. the example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is 'shown beside,' and a class can contain everything except its own paradigm.

the mechanism of the exception is different. while the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it. and just as belonging to a class can be shown only by an example - that is, outside of the class itself - so non-belonging can be shown only at the center of the class, by an exception. in every case (as is shown by the dispute between anomalists and analogists among the ancient grammarians), exception and example are correlative concepts that are ultimately indistinguishable and that come into play every time the very sense of the belonging and commonality of individuals is to be defined. in every logical system, just as in every social system, the relation between outside and inside, strangeness and intimacy, is this complicated."

queering heterosexuality

(although i have many critiques of this piece, i want to bookmark this - as it was a formative essay for me to read at one point in time)

queering heterosexuality by sandra jeppesen (from queering anarchism)

in this piece i will be considering the impact that taking on queer politics has had in my life, thinking through ways that queering anarchism might happen in the lives of anarchists and anti-authoritarians who society may identify as heterosexual due to the sex and/ or gender of the object of their desire, but who ourselves disidentify with all things straight, perhaps even with the subject-position of heterosexual. what does this mean? this means that we are working on queering straight-seeming spaces, that we are straight-ish allies of queer struggles, challenging heteronormativity in the anarchist movement, as well as in the mainstream spaces we inhabit, from workplaces to families, from classrooms to cultural productions. this piece itself is one intervention that attempts to queer the space of narrative and theory, through non-capitalization[1], on the one hand, and on the other hand, through mobilizing a personal narrative to think through or theorize the queering of heterosexuality and the de-heteronormativizing of ‘straight-acting’ spaces. through an examination of the queering of hetero-space from an anarchist perspective, a liberatory politics of sexualities and genders emerges that intersects with anarchaqueer liberation[2] in challenging dominant forms of social organization including the state, marriage, capitalism, parenting, love relationships, friendships, families, and other important sites of anarchist politics and struggle. 

through a meeting of anarchist and queer politics, we have found alternative positions, actions and relationships that are more profoundly meaningful to us. this is not to stake a claim in queer theory or queer politics for “straight” people—that would be exactly not the point. rather it is to acknowledge an indebtedness to these spaces, places, people and movements, while at the same time acknowledging that, as people who might have partnerships that appear “straight,” we can pass as heterosexual, and accrue the privilege that our society accords this category. nonetheless as non-straight-identified heteros, we take on anarchaqueer issues by living as queerly as possible. in other words, queer practices and theories are important for the liberation of heterosexuals from normative standards of intimate relationships from friendships to sexualities. moreover, queering heterosexuality reveals that the categories homosexual and heterosexual are wholly inadequate to describing the vast array of sexualities available to us once we start exploring beyond the heteronormative. 

where did this all start for me? i’ve never been “normal” as far as sexuality goes. but thinking of queerness as relevant to my own life started at a particular identifiable moment for me when i was volunteering at who’s emma[3], the anarchist punk infoshop in toronto. a (white gay male) friend took me aside one day and said that, while he admired my anarchafeminist, anti-capitalist politics, could i consider the possibility of including gay or queer issues in my conception of anarchism. of course, was my immediate response. i think i must have blushed as well, as i was a bit embarrassed, to be honest, to have to be asked something so obvious. but he didn’t criticize me for something i wasn’t doing, rather he opened up a space for something new—to move beyond heteronormative conceptions of anarchist politics. this was an incredibly important moment for me, though i did not know it at the time. 

i am relating this as a series of narratives about conversations that i have had with many different people over the years, or experiences that i and my friends have had and talked about. as queer and/ or anti-heteronormative anarchists i think we value personal experience and interpersonal exchanges as an important site of political knowledge production. in other words, we learn a lot about a wide range of political ideas, about the oppressiveness of language, and about our own position in the world we live in through conversations. through sharing narratives and stories. i want to value and give credit to the people, experiences and collective spaces that have helped me to learn about queer politics. i also want to put together some of these stories in a kind of collection of narratives here, to preserve, at least to some extent, the form in which i encountered them. of course they are filtered through my own perspective, and the lessons i’ve learned from them. moreover, the things they made me think about may be very different than the things they might bring up for readers, and i want to acknowledge this. my knowledge and my perspective will of course have their limits. at the same time, i did not want to theorize these experiences, putting a kind of intellectual distance between myself and the ideas because that is not how i encountered them. nonetheless i will be engaging many concepts, ideas and theories. our education system teaches us to understand stories one way and ideas another (for example, we study literature or stories differently than we study philosophy or ideas). it is my hope that these narratives will be understood not as cute little stories about my life, but rather as a source of important ideas about sexualities that might be useful to straight people in becoming antiheterosexist straight allies. and one last hope i have is that many more people will tell their own stories, which will be taken seriously by anarchist and other readers in our struggles toward radical social and political transformation.

friendship, sexuality, polyamory and other intimacies[4]

anarchaqueer theories and practices start with the basics. how do we relate to people emotionally and sexually? how have these types of relationships largely been determined by oppressive systems such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, families, culture, and the state, systems that we do not believe in, and which we are constantly rethinking and struggling to dismantle? while i had been a promiscuous feminist who, from a very young age, rejected gendered roles and stereotypes, up to the point when i was volunteering at who’s emma, my personal experience of non-monogamy had been pretty rocky. during my undergraduate degree, i struggled against the sexual double standard where women were not supposed to want sex, engaging in casual sex or short-term serial monogamous relationships, and taking a lot of flak for it. i then had a few nonmonogamous relationships in the punk scene. in one case, when the relationship became long distance, one of us was poly and one was not. we had bad communication in terms of disclosure and trust. eventually we broke up over it. in another, we both had other partners, and we communicated better at times, but not consistently so. we didn’t know anyone else who was having this kind of relationship. eventually we broke up for other reasons. 

when i encountered the anarchist scene in toronto, largely at who’s emma and the free skool, it seemed like everyone was into polyamory, and people did not really distinguish among partners based on sex, gender, age, or anything else. i had many friends who were having non-monogamous (or non-mono as we called it) relationships at the time, so we were all talking about these things. it was a bit of a free-for-all in terms of hook-ups, which was really fun, and there were also many longer term relationships that were both fun and serious. we started to think about how the word nonmonogamy was a reification of the centrality or supposed “normalcy” of monogamy, and we wanted to have a different starting place, a multiplicity of amorous possibilities, so we started to use the word polyamory instead. poly for short. there was an important resource book at the time that we were all reading called The Ethical Slut[5]. 

also at that time, people said “treat your lovers like friends and your friends like lovers.” we have a lot more expectations of lovers, we do a lot more processing about where the relationship is going, negotiating space, articulating needs, setting boundaries, expressing disappointment, etc. and sometimes we forget to have fun and just really enjoy the time we have together. we can be really harsh toward lovers, perhaps because we feel so vulnerable. that’s where we need to be better friends to our lovers. with friends we’re more likely to cut them some slack, to let things be a little more fluid. no big deal if they’re late, or miss a hang-out once in a while, for example. on the positive side, with lovers, we tend to do lots of special little things for them, like cooking their favorite food, making DIY zines or bringing them some little thing when we meet, something that says, i was thinking of you, something that shows we love them. along these lines, we need to be more loving to our friends, do more special things for them, go out on dates with them, make little heartfelt presents for them expressing how much we care. be more attentive to their needs, be supportive in day-to-day ways. treat them more like lovers. 

i think around this time, to take one example, a friend and i were both not in any sexual relationship, so for valentine’s day, almost satirically, one year she invited me over for a dinner date. she ran me a bath, handed me a glass of wine, and cooked dinner while i relaxed in the tub. the following year i did something similar for her. they were oddly romantic non-romantic, very caring friend-dates.

at this time in toronto there were a few long-term polyamorous “super-couples” who were held up as an example of the potential of polyamory to work. if they can do it, so can we, we all thought. they had good communication, and some interesting strategies that we learned from. one couple, when they were going out to a party, would decide ahead of time if it was a date or not. if not, they were free to hook up with other people. another poly couple i knew lived together, and had the guideline that they couldn’t hook up with someone else at their shared apartment. regardless of what the rules were, what was interesting to me was that any two people could make their own rules. you could say what you wanted, and listen to what the other person wanted, and then try it out, and check in with each other afterward and see how they felt about how it went. this for me was super different than heterosexual monogamy which had a bunch of rules, none of which made any sense to me, like the rule about how if you show how jealous you are, it means you really care about the other person. or if you hook up with one person, and then a second person, it means you don’t like the first person anymore, whereas in my experience, feelings for one person tended to have little bearing on, or perhaps even augmented, my feelings for another person. being able to incorporate this emotional experience into openly negotiated multiple relationships was awesome. 

for me, this openness to building relationships from scratch, not entirely without rules, but negotiating guidelines as needed, makes an appearance in queer theory, in eve sedgwick’s first axiom, “people are all different.”[6] we all have different bodies, different body parts, different desires; we all want different things from relationships, whether they are intimate, sexual or otherwise. so why shouldn’t we negotiate our relationships ourselves instead of following a heteronormative set of scripts. this was also different for me than my previous open relationships in the punk scene where people sometimes practiced dishonesty or coercion and called it non-monogamy. i didn’t learn tools for negotiating toward meeting each other’s needs in the punk scene. it was more like, i can’t be monogamous, so you can either be non-monogamous with me or we can break up. there was no way to say, hey, what you just did hurt me—is there some way we can deal with this by communicating in ways that rebuild trust? 

at some point i was lucky to participate in a class at the toronto anarchist free university[7] about polyamory. one of the best things the facilitator said was that, no matter how often or for what reason you have sex with a person, you still need to be honest and respectful with them. even if their motivations are different than yours (e.g. a party night hook-up or one-night-stand might be one person’s motivation, whereas an active polyamorous practice committed to alternative sexual, intimate, and community-based relationships might be the other’s). honesty and respect, appropriate establishing of consent among all concerned parties (including sometimes those who are not present i.e. the other person’s other partner/s), setting boundaries, and following through on what you’ve said are all critical elements of the encounter. to me this seems so far away from what heterosexual relationships are normally like, that it is actually something else. even if your partnerships are “straight.” 

for me, the polyamory scene and the radical queer scene were connected. we would get all glammed up to go to vazaleen, will munro’s radical queer punk anarchist dance party in toronto. people who hung out at vazaleen included trans people, drag queens and kings, and queers of all kinds. some “straight” people went as well, but we were the kind of straight people who disidentified with being straight. we didn’t identify with our birth sex/gender, we avoided norms or stereotypes of heterosexuality, we were critical of the objectification of women, we denounced predetermined gender scripts and sexuality scripts which we saw as connected to capitalism and patriarchy. perhaps we identified with queerness, for example, being attracted to people of a particular subculture, such as bears or femmie boys or butch dykes or trannies or whatever. it was a place where lots of gender and sex subversion and play happened. a queer space full of queers of course, some of whom were anarchists, some of whom were non-straight-acting heteros. i loved vazaleen because there was no sense, for me at least, of a normative sexuality. certainly it was not heteronormative. but it was not homonormative either. it did not echo mainstream representations of “gay couples” such as we might see on The L Word, or Queer Eye, with assimilationist, consumerist norms. instead it felt like a space of many sexual resistances.

non-normative sexualities

non-normative sexuality means, among other things, that people ditch sexual norms, and just hook up with and have long-term relationships with whoever inspires them, doing whatever they are into sexually. for me, sometimes this is women, sometimes it is men. often it is with people who are not my age. when i was younger i dated older people and now that i’m a bit older i seem to date younger people. these are more or less the people i seem to find myself hanging out with. i don’t really see age as an interesting way of dividing people. my friendships have always been across ages and even generations. my current partner is more than ten years younger than me. when we got together we were polyamorous and, although we communicated well and had great sex, we weren’t taking the relationship too seriously. it was lots of fun. we both had other partners, but soon that kind of went away, and we made more of an explicit commitment to each other, first to be primary partners, and then to be monogamous. i’ve always felt a little ambivalent about this decision. recently i moved to another town, and we decided to be poly, although neither of us have acted on it yet. 

this relationship is really amazing for me. he’s super sexy and we have a red hot sex life in which we do a lot of non-heteronormative things (whatever that means—i’m not telling you). i feel like this is particular to my own sexuality but also to the way i develop trust and caring or intimacy with a partner. he has the kind of emotional intelligence and empathy that is stereotypically not associated with men, and which is very important in keeping our relationship strong, perhaps because i do not, and so i am learning these things from him. today when someone called they said his voice sounds androgynous, and maybe that is part of the attraction, too. he doesn’t fit the gender scripts[8] any more than i do. for both of us, the non-normativity of the relationship is at least one of the things that keeps it alive and interesting. 

on the other hand, i worry that our age difference means that there is a power imbalance, which we have acknowledged, and we work together to try to compensate and make sure it is more equalized. another thing that concerns me is that maybe in being attracted to younger people, i am somehow replicating ageism—both the ageism in the anarchist scene which is really a youth-oriented scene, and a kind of internalized ageism that mainstream society offers where youth is valued and age is something we are supposed to fight or disavow, rather than accept or even respect (as some cultures do). sometimes i think it is unfortunate that there is not a lot of age diversity in the anarchist “scene.” one thing that happens a lot is that when i tell people my age they say i look a lot younger. this is supposed to be a compliment and i don’t find it insulting. but at the same time, it sometimes makes me feel like there is something wrong with me being the age that i am. that somehow i would be better if i were younger. or conversely, that i am doing something age-inappropriate that makes people think i am younger. i wonder if this internalized ageism plays a role in partner choice as well, in terms of who i might find attractive. what is considered attractive in older men in mainstream representations makes me a bit nauseous. i think who i am attracted to is more connected, however, to my punk roots and that particular aesthetic.

queer parenting and community

i think another way that anarchism has allowed me to have a more non-heteronormative life is the acceptance of not reproducing children, in a community in which people’s choices are accepted. when i chose to be polyamorous, it was accepted. i find being monogamous is also generally accepted because there is the notion of radical monogamy, which interrupts gender and sexuality scripts. some people i know have expressed a hesitation to admit that they have chosen to be monogamous, because there is now, ironically perhaps, an expectation of polyamory among anarchists. not having children is also accepted, whereas mainstream society tends to look askance at women who choose not to have children, or who choose politics over children. for example, when ulriche meinhof, who was part of the red army faction in germany, decided to leave her children behind and become an active urban guerrilla, living underground and working to overthrow the german state, there were many newspaper reports that demonized her for this (not for her political actions in and of themselves), and said she was not just a bad mother, but somehow actually insane for leaving her children with their father.[9 ]for anarchists, though, there seems to be no presumption about anyone’s life pattern or direction, in terms of getting married, settling down, having kids, doing political actions, etc. there is a sense that you can do things the way you choose, and people try as much as possible to create new paths for themselves, with the support of other people in our communities. 

instead of following a prescriptive path—marriage, kids, house in the suburbs—a long time ago i decided i would rather follow the path of collective living. this was a conscious decision, because i felt that i was unlikely to find, and did not want to succumb to, a happily married suburban life. in fact, that terrified me. it was such a relief to read a book called soft subversions by felix guattari where he talks about growing up in the suburbs and how alienating that was for him, how it made him feel kind of “schizo around the edges.”[10] i love that book. so i gave up on that whole dream, it was more of a nightmare for me anyway, growing up in the suburbs among the children of bureaucrats, people who were afraid of an active, gritty life in the city, so they moved to an area of carefully coifed lawns and polite conversation. dead time, as the situationists say.[11]

 

when i first wrote this piece, i was living in a crowded four-bedroom apartment in downtown montreal with three other people, one of whom happens to be my partner. it is a queer space and we tend to have queer room-mates by intention. our broader community includes the st. henri anarchist punks, student and academic anarchists, the radical queer and trans scene, anti-racist activists, and lots of different feminists. these loose groupings extend across canada, into the united states, and to places like korea, france and germany. our community also includes a lot of people who don’t fit into any of these identities, who are nomadic geographically and categorically. 

some people in our community have kids, some don’t. some people think the current geo-eco-political situation is too unstable to have kids, but some are brave enough to do it anyway. eight years ago, i was living in a collective house in toronto with five other people. three of us wanted to have kids at that point, me and two other women. one of them was part of a super-couple who had been together in a polyamorous relationship for several years, about four years i think. in addition to her cis-gender male partner, the woman was starting to see a person who was a “non-bio-boy” (a term no longer used as it is rooted in biological determinism), a gender queer guy or trans man (in fact, all of these labels are fraught with complex histories and uses, and may also, like non-bio-boy, fall out of use as we invent new terms that work better). they all three moved together into a big collective house with several other people, and started planning how they would conceive and raise a child together. in the end, though, she broke up with the cis-gender guy, and conceived a baby with a sperm donation from an ex-partner of her trans partner. they are monogamous now and raising the baby together. we had a funny conversation a few years ago when we both confessed to being in monogamous relationships, like it was a dirty secret. 

the other woman was strictly monogamous. she started dating a woman and they decided to have a baby together and live together as a couple. interestingly both women decided to have babies with sperm donors whom they knew and had long-term friendships with. the larger community living space becomes smaller when you have a baby, and more intensified. community works itself into your life in other ways. 

in my case, on the baby project, i met several times with an expartner who has a current partner and two children, living in new york city. we were considering the possibility of having a baby together, and talked about how the future might be, with his current partner and their children. but then he mentioned that he thought it might be better if she didn’t know about it. i didn’t think that was a very good idea. it seemed like a non-consensual decision, in which all parties’ consent would not be obtained. i didn’t go through with it. i decided not to have a baby after all. 

people make choices about having children in different ways, even people who may be in what appear to be heterosexual relationships. considering the consent of all parties, working around or against the legal sperm donor clinic method of conception (very expensive and medicalized), or even deciding to abstain from breeding. interestingly, for me, this decision has meant that i am trying to make deeper connections to people aside from my partner. i feel the need to have closer friendships, and to be more loving to more people, not in a sexual way, but in an intimate friendship way, developing creative collaborative partnerships, finding mutually supportive ways of interacting with people, and in fact spending more time, as i grow older, with nieces and nephews who are scattered all over the country, who are unrelated to the anarchist scene, but who are nonetheless of course an important part of my community.

liberation, responsibility and intimacy

in this context, liberation becomes a kind of odd concept. i still like spontaneous walks down by the train tracks, dérives, and nomadic urban wanderings as much as the next anarchist. taking off freighthopping across the country, or traveling wherever, no apartment, no money, but always finding places to stay, people who will take you places or take you in. this was always liberating for me, on the fringe of capitalism, against the way middle-class people travel, or live generally speaking, tied to house and job. 

but then a year or two ago i was at an anarchist workshop where the facilitator had a very interesting take on the notion of responsibility. i feel like mainstream society has inculcated in us the value of irresponsibility, and in anarchism we seem to link this to freedom, to nomadology, to spontaneity, and liberation. whereas really it is a kind of trapping capitalist individualism that seems unsustainable.

for example, i had a conversation with a friend once who had broken up with a partner because he was going traveling. i asked if that was a bit selfish, in that he wasn’t really considering her needs or feelings. he countered that he had to put himself first. to me, this is a sentiment that i think a lot of people might agree with, anarchists or not, though by anarchists it might be couched in terms of a liberatory politics. but it seems more like a failure to be responsible to those people with whom we are engaged in intimate relationships. 

at the workshop, the facilitator, who was an older indigenous-identified male, said that responsibility tells us where we belong in our lives. i have always been troubled by this notion of belonging, yearning for it in some ways, and yet unable to find it because i was charmed by the notion of spontaneity, freedom, the nomad life, new friendships and relationships everywhere with everyone who came along. at the same time, i was also perplexed by how i loved people who were always roaming, and that made it impossible to have a long-term relationship because we would break up or not see each other for long periods of time, and re-connections were difficult. i think i dreamed of finding a nomadic partner who would travel with me and we could be spontaneous together, and that this would be a sort of traveling set of roots that i could take with me. 

now i think of responsibility differently, i think of it as a deep connection to another person, related to intimacy. it means that we think of their feelings and needs as equal to our own, and quite often, more important than our own. we can also think of our responsibility to self as, rather than being in conflict with responsibility to others, being profoundly connected with a responsibility to others, in the very anarchist sense that the liberation of one person is predicated upon the liberation of those around them. to take one example of how this works in everyday practice, this means that a person can ask people in their community for help when they have a health need, because there is an implicit understanding that we each need to take care of ourselves and be taken care of, and that when other people have health needs we will in turn be there for them. so taking care of other people is nurturing ourselves, our community, and the reverse is also true—asking for care is in a way nurturing other people, and developing in our community the capacity for nurturance. this feeds the fostering of intimacies in community with others beyond heteronormative coupled partnerships. 

to tie this back to the notion of queering anarchism, what i think queer practices offer to anarchism is a language of intimacy. this language and its concomitant practice of intimacy is crucial for a revolutionary politics. radical queer politics and practices offer to non-normative heterosexual relationships a range of possibilities, including polyamory, intimate friendships, expressive communities, mental and physical and emotional mutual aid health care, and sexualities that are predicated on intimacy, respect and consent. of course it doesn’t always work out as perfectly as this all sounds. but that too is a lesson of queering anarchism. relationships are a lifelong process of negotiation and sharing, of putting mutual aid into practice in layers of more intimate and less intimate relationships. what i think anarchism offers to radical queer spaces, groups, networks and communities, is a way of putting consent, respect, nonhierarchical love, emotional nurturance, and collective living into relationships so that those communities can grow and sustain themselves/ourselves, with an anti-statist and anti-capitalist perspective, and bringing in anti-racism, anti-colonialism and other related or intersectional movements and ideas. so in addition to queering anarchist movements, we are anarchizing queer movements. what emerges is a vision of queer and anarchism not as two separate things that are starting to come together (certainly the history of the anarchist movement is full of queers and the history of the queer movement is full of anarchists!) but rather a mutual aid relationship in which the boundaries between the two bleed into one another and they become inextricable. 

queering heterosexuality from an anarchist perspective takes place in this context, where relationships are no longer heteronormative, where we are also moving away from homonormativity (the capitalist, state-run, white-dominated “gay pride” model, for example), and indeed open up into non-normative sexualities, where the labels homo and hetero are challenged at a basic level. sexuality like gender is thus a narrative, as my room-mate said the other day, a fluid series of experiences that we can write and rewrite as we live through them, things we can invent or get rid of, as we see fit, in a kind of multiplicitous, inter-connected, non-linear, rhizomatic diversity of sexualities and genders that we engage throughout our lifetimes.

non-heteronormative desires

i had a conversation with a friend of mine last week about our nonheteronormative heterosexual relationships. he is dating someone new, and was having an odd experience, or at least he thought it was odd until he started talking to friends about it. and then it turns out that there are many people having a similar experience. among anarchist hetero couples, if i may generalize for a moment, it seems that the guys are doing a really good job of being soft and sensitive, of taking direction from women when it comes to intimacy, to sexuality, and friendship. there is a new kind of language where men have had to find ways of expressing desire without being direct or aggressive. a tentative language, a conditional language, a language of questions rather than demands: would it be okay if? what if i told you? 

for feminists, for women who want to be respected in friendships, in intimate relationships, and in sexualities, this is sweet. it makes relationships wonderful and warm and open and caring and loving. it’s fabulous. so where is the odd experience in all of this, you may be wondering? 

sometimes, as women, we want to feel passionately desired. we might want to be swept away with passion and desire. we might even want things to get a bit rough, you know, a bite on the neck, an uncomfortable position. sex on the floor under a table, or going at it so hard we almost fall off the bed before we even notice. (and this isn’t news to anyone into bdsm or other fetish sex that explores intentional power exchanges in sex). i could go on, but i’ll get to the point, which is this—we seem to be creating new norms, and in those norms, there are built-in things like respect and communication, gentleness and sensitivity, and these are all of course great things, and should be a key component in every relationship, from sexual ones to intimacies to friendships to parenting to teaching to work relationships and family. but, as with any set of norms, including polyamory and other forms of anti-heteronormative relationships, the risk is that we become fixed in a certain set of behaviors, and forget that we have the power and agency to say what we want, to negotiate through active listening and honest disclosure, and to achieve very fluid and lively relationships that do not stagnate or conform to previous expectations, or someone else’s idea of what is right or wrong for us. 

dylan vade is a trans lawyer who has written about the gender galaxy, which is the idea that gender and sex are not configured as a binary (male/female or masculine/feminine) but rather there are thousands of different ways of living out our sex/genders, in a galaxy, where some genders may cluster together into constellations, and sometimes these constellations are perceptible, but sometimes they are not.[12] i’d like to think that sexualities are like this too. rather than the binary homosexual/heterosexual, there are thousands of different ways of living out our sexualities.

this leads me to one last thing that i have recently started having conversations about. we had a houseguest a few weeks ago, a woman who took advantage of the same-sex marriage rights in canada and got married a few years back. as her partner started female-to-male transitioning, their same-sex status became a bit more fluid. she said that now that he has fully transitioned, they are read by others as a heterosexual couple. she enjoys high-femme camp performance in everyday life, particularly when it is queer, and is now unsure how this will be interpreted by others, which is most often as straight. when a queer gender performance is misread as heterosexual, the risk is that the play with signifiers—the feminine dresses, the 1950s style and behavior, etc.—will be misunderstood by both queers and heteros as reinforcing gender role stereotypes rather than subverting them. it is also odd, she said, to suddenly be experiencing heterosexual privilege in her public[13] life, whereas her private relationship is still very queer and does not feel privileged. to put it another way, her narrative of sexuality is not one of privilege, and yet this is how strangers now engage with her and her partner. the narrative thus is becoming uncertain, or what bobby noble calls incoherent.[14 ]this is another way in which queering heterosexuality may take place in radical queer milieus and lives. 

another FTM trans person has told me how he now struggles to be accepted as queer or trans, since people read him as a straight man, though he lived for nearly forty years as a woman and a lesbian. he almost feels like he can no longer be part of the queer community, unless he is among friends who have known him a long time. for example, he told me that he recently went out to a bar that had a reduced cover charge for trans men, and he had to really insist that he was trans. the door person wouldn’t believe him. he repeatedly thanked the person, because they were reaffirming his sex/gender of choice, but in the end, he had to show the dreaded ID that still listed his gender as “F” in order to be accepted as a trans man. oh, the irony. this is not an experience that any trans person wants to go through. it demonstrates how heteronormativity, which causes people to assume everyone is gender-straight and non-queer, seems to permeate even queer scenes that are attempting to privilege trans people. furthermore, it reveals how even in spaces committed to radical queer and trans politics and subjectivities, the notion that someone’s own self-identification should be accepted at face value, without having to provide coherent identification, is not always put into practice very well. 

this is yet another one of the risks of queering heterosexuality. heterosexuality of course needs to be challenged, to be queered, to be wrested from its place of privilege. at the same time, we need to be very careful not to heterosexualize or heteronormativize queer spaces, subjectivities, identities, ideas, theories, and the like. there is a role here for heterosexual queer allies, even those of us who cringe at the word heterosexual and strongly disidentify with it. i believe and hope that we can queer our practices, without claiming queer as our own, or appropriating it. in other words, the idea is to support queer struggles, to integrate queer ideas into our practices, to be as queer as possible, in order to work as allies to end queer oppression. the idea certainly is not—and this is another risk—to perform queer identities when it is convenient and then return to our heterosexual privilege unchanged or unchallenged by the experience. 

liberation means this. it means we keep writing the narrative of our lives, our desires, our genders, our sexualities. it means that, rather than having the kind of freedom janis joplin sang about (you know, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose) when my parents were exploring their open relationship (that is another story in itself!) we have liberatory experiences and relationships that are grounded in communities and long-term commitments to exploring what these relationships mean and how they can best be fulfilling to all involved. for me, to get to this openness, the queer and/or anarchist communities that i have encountered over the years have been crucial. crucial to who i am as a person, but more than that— crucial to revolutionary politics. the entire capitalist patriarchal white supremacy that structures our world unequally, and indeed preys on unequal relations of power, requires heteronormative relationships. break down those kinds of relationships, and we are also starting to break down patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. as jamie heckert argues, breaking down micro-fascisms at the level of identities and intimate relationships is at the root of resistance to macro-fascisms at the level of institutions and structures of power.[15] queer practices, relationships, communities, scenes, and intimacies thus are making important contributions toward profoundly liberatory modes of being, doing, thinking, feeling and acting in the world that are intensely political. even for heteros. 

[1] challenging standard orthography (writing systems) by not using capital letters, by using ‘improper’ grammar such as sentence fragments and the like, has a long history and a complex set of motivations. most importantly, it challenges the phallogocentric domination of textual representation i.e. the presumed superiority of phallic (masculine) logos (use of words, acts of speech) that underlies western traditions of philosophy, theory, literary studies and other logocentric disciplines, and that can lead to semiotic subjugation (Guattari, Felix. Soft Subversions. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.)—the feeling that we are subjugated to language rather than subjects that can speak through language. second, it challenges the privileging of the written word over oral traditions. third, it challenges pedagogical norms that are imposed upon school children from a young age, norms called into question by anarchist educational approaches such as free skools. fourth, it disrupts the presumed relationship of the author being dominant over the reader, a binary ‘other,’ and instead allows the reader to intervene in the text she reads, to be an equal with the writer. fifth, through this deconstruction of the binary relationships between masculine/feminine, written/oral, correct/incorrect, writer/reader, etc., non-subjugated orthographies that refuse the use of capital letters and traditional grammar make space for the privileging of the collective, and co-operation in the construction of meaning, decentering the primacy of the individual writer, the supposed (rich straight white male) sublime genius who produces texts. this is therefore a radical, feminist, queer and anarchist strategy that disrupts the way texts are produced, valued, legitimated and circulated. bell hooks drew attention to these debates, for example, by changing her name, disavowing her ‘slave name,’ and writing her name without capital letters.

[2] Queerewind. London: self-published, 2004. http://www.queeruption. org

[3] O’Connor, Alan. Who’s Emma? Autonomous Zone and Social Anarchism. Toronto: Confused Editions, 2002.

[4] Berlant, Lauren, ed. Intimacy. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2000.

[5] Easton, Dossie. The Ethical Slut: a Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities. San Francisco: Greenery P, 1997.

[6] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U California P, 1990.

[7] Toronto Anarchist Free University. http://www.anarchistu.org/

[8] Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

[10] Guattari, Felix. Soft Subversions. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996

[11] Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.

[12] Vade, Dylan. “Expanding Gender and Expanding the Law: Toward a Social and Legal Conceptualization of Gender that Is More Inclusive of Transgender People.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, V. 11 (2004–2005) 253–316.

[13] Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

[15] Heckert, Jamie. “Sexuality/Identity/Politics.” In Changing Anarchism. Ed. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004.

aesthetic / ethical

"the purpose of my life would seem to be to express the truth as i discover it, but in such a manner that it is completely devoid of authority. by having no authority, by being seen by all as utterly unreliable, i express the truth and put everyone in a contradictory position where they can only save themselves by making the truth their own." -kierkegaard

"as part of the dialectical approach that permeated his thinking, kierkegaard wished to put forward ideas from a number of different points of view. no single point of view was to be taken as correct or authoritative (or even as the author's). the reader was left to make up their own mind over the often conflicting ideas expressed.

in order to overcome the appearance of didacticism, plato had couched his ideas in the form of dialogues. but kierkegaard was a solitary. in his case, the arguments were taking place inside a single mind. . .

fundamentenally kierkegaard suggested that there are two ways we can live our life, the aesthetic and the ethical. each individual has the opportunity to make a conscious choice between these two. here lie the seeds of existentialism. . .

individuals who choose the aesthetic viewpoint basically live for themselves and their own pleasure. this need not be a shallow attitude to life. in working for our own pleasure, we almost invariable work for the pleasure of others too, if we are thinking in the longer term. indeed, it could be argued that the scientist who selflessly dedicates their entire life to curing a painful disease, sacrificing personal, domestic, and social pleasure in the process, is also living the aesthetic life if they do this simply because they enjoy scientific research. and in the context of modern psychology and the liberal society, it is difficult to see how anyone doesn't live the aesthetic life. . .

on a basic level, the individual who lives the aesthetic life is not in control of their existence. they live for the moment, prompted by pleasure. their life may be self-contradictory, lacking in stability or certainty. even on a more calculating level, the aesthetic life remains 'experimental.' we follow a certain pleasure only as long as it appeals to us.

the inadequacy of the aesthetic viewpoint is [that] it relies upon the external world. it 'expects everything from without.' in this way it is passive and lacking in freedom. it relies upon things that remain ultimately beyond the control of its will - such as power, possessions, or even friendship. it is contingent, dependent upon the 'accidental.' there is nothing 'necessary' about it.

. . . when an individual who lives the aesthetic life reflects on their existence, they soon realize that it is lacking any certainty or meaning. such a realization often leads to despair.

this despair may be repressed or ignored, and it can even be forgotten altogether by living a bourgeois existence. in other cases an individual may come to see this very despair as the meaning of their life. perversely they will reassure themselves that at least this is certain. if nothing else, this something of which they cannot be deprived. . .

in this way they can take pride in their 'heroic' despair and achieve a level of tranquil understanding. but kierkegaard is quick to point out the flaw in this 'seductive fatalism.' by accepting it we renounce something vital, something central to the very notion of our existence. we renounce even the possibility of freedom. by accepting that we are 'fated,' we disavow responsibility. . . we are not accountable for our lives; we are mere pawns in the hands of fate. . .

kierkegaard is very good at detecting the subterfuges of self-delusion. (in rejecting what he fundamentally believed during his student years, he had tried them all on himself.)

his stripping away of the layers of self-delusion points the way out of the aesthetic condition. we may find it difficult to agree with his ultimate conclusion (which was inevitably christianity, in a forbiddingly spiritual guise), but the steps by which he leads us along the way are compelling. he is leading us out of the abyss of despair, into a life where we take full responsibility for what we make of that life. . . in kierkegaard's words, the way out of the abyss was 'to will deeply and sincerely.'

this leads us to the alternative to the aesthetic life - the ethical. here subjectivity is the 'absolute,' and the foremost task is 'choosing oneself.' the individual who lives the ethical life creates themself by their choice, and self-creation becomes the goal of their existence. where the aesthetic individual merely accepts themself as they are, the ethical individual seeks to know themself and to change themself by their own choice. they will be guided in this by their self-knowledge and their willingness not to accept what they discover but to try to improve upon it.

here we see the categorical difference between the aesthetic and the ethical: the former is concerned with the outer world, the latter with the inner. the ethical individual seeks to know themself and tries to turn themself into something better - they aim at becoming 'an ideal self.' what is clear is that the ethical individual is no longer contingent, inconsistent, or accidental. . .

we can never live an exclusively ethical life - there will always necessarily be an element of the 'outer' and accidental about our lives. even when we have chosen the ethical, an element of the aesthetic is bound to remain.

by a process of dialectic this very unsatisfactoriness concerning the ethical now brings about a third viewpoint, which is a synthesis of the previous two opposites. this kierkegaard calls the religious, and he deals with it in his next work, fear and trembling. . .

in this work kierkegaard examines the notion of faith. this he characterizes as the ultimate subjective act. it is irrational - a 'leap' beyond all possible justification. it has nothing to do with ethics or good behavior. the ethical life, with its notion of self-creation and responsible choice, is unable fully to accommodate the leap of faith. such 'higher irrationality' lies beyond the ethical, which requires rational behavior. faith relates the individual to something higher, which is itself the essence of everything ethical. the religious can be viewed as a dialectical synthesis of the aesthetic and the ethical. it combines both the inner and outer life, certainty and uncertainty. . .

sacrifice is necessary if we wish to achieve something. the sacrifice is usually irrational and may well conflict with our previously understood notions of right and wrong. subjectively we often discover our purpose in life through an irrational leap of faith which has little or nothing to do with the ethical. but it is also how anyone gives their life a consuming purpose - by believing in themself. . . as kierkegaard put it, 'a poet's life begins in conflict with the whole of existence.'

. . . kierkegaard's aim was to make existence as intense as possible. only in this way do we see it as it is, see it for what it can be. existence is a colossal risk. we can never know whether the way we choose to live is the right way. anyone who realizes this fully, who makes themself constantly aware of it, is bound to feel anguish. such subjective truths, supported by no objective evidence, are grounded on nothing. we thus come to know the nothingness of existence, the utter uncertainty that lies at its heart. life is fundamentally tentative and elusive.

even consciousness itself is a contradiction. this is the intersection of actuality and possibility, the meeting place of what is and what is not. consciousness is thus a 'doubleness.' as kierkegaard noted, the word double and doubt stem from the same root. consciousness itself is a form of doubt. . .

he distinguishes between two different types of dread. first is the dread we experience when we are threatened by an external object (such as a roaring lion). the second type of dread results from an inner experience - our confrontation with the limitless possibilities of our own freedom. when we become aware of this freedom we understand its enormity and its irrationality. . . our state of mind makes us understand our freedom. and we realize our freedom to its fullest extent when we experience the state of mind called dread. . .

conscious despair is aware of itself. this comes in two forms. the false notion of conscious despair occurs when an individual knows they despair but imagines that others do not. ('no one knows the way i feel.') this drives them to even greater despair. the true notion of conscious despair realizes that despair is in fact part of the human condition, and as such a part of every self. this true despair is thus conscious of belonging to a self. for kierkegaard, the only way out of despair is for an individual to choose their own self and make the leap of faith." - paul strathern

you stared.

quotes from ana patova crosses a bridge by renee gladman

"the crisis took words out of my books and
strung them together, put them in
envelopes, and mailed them to my
friends, appalling them with obscenities
and abstraction. the crisis made me
give up architecture, drawing up plans
for building, and sat me roughly in
this chair from which i did not leave
for years. it was ten years, the despair,
and it was five days, and it was your
childhood, and the time it took to cross
a bridge; it was the love you could not
have of the woman who called your name;
it was while you were farming, while you
built a circular home. the crisis tied you
to a chair and said, 'write!' then took
your sentences as they landed. i farmed
from my window."

"we were making chaos with our goodbye notes,
and it wasn't as though leaving wasn't
happening but that it just wasn't ourselves
who were doing it. no one could name names.
we all knew that hausen wanted to go, and
when he finally vanished, many of us felt
relief. we missed him, though we didn't
know him (we knew his confinement), but
we celebrated his departure as a threshold
crossing. 'hausen finally made it,' we'd say
and clink our glasses. so, we knew that leaving
was possible and that in many corners of
our neighborhoods people were preparing
to depart, and did depart. but, we couldn't
call out to them, even when the time came
and the deserter was someone we loved or
someone with whom we worked and drank.
our mouths would empty, for a long time,
would be dry, and when saliva came back
to us, it was only to ourselves that we could
point. 'i'm leaving,' i would misspeak
without knowing. 'i've left too,' would say
luswage."

"i wrote this book in a circular home on a hill, overlooking
the city, which roams while we are sleeping; i wrote it in
a cafe with my friends; i wrote it as i looked for hidden
streets, while sitting in desolate and lush spaces. i wanted
to say language leaves a trace, makes a simultaneous trail,
of us and of the crisis. my walking leaves a trace, also my
saying i have walked. and, this is important, because,
though these marks do not render precisely the picture of
our crisis, they do show where there are still people. the
day fills up with monuments, and the book attempts to
erect a fence around them. the book wishes to end a crisis
by the sheer fact of existing. but, rather than a history, the
book becomes an index. it shuffles our bewilderment. it
does not tell our story. it cannot do that. nevertheless, it
opens toward you."

"for one second, i spoke 'sentence,'
which confused her, since all this time
i'd been saying 'paragraphs.'it was a
moment of our mouths missing one
another. her mouth was emitting sound.
she seemed to be calling my name,
breathing heavily, she seemed to put her
words inside me. 'writing my frightening
paragraphs,' i said, involuntarily. 'your
paragraphs grow on the walls of your
books.' we were inside an argument. i
resisted my torso toward the ceiling. i let
my hamstrings rise, something caught in
my hip. it was an interruption. i was
correcting her about my books: they did
not have walls, they had holes dug deep
in the earth. 'it's frightening,' she blew
in my face."

"he was a man
who swam at night in empty buildings.
the man went home to someone who
did not seem quite like a woman, but who
also was not identified as a 'man.' the
man coming home lay on top of this
person and swam and told a story, which
was a confession, and the body gasped,
but we did not know if the man's story
was causing this gasping or whether the
cause was his writhing. the reader couldn't
hear the story, but hausen had the language
around the story crack and drop heat on us.
and the body writhed on top of the other
body and whispered to it about something
done and undone in the city, something
sitting under water, something terrible."

"the west was not available to me. my
country was in a state of unspeakable
emergency. you could lift your eyebrows
when someone said so-and-so had left, but
you couldn't put shoulders to it. you
couldn't bend and show how your heart
hurt. you couldn't answer questions from
finland. but finland called and i said
something non-committal to keep finland
around, because it felt good that someone
was looking in. i had no need to curtain
the space in which i wrote, in which i
worried. in fact, if i weren't able to look
up from time to time to catch a neighbor
steal a glance through my windows, i
would not be able to progress in my
work. i waited for interruptions. i waited
for the feeling of eyes on me. finland felt
that i should reconsider. i felt simply that
i should be seen."

"i met luswage in an alley
when the 'moments' began, and would
stand there and would stare at her. we
would stand close and would stare at one
another until our eyes hurt, until the skin
beneath our eyes tremored and beyond
that point. luswage amini stood next to
me. nothing in the world could deter
this, no storm, no regulator. hausen had
gone, relations were strained. we feared
the worse, which were the moments that
tore you away from the city. for love,
you met in alleys, you bowed and
gathered in your hands someone's hair,
you hid when you heard voices, and you
stared. you stared. and at the end of it
sheets of paper were exchanged."

inswept

quotes from event factory by renee gladman

"every time he changed my plate, he spoke softly, 'i am miho. i will be your server.' but i did not think i had come to ravicka to be served. i wanted to protest, but thought that would require knowing why i had come, which i had not yet discovered."

"leaving that house and retracing my steps back to the hotel proved difficult. these people appeared dismayed to see me go, perhaps even insulted, which surprised me, considering what had just taken place between us. nevertheless, i lost time recalling the 'turns' i needed to perform my apology. i was in a hurry - i did not want to travel in the dark, when the city was still so foreign to me. but rushing made me clumsy. we were all frustrated. i went through pareis several times, but always tripped up on the same move and had to start over again. you cannot skip ahead, or you'll be saying something entirely different. i wanted to say, 'when you are a visitor to a place, especially one such as ravicka, it is difficult to remain stationary. the landmarks call out.' but i could not get my body to say 'landmark' versus the 'shipyard' it kept performing."

"after a while, so much time of non-interaction had passed between us that she was a stranger again. i leaned away from her towards the aisle. felt awkward. i looked out the window across from me. i could not say that the city was going by. i believed that it had not yet become a city."

"i had never been to old ravicka: i was told its architecture gave one a medieval feeling. i did not have nostalgia for that particular moment in human history; it was the idea of being inswept in time (as held by place) that possessed me. i wanted to experience the muscularity of the present diminishing in me as it was replaced by a past i never could have known myself."

"crossing into the old city took the better part of the day when you were as hungry as we were, which was not a nutritional hunger but rather something deeply emotional. the iron of the bridge becoming stone, becoming ancient and rough as we moved along it, without having altered our course, but the world around us changing. 'eat before you leave,' was more like 'forget where you have been,' because it was impossible to hold this crossing in your mind. the contemporary city did not align with this old one, which, in its preserved state, made a mess of our eyes."

"'who are you?' she responded. 'do you need to come up?'
do i need, i thought.
'yes. i think that's right,' i said."

"despite (or due to) our attachment to the esaleyons, we were not allowed to remain with them. early one morning, they walked us out of the depths into old ravicka. we were expelled because of the intensity of my dreams. my body wore the signs. each forearm was deeply imprinted by the fingers of the opposite hand, though this was at so odd an angle i had to wonder if it really was i who had made these impressions. but my fingertips were hot when i pointed this out to them, which weakened my position. they said they woke me afraid that i was being too insistent with this text, these prints on my arms, and they needed to know what i wanted. was i a spy? did i have a message? i told them at best i was a linguist and that the dream was about architecture. but they stared at me, still waiting. i dug deep within myself for words that might satisfy them. 'do i have something?' i asked dar in her language. she said, 'well, tell them why you came here.' which was perhaps more what she wanted to know. i thought about the gaps and breaths and my failure to record them. i said, 'at some point i knew we'd have to leave here.' and they breathed and beat back, 'the violence of your premise.' leaving no room for response."

"on the morning of simon's return, zaoter was helping me behind the counter. an elderly couple, attracted by the columns out front, had wandered in to inquire about the hotel's vacancies. they spoke the thick accent one finds in the ravickian hillsides. zaoter could not understand a thing they said, but persisted in pretending that he did. i tried to intervene, understanding their needs, and kept saying to him, 'halabiti astanga lo,' which means, 'allow me.' i even accompanied this offer with a hand gesture, soft against his shoulder. he responded, in my native tongue, from the corner of his mouth, the approximate of 'let me live.' i saw it then: zaoter was in over his head. the picture took its final form: without simon, there was no center. there was no hotel. even though i stood there and performed simon brilliantly, without him, it was a different place. it was a dormitory, a train station, just as he had said. realizing this, i knew the rest instantly. i left zaoter and the exasperated couple to find their own way, and ran up to my room. after securing the lock, pulling the shade, and turning on the desk lamp, i removed a tablet and pen from my travel bag. i lay a sheet of paper across the desk and wrote the following words in blue ink, in a large script:

DEAREST SIMON,
WE NEED YOU. ALL SYSTEMS HAVE COLLAPSED. PEOPLE AND MONEY ARE ONE. THE CORRIDORS LEAD TO UNMARKED DOORS THAT WILL NOT OPEN. I HAVE ADMITTED THIRTEEN NEW GUESTS AND SAID GOODBYE TO SIX. BUT WITH NO CORE, WE ARE ACTING WITHOUT MUSIC. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE WHO TRULY LIVES HERE. PLEASE RETURN."

to be of use

prayer

by kazim ali

Denuded and abandoned I recite
but what do I want
To rise again from the ocean
or be buried alive in the surge and sleep
To be a fearsome range in a single body
or to wind my unity down into depth
Missing in action, ghost-like
bobbing in the distance
Singing psalms to terrify myself
into deciding:
So long liberation
My time in the world was
only a gesture
My body a lonely
stranger
an ache
I never knew

poem about police violence

by june jordan

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running
mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the tip
of my tongue or signs that I have never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle
(don't you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a "justifiable accident" again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently

atlas

under pressure

by nina puro

Yes, I did know I was being used, & how. That’s one
of those songs someone’s singing each second.
A seed-tray sprouts in the shed’s darkest corner. Friday ten kids
got shot. Tuesday a hurricane unshucked trees to matchsticks

two counties over. Just now I danced with a girl & when
night breaks, she’ll find another. I can’t align with why I should hurt
my way up…  nor why we ache to rely, & to believe for a moment
time’s malleable, & grows back green, & to forget hunger’s tender

current. Slow star, quick blade. Night doesn’t fall
or break: it seeps like blood plumes in water—as silt,
as cream, as madness seeds wind.  Books are a sheaf
of corpses in the language of the victors. I’m to want to ink 

my name on one in order to eke out my clearing. Houses are hollow
reliquaries built from books. I’m sidling toward the door, a curtain
of 4/4 pulsing at my heels. I throw my career under a bus
whenever possible, but I’ve never wanted to carve my love

into bark. Others have. Men on mountaintops blazed paths
with their white names long after people palmed caves inside mountains
& blew red powder to show where they’d pressed. One removed;
one accrued. Most of what I think about is how to get smaller

so there’s more later. Good days, I’m frightened by this terrible tenderness
tendriling in me: what’s not discharged festers. Maybe I’m not cruel enough
to claw my way into the junkshop’s interior, but I can’t help dismantle the empire
when I’m this stricken: knotting & unknotting my scarf,  trailing my trauma 

to the chip aisle again. I know this: bad nights, every angle’s a wall & shadows blur
but what seems set against us is only itself, breathing quiet. Listen. If trees could talk,
they wouldn’t. That sigh isn’t tree. It’s wind. Driving, your oasis is heat: you’ll have
responses to this & the responses will have responders— the reams of ancestors 

floating between us are who should be addressed. They can’t be repaid. I’ve this long
white debt. Various vistas will sweep around us, glow, get razed.
I should maybe go West for a bit. I’m sorry. The aftermath
of destruction is predictably peculiar. A hurricane, for example: after a flood,

fires start. One goes back. One’s never done.

a body

by al-saddiq al-raddi
translated by atef alshaer & sarah maguire

The body of a bird in your mouth
breathing songs.
Raw light spills from your eyes,
utterly naked.
You must breach the horizon, once,
in order to wake up.
You must open window after window.
You must support the walls.
I let alphabets cling to me
as I climb the thread of language
between myself and the world.
I muster crowds in my mouth:
suspended between language and the world,
between the world and the alphabets.
I let my head
listen to the myth,
to all sides praising each other.
And I shout at the winds from the top of a mountain.
Why does my tongue tell me to climb this far?
What is the distance between my voice and my longing?
What is there?
A body transcending my body.
A body exiled by desire.
A body sheltered by the wind.

reception

"sadly. . . we often have negative associations with the bodies that bore us. those of us that have been assigned female frequently feel boxed into being valued for the the sole abilities of making babies and sexually gratifying men. male assigned folks likewise face the threat of being targeted if they are seen as feminine. out of these very real concerns, many of us have come to associate letting go, giving, and admittance with danger.

this misconception can actually make us more vulnerable to outside influences. the walls and rules we create to protect ourselves may also be blocking out nourishing energies that we need, not only to survive, but to thrive and to grow. pulling this card is not an indication that you should allow anyone or anything into your life. . . hold your own hand and open up to deeper intimacy, while distinguishing what is actually dangerous from what just feels emotionally vulnerable. . . this is a great time for you to heal misconceptions about creation and mothering."

"your creative energies will heighten when you seek out and receive things that feel good. don't get stuck in social ideas of what sex and sensuality are supposed to look like. . . our world is generous in its complexity. . .

receiving has often been associated with weakness. it is actually the sturdiest of endeavors."

-the collective tarot

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"for a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. the shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. to someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction." -cynthia occelli

mysterium tremendum

quotes from jacques derrida – the gift of death

the genealogy of responsibility that nietzsche refers to in the genealogy of morals as 'the long history of the origin of responsibility' also describes the history of moral and religious conscience – a history of cruelty and sacrifice, of the holocaust even (these are nietzsche's words), of fault as debt or obligation, a history of the economy of 'the contractual relationship' between creditors and debtors. These relations appear as soon as there exists subjects under law in general, and they point back in turn 'to the primary forms of purchase, sale, barter, and trade.'

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god is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible words as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call god exists, (there is) what I call god in me, (it happens that) I call myself god – a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from 'god calls me,' for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret. God is in me, he is the absolute 'me' or 'self', he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity. And he is made manifest, he manifests his nonmanifestation when, in the structures of the living or the entity, there appears in the course of phylo- and ontogenetic history, the possibility of secrecy, however differentiated, complex, plural, and overdetermined it be; that is, when there appears the desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness of that invisibility. That is the history of god and at the same time secret and without any secrets. Such a history is also an economy.

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The smooth functioning of such a society, the monotonous complacency of its discourses on morality, politics, and the law, and the exercise of its rights (whether public, private, national or international), are in no way impaired by the fact that, because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities, that same 'society' puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts for only a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children (those neighbors or fellow humans that ethics or the discourse of the rights of man refer to) without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of others to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only is it true that such a society participates in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.

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the concept of responsibility, like that of decision, would thus be found to lack coherence or consequence, even lacking identity with respect to itself, paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or an antimony. That has never stopped it from 'functioning', as one says. On the contrary, it operates so much better, to the extent that it serves to obscure the abyss or fill in its absence of foundation, stabilizing a chaotic process of change in what are called conventions. Chaos refers precisely to the abyss or the open mouth, that which speaks as well as that which signifies hunger. What is thus found at work in everyday discourse, in the exercise of justice, and first and foremost in the axiomatics of private, public, or international law, in the conduct of internal politics, diplomacy, and war, is a lexicon concerning responsibility that can be said to hover vaguely about a concept that is nowhere to be found, even if we can't go so far as to say that it doesn't correspond to any concept at all. It amounts to a disavowal whose resources, as one knows, are inexhaustible.

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I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibilities to all the others, to the ethical or political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice, I must always hold my peace about it. Whether I want to or not, I can never justify the fact that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other. I will always be secretive, held to secrecy in respect of this, for I have nothing to say about it. What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female, rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is abraham's hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I make at each moment. These singularities represent others, a wholly other form of alterity: one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages. How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people? How would you justify your presence here speaking one particular language, rather than there speaking to others in another language? And yet we also do our duty by behaving thus. There is no language, no reason, no generality or mediation to justify this ultimate responsibility which leads me to absolute sacrifice; absolute sacrifice that is not the sacrifice of irresponsibility on the altar of responsibility, but the sacrifice of the most imperative duty (that which binds me to the other as a singularity in general) in favor of another absolutely imperative duty binding me to every other.

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paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and finitude. As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on mount moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the mount moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably.

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mysterium tremendum. A frightful mystery, a secret to make you tremble.

Tremble. What does one do when one trembles. What is it that makes you tremble?

A secret always makes you tremble. Not simply quiver or shiver, which also happens sometimes, but tremble. A quiver can of course manifest fear, anguish, apprehension of death; as when one quivers in advance, in anticipation of what is to come. But it can be slight, on the surface of the skin, like a quiver that announces the arrival of pleasure or an orgasm. It is a moment in passing, the suspended time of seduction. A quiver is not always very serious, it is sometimes discreet, barely discernible, somewhat epiphenomenal. It prepares for, rather than follows the event. One would say that water quivers before it boils; that is the idea I was referring to as seduction: a superficial pre-boil, a preliminary and visible agitation.

On the other hand, trembling, at least as a signal or symptom, is something that has already taken place, as in the case of an earthquake or when one trembles all over. It is no longer preliminary even if, unsettling everything so as to imprint upon the body an irrepressible shaking, the event that makes one tremble portends and threatens still. It suggests that violence is going to break out again, that some traumatism will insist on being repeated. As different as dread, fear, anxiety, terror, panic, or anguish remain from one another, they have already begun in the trembling, and what has provoked them continues, or threatens to continue, to make us tremble. Most often we neither know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret. We are afraid of the fear, we angish over the anguish, and we tremble. We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated; anticipated but unpredictable; apprehended, but and this is why there is a future, apprehended precisely as unforeseeable, unpredictable; approached as unapproachable. Even if one thinks one knows what is going to happen, the new instant of that happening remains untouched, still unaccessible, in fact unlivable. In the repetition of what still remains unpredictable, we tremble first of all because we don't know from which direction the shock came, whence it was given (whether a good surprise or a bad shock, sometimes a surprise received as a shock); and we tremble from not knowing, in the form of a double secret, whether it is going to continue, start again, insist, be repeated: whether it will, how it will, where, when; and why this shock. Hence I tremble because I am still afraid of what already makes me afraid, of what I can neither see nor foresee. I tremble at what exceeds my seeing and my knowing although it concerns the innermost parts of me, right down to my soul, down to the bone, as we say. Inasmuch as it tends to undo both seeing and knowing, trembling is indeed an experience of secrecy or of mystery, but another secret, another enigma, or another mystery comes on top of the unlivable experience, adding yet another seal or concealment to the tremor.

Where does this supplementary seal come from? One doesn't know why one trembles. This limit to knowledge no longer only relates to the cause or unknown event, the unseen or unknown that makes us tremble. Neither do we know why it produces this particular symptom, a certain irrepressible agitation of the body, the uncontrollable instability of its members or of the substance of the skin or muscles. Why does the irrepressible take this form? Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble with cold, and such analogous physiological manifestations translate experiences and sentiments that appear, at least, not to have anything in common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as tears. Even if one know why one weeps, in what situation, and what it signifies . . .  that still doesn't explain why the lachrymal glands come to secrete these drops of water which are brought to the eyes rather than elsewhere, the mouth or the ears. We would need to make new inroads into thinking concerning the body, without dissociating the registers of discourse (thought, philosophy, the bio-genetico-psychoanalytic sciences, phylo- and ontogenesis), in order to one day come closer to what makes us tremble or what makes us cry, to that cause which is not the final cause that can be called god or death . . . but to a closer cause; not the immediate cause, that is, the accident or circumstance, but the cause closest to our body, that which means that one trembles or weeps rather than doing something else. What is it a metaphor or figure for? What does the body mean to say by trembling or crying, presuming one can speak here of the body, or of saying, of meaning, and of rhetoric?

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everyone must assume his own death, that is to say the one thing in the word that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility. For one can say, in french, that at least in terms of this logic, no one can either give me death or take it from me. Even if one gives me death to the extent that it means killing me, that death will still have been mine and as long as it is irreducibly mine I will not have received it from anyone else. Thus dying can never be taken, borrowed, transferred, delivered, promised, or transmitted. And just as it can't be given to me, so it can't be taken away from me. Death would be this possibility of giving and taking that actually exempts itself from the same realm of possibility that it institutes, namely, from giving and taking. But to say that is far from contradicting the fact that it is only on the basis of death, and in its name, that giving and taking become possible.

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I can give the other everything except immortality, except this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death. I can die for the other in a situation where my death gives him a little longer to live, I can save someone by throwing myself in the water or fire in order to temporarily snatch him from the jaws of death, I can give her my heart in the literal or figurative sense in order to assure her of a certain longevity. But I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life in exchange for her death. Only a mortal can die, as we said earlier. That should now be adjusted to read: and that mortal can only give to what is mortal since he can give everything except immortality, everything except salvation as immortality.

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in order to understand in what way this gift of the law means not only the emergence of a new figure of responsibility but also of another kind of death, one has to take into account the uniqueness and irreplaceable singularity of the self as the means by which – and it is here that it comes close to death – existence excludes every possible substitution. Now to have the experience of responsibility on the basis of the law that is given, that is, to have the experience of one's absolute singularity and apprehend one's own death, amounts to the same thing. Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given,” one can say, by death. It is the same gift, the same source, one could say the same goodness and the same law. It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible.