In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have failed us already, mainly Marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism, or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism.” Present in all of these are the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics, representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking the question that few will ask; ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There where it smells of shit
it smells of being.
Man could just as well not have shat,
not have opened the anal pouch,
but he chose to shit
as he would have chosen to live
instead of consenting to live dead.
Because in order not to make caca,
he would have had to consent
not to be,
but he could not make up his mind to
lose being,
that is, to die alive.
~ Antonin Artaud To Have Done With the Judgment of god
Of where one shits, one shall not speak—to this oath is the whole of civilization held. From chamber pots to those euphemistically-named rooms whose real function has little to do with washing or bathing but is instead to flush away those shameful signs of human animality, there has ever been in the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a single second?
~ C. Baudelaire
The Anti-Social Turn
No Future, Edelman’s magnum opus of queer negativity, offers a series of crucial lessons for baedlings; that is, for those of us whose queerness means the refusal of society and not any negotiation with or within it. In our reading and use—or abuse—of Edelman’s singular work, we have no choice but to take him to task for his academic form, his position within institutionalized queer theory, and the separation between his theory and practice. His project fails in that it locates queer negativity within various cultural productions—literature, film—and yet never ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Friends,
I read (the rest of) Bædan with great interest. I will respond in a number of ways.
The questions I’ll ask here about Bædan concern your engagement with Lee Edelman’s No Future, specifically how he and you understand the queer as figure, as exemplar, and maybe as reality—and how you develop that understanding in the direction of anti-politics. The background of these questions is obviously the issue of nihilism—passive and active, or maybe just nihilism.
(“Nothing of what we have achieved is as negative as the behavior and opinions of those who say yes to the world we live in, those who accept it without question and shove as much of it as they can down their gob withou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Child
Wide-eyed and full of wonder, ignorant of good and evil, infinitely skeptical toward authority.
When restrained or punished she is genuinely hurt and cries deeply. When coddled, she falls instantly in love.
Curious and wise, disloyal, whimsical, and free.
Joyous when she is destroying, petulant when oppressed.
She sees not beyond the here and now, except when she dreams, and when her reality does not bear the fruit of freedom she passes immediately to despair.
Idealistic and tempestuous in undertakings, impatient with process, blind to the hurdles between herself and her ideals.
Her simple nature can be a joy or an exasperation.
Flighty and adoring; chaotic and demanding.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In this time as in all others, there are those who are hopelessly on the side of chaos, unpredictability, chance. Who want nothing but to delight in the nothing and seek amusement in the unfolding of the cosmos.
But in this they are hindered and led astray by so many emissaries and preachers from a world where everything has to be—and is—just so. A world that insists on hard work served with a smile, a world of reward and punishment, of just choices and of wrong ones. A world whose evils demand redress, in which the door is always open to do something about anything, and in which everyone must find his or her place. A world which, so they say, is this one.
On their worst days, the anarchists believe the preachers m... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The following lecture was presented at an anarchist conference held in Milwaukee in May of 2011. In the wake of the defeated anti-austerity struggle months earlier in Wisconsin, the Crisis Conference was organized as a space for anarchists to theorize intervention into the unfolding crisis and the nascent resistance to austerity.
Identity In Crisis
Contention One: A Crisis of Reproduction
i
While economists, politicians and technocrats of all varieties endlessly speak of this or that detail of the crisis, they remain caught up in diagnosing what they perceive as a periodic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. What goes unspoken is that all the various crises of production, consumption and accumulation are simply mino... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I should have liked to talk to you about encounters. I have a notion that the moment that provoked — or provokes — them is located outside time, that the shock spatters the surrounding time and space, but I may be wrong, for I want to talk about the encounters that I provoke and that I impose upon the lads in my book. Perhaps some of these moments that are set down on paper are like populous streets on whose throng my gaze happens to fall: a sweetness, a tenderness, situates them outside the moment; I am charmed and — I can’t tell why — that mob of people is balm to my eyes. I turn away, then I look again, but I no longer find either sweetness or tenderness. The street becomes dismal, like a morning of insomnia... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Percy Shelley is known to modern anarchists, if he is known at all, by a few
lines from “The Mask of Anarchy”,[1] a political poem he penned after the
Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when cavalry attacked a large crowd demanding the
reform of the Parliamentary system. This poem, surging with the righteous anger
of a peace-loving poet, contains a refrain sung (as if) by the Earth to her
children:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to Earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.[2]
(368–72)
These lines notwithstanding, Shelley tended to avoid, especially in his longer
poems, explicitly engaging with politics. It is n... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)