ill will editions

Next Saturday, in Chicago

BATON SONG: THE ZAD, DESTITUENT ASSOCIATION, AND THE JOY OF PLEDGING WAR

While #MississippiStand water defenders were cutting fences and locking-down to oil pipeline machinery and trucks this past Saturday in Keokuk, Iowa, a massive mobilization was simultaneously taking place in Western France on the Zone To Defend (ZAD) in Notre-dame-des-landes. Upwards of forty thousand people traveled to the spawling open-air land occupation to express their refusal of the proposed airport mega-project and their affirmation of the world that has for 10 years been built up in resistance to all that it stands for.

After winning 55% support for the airport in a widely-contested referendum earlier this year, the French government promised an eviction of the ZAD “this october, or this autumn”. In defiance of the government’s threats, tens of thousands answered a callout to travel to the ZAD with wooden batons, with which to make a visible and collective sign of their determination to defend it. Upon arrival, they planted their batons in the ground, and pledged that if the territory should come under attack, they would each return, collect their baton, and wield it against the ZAD’s enemies. One version published on the ZAD support site reads,

“Pledge: On this, the 8^th of October, we take hold of our batons, the symbol of our determination and the instrument for the defense of this ZAD that we love. By planting them here today, we seal into the soil of Notre-dame-des-landes our collective pledge to return to the ZAD, if necessary, to defend it. We won’t submit either to the law of profit, nor to the law of the strongest: we are here, we will be here!”

Regardless of how one feels about the ZAD, at a purely formal level it is certainly possible to read this demo as an admittedly-very-large but ultimately symbolic show of force, not fundamentally different from your garden variety leftist protest march or political festival. People marched, expressed their disapproval, listened to a few folk songs, ate some soup, then went home. That it included raising the frame of what will become a multi-function building adds some marginally practical dimension to the portrait, but doesn’t alter it in fundamental ways.

However, this picture misses something essential that, by touching on an essential paradox of our time, warrants more theoretical elaboration.

The Collapse of Classical Politics and the Reinvention of Association

The past decade has testified both to widespread disenchantment with electoral politics and a major uptick in struggles against infrastructural megaprojects, from pipelines to airports, garbage dumps to high speed train-lines, and beyond. It is in the vanishing point between these two facts that we suggest the significance of the Baton Song of the ZAD lies.

As the protracted exhaustion of classical politics continues its headlong abasement through this US current election cycle—which seems to have distinguished itself only by its being perhaps the first in living memory in which all party’s candidates are at this point universally reviled—the urgency of effecting a wholesale bifurcation with the entirety of the dissociative nightmare of classical politics screams in our ears. We know this. But somehow, it was really only at the moment when we pulled our car into the Mississippi Stand anti-pipeline protest camp at Keokuk, IA and noticed that the camp’s welcome sign had been hastily painted over a Bernie Sanders placard, that the difficulty of our present task confronted us.

It is of course neither surprising nor remarkable to see ‘Berned-out Sandernistas’ turn from elections to pipeline blockades, a move which, while undoubtedly signaling some measure of overall radicalization, seemed to drag with it enough Jill Stein buttons on its #noDAPL merchandise to let its roots show through. Likewise, there is certainly nothing preventing these folks from relating to current-day anti-infrastructure struggles with the same degree of placelessness and leftist moralism that once typified the anti-globalization protests of the early 2000’s. Yet if there’s something that links the exhaustion of classical politics to infrastructure, it’s not only the fact that the real architecture of power governing our lives long ago shifted its center of gravity from city halls and Senate floors to the transport controllers at logistics parks and distribution centers. It’s also that, since there’s never a one-to-one correspondence between mutations in power and the recalibration of subjectivities, there remains an open question whether, given power’s logistical turn, resistance movements will mutate in ways that allow our forms of association to slip out of the fetish of moralistic and juridical thinking (revolution as either the harmonization of political institutions with their inner moral basis, or as the replacement of one set of laws with another), and assume a truly destituent character.  

Here we wish to suggest that in the 40,000-strong Baton Song pledge at the ZAD we can see much more than the contours of a familiar leftist protest march. Everything appears as if, by severing the two elements of the classical theory of the social contract, Zadists and their supporters performed a “pact of association” against subjection, rather than for it. In its refusal to countenance the state referendum’s electoral majority, what is at issue is an irreducibly partisan pledge. Such a gesture is best understood not as a splitting of a totality into competing parts or factions each defined via mutually contested claims over the management of the whole, but rather as the intensification of asymmetrical differences that were already there within the way we live, which the ‘savage peace’ of the State only ever manages at best to attenuate, but never extinguishes. That its struggle is premised on a partisan idea of how we want to live is audible in very the slogan of the ZAD, “against the airport and its world”, which consciously distances itself from the politics of reasoned dissent or citizenly disagreement. After all, if one struggles by living differently on the ZAD, it is by means of the entirety of the world one builds thereby that one is waging war. In such a situation, what does one oppose, except another world?

To pledge oneself to the ZAD is not to lay the grounds for the constitution of a new totality, which some extrapolated “Zadist revolution” could some day fulfill or actualize, but to commit one’s resources to the gathering of a force in which construction and departure coincide. In a video interview from this Saturday, a Zadist assembling a cabin to house defenders explained that what distinguishes them from the state is not primarily their negative threat of self-defense, but above all their use of construction as a means of making war. This only begins to make sense if one recalls that to live in such a space is already to live experimentally, since the day-to-day absence there of police, of State administration, of prisons, and of a monetary economy within the territory of the ZAD is (in its contrast with the world surrounding it, in which we’ve all grow-up) a sort of complex problem to which life must respond by invention. Is every invention functional? Not at all. It simply means that life and politics are in reciprocal immanence—a single question, a single process, with no separation between oikos [household] and polis [politics] carving up our needs into specialized roles and functions. Destituent power is first of all this immanence of politics and life, from which it becomes impossible to separate off a supposedly ‘generic’ human form in whose name one may dominate others (every theory of human nature is in the end a metaphysical apologia for some form of subjugation). If every human life is already immediately a formed-life, a set of immediate evaluations of the important, the tolerable, the alluring and the repugnant, a sensitivity to this or that set of signs rather than others, and a set of corresponding capacities to act and think, then one is never not a partisan for some idea of living. The only question is: which one? And with whom are you allied?

This emphasis on the growing of a positive force of rupture rather than the contesting of power, this counterposing of association and subjection, tends to sever means from ends. What are classically treated as pre-political means (association, our powers of self-defense) in service of a political ends (a subjection to new laws, self-preservation) here become detached from any predetermined goal. Not that this makes them nihilistic. In fact, there is here a more difficult but potentially deeper affirmation that can emerge, if we attend to it. If, in our building of a force, we manage to consciously avoid relating to our enemies (and above all to ourselves) in terms of some claim we suppose ourselves to possess to a deeper universality or ‘constituent legitimacy’, if we measure our strength by the vitality of our positive asymmetry with the world of governance rather seeing ourselves as a People awaking to a “betrayal” by its representatives, then our entire idea of politics changes. Once we subtract innocence and abstract legitimacy from our idea of power, the pledge of association no longer exists to bring into being a proto-legal subject, but a new attachment to the world. It is on the soil of this attachment signaled in the pact that (in a secondary moment) we become capable of discerning who are our friends and who our enemies. It is this processural priority of the lived world, the sensitivity to and unwillingness to be disembedded from the immediate asymmetry or multiplicity of forms-of-life, that ensures that a quantitative “referendum” on our legitimacy will be unable to dent our confidence in our own power.  

It is worth recalling that the idea of a pledge or pact to stand together is linked to an older and arguably more profound meaning of the term “commune”. As some friends have recently insisted, the pact may be seen as the germinal element of a practical communism founded not on a model of governance or ownership, but on a situated and partisan mode of living in the world.

“What constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn by the inhabitants of a city, a town, or a rural area to stand together as a body….a commune [is] a pact to face the world together. It means relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What is aimed for is not an entity; it is a qualitative bond, a way of being in the world. […] Declaring the Commune is always to knock historical time off its hinges, to punch a hole in the hopeless continuum of submissions, the senseless succession of days, the dreary struggle of each one to go on living. Declaring the Commune is agreeing to bond with others, where nothing will be like it was before.” (Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, “Omnia Sunt Communia”)

Lessons For the Midwest & Beyond

What might those of us engaging with infrastructural struggles in North America draw from this gesture of war?

As infrastructural struggles such as NoDAPL and Mississippi Stand continue to attract more newly-disaffected Sandernistas (a development we should welcome), the latter’s occasionally fanatical insistence on non-violence and symbolic ‘stunt activism’ can make trust and shared understanding between newcomers and more seasoned warriors difficult. In such a context, it is important that we find ways to resist reproducing the pacifist vs. radical binary, which condemns us to marginality, makes us more easily targeted, and reduces the overall potential for ungovernability and disruption. Clearly the question cannot be solved by tactical compromises—most of us won’t be going down for voluntary “non-violent arrests”. Nor can we remain content with the liberal notion of a ‘diversity of tactics’, whereby our separation into radicals and pacifists is ultimately reinforced through a polite indifference to one another.

Instead, what we must seek out are those gestures that can make war inviting, joyful, and good-humored, while finding ways to invest peace with a partisan meaning, to invest the soil with the seal of combative alliances between us: we will be back.

In Iowa, a group of hippies sporting Jill Stein™ buttons have a prayer circle in a ditch next to the access road to the drilling site. We shudder, incapable of anything but silent contempt. A failed encounter. Only upon returning home do we begin to ask: What is a prayer, but a sacrament of language? What is a pledge, if not a sacrament of war? What if the reinvention of the sacrament and the pledge have as their aim not a respiritualization of politics, but the elaboration of a war-machine utilizing all the resources of the spirit, the better to break-away from governance, to reattach to this world, to find our friends, to defeat our enemies?

Peace to the ZAD, war on infrastructure!

[“We’re ready. We’ll see you in October, behind the barricades!”]

FREEDOM SQUARE—A PHOTO MONTAGE & A (LOST) CALLOUT

Below is a collection of photos assembled by our comrade @Soit_goes upon the final dismantling of the Freedom Square camp, after 51 days of occupation in the Lawndale neighborhood of West Chicago.

We are also sharing a callout written by a couple of comrades on August 10, 2016 (i.e. roughly halfway through the occupation) which—for a variety of reasons—was never finally circulated. It is not a reflection of the vision of Freedom Square per se, but rather of the aspirations and ambitions of one or two folks who participated in it and who felt it was urgent to encourage others to pursue similar experiments in police-free-zones in ways responsive to their own particular situations. It should (at a minimum) be read alongside the LetUsBreathe Collective’s statement after day 41, which adds to it a number of sobering considerations. -IWE

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CALLOUT FROM FREEDOM SQUARE: SPREAD THE ABOLITIONIST SPACES!

We know that the cops are evidently unable to stop themselves from killing black people. We know there’s been decades of economic disinvestment and institutional abandonment of black people in this country. We know that if there was anything to hope for from professional politicians and NGOs, we wouldn’t find ourselves where we’re at today. We know the police in this country cannot be reformed, that they’ve always functioned as a tool of racial domination, and that no amount of body-cams or ‘accountability’ can change this.

The only way out of this nightmare has got to come from us.

That’s why for years now we’ve been part of a wave of massive protests. We’ve marched alongside our friends and neighbors, we’ve blocked roads, malls, police precincts, freeways. While marches and freeway shutdowns can be powerful tools for expressing outrage and anger, they haven’t answered our need to be done with the police for good.

As the awareness of this truth continues to spread and deepen, we’ve started to see powerful and exciting new calls for police abolition. But what does abolition concretely look like? How can we begin to imagine a world without police?

Before such a world will be possible, we must learn how to collectively self-organize to face our problems together, not just to satisfy our day-to-day needs, but to take care of each other, to imagine, dream, and experiment with new forms of common life. We have to provide ourselves with the means to meet necessities like food, shelter, healing, education, and self- defense. We need permanent spaces in which to find each other, get organized, and begin to develop capacities for realizing our autonomy.

Three weeks ago, folks seized a piece of one Chicago neighborhood (across the street from the CPD’s organized torture unit) and began the experiment. Here hundreds of meals are served daily. There is a library, a medic tent, free clothing and art supplies, space to sleep, to talk. A garden was just planted. No money changes hands here, everything is free. And because folks care about each other, cops aren’t welcome, nor is racist, ableist, trans-phobic, or classist behavior. By removing the police and money from our calculations, we’re able to start learning–slowly–how to work things out ourselves, how to love ourselves and each other.

The tremendous outpouring of local support received has proven that this little experiment in world-building resonates with a lot of people right now. This doesn’t surprise us, as we’re all doing bad, we’re all searching for a way out of the wreckage.

On one hand, it’s true to say that every meal, every conversation, every workshop in this square is an immediate victory that no one can take away from us. On the other hand, if this experiment is going to succeed long-term, it needs to spread and multiply, to take on new shapes and forms. If abolition is to become more than a dream or an isolated island, living experiments need to grow and mutate.

That’s why we call on folks everywhere to begin seizing spaces of your own, to spread the experiment from where you already are, and build power locally, with your friends and neighbors. Take over an empty lot, block off a street, invite your neighbors, organize discussions, bring music, films, food, plants, soil, tents, and get going. It doesn’t matter how small it is at first, because what we’re doing makes sense, it is necessary. Everything begins with small realities.

There’s no time to wait!

-Aug 10, 2016

Our magnificent friend Kara Wild, who is currently imprisoned pre-trial in Paris and accused of helping torch a police car during an anti-police demonstration in April, has given us a list of books she’d be overjoyed to receive in the mail. Her supporters have created an amazon wishlist so we can keep track of what folks are sending her. It also includes her mailing address and instructions (e.g. softcover only).

Please send her hella shit! It takes two minutes and it will make her day, and ours too.

For more info on her case, please visit freekarawild.org

FROM FREEWAY SHUTDOWNS TO COP-FREE ZONES: a Reportback and a Proposal

“[B]eneath the surface of that idea – that truism, black lives matter – is an unsettling challenge. What would it mean to create a world, or at least a space, where that actually was true?” [1]

A Cop-Free Zone in Carbondale 

On Friday night a couple dozen folks converged on the local autonomous infoshop in Carbondale, IL for an illegal dance party in the street. In addition to locals, cars arrived from Bloomington, Chicago, and St. Louis to participate. The plan was to throw an unpermitted street party with free food and loud music, and as things progressed and energy rose, to block off the street and visibly polarize the space against state violence with large handmade banners declaring it a cop-free zone. 

The event proceeded more or less as planned: a collective cook-out transitioned into a dance party, furniture was dragged into the streets and fireworks were set off, until banners painted earlier in the evening were finally strung up across the two lanes of the street and the block was taken over. Several police SUV’s circled at a distance but avoided any direct contact for almost the entire evening. By the time they finally approached the block on foot, the party was already being slowly wrapped up and a large contingent of friends and locals had just bounced to go lake swimming. A decision was made not to enforce the blockade, yet after the street was cleared for two minutes and the police left, it was promptly re-blocked with furniture as loud jams continued to sound out into the night for another hour until the last people left.

While this first experiment was modest in its scale and intensity, we think that experimenting with police-free zones has a strong potential for resonance in the current North American context. It is less Carbondale’s specific event and rather the broader proposal that we wish to focus on below.

Sense and Tactics

 While recent weeks have seen thousands of people blockading traffic and freeways across the USA, the tactical impulses and the actions attempted in this cycle of anti-police struggle have largely rehashed what we saw in the summer and fall of 2014, without inventing or experimenting with anything all that new.

When we think strategically about tactical issues, it is important to recall that the relationship between sense and gesture is a dynamic and fluid one, one which camps on a shifting soil of forces and events. Sometimes thought falls short of the tactics and gestures that we’re engaging in, and we find ourselves demanding things we already possess, or framing things through terms or oppositions that the movement has already surpassed at a practical level. Other times, thought runs ahead of our tactical repertoire, such that every effort to elaborate a practice that feels appropriate to the affective declension of hostilities and the ideas that folks are thinking about seems to fall short.

Our sense is that our present situation resembles the latter scenario, where thought runs ahead of the gestures we’re seeing. The current cycle exhibits both a rupture in thought (since the 2014 cycle of struggle) as well as an exhaustion at the level of practical methods.

 We have the impression that the current tactical menu (freeway blockades and generally-pacified protest marches) actually fall short of what makes sense to people right now. Both on social media, in everyday encounters we’ve had, as well as in recent demonstrations among some of the newer Black activist cadres, folks right now seem to be much more interested in talking about the abolition of police than its reform or ‘community control’. We see this as a significant ‘ideological’ development (to speak loosely) that is encouraging, but which has so far failed to have any material consequences at the level of new practices. If we don’t want ‘better policing’ but rather to have police out of our lives, what sorts of experiments can respond to this collective need? What does it mean to give this theoretical and affective destitution of the police a practical face, one that corresponds to our currently low levels of material organization? This is the question that the current cycle of struggle is attempting to ask, and it’s one that calls for a practical answer.

At the same time, a cruel but apparently inexorable logic seems to ensure that virtually irrespective of its initial ‘radicality’, the more a certain tactic gets repeated, the more its impact tends to become purely symbolic.  

The Washington Post reports that in some parts of this country over half of the demos in the past two years have blocked freeways. While it once pushed the limits of the thinkable and broke open a new terrain of struggle, the freeway blockade has become a knee-jerk impulse which, for all its historical rationale (highways were often instruments to deepen segregation), is beginning to feel like a flat routine. In Chicago, things reached the point that when the first Alton Sterling demo took place a week and a half ago, the police all-but-invited us to take over the I-94, knowing that at most we’d be out there a few minutes before leaving and going home. Our impression is that the situation isn’t altogether different elsewhere.

The more our methods become calcified and predictable, the more easily they are governed, assimilated, and neutralized. But even more importantly, the more our gestures fail to become worthy of the thought-event of the police’s destitution (i.e. their having been momentarily stripped of any veneer of legitimacy, through the exhibition of the raw violence that it served to conceal). For legitimacy can be stripped without the force of the police being truly deposed. For the latter to happen, we must manage to articulate concrete forms of living in which they exert no force, nor shape the economy of meaning around us. For this to happen, we must do more than abandon any residual reliance upon and faith in the police. We must create open-ended experiments in relating to one another where they aren’t.

Demolitionist Desire

As anyone who has ever spent any time at the massive autonomous territory at Notre-dame-des-landes in Western France (known as the ZAD or the Zone-to-defend) can tell you, the fact that police don’t enter the ZAD shapes the experience of being within it in an essential way. The problem cuts two ways, of course, since the mutilated structures of behavior and association we have internalized as governed subjects do not spontaneously disappear when the police withdraw. Even small experiments such as the one in Carbondale the other night reminded us at certain moments that hostilities within our communities will continue to surface in contexts of reduced state presence. Yet there is no mistaking the feeling one has when navigating a car or bike through the circuitous barricade architecture that marks the outer edges of the ZAD, and feeling the weight of the air change as you pass inside, just knowing that at least for a while, at least here, we needn’t worry about police checkpoints, stop-and-frisks, and all their attendant forms of everyday terror. The feeling is palpable: it feels like an opening of the possible.    

In a different context, whose fate is no less uncertain as we write this, dozens of barricades remain in force across the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, as teachers and comrades of all ages push into their second month of frontal insurrection against the State. If the horizon of ‘abolitionism’ in our context remains a question mark at present—if its utility has not been sapped by liberals like Angela Davis and co.—then let it point to the struggle in Oaxaca, which is living abolitionism. For the barricades that dot the map of the region have the potential to rid their territory not only of the pestilence of police and politicians, they carry within them the potential to abolish the economy as well. 

To defeat and then depose the police, to abolish the economy—this would the horizon of a superior abolitionism, or better yet, what a friend has elsewhere preferred to call “demolitionist desire”.

But we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere near the level of organized struggle seen in Oaxaca. To propose passing from the highway shutdowns going on now to the highway barricades seen down south would require a quantum leap in our organization that is difficult at present to imagine, if it were even desirable (the highway might, after all, be the least habitable space in the metropolitan fabric).

For now, we propose a diffuse experiment with cop-free-zones in spaces we stand a better chance of holding down and inhabiting, such as blocks in our neighborhoods. The latter presents the incomparable advantage that it can actually conceivably hold and materially be filled with collective life. But for this, a different series of questions must be placed at the forefront of anti-police struggle:

On the one hand, logistical questions—what resources would we need to hold out? who can cook for two dozen, for a hundred? who knows how to effectively circulate info throughout the immediate and remote parts of town? how can we safeguard our need for anonymity, resist the trap of the media spectacle, and still evade the wingnut caricatures thrust upon us by the state? if one such zone were able to be held for a longer duration, how could it propagate itself?

So-called ‘technical’ questions like these cannot be detached from social ones: how will we negotiate the ethical differences between us once the cops ceased to play a role? if we had to defend the zone against police, who on our blocks would we find ourselves standing alongside? The degree of trust and shared vision existing between folks who find themselves positioned differently by police violence will play an important role here. If those most targeted by police lynching have the impression that the white folks aren’t serious about defending the space, if our contingency plans aren’t adjusted appropriately to the degree of organization and the density of bonds between the different crews of folks going into it, then runs the risk of feeling more like a Custeristic provocation of the cops than an experiment in defending a space expressive of a real desire for collective life.

Still, our separation will not be overcome prior to engaging in such experiments. And yet, to tear a block or a whole neighborhood away from the forces of order and begin experimenting with collective forms of life, we actually needn’t share the same experiences of those forces we seek here to exclude (police, prisons, etc.). As was pointed out elsewhere,

“A police-free zone is not a ‘new world’, it is merely the collision of many. Many worlds smaller than that of police order and governance individually, but that perhaps together are capable of defending themselves. Of surviving a collision.”

We need to get away from the exhausted debate around ‘riots versus peaceful marches’, ‘violence and non-violence’, ‘safety versus risk’, etc. Our time is much better spent getting organized in the places where we already live in ways that can make pushing for experimental police-free zones a plausible potentiality. And anyway, from the moment we take hold of such a zone, questions that right now are too-often answered by reference to sterile ideological oppositions, or else by sorting people according to their ‘structural identities’, tend to be reshaped and concretized around the substantial situation in which we face the world together, here and now.

A police-free zone is not a model or a program, it brings no pre-formed utopia into being. It is an opening of the possible that clears a space of encounter, of intense inhabitation, an ‘undercommons’ ripped from the hands of the pacified metropolis, for as long as it can be held down. If the abolition of police is to become more than a slogan, its preparation must begin with small realities.  

LA POSITION DU LAISSÉ-POUR-COMPTE — Un entretien avec Saidiya V. Hartman réalisée par Frank B.Wilderson, III 

READ / PRINT

A French translation of Frank B. Wilderson III’s 2002 interview with Saidiya Hartman, “The Position of the Unthought”, in which the two afropessimist theorists work through the political consequences of her book Scenes of Subjection. 

“Donc certainement, cela va plus loin que le désir d’inclusion dans le spectre limité des possibilités que le projet national offre. Qu’est-ce que ce langage – ce langage donné de la liberté – permet ? Et une fois que vous avez pris conscience de ses limites et que vous voyez qu’il est inexorablement inclus dans certaines notions du sujet et de la sujétion, eh bien ce langage de la liberté ne devient plus celui qui sort l’esclave de son ancienne condition, mais le site de la réélaboration de cette condition, plutôt que de sa transformation.”

This Saturday, 7pm, at 31st & Lock St. in Chicago. 

THE UNASSIGNABLE RIOT

The following article appeared in Lundimatin #67, on June 27, 2016. Translated by Ill Will Editions. 

“The novelty of coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the state organization. ”
               Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Minnesota, 1993, 86.

Everyone—including the enemy’s propagandists—generally agrees that the riotous new figure appearing at the head of the recent demonstrations [le cortège de tête] is one of the noteworthy inventions of the current uprising. The governmental attempt by the media to reduce this phenomenon to a soundbyte that is both disgustingly depoliticized (the enigmatic “black bloc” or, more commonly, the “smashers” [casseurs]) and quantifiable ( “dozens”, “several hundred”, “close to a thousand,” depending on the day) clearly aims to conceal a reality that is precisely the inverse: the head of the cortège is growing in numbers, at the same time that its composition is becoming increasingly unassignable.

One can, of course, find experienced political activists, members of this or that organization, some of whom have a long history of social movements and whose presence is expected, predictable, and normal. But the singularity of the head of the cortège lies in its generic character, which evades capture by any identity. In it, people are encountering others who they should never meet under the normal course of things, whose assigned positions appear radically incommensurate. What could be more worrisome for power than to observe (with an impotence proportionate to its brutality) the practical weaving-together of those very bodies it busies itself keeping apart? The CGT activist who clashes with the police instead of strolling along behind his union’s sound truck, the university professor who dons a hoodie and swimming goggles instead of signing a petition and once again separating speech from gesture, the student who leaves her classroom to go join the employees on strike, the retiree who braves the tear gas: so many uncontrollable lines of flight, so many miraculous journeys. If becoming-revolutionary means anything, it is precisely this assumption of the clinamen [1], this self-abandonment, this uncompromising engagement with the possible opened up by the situation.

“What Empire demands is not that each conforms to a common law, but that each conforms to his own particular identity. Imperial power depends on the adherence of bodies to their supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control over them.”
                   Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, Semiotexte, 2010, 23.

That everyone remains in their place—this is the injunction of the dominant order. However, the concept of form-of-life, which to our eyes seems helpful for grasping the collective élan at work in this ongoing experiment [experience] [2], designates precisely an attraction, an inclination, a taste that exceeds (through the intervention of an evental contingency) any identifying grasp, any substantial fixation. The form-of-life is a free use of predicates, one that suspends, deactivates, and destitutes them. Every objective determination is hereby rendered inoperative. Trade unionists, students, precarious workers, the unemployed, workers, intellectuals, activists, artists, youth from the banlieus: the head of the cortège embodies the neutral and anonymous coalescence, the becoming-anyone of this whole human multiplicity whose specific origins find themselves locally and punctually suspended. As Agamben put it, “a form-of-life is that which ceaselessly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself living.” [3]

To our eyes, a similar logic occurred in the refusal of work that took place on a mass scale during the labor struggles of the early 1970’s in Italy. What was at issue was not defending the identity of the workers, but negating it, materially destroying it. Whereas the union bureaucracies claimed to win better working conditions, thereby maintaining the worker in his alienated function as laborer, in his submission to the hierarchy of the boss, autonomous proletarians struggled against work itself through an entire series of offensive practices, from sabotage to absenteeism, all of which testified to a refusal on the part of the working class to reproduce itself as an available labor force, i.e., as capital. To refuse work, means to be extraneous to the relationship of production, to struggle against one’s own class identity, against all that is perceived as a negation and a dispossession of one’s existence. In short: “to struggle against production and against the command of the market [le commandement d’entreprise], to negate ourselves as working class and hurl ourselves into an attack on state power.” [4] From which we draw the following conclusion: if the enduring operation of power is to impose upon us a fixed set of predicates, from which are derived a series of specific behaviors, then the primordial gesture of liberation is a desubjectifying one that aims to subvert its own social identity.

"To assume a form-of-life means to be more faithful to our penchants than to our predicates.” [5] For weeks now, we’ve witnessed the unforeseeable encounter of bodies sharing a single form-of-life, a single penchant for direct emancipation, open antagonism, insurrectional audacity. That this has transpired through the reappropriation of mass violence (the symptom of an increasingly diffuse radicality), i.e. by the destitution of its centralized monopoly by the state, should no longer surprise us.

Obviously, the whole question now is whether this fabric of political friendships will be able to produce its own war machine, and overcome the momentary culmination inevitable at the present stage. If everyone simply returns to their old existence (prior to the event), if the bodies that today are affected by a common power resume their atomic separation, this movement will have been a mere convulsion without consequence. It is up to us to deepen these material and affective bonds, which right now are merely embryonic, and to give them a duration, an organizational consistency. To build and strengthen our Party: that is the task of the coming phase. By which we mean, to follow the line along which forms-of-life grow, to assume the becoming-common these networks of affinity, and to invent, far from all all vertical hierarchies, a new strategic operator.

We can, therefore we must.

-A musician from the head of the cortège.

[1] The ancient philosopher Lucretius’ term, used describe the unpredictable swerve of atoms. See the opening theses of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War. –Trans.

[2] The French expérience can mean both experience and experiment. -Trans.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, Stanford, 2016, Part IV.

[4] Marcello Tarì, Autonomie! Italie, les années 1970, La Fabrique, 2011, 20.

[5] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 23.

Reflections on Violence

The following text first appeared on the French website Lundi.am on April 18, 2016. Below is an English translation posted anonymously to Anarchistnews.org, with translation revisions by Ill Will Editions. 

**********

Preface

Since the events of April 9th and the wild week that followed, the Nuit Debout (Rise Up At Night) assembly placed the question of violence at the center of the debate. While citizens persist in their rigorous pacifism, stances in favor of the “diversity of tactics" are also multiplying. The National Student Coordination itself has explicitly refused to dissociate rioters and demonstrators.

Amidst this proliferation of discussions, the Nuit à Bout Action Committee has gathered a few positions that seem pertinent reinforcement of the movement as well as its repression. The more seriously we our presence in the Place de la République becomes, the more frequently situations leading to confrontations will present themselves. We must prepare for them. It isn’t a question of convincing everyone that violence is a viable option, or a necessary route. It’s simply a matter of finding those forms of action, perhaps frightening, that will deliver us from fear.

Reflection I

What must be explained is not why things sometimes get out of hand around the Nuit Debout gatherings in Paris, but why it doesn’t happen more often. In the end, it’s clearly understood why people who have been gathering every night for  two weeks to envision the end of capitalism end up wrecking the windows of the Société Générale bank (#PanamaPapers). This is obviously correct, it makes total sense. The problem lies elsewhere. Which is why neither the moral apologias for violence nor the theoretical or ideological justifications for smashing things will succeed in bringing more people to fight against the police or break bank windows.

We shouldn’t forget that if many people are staying quiet in demos, it’s not because pacifism is in their blood, but simply because they’re afraid. To overcome this fear is a collective task, one that is nowhere better accomplished than in the streets. This begins with taking care of everyone, and not only one’s friends—with us all taking care of each other, even in the worst situations.

Reflection II

"Diversity of tactics” is an expression which, like its cousin, “convergence of struggles”, tells us nothing about what must be done when people are brought together who don’t have the same way of struggling, or don’t have any way of struggling at all. The expression conceals what is actually a pretty liberal idea: everyone struggling next to each other, in their own way, without bothering or talking to one another. Diversity of tactics is nothing but a subtler form of dissociation. When will we get a “diversity of corteges”?[1] In fact, the FIDL [Fédération indépendante et démocratique lycéenne] already asks for it at every high school demo.

Reflection III

The question is not whether to be violent or not, but of being offensive or inoffensive. Three gangs of five friends determined to smash ATM’s but incapable of organizing on a larger scale than their own affinity group are just as inoffensive as 10,000 unionized citizens slowly marching behind the CGT’s sound-system-french-fries-van. Conversely, 3,000 people holding their ground in a cloud of tear-gas while a small group throws rocks from behind a banner almost succeeded in having a nightcap at Valls’ house.

All the most powerful moments experienced in the streets since March 9th have demanded, at one point or another, that those who were ready to fight and those who were not took care of each other, decided to stand together, and not just side-by-side in polite and diplomatic indifference. On April 9th at Place de la Nation, there weren’t enough tear gas grenades in all the capital to tear apart the hundred or so people who were bombarding the CRS lines from the hundreds of people who booed and filmed the cops, while cheering or nursing the rioters [émeutiers].

Reflection IV

Little by little, the "question of violence” appears for what it is: a diversion. As long as we continue to talk about this, and moreover to speak about it in moral and ideological terms, we won’t confront the true strategical problems posed by the demonstrations. To write one more apologia for violence will accomplish nothing. There are plenty of people ready to defend themselves from the police. What’s missing is precisely the cortège to defend.

Reflection V

A demonstration is not a symbolic ritual. It is a test of strength, wherein those who have reasons to revolt physically encounter those paid to maintain the world in the deplorable state we find ourselves in. Every demo is the actualization of a rapport de force between those who are ready to take risks to change the situation, and those whom we pay to preserve it. The problem of official union demonstrations is that they deny the very existence of such a force relation. The image of life and of struggle they offer us is disgusting. Sponsored balloons, sausage-slogans and security squads; if "struggling" means to march like the CGT, then to struggle means to remain passive, to repeat the same gestures again and again, to never take risks. That, in addition to being deceptive, is intolerable. One only starts to fight when one ceases to be inoffensive: this may sound tautological, but the entirely of the union forces spend their time affirming the contrary. Their gestures in the streets express nothing but submission.

Reflection VI

The police maintain order.[2] Because it is a protest against the order of things, a demonstration is, in its essence, a confrontation with police, no matter what form it takes. Therefore, when night comes, there is a winner and a loser. Either the police win (April 5th), or the demo wins (March 31st). The police win when everything goes as planned by the prefecture. Demonstrators win when everything doesn’t go as planned by the prefecture. What freedom we win consists in what we manage to collectively pull off under the noses of the police. Winning matters. As much for the construction of the rapport de force as for our ties to each other, for our courage. Too many people come to rallies like tourists, unconscious of the importance of successfully breaking the mold. They might be sympathetic clowns dancing in front of the CRS, or rioters who are indifferent to the behavior of the rest of the march. It matters little: both are inoffensive.

Reflection VII

To ensure that everything happens as expected, the cops set up their apparatuses: kettles, closed streets, hordes of plainclothes officers, and so on. In the demonstration, our challenge is to combat the police apparatus: we must prevent it from working, we must break it down. Not only are there thousands of different apparatuses, but there are thousands of different ways to break them down [déborder] [3].

Likewise, there isn’t much to say about a demo where the police apparatus hasn't been challenged. Which is perhaps why, when the media talks about demonstrations, they speak exclusively of the moments that break away [les débordements], for these alone mean anything. To say that “the confrontations occurred on the fringes of the demo,” makes about as much sense as saying “the goals were scored on the sidelines of the football field”.

Reflection VIII

Smashing things [La casse] is the easiest and most obvious way to break a police apparatus. It is also one of the least interesting, and most boring. What most narratives about rioters miss is that the latter would usually prefer to do something else: to free the demo by breaking the police lines, to occupy a building, to start a breakaway march, to hold down barricades, paint inspired tags, etc. Smashing is often a last ditch, stopgap option. It is the degree-zero of the demonstration. As for the classical union rally, family-friendly and good-natured, it isn’t even a demonstration: it is a police operation.

It's worth noting that there’s rarely been as few windows broken in a social movement as that of the month that just passed. When you’re confronting the police, you aren’t worrying about smashing shit. You’ve got better things to do.

Reflection IX

If the Nuit Debout’s assembly can be in turns entertaining, touching or ridiculous, it is a useless tool for organizing ourselves in a revolutionary perspective. It’s a practical problem: you just can’t discuss such matters in the same way one takes a ticket and gets in line at the butcher shop. The infinite succession of stopwatched, disconnected speeches all but abolishes the conditions of a constructed conversation. Nobody can say anything intelligent in two minutes. Everybody sees it, but everybody goes along with it. Whatever the “democratic” will of certain organizers or “facilitators”, the decision and voting procedures are generally nothing but a farce. What they parody from "formal democracy” is the powerlessness related to the fact that the decisions, in the end, touche nothing and reache no one [n’engage rien ni personne]. And yet, to sustain the confrontation does require that we make certain decisions – decisions which the general assembly makes de facto impossible. We attend them in the same way we consume The Voice. To elaborate a revolutionary perspective requires that other modes of speaking, sharing and of collective intelligence be deployed in a parallel fashion on site.

Reflection X

Our marches will begin to add up to something when everyone shares not a principled tolerance towards the actions of others, but a common strategic perception of the situation. That is to say, once we perceive all demonstrations as battles we must win by any means necessary; once we are all inclined, not to violence, but to speed, surprise, and being offensive. It is by our attentiveness to the movements and affects that agitate our demonstrations that we will succeed in finding a common ground allowing a true convergence of struggles—at one central point, Place de la République.

There are thousands of non-violent gestures that then come to mind that would help to increase our efficiency in the streets:

– March en masse on sidewalks in order to prevent the lateral movements of the CRS from catching the demo in its claws.
– Think carefully about the routes of wild demos. Those leading the march, in the heat of the action and improvisation, don’t always choose the best routes. Help them.
– Get in the habit of hiding our faces at the right moment: as much to sabotage the identification and surveillance work systematically and massively conducted by the police as to render demonstrators taking part in confrontation indistinguishable from the others.
– Confrontations tend not to unfold in silence or on mute. Slogans and chanting express the spirit of the movement. Thus, they have their place in all moments of confrontation. When others are fighting, sing and dance.
– Be mobile and do not allow any holes to form in the march when security squads or police attempt to divide it.
– Learn to protect ourselves from tear gas so that it’s not just those who came equipped standing in the clouds.
– Systematically send back tear gas canisters, or at least keep them away from the cortege.
– Stay calm during police charges to avoid brawls. Hold together and don’t back off a hundred times farther than where the police line stops, handing them more free space.

Their morals are not ours.  

Nuit à bout Action Committee

[1] A cortège is a procession, but here signals something more like a bloc within a march. —Trans.

[2] In French, the job of the police is typically described as “le maintien de l'ordre public”, which translates literally as ‘the maintenance of public order’. —Trans.

[3] This term appears frequently in these writings (cf. the article “Build the Hacienda”). Here it can also mean break away, outflank, overflow, jam, or to flee beyond. —Trans.

[The situation is excellent—where shall we toss the ashes of the old world?]

The Wisdom of Rioters

This article appeared on the French website Lundi.am on Monday June 6, 2016. Translated by Ill Will Editions.

Since the beginning of this movement against the loi travail(le) [El Khomri labor law] not a day goes by in which we don’t hear about those “rioters” [casseurs][i]. Reading the news, one gets the impression that the rioter is some sort of separate species that the humanities and social sciences have set out to try and comprehend. Psychologists want to pry open the black box behind the mask. The rioter must be psychoanalyzed, their biography dissected, the idiosyncrasies of their familial history brought to light, in particular those which led them deviate into so-called “radicality”. The paper Le Figaro has claimed that the “psychology of the rioter is hard to seize upon”, nevertheless proceeding to advance their own hypothesis, i.e. that these people are "adrenaline junkies.” The arts and music website Les Inrocks conjures up the devilish mind of a sociology PhD, who glimpses in the rioter something like a “common DNA with the autonomes”.  Everywhere, the media and its helpful academics ask themselves the same question as the cops: “who are these rioters?” It is our turn to offer an answer: the rioter is the sage who descends into the city.

The Eloquent Silence of the Rioter

The one who smashes takes no great pleasure in speaking. She loathes microphones and flees cameras. This would seem a logical enough fact. Yet it would be too easy to explain the reluctance to talk and be seen by simply invoking the prudence of the masked person living in a state of emergency. We propose instead that the rioter is a sage, and as such is essentially mute. The crowbar, the hammer, and the baton are the instruments of her public speeches, her silent language. The rioter has many reservations about language and meaning that is aimed to render the ensemble of her gestures coherent. To remain silent displays a disdain for the intellectuals and others who still dare to defend an alleged “democracy” that demands dialogue, with its strategies of producing consensus. Her verbal silence is courageous. The truth that she carries with her has only a physical language. In the style of Heraclitus, the rioter is content to say, “if I smash things, it is because you chatter idly”. Foucault spoke of the sage in similar terms:

“The sage…keeps his wisdom in a state of essential withdrawal, or at least reserve. Basically, the sage is wise in and for himself, and does not need to speak. He is not forced to speak, nothing obliges him to share his wisdom, to teach it, or demonstrate it. This accounts for what might be termed his structural silence. And if he speaks, it is only because he is appealed to by someone’s questions, or by an urgent situation of the city”.[ii]

 The Mysteries of the Smash-Up

 An emergency situation that brings about the descent of the sage into the city: here we are in a strange proximity to the ancient Greek scenario described by Foucault, with the difference that in our day the sages are masked. Like the rioter, the sage appears in the city only rarely, and in an ephemeral way. She descends only briefly, just long enough to exhibit and uphold a truth. For the sage and the rioter alike, truth does not manifest itself through lengthy prevarications. It is not the job of the sage to be clear. Her words are full of opacity. The sage and the rioter are not rhetoricians. They do not seek to convince or persuade, for they speak only in riddles. The truth sparkles with the silence of sages. What explains such a fascination with the rioter, is precisely that her silence carries such a mystery within it. Since the beginning of the movement against the Labor Law, no fewer than 527 articles have attempted to discern who these “rioters” are. What fascinates is not the hammer hitting the ATM screen, nor the identity of the one doing it, it is the mystery that gesture carries with it. To understand the rioter, we must see that she offers us perfectly enigmatic answers. She leaves those to whom she speaks in a state of ignorance and uncertainty: “The sage speaks in enigmas”, Foucault said.

 Visibility and Truth

Like the sage, rioter appears to act only for himself. He speaks in no one else’s voice, and demands nothing. He is hardly even a person. The rioter advances more like an atmosphere. Bystanders don’t always understand what the rioters mean to say—"Why do that?“ "C’mon, stop that! There are other ways to express yourselves!” “It’s crazy to go off that way!” “They don’t care about the demands of the movement, they smash things just to smash things.“

They’re not likely to understand any better tomorrow. The smash-up is the mute explication of truth. It is an act of silence that enunciates the very being of things. Broken windows, tags and paint bombs are so many marks through which what is concealed - corruption, lies, theft – comes to appear in perceptual life. Through a tactile act, the rioter makes visible the truth. But those in the position of the bystander or third party cannot help but have a confused relationship to this truth, for it contains nothing resembling an easily-assimilable knowledge. The rioter is not seeking the best argument, for he neither possesses nor circulates any knowledge in which we are supposed to self-identify. This explains why the truth he produces generates so many misunderstandings, for people do not like relating to enigmas, and have little tolerance for opaque truths. An old lady picks up a piece of broken glass: she holds in her hand the entire statement, but she can have only an oblique relationship to the truth therein, because this shattering has nothing to teach. The freedom of the rioter lies in not being subjected to any obligation of speech. He returns truth to the terrain of sensation: the thermal sensation of burning dumpsters on the pavement, the olfactory sensation of paint splashing the wall, the auditory sensation of the sound of broken glass. The metamorphoses and the scars his journey leaves behind are the terms of his truth-telling. It matters not who smashes, for the truth-telling of the sage is impersonal.

Smashing and Joy

Understood in this way, the rioter may come across as arrogant and irritatingly sober. Yet her act is generous. The sensory experience of the "beautiful” riot is always a moment of shared celebration. First, there is the beauty of the gesture: as she hurls herself towards her (normally quite carefully-chosen) targets, her gesture no longer retains its angry content. As the window resists her blows, she ratchets up the intensity with firm perseverance. Not far away, the audience awaits the felicity of the gesture. The window explodes. Everyone applauds, relieved and triumphant.

In this sense, the riot is joy. It is the joy of transforming a faceless power. And if this joy is won only through a largely symbolic act, this is because this power is accustomed to separating people from what they can do, that is to say, from their capacity [puissance]. Not satisfied with its privileges, power has for some time now prided itself on inhibiting our essential forces. Its greatest satisfaction is to make men impotent, that is to say, to act so as to ensure that they cannot act [faire en sorte qu’ils ne puissent pas faire], that they can not exercise their own capacities.

And it is in this way that the rioter confronts power. Clearly, her action does not make her powerful. It does not take control of the course of things. Instead, it expresses what we cannot do. It manifests this loss of control over the course of things. It expresses this lucid vision of what we cannot or can not do [ce que nous ne pouvons ou pouvons ne pas faire]. The consistency of the action of smashing resides here. These destructions carry in them a charge of reality. The usual course of events is interrupted. The eternal Sunday of our lives momentarily comes to an end. The landscape is transformed. In these streets, it is easy to identify the exact path of the rioter, and the sight of each fragment of power scratched or properly exploded communicates this desire to explore a world. Thus does the smashing of symbols of power communicate itself. It lays bare the fragility of power, despite itself, as an act we can and must engage in. Power is forced to board up its windows to prevent further smashings. It is here that power becomes naked; the images of such voluntary destruction present us with the disorientation of power [égaré], one vacant and empty, fighting in the mode of retreat. The institutions that became victims of this overflowing joy of the happy rioters even ended up abandoning their vain attempts at marketing, by which they had hoped to direct overwhelmed individuals to choose the right bank, insurance, or financial investments.

Here it is precisely the pride of power that is affected. Its loss is visible, and there is nothing it can do. Sometimes, it sends its workers down to passively oppose the friendly rioters. Such a situation is even more amusing. The collapse finds its passive and powerless witnesses, of which the rioter could only barely have dreamt. The next day, the landscape is lightened. With their ridiculous wooden boards, banks and insurance companies become interchangeable, indistinct and homogeneous. Only their dull logos survive, often crossed-out by the wisdom of the demonstrators. These institutions typically evade the public gaze. Hence, the first victory of the rioter is here: he has momentarily erased the haughty pride of the establishments that organize our dispossession and who have no fear of showing themselves in public space.

The Rioter Exhibits Existence

The riot tends also to kill boredom. It momentarily exhibits existence [elle dispose à l’existence], for it exhibits power’s defeat. We know it will resurface in all its radicality; the rioter knows it as well. She does not expect that her gesture durably transforms the course of things. Rather, she manifests energetically her passion for the real: to destroy the symbols of power, and thereby to reach the hard kernel of the real. The urge to smash is a political way by which reconquer a certain contact with reality, to rediscover the reality of the world. The latter is not destroyed. It is marked, scarred, damaged. Anger is anchored in the gutted windows. Here, perhaps, is a form of pure enjoyment, in which the incarnation of the negativity of the world is in motion. The lamentations of the prefects, mayors, and police contribute even more joy to the reversal of the balance of power.

Finally, what the rioter has also won, is the impossibility of the use of instruments of capitalism: the ATMs are out of service, bank branches closed sometimes for weeks at a time. Whereas we are accustomed to being worldly spectators, to understanding little to nothing about the world that surrounds us, the rioter clears a space of possibilities. In the place of an illegible world, she offers us an uncluttered version of it. Public space is finally rid of the arrogance of those institutions which had proudly displayed their power, and now offers other perspectives, such as those spoken through tags. These last few days, a stroll through the streets of Rennes was infinitely more delicious. It is possible to stop, pause, to rest, to wander, to contemplate and meditate on the consistency of the world that protesters sketched out with the points of their bombs.

The Phobia of Wisdom

Still, in spite of his generosity and his great virtues, many people experience a violent fright at the sight of rioters. More dramatic and more numerous are those who, having never had the sensible experience of a demonstration, are averse even to the simple mention of the word “rioter”. Just to raise the topic in a conversation means risking an anxiety attack in your interlocutor. Such knee-jerk reactions can’t help but remind one of the symptoms of phobia. There are dozens of names by which to designate the phobia of spiders, butterflies, water, forests, birds, etc. But it would be wrong to reduce  this affect of dread to a story of forms. Phobia is also and above all a story of schemas, i.e. of spatiotemporal dynamisms. Having a phobia of butterflies, for example, is to be frightened by their erratic flight. It’s to be unable to stand the entirely singular way they have of twirling about. Butterflies have no regularity in their movements, they seem to go in all directions, we can neither predict their curves nor anticipate their resting places. Nothing is more hazardous[iv] than the orientation of a butterfly.

As there is the concept of the butterfly, there is the concept of the sage. And the sage is also determined by a set of dynamisms, she is a silent being, who shows her face only in emergency situations and thus appears only rarely in the city, who descends to tell the truth, and to say what is only by means of riddles, her public appearance is always the result of a courage in which she places herself in danger. To the long classification phobias today we must today add a new nomenclature, the phobia of wisdom, or “sophiaphobia”. For people do not have a phobia of rioters, they have the phobia of wisdom, and rioter exudes the schema of the sage. The rioter is an example of wisdom that takes place outside of the traditional figure of the sage. Sophiaphobia is the real name of those who experience a repulsive shudder at the sight of rioters.

“Solon, for example, who, at risk and danger to himself, intervened in the city to tell the truth, but who intervened only occasionally, the rest of the time remaining silent in his wisdom. The sage intervenes only when his intervention is called for as a matter of urgency.”[v]

[i] The term “casseur”, which literally means “smasher”, is used in the media and by the state to refer to rioters in a derogatory way, implying valences of “hooligan”, “thug”. In the Anglophone context, it would be associated with “the black bloc”. We have translated the term throughout as “rioter”, and its cognate, “le casse”, as “smash-up” or “ransack”. Thanks also to RH and La Onda for their suggestions. –Trans.

[ii] Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 17

[iii] The French reads: “Elle s’offre au regard, à la fois ce qui rend visible ce qui peut, et doit, à tout prix, traduire cette fragilité « malgré tout » du pouvoir». This sentence is tricky. -Trans

[iv] The French term hasardeux comes from the term “hasard”, meaning “chance”. -Trans

[v] Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 85.

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