[deletia] stands for all that has been lost. a marker of things that were once somewhere.
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Against Gender, Against Society (This is What a Feminist Looks Like)
“Social war is the conflict that spans all society, social war is the struggle against society; that is to say all existing social relations. The self-destructive tendency within society, so-called ‘anti-social behavior’, the desire to command and to obey, acts of rebellion and acts of reinforcement, the riot and the return to work, these are the attacks and counter-attacks in this war. Social war is the battles between those who wish to destroy society and those maintaining it. Chaos against control. Nothingness and potential against everything and the existent. Everything that holds society together insulates us from each other; each blow to domination and control is a step closer to each other, a step away from our imposed identities, our alienation and toward infinite possibility. Because society is everywhere, the only way to escape is to win the social war; to destroy society. Gender is one of the fronts on which the social war is fought.”
A zine from ninjabikeslut, negatecity, and CTRL+Z Press on gender nihilism and social war.
“I want to avoid diminishing my nihilism to ‘just’ depression and I also want to avoid romanticizing my mental illness as a source of special knowledge, and I’m worried that I’m slipping toward both those interpretations with my avowal of nihilism. So let me put it this way: One reason I’m a nihilist is because of my experience of pain, and while pain is universal it is a deeply personal, particular experience.”
Combining personal reflections on nihilism with erudite critiques of some of the most well known queer/anarcho-nihilist texts, this zine from CTRL+Z Press provides a vitally necessary commentary on contemporary nihilist currents.
“It is the insurmountable that drives us to insanity; nothing and everything at the same time. No theoretical analysis can properly describe the combination of pains we endure. Although such poetic attempts may act as a salve to our depression and discomfort, it is one thing to recognize capitalism as a system of domination and quite another experience to watch a loved one die at its hands. There is no sense to be made of the latter, no amount of causal understanding could relieve the aching of this misery.”
Partly an auto-biographical recounting of grief, partly a cry of rage against the systems of domination that produce our grief and immiseration in the first place, this zine from the Institute for Experimental Freedom perfectly encapsulates the experience of misery and hopelessness that pervades contemporary reality.
“As the possibility of life on Earth is more forcefully called into question, life will more forcefully be called to revolt in ways that offer not the promise but the possibility of canceling the ongoing planetary cancellation of life. The accelerating intensification of climate, capitalism, and control has made the question of our collective survival indistinguishable from the question of our finding, assisting, and militantly acting with one another as a planetary destituent force that can bring ruin to planetary power and decisively leave nothing in its place. In the creases between Earth and its computation, between life and its coded predicates, between collective fugitivity and algorithmic domination, life must become totally ungovernable to be able to grasp the possibility of annihilating what presently threatens to annihilate everything.”
This zine reproduces the text of Ian Alan Paul’s 2019 video essay “Climate, Capitalism, Control”—a lucid and illuminating examination of our current planetary situation—in order to facilitate the reproduction and wide circulation of this critically important essay.
An excellent and succinct text on the last half century, as seen from the territorial and place-based struggles of today. If you’re wondering what ‘destituent’ politics means in the 21st century, this is a good place to start.
“The 1960s, whatever else they were, are another name for the moment when people throughout the world began to realize that the tension between the logic of development and that of the ecological bases of life had become the primary contradiction of their lives. Henceforth, it seems, any effort to change social inequality would have to be conjugated with another imperative—that of conserving the living. What the movements of the long 1960s initiated, and what the ZAD confirms, is that defending the conditions for life on the planet had become the new and incontrovertible horizon of meaning of all political struggle. And with it came a new way of organizing, founded on the notion of territory as a praxis produced by space-based relations. ’68 was a movement that began in most places in the cities but whose intelligence and future tended toward the Earth.
[…] Why does the history of the ZAD show us that defending is more generative of solidarity than resisting? Resistance means that the battle, if there ever was one, has already been lost and we can only try helplessly to resist the overwhelming power the other side now wields. Defending, on the other hand, means that there is already something on our side that we possess, that we value, that we cherish, and that is thereby worth fighting for. What makes a designation of
this kind interesting and powerful is that it enacts a kind of transvaluation
of values: something is being given value according to a measurement
that is different from market-value or the state’s list of imperatives, or
existing social hierarchies.
[…] But where once what was being defended might have
been an unpolluted environment or farmland or even a way of life, what
is defended as the struggle deepens comes to include all the new social
links, solidarities, affective ties, and new physical relations to the
territory and other lived entanglements that the struggle produced.”
“The partisans of the Imaginary Party grow and develop in the most complete violation of all the existing rules, without ever having the feeling that they’re breaking them, since they act in total contempt for them all. These partisans do not oppose the legal order, they depose it. They claim a higher justification beyond all written and unwritten laws: the lawless text that they themselves are. They thus unearth and renew the absolute scandal of Sabbatean doctrine, which affirmed that the “fulfillment of the Law is its transgression,” and leave it behind. They themselves constitute a fragment of Tiqqun, inasmuch as they are the living abolition of the old law, which split, divided, and separated…”
A wild article on memes, revolutionary destitution, & looting as ‘anti-fascism’ by two North American comrades who traveled to France.
“The meme reopens the basic question of the Party, and offers what is perhaps the minimal basis for organizing a force of rupture in the twenty-first century. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement. It does not solve, but simply defers the question of a common grammar of suffering to a later point…The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, like a Tarot deck in which the audience fills in the personal content. Each of us is invited to intervene against the enemy without waiting or asking permission, and for our own reasons.”
Critique of Violence — Walter Benjamin
Since its original publication in 1921, Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” has become a foundational work in the field of political philosophy. Attempting to formulate a critique of violence that does not depend on reference to the just ends or means of violent acts, Benjamin elaborates the relationship between the law and violence in its “lawmaking” and “law-preserving” functions, positing a “divine violence” capable of suspending the law in its entirety, thereby dismantling state power without positing a new law.
Contrary to all that we’re hearing, the real mystery is not that we revolted, but the fact that we didn’t do it sooner. What’s abnormal is not what we’re doing now, but all that we’ve put up with until now. Who can deny the bankruptcy of the system, from every angle? Who still wants to be shook down, robbed, and left precarious for nothing? Will anyone weep as the wealthy avenues of the 16th arrondissement are plundered by the poor, and the bourgeois watch their gleaming SUV’s go up in flames? As for Macron, he can stop complaining; it was he who asked us to come to him. A state can’t keep legitimating itself by reference to the corpse of a “glorious revolution” and then denounce the rioters as soon as a revolution gets going.
The situation is simple: the people want the fall of the system. But the system intends to keep going. It is this that defines the situation as insurrectional, as even the police openly admit. On their side, the people have the numbers, as well as their courage, joy, intelligence, and naivety. On the other side, the system has its army, its police, its media, and the deception and fear of the bourgeois. Since the 17th of November, the people have had recourse to two complementary levers: economic blockades, and the Saturday assaults on the government districts. These are each complementary, since the economy is the reality of the system, while the government provides its symbolic representation. To truly destitute them both, it is necessary to attack them both. This goes for Paris no less than the rest of the territory: to burn a prefecture and to storm the Elysée are a single and sole gesture. Every Saturday since the 17th of November, people in Paris have been magnetically focused on the same goal: storming the enclaves of government [marcher sur le reduit governmental]. From one week to the next, the only difference lies in (1) the increasing scale of the police apparatus set up in order to prevent it, and (2) the experience accumulated through the previous weekend’s failure. If there are a lot more people with swimming goggles and gas masks this Saturday, it’s not because “organized groups of rioters” have “infiltrated the demonstration.” Rather, it’s because people were gassed extensively the week before, and they drew the same conclusion any sensible person would: better come equipped the next time. And anyway, we’re not talking about demonstrations, but an uprising.
If tens of thousands of people invaded the Tuileries-Saint Lazare-Étoile-Trocadero zone, it was not because of a strategy of harassment that had been decided upon by a handful of small groups. It was a result of the diffuse tactical intelligence possessed by people had quite simply been prevented from achieving their objective by the police apparatus. To charge the "ultra-leftists” with attempting to foment an uprising doesn’t fool anyone: if the ultra-leftists knew how to hijack construction machines and use them to charge the police or destroy a tollbooth, we would know about it; if they were so massive in scale, so disarming and brave, we would know that too. The fact is, with its essentially identitarian concerns, the so-called “ultra-left" has been deeply embarrassed by the impurity of the movement of Yellow Vests, plagued by a bourgeois fear of compromising itself by mingling with a crowd that doesn’t belong anywhere within its own categories. As for the “ultra-right”, it is sandwiched between its means and its supposed ends: they sew disorder under the pretext of an attachment to order, they attack the National Police all the while declaring their devotion to the Law and the Nation, they want to behead the republican monarch out of love of a non-existent King. On these points, we will leave the Ministry of the Interior to its absurd rambling. It is not the radicals who are making the movement, it is the movement that is radicalizing people. Does anyone really believe that our government would consider declaring a state of emergency over a handful of ultras?
Those who make an insurrection halfway only dig their own tomb. At the point we are at now, and given the contemporary means of repression, we have two choices: either we overthrow the system, or we let it crush us. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate this government’s level of radicalization. Anyone who attempts to mediate between the people and the government over the coming days is destined to be torn apart: none of us want to be represented, we’re all old enough to express ourselves, and to discern who is trying to cajole or recuperate us. And if the government ends up taking a step backwards, this will only prove that we were right to do what we did, that our methods were sound.
This week will therefore be decisive: either we will manage, in ever-greater numbers, to halt the economic machine by blocking its ports, refineries, railway stations, logistics centers, etc., and by really taking-over the governmental enclaves and police stations next Saturday, or we’ve lost. The climate march next weekend has no reason not to join us in the street. After all, its purpose is make clear that those who have led us to the current brink of disaster cannot be counted on to get us out of it. We’re one step away from the breakdown of the governmental machine. Either we will succeed in diverting the course of things over the coming months, or else the foreseeable apocalypse will find itself accompanied by a securitarian backlash the depth and scale of which can already be glimpsed on social media.
The question is as follows: what does it concretely mean to destitute the system in practice? Obviously, it cannot mean electing new representatives, since the bankruptcy of the current regime issues precisely from the bankruptcy of its representative system. To destitute the system means to take over locally, canton by canton, the material and symbolic organization of life. It is precisely the current organization of life that is today in question, that is itself the catastrophe. We must not fear the unknown: we have never seen millions of people let themselves die of hunger. Just as we are perfectly capable of organizing ourselves horizontally to set up blockades, we have the capacity to organize ourselves to relaunch a more sensible organization of existence. As revolt is organized locally, so it is at the local level that our solutions will be found. The “national" level is only ever the echo that issues from local initiatives.
We can no longer put up with the endless accountancy of this world. If the reign of the economy is the reign of misery, this is first of all because it is the reign of calculation. The beauty of our blockades, in the streets, and in all that we have been doing for three weeks—already a form of victory in itself—lies in our having stopped counting, the moment we began counting on each other. When the question is that of our common salvation, that of the legal property of the infrastructures of life becomes a mere detail. The difference between the people and those who govern is that the people aren’t a bunch of losers.
