A Hole That Does Not Speak: Covid, Catastrophe and the Impossible Button 28 May 2022 Button Untitled, Bahman Mohasses; Image Credit: Wikiart Jack Black asks the vital question, namely whether it is at all possible under our current circumstances to discern an 'end' to the Covid-19 virus. In his essay, he argues that outlining how we must now retroactively align ourselves with the impossible, the Covid catastrophe sits as an impossible that happened; an impossibility which, in our response to its ongoing and unending impact, can only be conceived as well as tackled via a paradigm shift in our current social-political coordinates. To this extent, a retroactive perspective is not simply a ‘return to the past,’ but a considered attempt to theoretically, and, thus, philosophically, redefine the very framework in which our Covid-past is retroactively conceived and, as a consequence, how our Covid-future is impossibly determined. Black elaborates that attributing any meaning to the catastrophic era of coronavirus “is itself a way of curtailing the anxiety that we face when confronted with the indeterminacy of the Other’s desire – a desire which the virus provokes.” He proposes to approach the catastrophe as a “hole that does not speak,” and thus not to give “any deeper meaning” to this hole. To this end, he brings together accounts of the trauma of the pandemic that point to the urgency of transfiguring the linear concept of time in which the Covid-19 era is compellingly embedded. In this new temporal framework, Black embeds the concept of “second retroaction,” epitomized in the temporal modus of “the will always have been.” This modus confronts the acts willing to deal with the catastrophe, and even to prevent new ones, with the conditions of their own (im)possibilities, with the multitude of possibilities that, having been there but having not been realized, led to the catastrophe in which we find ourselves in. The second retroaction cares for a “sense of fatigue,” which re-symbolizes the new normal – a normalcy accustomed to catastrophe. What about this possibility which, one way or another, is always caught in its own impossibility? Maurice Blanchot (1) I. Covid-19 presents itself as a strange catastrophe. It has neither destroyed the planet nor has it erased humanity… but it has, in many ways, served to upend and alter what was previously considered ‘normal.’ As a result, what is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Covid catastrophe is the very way it endures. Beyond any notion of catastrophic shock, the Covid catastrophe continues, indeed, it lingers in daily news cycles, changes to working environments and restrictions on travel. It is an enduring presence, from which any determination of its ‘end’ is either nullified by an unending stream of Covid reports, or worse, ignored altogether. On this basis alone, is it even possible to discern an ‘end’ to Covid? Answering this question requires us to ascertain whether Covid represents a new form of ‘ending’ or a continuation of the end, the latter of which can be identified in the Fukuyamian ‘end of history’. As noted by Alenka Zupančič, what the “end of history” proclamation provided was “the disappearance of any real Outside” and, as a consequence, this “meant that we have reached a point where we are living in times that cannot end, at least not for any intrinsic reasons or contradictions.” (2) The ideological significance of this failure has meant that political events – such as the election of Donald Trump – are often viewed as a catastrophe to the very prevalence of a political system that can only account for disruption and change by directing culpability to some abject ‘outside’ force… either an asteroid or some other form of natural disaster. Consequently, whether it be fantasies of ‘the End’ or even a humble acceptance of our own guilt, in each case we resort to similar frameworks of protective reassurance – all of which help us to ‘make sense,’ temporally overcome, but ultimately avoid the far more catastrophic acceptance of the present deadlock. To this extent, the Covid catastrophe is not ‘new,’ but rather a mere continuation of the fact that, for many, the very social and political frustrations enacted under Covid-19 remain a miserable component of the day-to-day lives of large proportions of the world’s population – many for whom the Covid catastrophe has bared no considerable change or alteration to their daily lives. Certainly, such examples do not seek to encourage feelings of guilt – or worse, a far more perverse ‘race to the bottom’ (‘well, if you think this is bad, imagine how bad it is for those in the third-world’); instead, it is to recognize the catastrophes and cataclysms that constitute our presence on this planet. It is in this regard that the Covid catastrophe lays bare a certain paradox in how we confront the End: In the last couple of years, after the SARS and Ebola epidemics, we were told again and again that a new much stronger epidemic was just a matter of time, that the question was not IF but WHEN. Although we were convinced of the truth of these dire predictions, we somehow didn’t take them seriously and were reluctant to act and engage in serious preparations – the only place we dealt with them was in apocalyptic movies like Contagion. (3) Echoing these sentiments, Kamran Baradaran highlights how these failures follow the structure of fetishist disavowal: “I know these warnings are true, but at the same time I do not take them seriously; these catastrophes will not happen for several centuries, so why bother?” (4) What this disavowal posits, however, is a failure to acknowledge the elementary inconsistency of our social and political systems, as well as nature itself. Therefore, instead of attributing an end to that which has become ‘accepted’ (the end of history), and while refraining from the ‘unexpected’ end of something which was widely known, but disavowed (I know very well, but nonetheless…), we can begin to approach the Covid virus in a proper Hegelian mode: as an ‘end’ for which the Covid catastrophe has always-already happened. II. This orientation towards catastrophe, as that which has always-already happened, is not an attempt to bluntly accept the ongoing hardships which the virus has brought to light and made worse; nor, as the below will discuss, is it an attempt to offer some simple closure to what has occurred. Both of these falsehoods advocate a ‘no simple way out’ approach (for better or worse, we’re left with Covid). If anything, such claims should be unconditionally accepted: no matter what our course of action, we will have to acknowledge the various catastrophes that continue to shape our future on Earth. What remains of crucial importance is the extent to which our current catastrophic predicament reveals a sense of fatigue: a re-symbolization of the normal which is now accustomed to catastrophe. We are in danger here of ending up like the dystopian future depicted in Alfonso Cuaron’s, Children of Men (2006): a world, for whom after becoming bereft of children, simply trudges along with no real sense of how the catastrophe occurred or how it can be curtailed (instead, it would seem that in accordance with the film’s depiction of internment camps the path of fascism is all that remains). Mladen Dolar approaches this fatigue in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectic at a standstill” ( Dialektik im Stillstand ): a “tate of maximum tension” that Benjamin believed would help to invigorate an “awakening.” (5) Instead, Benjamin’s desire for the standstill to encourage a “waking-up” is, today, repurposed to “the point of [an] excessive fatigue which rather instigates indifference and irritation.” (6) A Boat Beached in a Port at Low Tide, Richard Parkes Bonington, 182; Image Credit: Wikiart For Gavin Jacobson, this “excessive fatigue” would suggest that we are already existing in a Children of Men present: an “eternal present, ideologically directionless and politically unmotivated to improve our lot.” (7) It is this catastrophe – the lack of any end – which provides “a weird immobility” to the pandemic (8) ; one reflected in the constant threat of further lockdowns or a mutation of the virus beyond the reach of present vaccines. Again, what seems to characterise this fatigue is “a fake appearance of normality” (9) , one that, echoing Children of Men , serves to avoid and/or obscure the question: what is to be done? (10) In answer to this question, we can echo Žižek’s contention that one trap to avoid is “futurology,” which, “by definition ignores our not-knowing.” (11) Here, he notes that: “Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem – futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies.” (12) Such extrapolation from present tendencies can be identified in examples of ‘risk management.’ In his articulations on our “risk society,” Beck sought to underline the fact that, today, whether rich or poor, we remain subject to the same levels of risk which, at best, must be analysed and thus rationalised under present conditions. What this argument ignores, however, is the fact that this risk is dependent upon those very conditions and forms of action that subsequently seek to prevent the risk it creates. (13) As an apologist of ‘risk,’ such management poses a number of ‘riskier’ contentions. Indeed, why, following Beck, would we use our current knowledge to manage the risks involved in oil spills and other ecological catastrophes instead of confronting the (disavowed) knowledge that such spills are a direct result of an economic infrastructure that encourages oil consumption? (14) In addition, what risk is there for the company manager or corporate/financial CEO, who, while exposed to risk, has the knowledge to manage and reduce (i. e. ‘cash-in’) this risk, leaving lower-level employees and banking customers subject to the subsequent risk of losing it all? (15) In each instance, any mitigation and modification is just as likely to maintain or even cause the very risk that such management sought to curtail. Instead, what these risks fail to consider – in fact, what they fundamentally ignore – is the very Real risk of acting on what we know we do not know. One way of approaching this knowledge is to conceive the Covid-19 virus as a hole that does not speak: The message that some people might read from [… this hole] is phantasmatic. And these phantasms circulate like the virus itself, from one cell to another. We know about the transmission and we can make projections like an election poll, we can make forecasts like a weather forecast, we can use all the instruments of the symbolic apparatus to generate data around this hole in knowledge. But the hole itself remains and it doesn’t speak. (16) In such instances, it is of particular importance not to provide this ‘hole’ any deeper meaning. Any meaning attributed to the catastrophe is itself a way of curtailing the anxiety that we face when confronted with the indeterminacy of the Other’s desire – a desire which the virus provokes. It is our lack of knowledge regarding the Other’s desire which posits a ‘hole’ that serves to expose how “in today’s constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse.” (17) However, it is when left with the catastrophe of the Other – that is, with the realization of its indeterminate form – that we can begin to determine the ‘new.’ Note the following from Vieira: … when we encounter an otherness with an essentially indeterminate desire, in addition to the anxiety that it can bring, something new can emerge. The Other of anxiety is imagined by Lacan as a giant praying mantis. What does this inscrutable thing, anxiety, do? This Other, as a Praying Mantis, the devil, but also the mugger on the corner or even the loved one, what does he want from me? However, it is precisely in this indeterminacy of the Other’s desire that we find the possibility of interpreting our own desire: ‘How did I end up here? What am I doing with my life?’ (18) What remains integral to this indeterminacy and, specifically, to Vieira’s questions, is that such interpretation provides the possibility to retroactively (re)interpret our desire. Here, the significance of the Covid catastrophe resides within its retroactive importance: an importance that requires a ‘risk’ far outside the parameters prescribed by our risk society and one that seeks no middle ground in evaluating the implications of catastrophe, today. III. In his appraisal of the virus, Žižek has frequently drawn from Jürgen Habermas’ concern that what the virus reveals is an “existential uncertainty.” (19) This uncertainty is predicated on the fact that, much like other catastrophes, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.” (20) To this, Žižek underscores the following: “Note his [Habermas’s] precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.” (21) The Catastrophe, Eduard von Grützner, 1892; Image Credit: Wikiart Certainly, while knowledge of a potential global pandemic was widely disavowed, both Habermas and Žižek help to emphasise that it is not the disavowal of this knowledge, which proves problematic to our present circumstances, but, rather, the revelation that the virus brings to bare a knowledge predicated on our very non-knowledge; or, as previously noted, to a ‘hole’ in knowledge. (22) Moreover, it is this gap in knowledge – this not-knowing – which is inscribed in the actions of our institutions; actions which lay bare their own temporality: a form of retroaction whereby what is not-known is already known. (23) To return to our previous assertion that the Covid catastrophe has always-already happened, we can consider how it is our (non-)knowledge of the Covid catastrophe and our responses to it that are inevitably entwined in the very catastrophe we seek to manage. In extending this consideration, we can begin to perceive how “every work of mourning, every symbolization of a catastrophe misses something and thus opens a path toward a new catastrophe.” (24) What’s more, “Our acts are never self-transparent, we never fully know what we are doing or what the effects will be.” (25) This approach is echoed in Ruda’s “comic fatalism” (26) , which, alongside Žižek (27) , echoes the work Jean-Pierre Dupuy on time and catastrophe. (28) What remains significant to Dupuy’s account (as well as the Ruda and Žižek variations) is the retroaction it posits. Opposing the concern that time presents a linear progression, Dupuy considers how our relation to time can be conceived as a ‘loop.’ In what he refers to as the ‘time of the project,’ which works in contrast to the perception that the past is fixed and the future open to possibility (potential options/choices, for example), Dupuy outlines how we should reconfigure this relationship so that it is the future which is determined and the past which is open to counterfactual possibility. In the case of catastrophe, this requires conceiving the catastrophe as predetermined, or, as noted above, as a catastrophe that has always-already occurred. By conceiving the future catastrophe as predetermined, we are driven to consider counterfactual possibilities to this future, thus, directing our action in the present. In summary: we should first perceive it [catastrophe] as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourself into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (‘If we had done this and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!’) upon which we then act today. Therein resides Dupuy’s paradoxical formula: we have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, it is our destiny – and, then, against the background of this acceptance, we should mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. (29) Certainly, any consideration of the very possibilities which led to the always-already catastrophe can just as easily be subject to examples of superegoic injunction: “Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means and at any price. You can do it, therefore you must!” (30) Under such circumstances, “we are expected to […] realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities.” (31) Instead, following Dupuy, we can concern that what is required is not the complete understanding of the multitude of possibilities that led to the catastrophe, but to a rethinking of the very framework which structured these possibilities in the first place. Subsequently, while any pre-Covid prevention may have seemed ridiculous (perhaps being viewed as scaremongering), it is only in hindsight that we can retroactively conceive of these ‘ridiculous’ actions as being drastically required. In light of the Covid catastrophe that happened (as well as the possibilities that led to it happening), what we require now is no longer ridiculous, but impossible. Interior Strandgade 30, Vilhelm Hammershoi, 1901; Image Credit: Wikiart IV. What remains unique to the Covid catastrophe is that we don’t require an ‘as if’ – the catastrophe has happened. (32) In other words, what was perceived as impossible – or, at least, what was disavowed as possible (not believed) – has occurred. As a result, “Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up the space of freedom.” (33) This space of not-knowing prescribes an “impossible in-sight” (34) , which, from a preordained ‘future’ position, retroactively determines what, at present, we do not know. The catastrophe of the present, therefore, is that it posits this very contradiction in our knowledge. More importantly, when set against a predetermined future, past possibilities are not merely other potentialities working towards the same end, but are instead prescriptions of a retroactive ‘cut’ which announces the advertence of a contradiction – a point of impossibility – that fundamentally discloses the inconsistencies in our current socio-political frame. Though interpretations of this ‘cut’ work in accordance with Lacan’s account of the Act – defined, by Žižek, as what “changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility” (35) – we can consider how this ‘change’ transpires via a self-determining ‘cut’ that retroactively proposes – and, thus, serves – its own self-limitation. (36) This suggests that one is not simply ‘free’ to ‘choose’ the past in whatever way they see fit (this would have to assume that one’s future remains non-determined, if only on the basis that one’s choice would determine this future); instead, the underlying logic of a future that is determined is that it can only ever be retroactively determined by the self-limitation it establishes. For example, consider Ruda’s appraisal of Jameson’s program of utopia, an account which highlights how any determination is limited by its own ‘self-limitation’: in a first move, the very act of proposing an impossible utopia posits its own conditions of possibility – creates a new possible imaginary – and as soon as this act is performed there is a second retroaction involved, that leads to the fact that after the act the utopia will always have been a political program. (37) It is this ‘second retroaction’ (‘the will always have been’) which lays bare the limitation that underscores any act which posits its own (impossible) determination. Today, such an act must be identified “in a series of modest demands that are not simply impossible but appear as possible although they are de facto impossible.” (38) It is our fated catastrophe which determines that we must now retroactively align ourselves with the impossible. In part, proclamations of the “impossible” can work to cover-over the fissures in the symbolic order; a pretence echoing that of the ‘outside’ catastrophe which unexpectedly changes the present-state of things. Yet, to encounter the impossible is to perceive it as that which happens under our current ideological coordinates. Under such circumstances, the impossible is a foreclosure of what is perceived to be possible under present conditions . It is in this sense that the Covid catastrophe highlights how the impossible is possible: an impossibility in the very sense that retroactively such an impossible possibility has always-already occurred. Encountering the impossible in the context of catastrophe requires what can only be conceived as a paradigm shift in our social-political coordinates. More to the point, it requires (retroactively) recognizing the necessity of failure as constitutive to our knowledge of the virus. It is in reconciling with this failure (conceived in the above discussion as a hole in knowledge, the knowledge in not-knowing and as the impossible) that our relation to catastrophe can help us identify the possibility of new failure. The necessity of such failure suggests that it is only in failing that we establish what it is that failed. (39) We are Making a New World, Paul Nash, 1918; Image Credit: Wikiart In the wake of the Covid catastrophe that has always-already happened, we can assert the following: what we retroactively require are institutions that at present are impossible (i.e. do not exist, unless conceived from some future position). Though widely derided, Žižek’s call for a communist response to the Covid catastrophe is not an attempt to reassert the communist past, marred by Soviet terror, but is instead a demand for ‘collective principles’ set on orchestrating an international response to an international catastrophe (pessimistically, if these institutions were ‘presupposed’ to fail, they would have to be established in order to know what it is that failed). On this basis alone, a retroactive perspective is not simply a ‘return to the past,’ but a considered attempt to theoretically, and, thus, philosophically, redefine the very framework in which this past is conceived and, as a consequence, how our future is impossibly determined. NOTES 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community . Trans. Pierre Joris. Station Hill, 1988, 2. 2. See Alenka Zupančič, “The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 119.4 (2020): 833–844, https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/119/4/833/166844/The-End-of-Ideology-the-Ideology-of-the-End?redirectedFrom=fulltext Accessed 31 October 2021. 3. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World . OR Books, 2020, 64. 4. See Kamran Baradaran, “The Ruins of our Lives: A Plea for Fatalist Sleeplessness.” The Philosophical Salon , 9 August 2021, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-ruins-of-our-lives-a-plea-for-a-fatalist-sleeplessness/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 5. Dolar adds: “The standstill involves the heightened tension which is at a crossroads – there was a lot of standstill, but where is the dialectic? The pervasive wish to go back to normalcy is the escape from this tension, which also offered, and continues to offer, a chance of a different path.” (Qtd. in Mladen Dolar, “Interview with Mladen Dolar: Dialectic at a Standstill? Hegel at the Times of COVID.” By Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda. Crisis & Critique 7.3 (2020): 480–497, here 495–496, http://www.crisiscritique.org/uploads/24-11-2020/interview-with-mladen-dolar.pdf . Accessed 31 October 2021. 6. Ibid., 496. 7. See Gavin Jacobson, “Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.” New Statesman , 22 July 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/children-men-alfonso-cuaron-2006-apocalypse-coronavirus . Accessed 31 October 2021. 8. Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost . OR Books, 2020, 12. 9. See Slavoj Žižek, “The will not to know.” The Philosophical Salon , 24 August 2020, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-will-not-to-know/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 10. Matt Colquhoun, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher . Repeater Books, 2020. 11. See Slavoj Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset, Not a Corporate ‘Great Reset’.” Jacobin , 31 December, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/slavoj-Žižek-socialism-great-reset . Accessed 31 October 2021. 12. Ibid. 13. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity . Sage, 1992. 14. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times . Verso, 2010. 15. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates . Verso, 2002. 16. See Markus Zöchmeister, “Life.” Lacanian Review Online , 7 April 2020, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/life/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 17. See Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce . Verso, 2009, 154. 18. See Marcus André Vieira, “Notes on Desire and Isolation.” Lacanian Review Online , 27 April 2020, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/notes-on-desire-and-isolation/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 19. Habermas qtd. in Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset.” 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Let it be clear that this account of ‘non-knowledge’ is not a cynical discrediting of the work of medical researchers and practitioners attempting to understand and treat the virus. It is, rather, an attempt to acknowledge that there are aspects of the virus that remain unknown and, more importantly, that the impact of our interventions in treating the virus are unknown (or, at least, we know what we don’t know). 23. Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism . U of Nebraska P, 2016, 126. 24. Žižek, Pandemic! 2 112. 25. Ibid., 112. 26. Ruda, Abolishing Freedom . 27. Žižek, Slavoj. In Defence of Lost Causes . Verso, 2009. 28. In what follows I draw entirely from Žižek and Ruda’s interpretations of this work. 29. Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes 459–460. It is from this point of projection that further links can be made with the ‘inhuman’ and the Lacanian ‘not-all’ (see Jack Black, “COVID-19: Approaching the In-human.” Contours Journal 10 [2020]: 1–10; Alenka Zupančič, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing.” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 10–11 [2017]: 16–30, http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/article/view/82/101 . Accessed 31 October 2021). 30. Zupančič, “The End of Ideology” 2. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. See Zupančič’s critique of Ruda’s ‘comic fatalism’ (Zupančič, “The End of Ideology”). 33. Žižek, “We Need a Socialist Reset.” 34. Frank Ruda, “The Impossible InSight.” Coils of the Serpent 8 (2021): 23–33, here 31, https://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A73702/attachment/ATT-0/ . Accessed 31 October 2021. 35. Žižek, Living in the End Times 420. 36. The reference to self-determination is drawn from Todd McGowan’s Hegelian interpretation of freedom (Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution . Columbia UP, 2019). 37. Frank Ruda, “Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism.” An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army . Ed. Slavoj Žižek. Verso, 2016, 200. 38. Slavoj Žižek, Disparities . Bloomsbury, 2016, 382. 39. Here, I deliberately re-work Zupančič’s account of Blanchot’s, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing.” For Blanchot: “The true choice is not between tolerating the Bomb (and hence running the risk of losing everything) on the one hand, and preventing the looming destruction of the world (but thereby running the risk of losing our liberal freedoms) on the other hand; the true choice is between ‘losing it all’ and creating what we are about to lose (even if we lose it all in the process): only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense” (Zupančič, “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing” 21). Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Brownian Society Button 7 June 2021 Button “Le Radeau de la Méduse” (The Raft of Medusa) by Théodore Géricault. Wikimedia Commons. The time has come to take a radically non-Hegelian view of history. Hegelianism seems to me the most sophisticated version of a comforting metaphysics according to which history has a transcendent meaning, and converges towards absolute knowledge. The fact is that history has no meaning, and therefore no secret rationality. History is not cunning: we may say that real history – what actually happens – is rather the multiplicative product of human naiveté. Scene One In 1905, a young man aged 25 sent an article on Brownian motion to a prestigious German physics journal. Brownian motion is the name of a rather banal phenomenon: it describes the fact that very small particles, for example tiny grains of dust, when suspended in air or in a liquid, flicker and slowly “drift”. This motion, or rather these fluctuations, led the young man –who lived in Zurich – to infer that molecules suspended in air or in a liquid cannot be infinitely small, that they have a discrete and minimum size, and that they are atoms – from the Greek word, which means indivisible and individual . In fact, if it were possible to have infinitely small molecules, their impact on the grains of dust would balance the grains which would remain stationary. Instead, they drift. It is interesting that the Japanese call the sensible world, the everyday world in which we live, “the drifting world”. Einstein (the name of the boy who lived in Zurich) had a view similar to that of the Japanese. Then came quantum mechanics, which tells us that everything is granular, even space and time, and that for this reason if Achilles allows the tortoise a head start, he will sooner or later overtake it, because he will have to cover a finite number of segments. Since the world is not continuous, its motion is a kind of eternal Brownian motion. “Space is a fluctuating swarm of gravity quanta – gravitons – acting on each other.” (1) According to modern physics our world drifts, like a piece of wood floating on the surface of a river. Scene Two I read about the political situation in India today. Which is now ruled, I would say dominated, by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), “the largest political party in the world,” (2) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Challenging the principle according to which it is not correct to interpret Asian parties as counterparts of Western parties, I would like to say that the Bharatiya Janata Party Janata Party is essentially a fascist political force: it expresses Hindu nationalism, combining a strong national identitarianism with a religious one, it relies partly on paramilitary forces, and is fiercely anti-Muslim. The fact is that 14.2% of the1.3 billion Indians are Muslims. Indian Muslims occupy the lowest position in society, also from an economic perspective. Commenting on the 2014 Indian election results, renowned political scientists were not surprised that only 10% of Muslims voted for the BJP, whose support increases the more one moves up the Indian caste system (the most prestigious caste, that of the Brahmins, accounts for most of BJP’s votes, 60%). Also, they were not surprised that the Muslims of India prefer to vote for the Indian National Congress (INC, Gandhi’s party), which had a project for the secular and extra-religious unification of India (46% of Muslims vote for the INC). Now, my reaction is opposite to that of these political scientists: how is it possible that 10% of Indian Muslims vote for a party that preaches a kind of religious war against them ? And also: how is it possible that only 46% of Muslims vote for the INC ? It is said that sociology and political science should not focus on details, on small minorities, that overwhelming and undemocratic majorities rarely exist... That 10% of Muslims probably voted for the BJP by mistake, or because they were ill-informed, mentally ill, or snobs... The fact is, however, that social and political reality always includes people who make mistakes, who are ill-informed, who are mentally ill, or snobs... And it is wrong to believe that these marginal phenomena have no social impact. The exceptions do not necessarily confirm the rule, we may say that the exceptions are the rule , and that the rule always results from the intersection of exceptions. Is it wise to approximate, to exclude the fringes, the unpredictable foam generated by the splitting of things, so that the edges of things are never sharp, but always dissolved and uncertain? history has no destination, which basically means it makes no sense. In the double sense of “sense”. It does not zigzag towards a specific destination, rather, it drifts aimlessly like dust particles in liquid. The movement of history is a Brownian movement. When the emperor Theodosius promulgated the edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD.– which made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire – the Nicene Christians of the Empire (as opposed to Arian Christians) amounted to less that 10% of the total inhabitants (so the same ratio as Muslims voting for their enemies in India). The masses, especially in rural areas and small towns, remained pagan. Yet historians tell us that the reign of Theodosius can be considered as the starting point of a completely Christianised Europe. It is a rather incomplete completeness. The truth is that a minority – in this case a Christian one – can be historically decisive. So why shouldn’t the fact that as many as 10% of Muslims voted for Modi be historically important? Interlude Some might say that the Christian minority coincided more or less with the ruling class at the time of the Empire: an example of a minority dominating the majority. However, also in oppositional or revolutionary contexts, it is often the smallest minorities that bring about change in the world. We may think of the Italian Risorgimento : how many people in the various States that were later to constitute Italy were really interested in Italian unification? No polls were produced in the 19th century, but it is easy to imagine that very few thought about a united Italy. Indeed, most Italians were illiterate at the time, and therefore could follow political events very little. History books claim that Giuseppe Mazzini’s followers played an important role in the Risorgimento , but how many followers could there be? It was the intellectual and political elites that made Italy, not “the masses”. Along with ruling elites, also opposition elites exist. This is what makes me doubt so much quantitative sociological research. In this domain the conventional divisions that sociologists speak of when considering or interviewing people are treated as real divisions. For example, many sociological studies label interviewees as “Farmer”, “Labourer”, “Clerk, middle-level manager”, “Senior manager, industrialist, freelancer”, and conclusions are drawn about social classes : as if the rough division that sociologists trace between very different individuals, even though they might have a similar job, corresponded to specific and definable social objects . The truth is that these are hypothetical distinctions, largely arbitrary, which always include a wide range of exceptions. Hence the idea, now increasingly widespread, that social classes are not ontological entities but nominalist classifications . (3) Pierre Bourdieu; Image credit: Bernard Lambert, Wikimedia Commons For example, in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu asked women from all walks of life what they thought about a series of things. He also asked “Do you have a bath or shower at least once a day?” (4) In relation to the profession of the head of the household, this is what emerged: “Have a bath or shower at least once a day” – Farmer Labourer Clerk Upper social class 9.8% 16.9% 36.6% 43.2% In addition, 23.2% of women who did not work and 32% of those who did work responded positively. The conclusion that should be drawn, as sociologists, is that the higher the social status the more people wash. Which is itself an interesting piece of information to explain. However, I would be inclined to go further and investigate the almost 10% of farmers who shower every day; or the more than 50% of women in the upper classes who do not wash every day. It is precisely what deviates from an expectation, from a norm that in this case is statistical, that can be the most interesting. Perhaps the only farmer in ten who washes every day is the one who indicates in what direction the peasant way of life is going to evolve. It is for this reason that – unlike what certain superficial and dogmatic neo-Marxists do – we cannot reduce all political, religious, and cultural forces, all economic activity to a rigid class, as if society were a series of distinct boxes in which individuals cluster, with a few individuals who wander from one box to another, presenting exceptions considered irrelevant. This mistake was made by the German Social Democratic Party at the end of the 19th century, when it saw that it was being increasingly voted by workers in elections. Since the majority of the German population at that time comprised more or less manual workers, the conclusion was that sooner or later the German SPD would come to power, once all workers had voted for that party. To the point that people were surprised when not all the workers in a small town voted Social Democratic ! Obviously things didn’t work out that way, because the minority of workers who (at that time) did not adhere to Marxism at some point directed other workers away from socialism... and, in the 1930s, to a large extent, towards the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. No human being is completely defined by his or her social qualification: worker, wage earner, entrepreneur, young, old, man, woman, highly qualified, badly qualified, heterosexual, LGTB, married, single... etc. Drawing a circle between individuals who share common traits and saying “this is a social identity” is a big mistake. If things were so simple, human history would not be so chaotic and unpredictable. History would be like a train ride along a track, a train that might have to stop every now and then because of an unforeseen event, a cow standing on the track, for example, a traveller who commits suicide... but sooner or later it would arrive at destination. In my opinion history has no destination, which basically means it makes no sense. In the double sense of “sense”. It does not zigzag towards a specific destination, rather, it drifts aimlessly like dust particles in liquid. The movement of history is a Brownian movement. Third scene As we have said, Einstein understood Brownian motion existed because each fluctuating element is affected not by continuous pressures, which would keep the element in a state of balance, but by discontinuous, discrete and individual pressure. I believe that in society something similar occurs: being formed by individuals, i.e. discontinuous elements, societies push the various social entities – institutions, parties, churches, cultural movements – in all directions. This seems to confirm the sociological line of research called methodological individualism . Albert Einstein on the cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, December 14, 1919; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. For more than a century, sociologists and philosophers of society seem to have been beset by this dilemma: are societies holistic entities, i.e. are they a whole that more or less conditions individuals? Or are societies to be understood as the result of the actions of individuals , each with their own desires and beliefs? When Margaret Thatcher claimed that society does not exist, she was evidently referring to the latter philosophy, according to which social entities are nominal, not real: only the individuals who make up societies exist. The moral is: “mind your own business and society will be just fine”. It is usually said that methodological individualism is typical of a right-wing approach, while holism is typical of a left-wing approach, but this is not true. Many thinkers on the left were or are individualists (one name stands out: Norberto Bobbio), while thinkers on the right can be holists. In fact, individualism is very often understood in relation to how important individual rationality is believed to be, whereby individuals are seen as representatives of the homo oeconomicus , that is, – according to the fictitious narrative of most modern economics – they are individuals who tend to make wise choices, who use the information they have, following their beliefs, in order to try to maximise their profit. (5) Here is not the right place to address this topic. I will limit myself to saying that the opposition between holism and individualism is a false dilemma, because human society is both the effect of the choices and behaviour of individuals and of institutions (what Hegel termed the Objective Spirit) that shape human choices and behaviour. In Aristotelian terms, (6) I would say that individuals as such are the material cause of society, while the óla , the “all”, are its formal cause. As for the efficient cause, it consists of the desires, needs, hopes, drives of individuals. While the final cause – although this is rarely consciously acknowledged – is the survival of the species. After all, the “aim” of any society is to perpetuate itself biologically, even though this aim might be an implicit one, so to speak (but not always: fascism taxed unmarried men and women). When I say that many “holistic” sociologists ignore individual fragmentation, I am not referring to this – more or less idealised – image of homo as a rational decision maker. Human individuals are often no less adrift than a speck of dust: precisely because they shift, the whole of society ends up fluctuating, taking unexpected directions. Individuals are not coherent units, they are – as psychoanalysis teaches us – an often contradictory combination of mostly irrational impulses. When a poor Muslim, for example, decides to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party, his choice is a specific one, it can be isolated, but the impulses that lead to that choice may be the most idiosyncratic and often conflicting. Political scientists know that many people in our democracies decide who to vote for on the day they go to the polling station, sometimes they even decide while standing inside the voting booth… And what determines a choice may be something that has no direct relation with the vote itself. This man may decide he wants to vote for BJP that day because he has quarrelled with his wife earlier, or because his football team lost the day before, or because it is raining... Sociologistic sociologists – sociologists who study society as if it existed to be studied by sociologists – will say that there may very well be random individual variations, but that in the end it will be possible to draw a coherent picture that makes sense. However, precisely this overall and coherent sense is the great illusion of sociologistic sociology, according to which social processes have simple, linear, identifiable, describable causes... I would not disregard the 10% of Indian Muslims who vote for Modi, or the 10% of French peasants who take a bath every day, as insignificant deviations from the average, as the indistinct contour of the clear-cut figures of sociological ontology (social classes, income levels, ethnic groups, confessional groups). Because the whole of society is, in fact, indistinct contour continuously turning into another indistinct contour. For example, we have read in several places that European suicide bombers and terrorism are the effect of the condition of marginality of many young people of Muslim origin in certain European societies. In fact, Europe’s kamikazes were mostly second or third generation immigrants, who came from families that were mostly not particularly religious. Hence the simplified and linear reasoning: the marginalisation of so many young people in European banlieues is the cause of fundamentalist terrorism . This simplification points us in the wrong direction. A young person of Muslim origin who feels dissatisfied, economically or culturally marginalised in a European country, can “react” in multiple ways: he or she might turn to petty or organised crime, to drugs or alcohol, re-emigrate to the family’s country of origin, fall into depression, become a social worker specialised in Muslim issues, be interested only in nightlife, become an animal rights activist, etc. If, at a certain point, this person turns to jihad in the form of terrorism, it is because this person embraces a ready-made ideology which seems to provide an answer. All ideologies interpret our problems, the same way poetry does, rock or funk music, videos, political demagogues, etc. Society offers us languages, signifiers, (7) through which we try to express our idiosyncratic discomfort, our problems – and jihadism is an effective means to express the envious anger of some people. However, there is no linear causal relationship between a type of social marginality (which does not necessarily mean extreme poverty) and some “heroic” ideological options. Increasing technological development is to be expected, of course, but it is difficult to say where this technological development will take us. It could lead to the atomic or ecological destruction of the planet, or to a more balanced and peaceful society, or to something different that science fiction authors strive to predict. Who can say? The fact that individuals are the raw material of society – in the sense that if there were no individuals there would be no society – is self-evident. The point is how these individuals interact and create history. Certainly institutions, ideas and ideals, faiths, philosophies, works of art... exist to provide a direction. But the reasons and ways in which each individual embraces institutions, ideas and ideals, faiths, etc., can be the most diverse, and for this reason the outcomes are unpredictable. Who has ever really predicted history? How many predicted the Stalinist evolution of Bolshevism? Who predicted Hitler’s advent to power in the most cultured and scientific country in Europe? In 1932 a naïve Bertolt Brecht bought a house in Germany... In the spring of 1989, who predicted that that same year Soviet communism would commit suicide? Five years ago, who would have predicted the rise of anti-globalist sovereignty, Brexit, Trump, and Matteo Salvini in Italy? Thirty years ago, who could have predicted that China was to become an economic super-power? If some did predict the future it was by accident, and when they did they predicted certain things about the future, not the entire future. It has been repeated to the point of boredom that Marx predicted socialism. However, the kind of socialism experienced by the Soviet Union, and then elsewhere, was not a prophesied event, it was precisely the application of Marx’s programme, it was the attempt to carry out a conscious historical project. Surely Marx did not foresee that the revolution would break out in a capitalistically immature country such as Russia, that it would take a Stalinist turn, that two opposing military blocs would be born... He did not foresee anything about actual history. Nowadays, we often quote something the meteorologist Lorenz said: “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Japan may cause a hurricane in Argentina”, (8) to say that small causes can have significant effects, or vice versa; that in short, the future is largely unpredictable. And this expresses the notion that history is as fluctuating as Brownian motion. Every epoch has constructed a certain sense of history . In Antiquity, a decadentist view of history prevailed: a golden age of heroes, of glorious ancestors was followed by present times characterised by what was continuous decadence (this was essentially the Greek and Roman conception). There was also an idea of circularity : at a certain point a flood would exterminate human societies, or most of them, and humanity would have to start its journey all over again, starting from barbarism. The idea of the present as a decadent epoch compared to a marvellous past was common also among Humanists from the 15th century onwards: the Ancients, especially the Greeks and the Latins, were better and more intelligent than contemporaries. With Christianity, a messianic and therefore non-decadentist vision of history took hold: the world was moving towards the end of time, when God would finally judge the living and the dead. A progressive idea of history has therefore prevailed in the West for about the last three centuries: exposed in part by Vico, then by Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spencer and positivism... Progress means marching in the direction of Reason or knowledge: humanity gradually emerges from the darkness of ignorance and superstition (i.e. from religions) and moves towards the light of rationality, of which science is the paradigm. When I say that many “holistic” sociologists ignore individual fragmentation, I am not referring to this – more or less idealised – image of homo as a rational decision maker. Human individuals are often no less adrift than a speck of dust: precisely because they shift, the whole of society ends up fluctuating, taking unexpected directions. Perhaps, after a couple of centuries, we are at another turning point: the development of chaos and complexity theories, together with the impact that the second principle of thermodynamics has had on our worldview, is causing us to open up to an indeterministic view of history. That is, humanity is seen as a boat floating in the ocean. Increasing technological development is to be expected, of course, but it is difficult to say where this technological development will take us. It could lead to the atomic or ecological destruction of the planet, or to a more balanced and peaceful society, or to something different that science fiction authors strive to predict. Who can say? On the other hand, the theories about the circular nature of history, such as those professed by the Ancients, do not seem to play the slightest role today – and in this sense, our view of history is not at all Nietzschean. In short, the time has come to take a radically non-Hegelian view of history. Hegelianism seems to me the most sophisticated version of a comforting metaphysics according to which history has a transcendent meaning, and converges towards absolute knowledge. The fact is that history has no meaning, and therefore no secret rationality. History is not cunning: we may say that real history – what actually happens – is rather the multiplicative product of human naiveté. NOTES 1. C. Rovelli, La realtà non è come ci appare , Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2014. loc. 2193. 2. Because it counts 110 milion members, more than the Chinese Communist Party. 3. Already Raymond Aron claimed that social classes had a nominalist value. See R. Aron, La lutte de classes , Gallimard, Paris 1964. 4. P. Bourdieu, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement , Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1979. 5. Economic psychology was later used to counter this rationalist axiom, its focus on the irrationality of economic behaviour. See the works of Daniel Kahneman, Eric Kirchler, Dan Ariely, Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, etc. 6. Aristotle ( Physics , 194b 15-195a 2; 198a 24-25) distinguished four causes: material, formal, efficient, final. The material cause of a statue, for example, is the marble from which it is made. The formal cause is the form that the sculptor’s mind wants to give the marble. The efficient cause is the action of the hammer or planer on the marble. The final cause is the intention of the sculptor to provide the City with a beautiful statue. 7. As in structuralist linguistics, but mostly in the sense given to this word by Jacques Lacan. 8. E. N. Lorenz, “The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow ”, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences , 1963, 25 (4): 409–432. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Politicised Bodies: We Cannot Always Take Care of the Life We Are Carrying Button 20 July 2022 Button Image Credit: The Guardian. The dimensions of existence, care, responsibility and autonomy of women, and of the care of society itself are ignored in the recent American political theatre. This decision gives a dramatic signal and reminds us how much a woman's body bears witness to juridical and electoral democratic conditions. That is, during political crises the first decisions of a group of people with power will be directed at women's freedom. Women are the sounding board for the political state of a country, they are forced to pay. These are images, memories from my early teens in the 90s, images shown on TV of the so called ‘pro-life’ women demonstrating outside clinics with signs depicting enlarged fetuses, hateful messages to women, and some blood-red liquid being poured over other women who were entering the same clinic. At the age of 11 I didn't really understand what abortion was, but I had at least understood that it could be at the root of women's hatred of other women, which seemed to me astonishing, confusing and impressive enough to try to understand what kind of logic was at play. The first logic that comes into play in this game is that of the hierarchy of life. When does life begin? At what point does an embryo come to have a soul? What is a soul? Does abortion correspond to an assassination for the benefit of the mother's comfort? Can the life to come be taken as an "absolute value" whatever be the circumstances of conception, whether it be rape or incest? These questions are known, had been worked on, but were never surpassed, since in many states of the world abortion is illegal, as it is on almost the entire African continent (unless it allows the mother's life to be saved), with the exception of South Africa and Mozambique where it is authorised. The same is true in South America, with the exception of Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia where it is legal. At the opposite extreme, it has been the norm in China for the implementation of the one-child policy. For now it is legal in India too. For a dozen states such as Nicaragua, Jamaica, El Salvador, Honduras and Madagascar it is illegal and criminalised. Thailand decriminalised it a year ago. American law, 50 years after the Roe vs Wade amendment, still considers that a woman's body and her destiny do not belong to her. The law decides on her body and thus on her health, on her ability to make choices, as if a woman's only destiny were to be just a mother. The U.S. Supreme Court is shifting the balance of what a woman can choose by giving back to each of the states of America the ability to legislate on abortion, knowing that many will choose to make abortion illegal, unless it endangers the life of the mother. (1) This decision gives a dramatic signal and reminds us how much a woman's body bears witness to juridical and electoral democratic conditions. That is, during political crises the first decisions of a group of people with power will be directed at women's freedom: to restrict them, to break them, to criminalise them. Women are the sounding board for the political state of a country, they are forced to pay. This is a far cry from the declarations of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, (2) where the need to promote women's autonomy in the decisions that concern them was affirmed worldwide, as a "right of peoples to self-determination" applied to women. It would be simplistic to think that this setback is due formally and simply to a vote by men against women's bodies. As I said at the beginning of the text, it is also a question of women opposing each other on what the body says, what it is, on the definition of a female body that is essentialized or not in its mission of gestation, of giving life. A body assigned to what happens to it, whatever the cost to its own life. Women's bodies on the issue of abortion resist secularisation, they remain attached, bound, prisoners of both a biological and religious representation of the female body. It seems that American law, 50 years after the Roe vs Wade amendment, still considers that a woman's body and her destiny do not belong to her. The law decides on her body and thus on her health, on her ability to make choices, as if a woman's only destiny were to be just a mother. The law thus creates the possibility of intimate violence in favour of a single, universal figure, the mother. The United States is thus re-launching the promotion of this image of the woman as an inhabitant by erasing the scene of procreation, by denying the figures for abortions, the catastrophic risks to women's health, and by erasing the truth: we cannot always take care of the life we are carrying. Image credit: Banksy, www.banksy.co.uk No abortion takes place without leaving a trace in a woman's history, that is what my clinical experience has taught me. In every woman's story, if the act of abortion has been chosen, it is never forgotten, swept away, suppressed, it may be the object of a repression, a shame, a modesty or a secret, but it is never counted for nothing, it always remains a place in the psyche, a marker. This act is not always the result of a deliberate, pure choice; on the contrary, it can be forced by the identity of the partner in cases of rape and incest, but also forced by a moment in life. Abortions punctuate family histories, pierce filiations and genealogies, they are the secret history of women who, let us not forget, also abort at the request of men who do not want to "keep the child". In this respect, abortions always constitute stories that are invisible in the civil registry, but which are always alive and which we inherit in one way or another. In this, we can fully support the freedom to choose without trivialising the act resulting from this choice, because every woman knows the price in her body and psyche. These stories run through us, it is a knowledge that women share with each other, a taboo that still seems to be and unfortunately is becoming more pronounced in the 21st century. How many women have secret abortions at the cost of their lives? How many are still in the United States now? Who can consider that a woman is wrong when she has an abortion? Who can judge this act, certainly the most intimate that a woman can go through? When the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott wrote "there is no such thing as a baby" (3) , he captured in one sentence that it is impossible to deny the decisive impact of a mother's physical and mental state when she gives birth. Giving birth is the most fundamental gesture of welcome, how can we believe that women ignore it? Choosing to have an abortion in one's life is, on the contrary, to preserve the sacred dimension of this gesture when it must take place for each woman, when she wishes it. NOTES 1. Which is itself doubtful as can be seen in recent new reports. See “10-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for abortion”, The Guardian, 3 July 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/03/ohio-indiana-abortion-rape-victim 2. See the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action document, https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headquarters/Attachments/Sections/CSW/PFA_E_Final_WEB.pdf 3. Donald W Winnicott, “The Baby as a Person”, The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 3, 1946-1951 , Edited by: Lesley Caldwelland Helen Taylor Robinson, Oxford University Press, 2016. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Hommage to Jean-Luc Nancy. “The unstoppable murmur of being together”: Remembering Jean-Luc Nancy MARÍA DEL ROSARIO ACOSTA LÓPEZ 6 June 2023 PHILOSOPHY JEAN-LUC NANCY Image credit: Die Welt Hommage to Jean-Luc Nancy. The story of how I met Jean-Luc for the first time is a testimony to the generosity his thinking leaves us with and the kind of community his writings will continue invoking. It was 2011 and I was an assistant professor of philosophy in Colombia. I had been reading for more or less a year Jean-Luc’s work with a group of amazing brilliant students - who I am still very close to and I still keep very much in interlocution with - after having taught a seminar on the inoperative community. Because of the times we were living in (Colombia was in the midst of a transitional justice process while also very much submerged in the longest armed conflict in the southern cone) reading Nancy’s work at the time felt both like and invitation and an open question. We felt inspired by his way of approaching the question of violence – almost without naming it; by his trust in the power of being in common and the critical importance of taking it up as a task (that “infinite task at the heart of the finite,” as he puts it), while also very much warning us of any political discourse that would invoke it as a goal; by his conception of representation behind which, we suspected, there was a connection between history and narrative that felt so timely and urgent at times when any form of testimony seemed so insufficient to make audible the stories that were finally coming out of the war. We all had so many questions and a lack of grammars to put them in words. Putting his own thinking in dialogue with our historical circumstances was an attempt to find resources to render our own lives meaningful, credible, legible – in spite of the gaps that are naturally part of the experience of reading a European author in and from Latin America. This difference, however, does not transpire in his work as irrelevant, or even less as an excluded question. Quite the contrary, the vulnerability in Jean-Luc’s work, the way he was very consistent, as a thinker, with the commitment to a radical exposure - the sharing and opening of a heart that was his and not his to claim – was the reason we kept coming back to his work once and again, in that difference, and with the intention of turning it into the possibility of the encounter. Following the advice of my very good friend Marcia Cavalcante, I wrote to Jean-Luc and told him, simply, we had so many questions for him. I explained the context briefly and sent it out as an email. His reply came right away: he was inviting us all to come to Strasbourg for a three days seminar, just us and him (he could no longer travel overseas, he explained, otherwise he would come to us). He wanted us to come and visit, to listen to our questions, and answer those he felt like he could, but mostly, as he put it, to get together, to be together in thinking. And that’s what it was, really, when we finally got to go and meet with him a couple of years later (the story of how we managed, the 13 of us, to go all the way from Colombia to Strasbourg with no funding available for this kind of traveling … that’s a story for another time). We were indeed together in thinking. We were indeed together. We gathered around his thought but ended up learning how, for him, there was no such a thing as a thought to call his own. Every time we referred to one of his works, instead of going back to what he had written, or had already thought about a subject, he literally started thinking anew… like answering for the first time a question that had never been posed to him before, as if the space opened up between us was the inauguration of a world of sense, an opportunity for its re-circulation, a new site for resonance. (1) Indeed, Jean-Luc cannot be separated from his philosophy. He practiced it and embodied it so consistently that it honestly came at first as a surprise. This ultimate trust, this ultimate bet his philosophy places on an ontology of being singular plural – at a time when the skepticism and suspicion towards anything that mentioned community was at its highest – was not just a theoretical approach, but a way of living. And this is what was most compelling for us about his thinking. This is, I think, one of the reasons why his thought has been taken up in Latin America in the way it has, and why his notion of inoperative community has become such a referent for many thinkers of the common in our continent. Because while Europe was undergoing an exhaustion of the experience of community and of the concepts that had given place to its historical realization, while European thinkers were worried about the end of democracy as they had known it and the need for an interruption of the political structures that had allowed it to become a threat to the political, in Latin America many voices (decolonial, anti-colonial, feminist and anti-racist) were raising to claim the need for a thinking of the commons , of the under-commons , of other ways of being in common that cannot be understood and cannot fit those modern, mostly white, thoroughly colonial, historically European approaches to community. Jean-Luc was a thinker that dared to insist on the need to think of the common at a time of (its) crisis. In Latin America, voices raise every day to insist on the need to think of comunidad in the context of a crisis of time itself, asking for other aesthetics, other temporalities altogether. Everyday communities are rewriting history with a claim to their right to exist, with the very resistance that only being in common can offer – as Jean-Luc wrote in The inoperative community : the restless resistance that being in common poses to the constant attempts to its destruction. Interrupting these attempts, once and again, is the “task of community;” not a goal or a project but rather the possibility of imagining (and thus bringing into existence) those worlds that live through the fissures of that over-saturated language of totality – and of the totality that is represented by that abstract concept of individuality that runs through our contemporary political and economic systems, as Nancy pointed out once and again in his work. Let me quote him in length here from that seminar in Strasbourg in 2013; because I think only the echo of his voice can do justice to the relevance and timeliness of his thinking today – and today more than ever: what happens when a speaker is interrupted or interrupts themselves? Their speech does not come to an end; it is just suspended and will go on. Or maybe when an interruption takes place something does go on, something that no longer has to do only with listening. My feeling, my relief or my craziness is to imagine that during the interruption something like a murmur goes on between all of us; the unstoppable murmur of being together (just imagine what would happen if it stopped). […] This – if nothing else – is what constitutes an absolute ground of resistance. The evidence is that, in order to shatter this resistance, hate and violence are necessary. A selfishness so great that it destroys the very ego that seeks to isolate itself is needed to break this resistance. Against this selfishness, we have the generosity of Jean-Luc’s thought. Not just his generosity, but the essential generosity his thinking claims as being at the ground of what we are: the generosity of an ear always attentive, always ready to listen to the murmur, the unstoppable murmur of being together, that reminds us of our responsibility to care for the world, and the duty to defend as our ultimate imperative the right of every being to be audible, infinitely, without end. NOTES 1. The final version of these meetings, after their transcription and a thorough process of editing in which Jean-Luc was very involved, is coming out as a book with Fordham University press. Related Articles Jean-Luc Nancy: in whose wild heart immortality sleeps homeless. DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article The Eternity of Jean-Luc Nancy SHAJ MOHAN Read Article

Intimité et clinique : L’espace de la métamorphose Button 24 February 2022 Button de la série Shame, Penny Siopis, Afrique du Sud ; Crédit image : Mario Todeschini Compte rendu du livre La chute d’intime par Laurence Joseph, Éditions Hermann, 2021. Cet ouvrage a la puissance de la curiosité de l’auteure, curiosité telle qu’elle y est définie : « c’est l’acte de prêter attention au monde, à ses détails, à ses changements (…) la curiosité à l’autre est un moyen de prendre soin. » La chute de l’intime est un livre traversé par la clinique. Clinique de la vie qui désire, qui s’interroge et qui construit lorsque sont préservées les frontières de l’intime. Clinique du discours des patients dans ce lieu de l’intime qu’est la psychanalyse, là où se fait au plus près l’épreuve d’une différence à l’intérieur de soi. Mais aussi clinique du monde, monde démocratique menacé par la mélancolisation du discours qui s’est faite entendre dans le temps des restrictions sanitaires mises en place pour lutter contre la propagation de la Covid-19. L’écriture de Laurence Joseph est une écriture de clinicienne, celle qui ne quitte pas des yeux la société dans laquelle elle exerce et en cela, elle plaide, témoigne et manifeste. Plaidoyer pour l’intime. L'écriture épouse le fond de l’intime pour mieux lui donner corps, créer des images et partager une mythologie. Ce corps c’est celui de la fée Mélusine, figure de légende qui se métamorphose chaque samedi en femme serpent dans le secret de sa salle d’eau. Allégorie de l’intime, elle vient témoigner de la nécessité pour chacun de posséder des territoires personnels qui délimitent le champ de l’intime pour qu’une transformation puisse avoir lieu. Tant que son secret est respecté, Mélusine peut consoler, construire, apporter son écot à la cité, mais à la trahison de la parole donnée, son intimité est violée, la création cesse et des présages de mort s’ensuivent. Point d’action politique dans la cité, point de destin de bâtisseuse, sans la possibilité d’un temps de retrait pour abriter un secret, celui d’une rencontre avec la parole de l’Autre. Un dehors et un dedans inextricablement liés. À l’instar de l’ami intime dont elle déploie la fonction, Laurence Joseph refait le monde avec nous, elle le refait parce qu’elle le renomme, en appelant ainsi au transfert du lecteur. Elle aiguise notre curiosité par une écriture emprunte de fraîcheur. « Un langage nouveau suscite des idées nouvelles et des pensers nouveaux veulent une langue fraîche » disait Raymond Queneau plaidant pour une langue vivante. Cette fraîcheur permet de reprendre, d’entendre autrement, d’ouvrir d’autres horizons, une écriture plaidoyer de l’intime. Une écriture où les signifiants se libèrent, trouvent une autre destinée. C’est peut-être le très beau chapitre sur l’Autre en moi qui touche au plus près cette délicatesse-là. Ici l’intime dans des circonstances ordinaires fait l’expérience extraordinaire de l’altérité. Aborder l’essence de l’intime c’est aussi éclairer sa fragilité. Témoignage de la chute de l’intime Cette fragilité a été éprouvée dans l’ébranlement du socle de l’intime, de ses bords, lors des restrictions sanitaires qui ont rendu impossible ce retranchement dans « une chambre à soi ». Le confinement. Temps suspendu et pour certains, temps confisqué dans lequel résonne déjà ce sentiment de préjudice propre à la mélancolie. Temps mort car sans différence, sans ponctuation, sans battement entre le dehors et le dedans, par essence plus de rythme, ni pulsation. L’entendu ne pouvant être négligé, l’écriture témoigne. Elle témoigne de l’abrasement des discours, du lissage des subjectivités, de l’asthénie du désir, « d’une perte de la capacité d’aimer » , cette caractéristique psychique de la mélancolie pour Freud qui pour l’auteure fait écho à l’indifférence, à la disparition pour le goût des autres, du prochain, pouvant aller au rejet, à la ségrégation. Ce qui a été entendu, c’est que le discours totalitaire sur la Covid « a desséché les autres discours, et précisément ce langage créateur qui est celui de l’intime. C’est cela la mélancolisation du discours. » « Privés de rencontres et d’événements, ce sont les coordonnées de l’altérité qui se sont érodées » et cet effacement de l’autre a provoqué des sentiments d’abandon, de solitude, de doute et de colère. De colère car pour certains, c’est le monde lui-même qui les a abandonnés : l’état, le système de santé, la science, le savoir, « de tout ce qui faisait abri, aucun n’a tenu parole » . Ces sentiments ne sont pas nouveaux, ils ont seulement trouvé à se faire entendre à l’occasion de la pandémie. Serrant au plus près Deuil et Mélancolie, Laurence Joseph y tire le fil de « la constellation psychique de la révolte », mélancolisation précédant l’accablement mélancolique, moment où l’intime entame sa chute. Un état psychique guidé par un sentiment de trahison. Ici n’existe plus cette possibilité d’énigme qui étaye, seul règne la certitude ravageante d’un sentiment de préjudices et de remords. Victime de trahison, le sujet pré-mélancolique en vient à se détourner des principes démocratiques car il considère qu’il n’a été ni entendu ni protégé. Il se sent lésé, laissé-pour-compte. Cet état est un moment clinique hautement lié au politique alerte l’auteure, car le lien démocratique s’épuise et se teinte de négativisme, couleur mélancolique. On ne peut qu’entendre le : « À quoi bon… » et donc l’abstention. Négativisme d’une part et agressivité de l’autre. Le sujet emprunt du remords « d’avoir cru en l’objet qui était entré dans le champ du désir et qui a été retiré », a envie d’en découdre. Revenant à l’étymologie du remords, l’auteure nous fait entendre combien la mélancolie est porteuse d’insurrection car il va s’agir de « mordre en retour », il faut répondre et attaquer là où on a été blessé. Du remords découle la défiance. Défiance de l’altérité, de la parole politique trompeuse à laquelle on avait pourtant cru. Le dehors hostile et menteur, il faut s’en désaffilier. Le complotisme vient s’infiltrer dans cette crise de confiance, en proposant « une autre mythologie pour dégager l’autre de sa crédulité et le persuader des tromperies du pouvoir. » La pertinence de « la constellation psychique de la révolte » se fait entendre tout au long de ce chapitre tant ses ressorts viennent éclairer les maux de notre société qui mettent en péril le socle démocratique. Manifeste pour l’intime au regard de la démocratie Répondant tout autant aux exigences d’une recherche à laquelle la pratique de la psychanalyse engage qu’à l’intime conviction de l’auteure, l’écriture se fait moins ronde, plus incisive, elle percute. Laurence Joseph investigue ce qu’il advient du discours dans son destin collectif quand il se mélancolise. Elle questionne notamment les risques encourus par le discours si, à l’instar du moi mélancolique, il en venait à se prendre pour un objet et se retournait contre lui. « Le globish galopant rejoint par la novlangue de la Covid » ont déjà rendu fragile la parole singulière. Ainsi, d’autres discours captant le désarroi de l’abandon et la haine sourde de l’objet, pourraient advenir et se glisser dans cet intime chuté, discours portés par un Autre séducteur pervers. Cet Autre n’est pas l’interlocuteur avec lequel une métamorphose pourrait s’opérer, car cet Autre ne se laisse pas transformer par celui qui y adhère, il ne cherche que le pouvoir et la jouissance… Le vote de plus . L’intime chuté, c’est un intime qu’on a fait taire car il n’est plus entendu. Une sortie du discours. Si la parole n’éveille plus la curiosité et le désir de l’autre, le sujet ne se sent plus compté parmi les autres mais rejeté comme un déchet. C’est le sujet tout entier qui peut en venir à chuter, chuter jusqu’au trottoir si ce n’est par la fenêtre. de la série Shame, Penny Siopis, Afrique du Sud ; Crédit image : Mario Todeschini À chaque étage chuté de l’intime concorde une mutation du lien social inhérente à la mélancolisation du discours. L’immeuble est haut, la chute est longue. Nous ne pourrons ici en recenser tous les niveaux. Mentionnons cependant le passage Destruction de l’intime où l’auteure noue les élaborations de Lacan sur l’ex-time à la disparition de l’autre au long des divers confinements, rendant tout un chacun plus malléable à cette part d’ex-time en lui. Son développé est édifiant sur ce qu’il pourrait advenir de l’efficience du langage, de son lien à la vérité et par là même de notre curiosité. Pour autant, Laurence Joseph ne succombe pas à la mélancolisation du discours. La chute de l’intime en fait foi. Quand Lacan en 1967 s’adressait aux psychiatres de Saint-Anne, les alertant sur les effets de la ségrégation, il les enjoignait à une forme de curiosité en leur disant qu’ils pourraient avoir quelque chose à dire à ce sujet, « sur le sens véritable que ça a » car « savoir comment les choses se produisent ça permet très certainement de leur donner une forme différente. » Cet ouvrage relève de cette mission, il a la puissance de la curiosité de l’auteure, curiosité telle qu’elle y est définie : « c’est l’acte de prêter attention au monde, à ses détails, à ses changements (…) la curiosité à l’autre est un moyen de prendre soin. » La réponse de Laurence Joseph à la chute de l’intime est la proposition d’un espace en partage pour métamorphose(s). Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

l’indéracinable optimisme de Jean-Luc Nancy Button 23 August 2022 Button Translation of the text written by André Bernold in 2017, and read by him on the funeral of Jean-Luc Nancy. It is presented here as in the “Livret” of the funeral orations. [The indomitable courage (that's the expression, but it's the right one), his inflexible, unyielding optimism of Jean-Luc Nancy are so powerful that they make me, for a moment, reverse all perspectives: what if there were, in the end, more good than bad? What if there were everywhere, in every corner, beings as amazing as him, many more than fools and cowards? What if the exception was the rule? In front of Jean-Luc Nancy my inveterate pessimism suddenly falters, and I look at the world with entirely new eyes. Alas, I do not see him as often... as I should... Another blessing in my life. I should say more. I must say that a philosopher capable of living like this can only be the object... of a favorable prejudice... as to his philosophy. He claims no one in particular, claims nothing. He studies, calmly, examines. He is a very sick man and a true doctor of the soul, a kind of very special hakim who goes everywhere, even through the nets of death. ] [ L’indomptable courage (c’est l’expression consacrée, mais elle est juste), l’inflexible, l’indéracinable optimisme de Jean-Luc Nancy sont d’une telle puissance qu’ils me font pour un instant renverser toutes les perspectives : et s’il y avait, en définitive, plus de bons que de mauvais ? S’il y avait partout, dans tous les coins, des êtres aussi étonnants que lui, beaucoup plus que d’imbéciles et de lâches ? Si l’exception était la règle ? Devant Jean-Luc Nancy mon pessimisme invétéré soudain chancelle, et je regarde le monde avec des yeux entièrement neufs. Hélas, je ne le vois pas aussi souvent... qu’il faudrait... Encore une bénédiction dans ma vie. Je devrais le dire d’avantage. Je dois dire qu’un philosophe capable de vivre comme ça ne peut faire que l’objet... d’un préjugé favorable... quant à sa philosophie. Il ne se réclame de personne en particulier, ne revendique rien. Il étudie, posément, examine. C’est un très grand malade et c’est un vrai médecin de l’âme, une espèce de hakim très spécial qui passe partout, même au travers des filets de la mort. ] Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Art is the Anti-End of the World Button 21 February 2021 Button Le baiser, René Magritte, circa 1951; Image credit: Charly Herscovici, Bruxelles 2011, artibune.com. Art is the anti-end of the world. It will bring us together, bridges, channels, hearts and minds, an invisible parliament where not any voice will be silenced. Not a leisure park, as the majors of the global entertainment companies try to incarcerate our sense and sensibility, but a infinite agora to reinvent a fare globalization. 黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛 我却用它寻找光明 -- ( 顾城, 一代人 ) The dark night gave me dark eyes I use it to look for the light — (GU CHENG) We are experiencing Art in a way we never did before. Our endangered times may be operating a genetic mutation on us, transforming an increasing portion of human beings as a presentable Walking Dead outfit not far away from the Robert Kirkman comic series. A morbid combination of prisoners surrounded with a digital and military wire fence, contaminated vulnerabilities accused of being the agents of the pandemic, waiting for some miraculous (and certainly expensive) remedy. Or the lonesome judge-penitents in Albert Camus’ The Fall , shouting alone in the middle of the desert. In this black hole civilization, Art may offer a path through the night. During the lockdown of spring 2020, I was obsessed about the public libraries, museums, theatres, art houses and cinemas all across the entire world. At night, while the planet was breathing and the sky having a rest from the unremitting airplane ballet, I was navigating from one museum website to another, disrespectful from every geographical and time constraint, increasingly depressed by the automatic announcement, in every language of the world: “We are closed as a precautionary measure to help contain the spread of coronavirus.” I was thinking about them, the unread books, the unseen paintings, the untouched sculptures, the unplayed concerts, locked-down in these cultural fortresses – and somehow, I was more and more convinced about the importance to unlock them, to make them free. Our own freedom depends on their freedom. Art is vulnerable. How can we help a bird with broken wings to fly again without crushing its fragile abdomen? In the meantime, the proliferation of digital meetings, social media fever, TV shows and continuous flow of news about the global situation may have transformed each one of us as simulacra , putting everything, including Art and Education, on the same level of the flat screen. The capitalism was at ease: trespassing the problem of infrastructures, denying any form of resistance to a global locked-down population, drafting its development plan to a renewed productivity based on Smart Cities, Smarts Villages, Smart Countryside – Artificial Intelligence without critical mind. In French language, the lock-down sanitary measures are called confinement . It reminds us how imperialism comes with two parallel strategies, as Franz Fanon’ Wretched of the Earth analysed it: a system of exclusion and a system of confinement, and whatever violence and repression is used is justified in the name of reason, rationality, public health. Is Art of any help to struggle against such a system? Or is it a way to make it less hurting, infinitely depicting a phenomenon, powerless, neutralized, and sanitized? Can a bird flying in its cage with invisible bars and a Windows-like blue sky above still be defined as a bird? Step by step, texts after texts, the ideas became stronger thanks to this shared experience, and finally revealed a thought not unique but common. Art was not a tradition anymore: it was a contemporary creation, encompassing each one of us. We are like Jonas (or Yunus in the Koran) in the belly of the whale. If we refuse the resurrection to come as a Biblical judgment (Matthew, 12), we have to create our own breach. Art can provide the map to the prison break. Time has come to reweave the close link between creators and citizens. Cultural spaces have to reopen, even if their activity is very reduced. It is vital to inhabit the world and that a place of culture must be a place of life above all, even if it is no longer a place of representation of the world, but only of life. It is never too late to fight against representation as an authority. I was thinking about them, the unread books, the unseen paintings, the untouched sculptures, the unplayed concerts, locked-down in these cultural fortresses – and somehow, I was more and more convinced about the importance to unlock them, to make them free. “Representations are a form of human economy, in a way, and necessary to life in society and, in a sense, between society. So I don’t think there is any way of getting away from them – they are as basic as language. What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the kind of authority which, to my mind, has been repressive because it doesn’t permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.” I cannot agree more with these words of Edward Said in a 1985 interview in the New York based Wedge magazine. Every part of the population, not excluding any one, should bring their own culture to this new path of Art, in a participative way. In the long-term creation as such would emerge from this pragmatic relationship with the daily lives of the citizens. When I say that the cultural spaces must open, I am not talking only about their social and educational missions, but also as public services and part of the economic life. Especially since these places are often well located, in crossroads geographies (even in rural areas - like where I live, the only living place in the village of 500 inhabitants is a public library backed by a village hall -, and suburban areas, with actors in the field who are too rarely approached by the cultural world), Art can help us map a new geography of citizenship. What is the flying bird able to see? As for creation as such, breeding ground for all innovations, we should not worry too much: when it is driven by a necessity, it always manages to find the way. The dark night gave me dark eyes I use it to look for the light — (GU CHENG) Here. In short, we have to look for the light. And don't just scratch our eyes! What is Art doing to me? The scale of this question needs to be enlarged. What is Art doing to whom? Izumi Dance Company at Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, Angoulême, July 2020; Image credit: received. Let me share one of the most vivid experiences I ever had with art. A group of teenagers from a suburb area had worked intensely on a dance project during ten days. There were more than one language, and a large part of these young people were black with African and Comorian origins. The choreography was their common language, a new collective mother tongue without any inherited burden. They were dancing under the artistic and social guidance of one of these unknown fighters who give all they have to enhance the potentialities of children usually bound into a pessimistic pattern. The result was simply stunning, unforgettable. Watching it, on a very sweet summer night, in the middle of a crowd smiling behind the face masks, my eyes became bathed with an irrepressible emotion and then, it was all clear. Art is doing this miracle to bring people together. Do you know why? Henry Miller, in a letter to John Cowper Powys (sent from Big Sur, California, on the 17th April 1950), was writing: “Our young people seems to be ruined even before having started to create anything. The problem, I guess, being they are all waiting for the end of the world .” Art is the anti-end of the world. It will bring us together, bridges, channels, hearts and minds, an invisible parliament where not any voice will be silenced. Not a leisure park, as the majors of the global entertainment companies try to incarcerate our sense and sensibility, but a infinite agora to reinvent a fare globalization. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

YOTA DIMITRIOU Yota Dimitriou is an art historian, curator and translator. She studied History and Philosophy of Science at Athens University, Art History at the American College of Greece and completed her MSc in Contemporary Art and Curating at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. She is currently translating a short novel while working as curatorial assistant for an Athenian contemporary art gallery.

« La solution finale » au problème Gaza-Hamas de l’Israël Button 21 November 2023 Button Les ruines de Hiroshima, 1945 ; Crédite d’image : AP Les Palestiniens sont les « Indiens » des temps modernes, dont les terres ont été volées pour construire un nouvel État, et aux fantômes desquels les États-Unis ont donné le nom de « terroristes » pour justifier leur « guerre contre le terrorisme ». Ce que les États-Unis ont fait pour la fondation du pays est reproduit par Israël au milieu du 20e siècle. Les États-Unis ne peuvent donc pas empêcher Israël d'éradiquer leurs « Indiens ». Les États-Unis, qui ont largué les bombes atomiques sur Hiroshima et Nagasaki et qui tentent depuis lors de régner sur le monde sous le couvert de la dissuasion nucléaire, n'ont d'autre choix que de permettre l'éradication de ces « peuples indigènes ». Aujourd'hui, le monde est enfin sur le point d'apprendre que l'« ère américaine » est terminée, mais les États-Unis ne l'accepteront évidemment pas. C'est justement là la raison pour laquelle le monde contemporain est en ébullition. Depuis la plus grande attaque transfrontalière du Hamas le 7 octobre, Israël a complètement bloqué la bande de Gaza sous la bannière de l'éradication du Hamas, en fermant les infrastructures de vie et en procédant à des frappes aériennes à grande échelle et à une invasion de troupes au sol. Le secrétaire général des Nations unies, M. Guterres, a déclaré que « Gaza est devenue un cimetière pour enfants », la communauté internationale a condamné la situation et des citoyens de nombreux pays ont manifesté en grand nombre. Néanmoins, le Premier ministre Netanyahou réitère la poursuite de la « guerre » et profite de l'occasion pour terminer le nettoyage de « l'organisation armée du Hamas », en déclarant que les récentes attaques du Hamas constituent la plus grande crise depuis la fondation du pays. 　 Il ne s'agit pas d'une « guerre », mais d'une extermination de groupes de réfugiés enclos. Mais il ne s'agit pas d'une « guerre ». Les Palestiniens n'ont pas d'État, en particulier dans la bande de Gaza, une colonie de réfugiés, qu'Israël gère en la fermant par un mur haut et solide en échange de la levée de l'occupation illégale. Le Hamas (Mouvement de résistance islamique) est essentiellement un quasi-gouvernement dans la région (il a remporté les élections du Conseil de l'Autorité palestinienne de 2006 face à l'OLP, mais l'Occident a refusé de reconnaître ce résultat et a été contraint de ne placer que la bande de Gaza sous son contrôle) et son aile militaire est organisée pour la résistance contre Israël. Il n'est donc pas possible de distinguer strictement le Hamas des habitants de la région (c'est la branche politique du Hamas que les médias désignent sous le nom d’« Autorité sanitaire de Gaza » dans les annonces des nombres de décès, etc.) Ainsi, l'éradication du Hamas par Israël signifierait effectivement la destruction de toute la bande de Gaza. Il ne s'agit pas d'une « guerre » d'affrontements entre États, mais seulement d'une opération d'extermination d'un groupe de réfugiés sans État. En fait, les militaires israéliens semblent le penser et, lors de discussions informelles avec des responsables militaires américains, ils ont justifié la destruction complète de Gaza en citant le largage des bombes atomiques sur Hiroshima et Nagasaki pour forcer le Japon à se rendre, en réponse à la demande de l'armée américaine de contrôler les pertes civiles. Israël envisagerait également de « déplacer de force » deux millions de réfugiés vers des camps prévus se situer dans la péninsule du Sinaï. En bref, ce serait une « solution finale au problème de Gaza et de la Palestine ». Utilisation de phosphore blanc à Gaza, octobre 2023 ; Crédite d’image : Aljazeera La « question palestinienne » est née, bien entendu, de la création de l'« État juif d'Israël », qui a exclu la population arabe. Cela a donné lieu au conflit israélo-arabe et a créé les « réfugiés palestiniens » qui existent jusqu’ aujourd'hui. Les « accords d'Oslo » de l'après-guerre froide (1993) ont constitué un tournant majeur dans cette situation. Un plan de reconnaissance mutuelle d'Israël et de la Palestine et de coexistence entre les deux États a été lancé, mais le Premier ministre israélien Yitzhak Rabin, qui avait accepté ce plan de paix, a été rapidement assassiné dans le même pays et le plan a été escamoté. Le tournant suivant a été la « guerre contre le terrorisme » lancée par les États-Unis. 　 Pourquoi les États-Unis sont-ils si sur la défensive ? Néanmoins, pourquoi les États-Unis (United States of America) continuent-ils à défendre et à soutenir Israël dans une telle mesure alors que des manifestations massives « Save Gaza, save Palestine » ont lieu dans le monde entier (même dans les pays occidentaux) ? Les médias en parlent beaucoup. De la pression exercée par la communauté juive des États-Unis, ou le fait que ce pays ait été créé pour les protéger des nazis... Pendant la guerre froide, Israël a également été une tête de pont pour l'Occident, en tant que moyen de pression contre les États arabes riches en pétrole. Mais même lorsque, comme cette fois-ci, la « guerre » d'Israël a perdu le soutien de la majorité de la communauté internationale, les États-Unis continuent de soutenir le « droit à la guerre d'autodéfense » d'Israël. Avant d'admettre qu'il s'agit là de la position diplomatique fondamentale des États-Unis, nous devons nous demander pourquoi cette prise de position ? D'une part, c'est la « guerre contre le terrorisme » qu'Israël mène et, depuis le début du XXIe siècle, les États-Unis l'ont érigée en régime mondial. L'ennemi n'est plus un État mais des « terroristes », et les « terroristes » ne sont pas des êtres humains et doivent être détruits à tout prix par les tenants de l'ordre. Le droit international régissant la guerre ne s'applique plus. Non, il n'a pas de sens. L'ennemie n'est pas un État, mais un groupe armé illégal. Ils seront traqués jusqu'au bout du monde et éliminés où qu'ils se trouvent, sur le territoire d'un autre pays ou non (mais ils ne peuvent pas bombarder à l'intérieur du pays, donc un système de surveillance sera mis en place à l'intérieur du pays). Il en va de même pour les pays qui soutiennent les « terroristes » : ainsi, l'Afghanistan et l'Irak seront détruits d'un seul coup par des bombardements intensifs. C'est la "guerre contre le terrorisme" au nom de la civilisation (qui a finalement échoué au bout de 20 ans et les États-Unis se sont retirés d'Afghanistan, mais ils ont conservé l'habitude de désigner leurs « ennemis » comme des « terroristes ». Les États-Unis les ont désignés comme terroristes, les plaçant hors de toute protection juridique, et d'autres pays ont suivi leur exemple). Lorsque le président américain George Bush l'a proposée après le 11 septembre, Israël a été le premier à l'accueillir. Le Premier ministre de l'époque, Ariel Sharon, a justifié la répression militaire de l'Intifada en déclarant : « Ce que nous avons fait, c'est précisément la guerre contre le terrorisme ». Depuis lors, le Hamas, issu d'organisations musulmanes, peut être exterminé en toute impunité en tant que « terroristes », et les habitants de Gaza, qui produisent des combattants du Hamas, peuvent être emmurés comme des « foyers de terreur » et bombardés à tout moment. Les États-Unis ne peuvent donc plus critiquer les méthodes d'Israël. 　 Les origines des états isomorphes Mais les racines des faits sont bien plus profondes. Alors qu'Israël vise à éliminer les Palestiniens de la surface de la terre au nom de la « légitime défense », l'État d'Israël est en fait exactement le même type d'État que les États-Unis d'Amérique. L'attaque et l'assassinat d'Oussama ben Laden en 2011 constituent une étape importante de la « guerre contre le terrorisme ». Le nom de code de la « cible » utilisé par l'armée américaine dans cette opération était "Geronimo". Un éminent Indien (peuple indigène) qui a résisté jusqu'au bout aux États-Unis d'Amérique (et aux Américains) a été utilisé comme nom de code pour désigner un « chef des terroristes ». Cela illustre à l'envers ce que les Indiens étaient pour les Américains d’aujourd’hui (surtout pour les dirigeants nationaux). L'« Amérique » a commencé à s'instaurer lorsque les puritains, fuyant les persécutions religieuses en Angleterre, ont traversé l'Atlantique vers un nouveau continent où ils pouvaient acquérir des terres « librement », établir des droits de propriété dans les colonies, chasser les indigènes qui n'avaient aucune notion de la propriété foncière, et étendre progressivement leurs possessions pour construire des villes. Cela a immédiatement entraîné des conflits avec les indigènes, mais les « Indiens » (comme les Européens les appelaient), qui n'étaient pas civilisés et ne possédaient ni chevaux ni fusils, ne pouvaient pas rivaliser avec eux. En outre, les colons voulaient s'approprier cette « liberté ». Ils ont donc pris leur indépendance vis-à-vis de la Grande-Bretagne et ainsi les États-Unis d'Amérique ont été créés. En moins de cent ans, ils sont devenus une puissance transcontinentale, mais dans le même temps, la population indigène a presque disparu. C'est Geronimo qui a conduit les Apaches, considérés comme « belliqueux », à résister jusqu'au bout. Les États-Unis d'Amérique ont aussi eu le problème des esclaves noirs (que la guerre de Sécession a définitivement résolu, dirait-on), mais avant cela, le pays était un pays « libre » parce qu'il avait presque anéanti la population indigène (la terre est donc devenue « free »). Et c'est parce qu'ils ont converti toute la terre et la nature en bien foncière et en marchandise que les États-Unis d'Amérique sont devenus le pays le plus riche et le plus puissant du monde à la fin du 19e siècle, et en 20 e , surtout après la chute de l'Europe lors de la Grande Guerre. Hiroshima, 6 août 1945 ; crédite d’image : penntoday.upenn.com Un monde qui n'accepte pas la suffisance des États-Unis et de l'Europe. Israël a été créé par des Juifs (sionistes) qui se sont installés en Palestine pour créer un État sur la base de l'Ancien Testament et qui, à travers marasme des deux guerres européennes, ont expulsé les Arabes qui y vivaient (fameux Nakba) et ont créé un État exclusivement juif. La guerre a éclaté entre eux et les États arabes qui s'opposaient à l’Israël, mais avec le soutien ferme des États-Unis et des pays d’Europe (qui étaient en effet responsables de la persécution historique des Juifs, maladie incurable des sociétés de la traditions chrétienne, devenue dans la modernité « antisémitisme »), l'État est devenu ce qu'il est aujourd'hui après la quatrième guerre du Moyen Orient. Cependant, les gens qui avaient vécu là (les autochtones !) ont été expulsées lors de la création d'Israël. Certains de leurs descendants résident aujourd'hui dans la « réserve » (des Indiens) appelée Gaza. En passant, on se souvient que, pour les premiers puritains, la traversée transatlantique était assimilée à un « Exode » (de l’Égypte), et les immigrants enduraient des épreuves dans l'espoir de créer un « nouvel Israël » sur la nouvelle terre, de « construire une ville sur une colline » que le monde entier pourrait admirer (épisode de J. Winthrop, premier gouvernant de la colonie Massachusetts, un élément important de l’histoire de la fondation des États-Unis d’Amérique). C'est pourquoi les États-Unis ne peuvent pas répudier Israël. Car répudier Israël reviendrait à répudier sa propre fondation. Les Palestiniens sont les « Indiens » des temps modernes, dont les terres ont été volées pour construire un nouvel État, et aux fantômes desquels les États-Unis ont donné le nom de « terroristes » pour justifier leur « guerre contre le terrorisme ». Ce que les États-Unis ont fait pour la fondation du pays est reproduit par Israël au milieu du 20e siècle. Les États-Unis ne peuvent donc pas empêcher Israël d'éradiquer leurs « Indiens ». Les États-Unis, qui ont largué les bombes atomiques sur Hiroshima et Nagasaki et qui tentent depuis lors de régner sur le monde sous le couvert de la dissuasion nucléaire, n'ont d'autre choix que de permettre l'éradication de ces « peuples indigènes ». Mais aujourd'hui, les pays qui ont l’expérience d’être colonisés par les pays occidentaux et qui ont subi leur joug depuis leur indépendance n'acceptent plus l'autojustification de la suprématie des États-Unis et de l'Europe (de l’Occident). En particulier, la Chine, l'Inde, la Turquie et d'autres pays ne s’en contentent plus et deviennent une « menace » pour les États-Unis. En Amérique latine, beaucoup de pays deviennent plus indépendants. Et aux Nations unies, une résolution appelant à la levée de 70 ans de sanctions économiques américaines contre Cuba a été adoptée à une écrasante majorité. Et la Bolivie, le pays le plus progressiste en matière de restauration des peuples « indigènes », a annoncé la rupture de relations diplomatiques avec Israël en signe de protestation contre le bombardement de Gaza. Aujourd'hui, le monde est enfin sur le point d'apprendre que l'« ère américaine » est terminée, mais les États-Unis ne l'accepteront évidemment pas. C'est justement là la raison pour laquelle le monde contemporain est en ébullition. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

What do mainstream scientists acknowledge as original scientific contributions? In other words, what is the current épistémè in natural sciences? This essay attempts to characterize this épistémè as computational empiricism. Computational empiricism : the reigning épistémè of the sciences MAËL MONTÉVIL 30 July 2021 PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE Article PDF Le Bon sens , René Magritte, 1945. Image credit: Fotki . What do mainstream scientists acknowledge as original scientific contributions? In other words, what is the current épistémè in natural sciences? This essay attempts to characterize this épistémè as computational empiricism. Scientific works are primarily empirical, generating data and computational, to analyze them and reproduce them with models. This épistémè values primarily the investigation of specific phenomena and thus leads to the fragmentation of sciences. It also promotes attention-catching results showing limits of earlier theories. However, it consumes these theories since it does not renew them, leading more and more fields to be in a state of theory disruption. Introduction Provided that, for better and worse, the historical model of modern sciences is classical mechanics, theories, and theorization used to have a central role in mainstream sciences. Then, the decline of theoretical thinking in sciences, the object of this special issue, becomes possible only once practitioners no longer feel the need for such work — or possibly when its possibility vanishes since the lack of possibility may very well translate into a lack of perceived need. This decline requires a transformation in what is considered scientifically acceptable and what is acknowledged as scientific research. As such, we should ponder the nature of the dominant perspective of current sciences and the possibility that a new épistémè emerged. The justification of current practices lack sufficient elaboration and explicitness to shape a full-fledged doctrine and, a fortiori, a philosophy — though some of the components of these practices are highly refined. The most informal nature of the foundations of current practices seems necessary since it cannot withstand contradictions on intrinsic and extrinsic grounds — refutations have been numerous and compelling. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that it shapes both scientific institutions and everyday practice, sometimes by highly formalized procedures. In a sense, several of its key texts are polemic, such as the one of Anderson (1) . However, we think that their aim is not to take genuine theoretical stands, but to shift Overton’s window, the range of ideas, and, here, of methods that mainstream practitioners consider sensible. We should acknowledge that this window has moved considerably. There are fields, such as molecular biology, where using artificial intelligence to generate hypotheses is received as a superb idea, and, by contrast, the very notion of theoretical or conceptual work has often become inconceivable. To interpret this épistémè, let us not rush on the gaudy flags waved by some extreme authors and, instead, focus on the mainstream practice of sciences and its organization insofar as it has an epistemological dimension. To this end, we focus on some general but nevertheless precise characteristics of how current scientific work is structured intellectually. The strange philosophical amalgam structuring scientific articles In order to investigate the dominant épistémè in current sciences, let us start with the elementary unit of current scientific practice, namely the research article. We concur with Meadows when he states: The construction of an acceptable research paper reflects the agreed view of the scientific community on what constitutes science. A study of the way papers are constructed at any point in time, therefore, tells us something about the scientific community at that time. (2) In Foucauldian words, the structure of acceptable research articles provides evidence on the épistémè at a given time. The prevailing norm for the structure of scientific articles is IMRaD; that is, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. This structure has been introduced in the 40s and 50s, depending on the disciplines. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formalized it as a standard, and its rule is still growing. It is enforced more or less rigorously in most scientific journals, especially in biology and medicine (3) . The rationale of this norm is first to shape an article like an hourglass. The introduction goes from the general situation in a field to the specific question addressed by the article, the Methods and Results are narrow contributions, and the Discussion goes back from these results to their impact on the field of interest. In this sense, the main contribution of research articles is like a single brick added to the cathedral of scientific knowledge — especially when scientists aim for the minimal publishable unit, to further their bibliometric scores. However, since we consider that theoretical thinking requires reinterpreting empirical observations and theoretical accounts — not only in the field of interest but also in other relevant fields — this structure is deeply inimical to theoretical thinking. In other words, theorization is not about adding a brick in the edifice of a specific science; it involves rethinking its map or even its nature. Let us proceed with the Discussion of the IMRaD structure. In 1964, P. Medawar, a Nobel prize winner, called this structure fraudulent, emphasizing the artificiality of the split between Results and Discussion: The section called "results" consists of a stream of factual information in which it is considered extremely bad form to discuss the significance of the results you are getting. You have to pretend that your mind is, so to speak, a virgin receptacle, an empty vessel, for information which floods into it from the external world for no reason which you yourself have revealed. You reserve all appraisal of the scientific evidence until the "discussion" section, and in the Discussion, you adopt the ludicrous pretense of asking yourself if the information you have collected actually means anything. (4) Medawar attributes this crooked structure to an inductive view of science, especially John Stuart Mill’s. Science would move from unbiased observations to knowledge. This perspective is philosophically dated; among many shortcomings, experimenting means bringing forth a specific situation in the world, motivated by a scientific stake and, therefore, endowed with interpretation and theoretical meaning. We add that, in theoretical thinking, a central question is the scientific interpretations of what it is that we can and should observe. For example, Einstein famously stated that: This épistémè builds on induction and is a kind of empiricism. At the same time, it typically uses a computational Popperian scheme to decide whether the results are genuine or the outcome of chance alone. The contradiction between the two philosophical stances is strong. Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed (Einstein, cited in ( 5 ) ) From this perspective, with IMRaD, the meaning of, say, an observed quantity is scattered between the Methods section that describes the procedure generating this quantity, the Results section that describes the outcome of this procedure, and the Discussion that interprets the results, notably in causal terms. Even though Medawar does not discuss the Methods section much, we think its transformations in the last decades are worth discussing critically. The Methods section is often called Materials and Methods. Materials are the description of the concrete objects that scientists worked with, including the instruments of observation. Methods include sampling and transforming concrete objects, getting data from them, and analyzing these data. Let us consider the statistical component of the Methods. For example, when observing different samples in an experiment, an argument is required to assess whether a result stems from chance or is evidence of causation. To this end, the primary method is the statistical test. Statistical tests are a kind of computational version of Popper’s falsification (6) . First, tests require a null hypothesis; for example, treatment has no effects. Second, they require an alternative hypothesis, such as a decreased hospitalization rate in COVID-19 vaccines. Then, under the null hypothesis, the test estimates the probability of observing the experimental outcomes. If this probability is too low, the observations falsify the null hypothesis. Then, the latter is rejected in favor of the alternative. There are many flaws with this method. For example, the typical threshold in biology is p=0.05, that is, one chance over twenty. However, this also means that it is sufficient to redo twenty times the same experiment or variations of it to have a good chance of a positive result — this is an explanation of why it is somewhat easy to provide empirical "evidence" of ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception) (7) . Significant. Image credit: xkcd In this context, statistical tests appear as a general, almost automated way to assess whether an experiment yields “real” results or not. This automation, of course, is furthered by the use of user-friendly statistical software. The latter entails the usual dynamic of proletarianization, that is, the loss of knowledge following its transfer into the technological apparatus described by Marx and reworked by Bernard Stiegler (8) . In many cases, none of the authors of an article understand the concepts underlying these tests. As a result, tests have become rules of the experimentation and publication game and not an object of healthy controversy. Statisticians protested collectively against this situation in an unusual statement by the American Statistical Society (9, 10) ; however, this stance has no systemic consequences for now. Since statistics require a population and are about collective properties, in this mainstream methodology of experimental science, case studies do not play any role and sometimes seem inconceivable to the practitioners. Nevertheless, among many other examples, it is still crucial in biology to define new species, in medicine to show that procedures like organ transplants are possible, or in astronomy to argue that an exoplanet exists in a specific system. This point brings another aspect of the dominant épistémè into light, namely the positivist influence. Indeed, the predominant aim is finding causal patterns such as "mechanisms" or mathematical relationships. By contrast, case studies provide a very different epistemological contribution; they show that something exists and a fortiori that something is possible — which may have profound practical and theoretical ramifications. Overall, the disconnection between the Methods section and the critical examination in the Discussion is conducive to scientific writing and thinking protocolization. Experimental and analytic methods, including statistical ones, are described to be reproduced by other practitioners. In the context of the crisis in the reproducibility of experimental results (11) , this trend has gained momentum, emphasizing the transparency in the publication of the methods employed (12) . We have no qualms with an increase in transparency and in emphasizing reproducibility —especially if the same norm is applied to the scientific output of industry, for example, in the case of chemical toxicity investigations. However, we insist that protocolization can also be counterproductive since it downplays the work of objectivation, that is to say, the articulation between procedures and theoretical thinking. The choice of the quantities to observe, their robustness concerning details of the protocols are all questions that the IMRaD structure tends to marginalize. Neither the Methods nor the Results section accommodates naturally empirical or mathematical works aiming to justify the methods. Moreover, an underlying problem is widespread confusion between objectivity — an admittedly problematic notion — and automation. For example, the automatic analysis of biological images may depend on their orientation that stems from the arbitrary choice of the microscope user — it is then automatized but yields arbitrary results. Separating the methods from the Discussion contributes structurally to this confusion between objectivation and automation. Incidentally, the IMRaD structure is highly prevalent in biology and medicine; however, it is not as strong in physics, where mathematical modeling plays a central role. A brief investigation shows that in multidisciplinary journals following IMRad or some variant, physicists tend to escape this structure, mainly by merging Results and Discussion or by transgressing the rationale of IMRaD sections shamelessly, often with the welcome complicity of editors and reviewers ... or by twisting their arms. We come back to the case of modeling below. Computational empiricism is an industrialization of research activity, a paradoxical notion considering that research is about bringing new, singular insights. To accommodate this tension, the original works it acknowledges are local; by contrast with the theoretical works that have precisely a synthetic function. A key reason why this article structure dominates biomedicine is the massification and acceleration of scientific production. With a standard structure, hurried readers can find the same kind of information in the same place in all articles. In this sense, all articles have to follow the same overall rationale because scientists do not have the time to engage with specific ways to organize scientific rationality. The information paradigm is relevant to understand this situation. In information theory, the sender sends a message to the receiver; however, neither of them changes in this process. Articles following a standard structure — such as IMRaD — assume that the architecture of thinking can and should remain unchanged, and in this sense, these articles provide information about phenomena. Again, there is a gap with theoretical thinking since the latter aims precisely to change how we think about phenomena and address them scientifically. Let us now put these elements together to develop a first description of the épistémè we are discussing. This épistémè builds on induction and is a kind of empiricism. At the same time, it typically uses a computational Popperian scheme to decide whether the results are genuine or the outcome of chance alone. The contradiction between the two philosophical stances is strong. However, it may escape many practitioners due to the protocolization or even the mechanization of scientific practices as typically described in the Methods sections. Moreover, once implemented in a computer, a statistical test is no longer primarily a scientific hypothesis to refute; instead, it becomes a concrete mechanical process to trigger. In a sense, in everyday biomedical practice, computers transformed statistical tests into an empirical practice, where the device (the computer) produces a result that can be faithfully published. The IMRaD structure and the common use of statistics are not relevant to the complete scientific literature. Let us now discuss two other kinds of contributions: first, evidence-based medicine and its use of review articles, and then, mathematical modeling. Evidence-based medicine and review articles Evidence-based medicine is somewhat unique because it is genuinely a doctrine organizing medical knowledge — this statement does not imply that we concur with this doctrine. Prescriptions for original experimental research follow the IMRaD structure, and our Discussion above applies. Double-blind, randomized trials are the gold standard of the experiment, and statistical tests discriminate whether they provide conclusive evidence for or against the putative treatment. There are precise reasons for this method: in several cases, reasonable hypotheses on the benefit of drugs or procedures used to be broadly followed by medical care practitioners and were proven false by randomized trials. However, this standard also means that the organization of medical knowledge does not accommodate theoretical considerations, and therefore, the latter provides a limited contribution to medical knowledge. Evidence-based medicine distrusts of theory may come from a confusion between theory and hypothesis. A theory provides a framework to understand phenomena; notably, it specifies what causality means in a field. For example, in classical mechanics, causes are forces, i.e., what pushes an object out of the state of inertia. In molecular biology, DNA plays the role of a prime mover, and effects trickle down from it. By contrast, hypotheses discussed in medicine posit that a specific process takes place and yields a given outcome. The theoretical issue with the latter is that, even though the putative process may indeed occur and the local hypothesis may be correct, other processes can be triggered by the treatment, some of which may be detrimental, leading to more risks than benefits. Incidentally, these other processes can also be therapeutically interesting; for example, Viagra resulted from investigating a drug against heart diseases. Moreover, for methodological reasons, this doctrine implies that evidence only pertains to the effects on a given population (meaning here a collection of individuals on which the clinical trial was performed). A political shortcoming in these cases is that the population used is often rather specific; it typically corresponds to the North American or West European populations. Other populations may have frequent, relevant biological differences — not only for genetic reasons but also due to differences in their milieu and culture. Last, patient individuality and individuation are not entirely ignored by evidence-based medicine, but they are rather left entirely to practitioners’ experience: again, they cannot be the object of evidence for methodological reasons (13) . Needless to say, this perspective is also a regression with respect to Canghuilhem’s critic of health as the statistical norm and his alternative concept of health as normativity (14) . A noteworthy aspect of evidence-based medicine is that it provides a global perspective on the organization of medical knowledge targeting the practical work of healthcare practitioners. Its founders considered the massification of publications mentioned above and the need for practitioners to acquire the most recent evidence relevant for the cases encountered. To this end, evidence-based medicine institutionalized review articles. These articles synthesize the results of primary research articles to conclude on the efficacy of one protocol or another so that practitioners, who have limited time to make decisions, do not have to read numerous articles. A recent, notable trend is to perform meta-analyses, that is to say, to put the results of different trials together in order to provide a statistical conclusion — again, statistical computations are the gold standard of evidence. Review articles also raise other considerations, sometimes even conceptual or epistemological. Nevertheless, they are no genuine substitute for dedicated theoretical research. The latter also synthesize a diversity of empirical work, but under the umbrella of a new way to consider the phenomena of interest in relation to other phenomena and theoretical perspectives. The needs of medical practitioners also exist in fundamental research due to the massification and acceleration of scientific publications. Therefore, review articles are central in current sciences, and in a sense, are the locus of most synthetic works taking place in research. However, they are also in a very ambivalent position. First, journal editors typically commission reviews —and editors are not academics in many "top journals." Thus, the initiative to write and publish review articles does not come from authors and sometimes does not even come from research scientists. However, in situations where no theoretical framework pre-exists, the principles used to model a phenomenon are themselves local and typically ad hoc. In the absence of theoretical discussions, the meaning of models’ features remains shallow, and the modeling literature is rich in contradictions that are not elaborated upon and that accumulate, even in relatively narrow topics. Second, writing, publishing, and reading review articles carry a fundamental ambiguity that can be made explicit by distinguishing between analytic and synthetic judgments (or other concepts that may justify that a contribution is scientifically original). This question is raised provided that reviews do not contribute new empirical data and are not supposed to develop an entirely new perspective. Our aim, here, is not primarily to examine the nature of the reasoning taking place in these articles, like in the fundamental question of mathematics’ analytic or synthetic nature in Kant critic or the analytic stance of the Hilbert program. Instead, we aim to examine the current épistémè, and accordingly, we are interested in how the scientific community acknowledges review articles. For example, do scientists consider that review articles are primarily analytic recombinations of previously published results, or on the opposite, do they provide new insights? Institutions and singularly scientific journals provide a very clear answer to this question. Review articles are typically published in contrast to original research and explicitly exclude them. This situation does not imply that original contributions do not take place in standard review articles, such as the critical discussion of empirical results or hypotheses — editors typically require the review work to be critical. Now, a notable exception to the judgment on reviews is when statistical meta-analyses are performed. In the latter case, they may be considered original research. In other words, it seems that the computational nature of meta-analyses provides them with higher originality recognition than the critical arguments of other reviews. We consider that theoretical works have a synthetic function. Review articles have largely taken over this function. They sometimes bring up theoretical considerations; nevertheless, they are not considered original research. The main exception is when original computations are performed in meta-analyses. The case of mathematical modeling Let us now discuss mathematical modeling in mainstream scientific practice. Mathematical modeling is often considered theoretical, and this is correct, of course, when theory is understood by contrast with empirical investigations. However, here, we sharply distinguish modeling from what we call theoretical work. Theory and models are distinct in fields such as physics or evolutionary biology. Moreover, they correspond to different research activities, playing different roles. Let us now discuss these points. The notion of mathematical model carried significant epistemological weight in the 50s. For example, Hodgkin and Huxley described their mathematical work on neuron action potentials as a description and not a model (15) — the vocabulary shifted, and it is now known as the Hodgkin Huxley model. Similarly, Turing contrasted his model of morphogenesis with the imitation of intelligence by computers (16, 17) . In current practice, the notion of a model is laxer than in the previous period. It encompasses computational models, that is to say, models whose only interpretable outcomes come from computer simulations. Statistics aside, modeling is currently the most popular use of mathematics to understand natural phenomena. A central difference between models and theoretical thinking is that mathematical models are primarily local. They are concerned with a narrow, specific phenomenon, for example, the trajectories of the Earth and the Moon or the formation of action potentials by the combined action of several ionic channels in neurons. Nevertheless, models can have a variety of epistemological roles concerning theories. For example, Turing’s model of morphogenesis can be interpreted as a falsification of the notion that biological development requires something like a computer program (18) . Another example is Max Planck’s discretization of energy — the idea that energy should not be seen as continuous but as small packets. This discretization was initially a modeling effort, aiming to understand the observations of light ray emission. Max Planck later stated: ( It was) a purely formal assumption, and I really did not give it much thought except that no matter what the cost, I must bring about a positive result (19) . This daring modeling move was not theoretical by itself precisely because Max Planck did not, in his own terms, give it much thought. Nevertheless, this assumption was in profound contradiction with classical physics (classical mechanics and thermodynamics) because discreteness is not compatible with continuous deterministic change. It became the starting point of quantum mechanics, a revolutionary theoretical framework in physics that required to rethink observations, the nature of objects, determinism, and even logic. Let us also mention that mathematical contributions to theoretical thinking do not always go through models. A prominent example of this is the relationship between invariance and symmetry that Emmy Noether brought to light with her famous theorem. Beyond solving a pressing concern about energy conservation in general relativity, Noether’s theorem reinterpreted critical aspects of the structure of physics’ theories and became one of the most fundamental mathematical tools in contemporary theoretical physics (20) . Emmy Noether. Image credit: Wikimedia Now, the case of Max Planck’s discretization of energy shows that mathematical modeling requires a specific theoretical work about the integration in a broader framework to provide a genuine theoretical contribution and not just the opportunity for one. Most works on mathematical models do not contribute general theoretical considerations. Instead, they are more or less ad hoc accounts of a specific phenomenon, aiming to imitate several of its properties with precision. The contribution of the model is then narrow because it pertains only to a specific phenomenon. Thus, the contribution of these mathematical models and their publication structure follows the hourglass’s logic, as IMRaD articles, where texts go from broader considerations to a narrow contribution and finally back to a broader discussion. In this conception, like for empirical works, controversies are primarily local; they pertain to the elements and the specific formalism needed to account for the intended phenomenon. In this sense, mathematical models are primarily local. Nevertheless, they may build on established theories, such as in many physics models. For example, models of the trajectories of the Earth and the Moon build on Galilean relativity, Newton’s universal gravitation, and Newtonian mechanics. The backbone of these principles is made explicit by numerous earlier theoretical discussions and results, such as Noether theorem. Thus, these models build on earlier work theorizing numerous empirical observations and mathematical and epistemological considerations. This situation explains why an elementary change in the mathematical structure of a model, such as Max Planck’s discretization, can be the starting point of a revolution once considered a theoretical move. Thus, theoretical work confers profound scientific meaning to the properties of models. However, in situations where no theoretical framework pre-exists, the principles used to model a phenomenon are themselves local and typically ad hoc . In the absence of theoretical discussions, the meaning of models’ features remains shallow, and the modeling literature is rich in contradictions that are not elaborated upon and that accumulate, even in relatively narrow topics (21) . At the same time, the lack of interest in enriching models with theoretical meaning leads to conceiving mathematics as a tool, and the same tools tend to be used in all disciplines, a situation that the mathematician and epistemologist Nicolas Bouleau calls ℝn-isme in reference to the modelization of a system as determined by a set of observed quantities and their relations (22) . To conclude, mathematical modeling is sometimes described as theoretical work; however, its local nature differs from working on theories. Current works emphasize the computational aspect of models, their ability to fit empirical data concerning the intended phenomenon and possibly make predictions. For these local developments, practitioners tend to think that the coherence and integration with other models and theoretical frameworks are not needed; however, this belief also implies that models’ features remain superficial, and, therefore, arbitrary. Discussion Let us conclude on the way we can characterize the épistémè that predominates in current sciences. Original scientific works are primarily empirical, generating data, and computational to analyze these data and reproduce them with models In empirical works, the overarching rationale is inductive, but they also require statistical computations that use Popper-inspired tests to discriminate whether results are significant. In computational models, the ability to fit empirical data is the central criterion by contrast with theoretical consistency or significance. Computations are ambivalent, especially since the invention of computers. Computers implement mathematical models, and at the same time, computations are processes that users can trigger without mathematical knowledge. We distinguish calculus from computations. The first corresponds to mathematical transformations that are theorized with mathematical structures and from which theoretically meaningful results may be pulled out, while the second corresponds to the mechanizable execution of digital operations. This épistémè requires the input of concrete objects, empirical or computational. By contrast, it does not value theoretical interpretation and reinterpretation. Critical synthetic works are performed primarily in review articles. They are not considered original research except when new computations are performed in meta-analyses. This épistémè primarily investigates specific phenomena and its contributions are supposed to be bricks contributing to the edifice of knowledge. In other words, it shares the cumulative view of positivism. By contrast, it marginalizes theoretical works that rethink how we understand phenomena by integrating a diversity of considerations. Therefore, review articles are central in current sciences, and in a sense, are the locus of most synthetic works taking place in research. However, they are also in a very ambivalent position. On this basis, it seems reasonable to name this épistémè computational empiricism. Computational empiricism has a strong empiricist stance like logical empiricism; however, its stakes are different. Logical empiricism posits that science is about analytical (logical) or empirically verified truth. By contrast, computational empiricism focuses on empirical data and mechanized computations. It cares for numerical questions (like statistics); however, it does not attend its logoi significantly, by analytical means or otherwise. Computational empiricism is an industrialization of research activity, a paradoxical notion considering that research is about bringing new, singular insights. To accommodate this tension, the original works it acknowledges are local; by contrast with the theoretical works that have precisely a synthetic function. Accordingly, it leads to the fragmentation of research work and scientific knowledge, and it goes with an institutional fragmentation, where different laboratories address similar questions with similar means on slightly different objects. The underlying government of science expects that interesting results will emerge by probing the world in many different places without attending to scientific reflexivity. In some cases, like molecular biology or the human brain project, the underlying idea is to decompose complex objects (living beings or the brain respectively), so that each laboratory studies a few aspects of it (a molecule, a pathway or a neuronal circuit) under the assumption that the result of these studies could somehow be combined. This organization goes with a cumulative view of science, where productivism is a natural aim. In this sense, computational empiricism aims primarily to extract patterns from nature, considering that some of them may be usable. Politically, it means that theoretical controversies no longer can set a field ablaze, leading to the bifurcation of its perspective on their phenomena of interest. Thus, partition yields academic peace, even though it might very well be the peace of cemeteries. Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, J. M. W. Turner: Rain, 1844. Image credit: wikimedia. Computational empiricism logically values technological innovations highly, whether experimental or computational — especially when they have transversal applications. Similarly, the deployment of recent innovation on new objects are natural activities in this épistémè. In a somewhat perverse way, it also promotes empirical results that destabilize former theoretical frameworks because they catch attention. However, it does not promote rethinking these frameworks, leading to what may be called a theory disruption that is more or less advanced depending on the fields and is a component of the disruption diagnosed by Bernard Stiegler (23) . Computational empiricism has substantial inconsistencies in its current form. In empirical articles, one of them is the need to formalize statistical hypotheses for statistical tests. Indeed, a Popper-inspired scheme does not integrate well with an entirely inductive rationale. Opportunely, deep learning provides methods to find patterns in big data. It is then not surprising that a strong current pushes forward the idea to generate hypotheses by artificial intelligence methods (24, 25) . Kitano notably puts forward the aim for artificial intelligence to provide Nobel prize level contributions (26) . More concretely, Peterson et al. (25) use deep learning to generate "theories" of human decision making; however, we can also note that this method requires theoretical constraints to produce interpretable "theories". Computational empiricism is not a consistent doctrine, and the repressed need for theoretical insights always makes a return. Peterson et al. make very explicit their use of prior theoretical considerations; however, others argue differently on far more informal grounds (1) . Computers do not only provide automation of computations and derived tasks such as classification or optimization. They are also an efficient artificial metis as proposed and made explicit by Turing in the imitation game (16) . As such, they can be used to generate epistemological illusions, notably the illusion of scientific research without theorization. However, such an illusion would not have taken hold without an épistémè preparing the minds for it. This decline requires a transformation in what is considered scientifically acceptable and what is acknowledged as scientific research. As such, we should ponder the nature of the dominant perspective of current sciences and the possibility that a new épistémè emerged. Of course, counter forces are calling for theoretical work in various fields and with diverse epistemological and theoretical stances (27, 28, 29) . At the institutional level, the call for interdisciplinarity may be a clumsy method to promote synthetic theoretical works, even though interdisciplinarity can also regress to the division of labor that finds its home in computational empiricism. An opposite perspective would be to distinguish, for example, the principles of construction from the principles of proof in scientific knowledge (20) . Computational empiricism only values the principles of proof (empirical and computational). 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In: Nature Human Behaviour 3.3 (Mar. 2019), pp. 221–229. issn: 2397-3374. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1 . 29. M. I. O’Connor, M. W. Pennell, F. Altermatt, B. Matthews, C. J. Melián, and A. Gonzalez. “Principles of Ecology Revisited: Integrating Information and Ecological Theories for a More Unified Science”. In: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7 (2019), p. 219. issn: 2296-701X. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2019.00219 . Related Articles Du bon gouvernement de la recherche ALAIN SUPIOT Read Article Vaccines, Germs, and Knowledge MAËL MONTÉVIL Read Article

The ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people and the bombing of Lebanon should not be blamed on Israel alone. It is America that has been waging wars across the world since they dropped the atomic bombs in Japan, and the present crimes against humanity and genocide are American crimes through the instrumentalization of Israel. Palestine Lebanon Extermination Camps: Call to Arms SHAJ MOHAN 14 October 2024 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Article PDF Equality or Nothing ; Image credit: Philosophy World Democracy . The ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people and the bombing of Lebanon should not be blamed on Israel alone. It is America that has been waging wars across the world since they dropped the atomic bombs in Japan, and the present crimes against humanity and genocide are American crimes through the instrumentalization of Israel. Appealing to international law alone is not helpful as its foundational acts were meant to prevent American officials from being punished for the great crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The relation between America and Israel remains essentially that of antisemitism and it is grounded in the “Aryan doctrine”. From the outline of this extermination campaign taking place in West Asia, its expansion into all its neighbourhoods to create lands without people can be seen. This calls for a collective preparation for their own survival by the third world countries, who should move beyond Intifada (resistance) to Inquilab (revolution). They have been offered only death — Gilles Deleuze The autumn of the people of the third worlds. And yet, this is spring, the spring of blood and burnt flesh. Gun shot, Hibiscus . Shrapnel, Dahlia . Bunker buster, Orchis italica . The little heads of children roll easy along the earth scorched by phosphorous bombs, like fruits in the orchards. Flames bloom in olive trees. A dismayed child carrying a severed arm as if it were a bouquet. A boy speaking in tongues in a trance carrying the corpse of his little sister in a sack, like dead leaves. A mother curses poetry, whimpering and pointing to the little arm sticking out from the rubble of a bombed apartment; a lone Lilly held out in a pond of concrete for those in ‘the west’. Ancient pavements—older than Europe or America—now spit stones. The revenants are all awake—those who wrote and fought before letters were read in Europe, which is not Greece; Greeks were of the ancient world of Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan. The dead garrisoned in the Beqaa Valley now rise above their tombs scattered by thunderous bombs, to console and join the revenants of all the hills and the valleys—Hind Rajab (1) , Abdi Riša, Nasrallah, Shaushtatar, Kanafani, Tushratta, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh—to raise an army unlike any other that America has seen. For they know, America kills . The American slave kingdoms of the desert, too, know that their people—always hidden contained behind the veils, in prisons, and smothered by the imposed illiteracy—are aware that they are merely the slaves held by the king slaves. The servant kings in torpor and the intoxicated slave princes perhaps know this, since Netanyahu (2) showed the map made in America, that the arms (and arms) are extending towards them. The only justification to retain a kingdom is the pretence to the so called international law—that they are sovereign countries with their own people. From Palestine onwards—but also the American invasion of Lebanon in 1958, Iraq wars, Afghanistan, Syria—it is clear that America-Israel does not need to follow this norm that is slowing their advance. Brahmin, the “Pariah”, and international law The sanctity and infallibility of the Vedas, Smritis and Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and the senseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritable instruments of torture which Hinduism has forged against the Untouchables.— Dr. B. R. Ambedkar The extermination project that has begun in Palestine and Lebanon is making it clear to everyone in the third worlds that America is creating a new epoch, and the only epoch a country such as it can make. In this epoch, America—which has already killed directly and indirectly more people than any other country on earth—seeks lands without people , the minerals, the oil, the military fortifications which are secure as they gaze ahead into the expanses without man. The phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” means people and countries that had come and are soon going to come under American-Israeli “interest” in Asia and Europe do not have any right other than the right to submit or the right to perish. The dead garrisoned in the Beqaa Valley now rise above their tombs scattered by thunderous bombs, to console and join the revenants of all the hills and the valleys—Hind Rajab, Abdi Riša, Nasrallah, Shaushtatar, Kanafani, Tushratta, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh—to raise an army unlike any other that America has seen. For they know, America kills. The map of America-Israel shows the path to India, after Iran. There is a barely literate government in India—long ago was the India of the cunning of Gandhi, the acuity of the polymath Ambedkar, and the historicised mastery of world politics of Nehru—which is now aiding with trolls and drones their ‘Bibi’. The Gandhian cunningness above all else was what Mossadegh—the democratically elected politician of Iran, who was overthrown in a coup by Britain and America in 1953, for being excessively and inconveniently democratic—lacked while he possessed erudition and passion for politics as the fight for freedom (3) . Israeli bombing on hospital tents for children; image credit: Haaretz. But those who are able to see all this in its aspect, and more acutely, are the Jewish intellectuals and activists of the world— “I speak here as an intellectual, a Socialist, and a Jew (among other things, since I don’t believe in exclusive identities)” (4) . They assert what many ‘western’ countries are afraid to admit—it is America’s extermination feast through the arm of Israel and the vilest instrumentalization of the Jewish people and their historic suffering (5) . They are not confused by the conversations about international law; they know that such things are applied after the deaths and the spoils are found sufficiently filling by the victors. The most brave Francesca Albanese ( as Norman Finkelstein and others have remarked, opposing ‘them’ invites death ), UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, often speaks of international law as though it were a well determined logical fact. However, the language of Albanese conveys the horrific values underlying this ‘international law’—“I think it is unavoidable for Israel to become a pariah in the face of its continuous, relentless, vilifying assault of the United Nations, on top of millions of Palestinians.” (6) In Albanese’s case, this expression—“pariah state”—is innocent as it is the adoption of a common place that was used for many other states in the past. The Tamil language term “Pariah” was adopted by the colonial powers using a racialisation schema created in imitation of the “Aryan doctrine” of the Brahmins of India. This doctrine is the auto-constitution of being a special people, “Arya”, who must raid, pillage, denigrate and dominate all other peoples it encounters in its path of expansion of territories; it is the exercising of a theologically given right, a pact with the gods, who receives sacrifices offered by none other than Brahmins. It quickly moved along a hypophysical—the conception of the nature of a thing as its value itself—axis into Europe along with the “Aryan doctrine” (7) , and thus began the path towards the concentration camps. That is, ‘the west’ is the euphemism for the continuing white imperialism and its military alliance derivative of the “Aryan doctrine”. The other path to auto-constitution of the ‘west’ is the appropriation of the intellectual history of the Greeks, who did not know themselves as Greeks. The Greek schema of relations with other peoples—racist by today’s norms—sought relations only with their south east. In other words, the so called Greeks exchanged philosophies, loves, astronomy, myths and wars only with what was to their east—Lebanon, Egypt, India, Iran, Afghanistan and so on. Now, the “pariah” or “paraiyar” travelled to Europe and found a place in Victor Hugo’s literature. Of its theoretical uses, Weber’s was, perhaps, the most influential followed by Arendt’s well known text “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” (8) . For Arendt, Jewish people were the ones “to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life” and with the “vision” of how “Jewish creative genius could grow and contribute its products to the general spiritual life of the Western world”. Instead, the political and social life of Jewish people came to range between that of the parvenu and “pariah”, without these two ever being offered as a choice, since the Jewish people were never given equality and acceptance among the highest of ‘the west’, which was by then conceived and configured in the analogy of the “Aryan doctrine”. The terms “pariah” and “parvenu” circulated between the two poles of the same desire, being denied by this very image of the “Aryan doctrine”— “The parvenu who fears lest he become a pariah, and the pariah who aspires to become a parvenu, are brothers under the skin and appropriately aware of their kinship”. Arendt’s understanding of the term “pariah” is further revealed when she speaks of “pariahs, calmly enjoying the freedom and untouchability of outcasts”. The first lesson to learn here is that Arendt uses the “Aryan doctrine”, the doctrine made by the ‘highest’ for the ‘highest’ (“Arya”), to conceive the crisis of sense in Jewish political life by adopting the name of the lowest of castes— the political category is today Dalit —the “pariah”, whose very sight is polluting according to this doctrine. That is, the sense of Jewish political being is conceived still in the terms of ‘the west’, and an ambition is set for the “Jewish genius” to reach the height of the “Aryan genius”. The second lesson points towards the very meaning of “pariah state” and also towards the discourse of international law as still entwined in the “Aryan doctrine”. For Arendt, “the despised pariah Jew, dismissed by contemporary society as a nobody, could at least share in the glories of the past”. The “pariah” or “Paraiyar” of India have no “glories of the past”, wealth, or the possibility of ever being “parvenu”, nor are they given the freedom even today to walk the streets and pursue their studies. They are killed routinely. Instead of relishing in the “Aryan” model of “creative genius” and the Jewish possibility of “enjoying freedom and untouchability”, the Paraiyar of India have always lived through the tremours of the image of imminent death, like the Palestinian people now. That the Americans were not hung in Japan is the real foundation of the sham we call international law. It is impossible that in this deft interpretation of Jewish political being Arendt did not know the meaning of the term she was deploying, for she was a scholar. Or else, she may have adopted it with the same levity with which the ‘west’ appropriated the “pariah”. As Aarushi Punia wrote in Philosophy World Democracy , “Ultimately, the outcaste whose fate Arendt was concerned with was the Jew and not the Pariah or the Indian untouchable” (9) . We must mark here—This use of “pariah” is objectionable . Hassan Nasrallah; Image credit: CNN. The discourse of international law continues to deploy “pariah” without the “Arya” because we know who the “Arya” are; that is, those who have the power to kill anyone today, anywhere, make and unmake laws, kneading mass deaths with bloody hands, and pretend to a certain “nobility”—the quality of knowing or wanting to know—while in reality remaining ἰδιώτης or idiots in all their senses. Instead of determining the meaning of politics and law through the equivalent terms—including (but not exhausted by) “terrorist”, “immigrant”, “extremist”—the future awaits a different discourse of law, and the life of the earth, which can only be realised once America comes to stop exterminating brown and black people and totally withdraw from their lands. Law and force I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima — M. K. Gandhi The actuality of law is the ritual spear in the hands of the one who already has several for war in his chariot. America is the very law of this lawlessness. America and its ‘west’ have been preparing the oppressed people of Palestine, Lebanon, West Asia in general, and Africa for their death. They are told they must not raise armies against their exterminators. They can resist, a little, but ‘non-violently’; that is, they must commit to their own death as a political destiny for the greater good—the good of the ‘west’. We have found previously, in the context of M. K. Gandhi and India, that the concept of violence (and non-violence) is not jurisprudential. Instead, “violence” is derived from the hypophysics of forces—that is, identifying a value with a particular scale of force. A force effects a change in the regularity of something else; or it helps to constitute a new regularity altogether. Force is inseparable from the regularities and irregularities which are themselves components (στοιχεῖον) in a complex of relations. For example, the rockets sent by Hezbollah into the empty fields in Israel and the drones sent by Israel to kill Palestinian children are components in relation with the componential regularities of exchanges and gifts from other countries; the trade in illicit commodities; networks of corruption which is the very foundation of capitalism; and, theological sanctions which are often used to override morality. That is, guns are never given in a mere exchange for the oblations to gods. In hypophysics—which permeates our understanding of force, resistance, and war—certain forces are conceived as good in themselves; for Gandhi, death is the height of good force as it does not effect any changes in something else. Each death is the disappearance of a singular epoch of exchanges of regularities and irregularities. The passivity of the passive resister of Gandhi is this readiness for absolute passivity—the purest non-violence. Unlike the middle class ‘western’ intellectuals and academics who would like the people of Middle East to resist or just die passively adhering to Gandhi, while the ‘west’ retained the force and right to exterminate everyone else, Gandhi himself had other plans. The ‘western’ moral stance is the denial of power to act and to wage war, and this intellectualised and aestheticized slaughter of the will to live is evil. Without this aestheticized moral stance of non-violence and the theatrical appeals “to all parties to stop”, no extermination campaign or its encampments can proceed. Gandhi’s passive resistance was not an instrument in a particular encounter attuned to the ends that were in sight—expelling England from India. Rather, Gandhi was not hypocritical. He wanted the whole of humanity to be passive resisters, in such a way that humanity itself surrenders to death and leaves the earth a field of ruins of man; or, adaptable conditions for animals who may not have the concern for ruins. And in these nights darkened by blood flowing over the eyes and lit like a thousand suns by bombs in many a third world country we should begin another practice. Before we put the children to sleep, we must warn them—America kills. Force must be thought again and again for each occasion without hypophysical seizures of it. Here, in the face of the American-British-Israeli ecstasies at extermination we should recall that we have duty to not be killed—the very first duty towards what is called humanity. When we know that we, the third world, are going to be faced with more and more extermination wars, we should assume that sufficient force is not being cumulated and its distribution and actualisation are not efficient for preventing our own exterminations. We, the third world, alone can prevent, and have any interest in preventing, the exterminations in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Iran, Myanmar, Yemen and so on . And then eventually Saudi Arabia, Egypt , and so on . Amidst the chaos of suffering and desperation one can see several who appeal to the wisdoms and kindness of China and Russia. This is foolish. All powerful nations await these new conditions—the exterminations— to prevail in order to take their own share. It is in their interest to see to it that America spells out the law of lawlessness, and then to partition the lands without people with America. The destruction of Gaza, Palestine; Image credit: CNN. But this is not a recent realisation for the world, that there is no such thing as international law. In the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or the Tokyo trials (1946 - 48), an Indian judge named Radhabinod Pal gave a dissenting judgment where he called the jurisprudential grounds and the death sentences derived from it a “sham”. I f universal legal principles were applied then Americans from Roosevelt and Truman to the generals and the pilots who dropped the bombs should have been hung . Instead, criteria for crimes and their corresponding laws were selected—much like how America selects political leaders in most countries of the world—to avoid being punished for American crimes that were on par with the Nazis (but also of another order), and the crimes they intended to carry out in future. That the Americans were not hung in Japan is the real foundation of the sham we call international law . Justice Pal wrote in his judgment, which should be quoted at length, I might mention here in passing that like the Western people the Japanese also were mostly worshippers of "a god of the chosen people". I am not sure if the fear which the white world was entertaining from this rising racial feeling in the East might not be ascribable to what Professor Toynbee refers to as the third of the elements in "the situation which go far towards accounting for the strength and virulence of Western race-feeling in our time”. The atom bomb, we are told, has destroyed all selfish racial feelings and has awakened within us the sense of unity of mankind. It may, indeed, be that the atom blasts at the close of the Second World War really succeeded in blowing away all the pre-war humbugs; or it may be that we are only dreaming (10) . We were never “only dreaming” but we refused to act against America the same way we let Nazi Germany flourish to the point of extermination camps. Hiroshima is in Gaza, “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held [by their parents]. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago” (11) . We always knew this in the third worlds. And in these nights darkened by blood flowing over the eyes and lit like a thousand suns by bombs in many a third world country we should begin another practice. Before we put the children to sleep, we must warn them— America kills . The Anglo-Saxon “Aryan Doctrine” and the Place of Jewish People in It The grandson of a victim of the gas chambers myself, I find it unbearable that the memory of the Holocaust is instrumentalized to justify colonization, apartheid, oppression, extermination, in the name of the defense of the ”Jewish People”. — Étienne Balibar What ties Hiroshima to Gaza is not Israel, it is America. However, it is also the desire—in the sense of that image which draws the faculty of will—which seeks to be identified with, or to seek recognition within the “Aryan doctrine” that continues to offer Israel up to America. The tragedy of Jewish people—identified by Arendt without her being able to think beyond it, as a non-choice between either the “pariah” or the parvenu to the “Aryan doctrine”—is evident in the statements made by Netanyahu, his cabinet of ministers, and other politicians in Israel. They have been appealing woefully to the image of ‘the west’ equating it with “civilisation” (there has never been an American civilisation in any sense of this term), and all this series remains determined by the “Aryan doctrine”. How else do we explain these statements of Israeli politicians? A) "The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and levelled flat, just like in Auschwitz." — David Azoulay, the head of the local council of the town of Metula (12) B) 'As Hitler said,' Moshe Feiglin said to Channel 12 news, 'I can't live if one Jew is left,' we can't live here if one 'Islamo-Nazi' remains in Gaza' — Moshe Feiglin, Former Israeli MK (13) C) “Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here.' 'So what should I do with them?' he asked. He said, 'Burn them.'” — Benjamin Netanyahu (14) A British soldier patrols the Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq, 1 February 2005. BP was awarded the contract to be lead operator of the field four years later; Image credit: BBC. While today many scorn at the statements of the politicians of Israel as being “lumpen”, they remain continuous with the desire for recognition in the “Arya doctrine” expressed by “bourgeois” intellectuals and politicians in the past in terms of JewGreek, GreekJew, Judaeo-Christian . It is too late now to think in particular about Israel, as it will forever be the apartheid state that conducted the heinous crimes against humanity, raped its prisoners, assassinated children with headshots, for the genocide, and for the extermination campaigns. But the danger created and managed by America and Britain (one only has to locate in which countries British Petroleum operates to its role in the miseries of the people) to the Jewish people is rising. Oppressed people of the world unite! We have nothing but our lives to lose. We have a world to make. As Tanya Reinhart wrote, “Israel’s birth was in sin […] during the war of 1948, 730,000, more than half of the Palestinian population […] were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army”. (15) But attributing this constitutive sin to the Zionists alone is to foreclose the possibility of any peace. The first sin was British, and through the malice of division Britain created sectarianisms and conflicts in its former colonies for future exploitations. In West Asia including Iran, British greed for oil remains one of the primary causes of all miseries. Even before the Second World War Britain, and for a while France, had instrumentalised the suffering of Jewish people in order to create a base and a right—the right to prevent antisemitism—in West Asia, and to prevent any political unions of consequences appearing in the former Ottoman states. America took over the instrumentalization of antisemitism and the right to administer the fear among Jewish people of another Shoah in the future through its aiding and controlling of the Zionist state. Even today Netanyahu must appeal to and affirm the American patriarchs— “With American support and leadership, I believe this vision can materialize much sooner than people think“—in contrast to the image of his defiance of Biden in the American propaganda to protect American image, in case the war games go out of control. Of course, Netanyahu cannot be exonerated in any court that recognises that justice contradicts “ American interest ” in genocide and war crimes. But such a court must try the present American British administrations as well. It is not impossible. It is this situation that gives the Jewish people a choice only within the “Aryan doctrine” or the image of ‘the west’ that is anti-Semitic. It is the very instrumentalisation of the Shoah, which was preceded by centuries of pogroms, and of Zionism for Anglo-Saxon oil profits that is today the worst of anti-Semitisms. It is in this sense that we have to understand Jake Romm’s statement that, “Zionism is an antisemitism, first and foremost, because it internalizes and recapitulates the very same European antisemitism that sought the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah”. (16) The future of Israel is invisible to it; it is the same affliction given to all those who cross the limits of Primo Levi’s argument if this is man . Those who witness the impossible— impossible, if this is man —committed by their own hands receive the cataract in their eyes, and from thereon they live beneath (κατάθεμα) and under its weight. All American soldiers carried the cataract from the Asian deserts and mountains to their homes: America is already a country living beneath (κατάθεμα) this cataract. If the Jewish people and the Palestinians seek to form a new country today, under a new model, it will threaten the oil super wealth of America and Britain. For that reason, America will continue to prohibit the appearance of the political conditions in Israel through which a democracy—where Arabs, Jews, Palestinians and Christians will be able to live in their own shared indestinacy—can be realised. Such a project will be opposed in the same way that America successfully opposed Socialist parties in Europe, India, and Iran since the 1950s; and, in recent years the destruction of politics itself in Britain. The American taboo in politics—no real democracy anywhere—is as distinct an experience as any other taboo. Today, America determines the political course of nearly all the countries of Europe, with the European Union becoming indistinguishable from the bureaucracy of NATO. Can you imagine Corbyn a British prime minister, or Melenchon a French president? Resistance Intifada , Revolution Inquilab We hear incessant roar of heavy gunfire. We see grenades exploding. I am in a very good mood. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, 9 October 1914 Netanyahu keeps selling the people of the region—Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and all the others implied—the Zionist deal, either be killed or just kill yourselves. As if to punctuate the point with deaths—the only tongue now spoken by Israel-America is death—a 12-year-old Palestinian child is shot dead in the West Bank. (17) Israeli hospice dropped firebombs on the tents where the injured and the dying were sheltered. The lit children are still moving; wicks on flesh. (18) We can smell the human incense wherever we are; we can hear the bones of children cackling in that furnace wherever we are. Revolution begins; Image credit: Revolution Festival. We know this fire will be gathered into a storm by Israel-America and their ‘western’ slaves towards tents in the deserts, huts in the hills, villages of the valleys from Asia to Africa. In this furnace of human flesh, they will cook their godly meals. In the air filled with the incense of flesh, when the feast opens, they will have put all the gods ever imagined to shame. This is a call to arms to all those who think. This cannot be a philosophical reflection, not anymore; for if it were, it will then be a call to arms . If not a call to arms , then it will be akin to letting these mass deaths fester the earth itself the way it did in Nazi Germany. This world now whimpers before the possibility—the American deal—of the earth being left behind as the stigma of the human animal, without the human animal. This is a call to arms to all those who think. Then, we have to think a little about that to which we may contribute, with whatever we may have—stones, paper, words, food, guns, reason, money, metal. Is it Intifada (an inflection within resistance) or Inquilab (the surge of a revolution)? The intifada or the unrest created a system of resistance, and from the peripheries of these many systems of resistance other intifadas arose. But there is a distinction between resistance and revolution. Any resistant system—Hamas for example—remains in a componential relation with the system of oppression. The older example of the factory workers, the union, and the capitalist shows that the resister is never more than a component of the capitalist system. When the workers strike to raise their wages the union leader takes the middle position and negotiates with the management. Taking a cut from both parties the union leader gives the workers a marginal increase in their wages and for the management longer working hours. The resistance has now lost more than they realise. The role of resistance in any political system is to perform the function of regulation—not too fast, not too slow—while the creation of new regularities are always the right of the oppressor. Towards the expenditure to exist, resistance must constitute componential relations which would eventually compromise it. These compromises can include corruption as the real power of capitalism; weapons trade; becoming a militia to acquire working knowledge of ‘the field’; and, even deals with the oppressor. Sojourning this path one necessarily comes to be the Palestinian Authority, which is now an arm of the Israeli apartheid state, which points out which young men and women are trouble to their torturers. From Intifada we should begin to think and practice the opening acts of Inquilab or revolution. Revolution is first of all the recognition that a majority is oppressed by a minority, who have divided the oppressed according to ranks, sects, and religions. Secondly, it is to will that the present situation, the status quo, in any of its forms or variations offered up in the future is unacceptable. Thirdly, the revolutionary will must be created, which requires the image of the world without the oppressor, and an image that demands and secures for all the promise that there shall be a people of Inquilab who will no longer let any oppression commence amongst them. That is, resistance is possible without women leaders, which will eventually be realised as the Palestinian authority. But Inquilab cannot be lit without the torches of women revolutionaries. Everyone else in the third worlds (and second worlds including the precarious Eastern European countries) can see now that the Palestinians and the Lebanese freedom fighters are dying for the liberation of all of us, for the very survival of humanity—that is, opposing the American schema of politics which is a nihilism that identified itself as the value—American nothing—to be produced everywhere, while destroying all that is opposed to this lumpen nihilism, including philosophy. Oppressed people of the world unite! We have nothing but our lives to lose. We have a world to make. Notes 1. Hind Rajab was 5 years old and trapped in a car when she was killed by Israeli soldiers who fired fired 335 rounds from their tanks. American and British media referred to her as a “woman”. See Arwa Mahdawi, “The adultification of children has consequences from Palestine to the US”, The Guardian, 04 May 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/04/adultification-children-palestine-us 2. “In UN speech, Netanyahu holds map showing West Bank, Gaza as part of Israel”, Middle East Monitor, 27 September 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240927-in-un-speech-netanyahu-holds-map-showing-west-bank-gaza-as-part-of-israel/ 3. There are many in the ‘west’, and also the Iranians living in the ‘west’, who dream of bikini beaches in Tehran in the monarchical puppetry run by Britain and America through the Shah. But the destruction of democratic possibility through the coup that brought down Mossadegh is hardly understood. The tragedy of Mossadegh and Iran is one of democracy itself, and it shows that it is fragile. It is also the reason many countries in the world refrain from democratic expansions and experiments, fearing the destruction of their people by America through coups. Iran remains threatened with British revenge and American will to extermination, as shown by the statements of Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris in recent times. See Mark Curtis, “Iran 1953: MI6 Plots with Islamists to Overthrow Democracy”, Declassified UK, 1 August 2023, https://www.declassifieduk.org/iran-1953-mi6-plots-with-islamists-to-overthrow-democracy/ 4. Étienne Balibar, “The Genocide in Gaza and its Consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, Philosophy World Democracy, 19 September 2024, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/the-genocide-in-gaza-and-its-consequences-for-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict 5. Twitter feed of Medea Benjamin, https://x.com/medeabenjamin/status/1844863934391628071?s=61&t=JA0tABAj0IbdTsr5RcCSkg 6. Emphasis added. “Israel will become a ‘pariah’ over Gaza ‘genocide’, UN rights experts say“, Al Jazeera, September 17, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240917-the-uns-protection-of-pariahs/ 7. See Divya Dwivedi, “The Evasive Racism of Caste—and the Homological Power of the "Aryan" Doctrine”, Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 11 no. 1, 2023, p. 209-245. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/887363 . For the birth of a European self identity and the fabrication of a vague historical depth through the “Aryan doctrine”. 8. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”, Jewish Social Studies , Apr., 1944, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr., 1944), pp. 99-122. 9. Aarushi Punia, “Calypsology of Caste through Metaphorization“, 22 November 2020, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/book-reviews/calypsology-of-caste 10. Radhabinod Pal, International Military Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient Judgment of Justice Pal , Kokusho-Kankokai Inc, Tokyo, 1999. 11. “Atomic Bomb Survivors Win Nobel Peace Prize, Say Gaza Today Is Like Japan 80 Years Ago”, 11 October 2024, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/11/nobel_peace_prize_nihon_hidankyo 12. “Israel-Palestine war: Israel should 'level Gaza and make it look like Auschwitz', says official”, Middle East Eye, 18 December 2023, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-level-gaza-make-like-auschwitz-says-official 13. “Former Israeli MK Quotes Hitler While Discussing Gaza War“, Haaretz, 16 June 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-16/ty-article/former-israeli-mk-quotes-hitler-while-discussing-gaza-war/00000190-224f-d231-a1b2-e65f76fe0000 14. “After Netanyahu's Holocaust Remark, Germany Cites Its Own 'Break With Civilization'”, The Two Way, 21 October 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/21/450553110/after-netanyahu-s-holocaust-remark-germany-cites-its-own-break-with-civilization 15. P 52, Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 , Letword Publishing, New Delhi, 2003. 16. Jake Romm, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: The limits of Zionism”, From The River to the Sea, Palestine Issue, Parapraxis, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/elements-of-anti-semitism 17. “Israeli Forces Kill 12-Year-Old Child and 66-Year-Old Man in Raids on Occupied West Bank”, 8 October 2024, Democracy Now!, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/8/headlines/israeli_forces_kill_12_year_old_child_and_66_year_old_man_in_raids_on_occupied_west_bank 18. “Deadly fire rips through tents after Israeli attack on Gaza hospital”, Al Jazeera, 14 October 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/10/14/live-22-dead-80-wounded-as-israeli-army-shells-gaza-school-shelter Related Articles The Genocide in Gaza and its Consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ETIENNE BALIBAR Read Article « La solution finale » au problème Gaza-Hamas de l’Israël OSAMU NISHITANI Read Article

Translating Kurdish Feminism: Urgent Lessons on Radical Democracy Button 30 March 2024 Button Atlanta Beltline - Krog Street Tunnel 2024; Image credit: Dilek Huseyinzadegan Review of Gültan Kışanak, ed. The purple Color of Kurdish politics: Women politicians write from prison . London: Pluto Press, 2022. “Woman, Life, Freedom” or “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” is not (only) a political slogan or a battle cry; it is also a political program that Altun and others have put to practice in Turkey. Anyone interested in radical democracy in a feminist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist key would do well to study the Kurdish feminist movement, and this book is an exceptional start. On March 31st of this year, Turkey will hold its local elections (1) . Exactly ten years ago, following another local election cycle, many Kurdish feminists dared to prioritize Women, Life, Freedom ( Jin, Jiyan, Azadî ; ژن، ژیان، ئازادی) in their policies. In about eighteen months, these women would be arrested with bogus charges of “being a member of a terrorist organization” and “aiding in the propaganda of a terrorist organization” intended to divide the Turkish state. A majority of them remain in prison today (2) . This International Women’s Month, I propose that we turn to the newly translated book that 22 of these brave women wrote, The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (3) and be inspired by these women’s courage and solidarity. Kurdish feminism is not a monolith (4) ; it has assumed various strategies and practices since the 1980s and it continues to evolve and adopt. This collection provides a glimpse into local Kurdish feminist activism via electoral politics in Turkey, especially between 2014-2016. The book offers stories told by 22 Kurdish women politicians, who were democratically elected as parliamentary representatives and co-mayors in various Kurdish cities and municipalities within the national borders of Turkey in the 2014 elections. These women served as mayors for about eighteen months, and after that, they were imprisoned by the Turkish state on various bogus charges. 2014 Local elections in Turkey were exciting because it was the first election following the mass anti-government Gezi protests of 2013 (5) . Tensions were high: not only were there suspicions of election-rigging, President Erdogan threatened to ban Twitter and YouTube during campaigning season after recordings of his plans to attack Syria to provoke a war (6) was revealed. It was also the first time that women were elected as mayors in large numbers in Turkey overall, thanks to much campaigning by the Kurdish feminist movement. Authors of the book were officially elected mayors and representatives of major Kurdish cities and municipalities within the borders of Turkey; for instance, Gültan Kışanak, the convenor of the book, was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, and Nurhayat Altun, mayor of Dersim. As long-time Kurdish feminist activist Gültan Kışanak reminds us, Kurdish women’s political struggle began in a prison, specifically in Diyarbakir prison, after the arrests following the 1980 military coup in Turkey (7) . During that period, she was detained for two years. Now, 40 years later, she is in prison again. (xiv) At this point, Kışanak sees the prison not as an end but as a beginning of the movement. While the book undoubtedly belongs to the prison-writing genre, it is also a unique synthesis of feminist theory and praxis: it provides urgent radical democracy lessons for all anticapitalist, decolonial, and ecofeminist movements around the world. In fact, it was originally put together as an act of feminist solidarity that takes the personal to be political. When Kışanak was asked to write a memoir about her experiences in feminist organizing, she saw it as an opportunity to connect the dots between the past and the present of the Kurdish feminist movement. That she decided to make it a collection of women’s stories rather than just her own personal/political struggle in prison is an act of feminist solidarity. Kışanak then mailed interview questions to her friends in various other prisons around the country. Each of these Kurdish women had a unique experience within the Kurdish movement, and they were a part of a radical democratic experiment in Turkey’s political arena, especially in that brief window of opportunity between 2014 and 2016 where they have served in elected office ( Kışanak xiii). She turned the responses into narratives, sending them back to the inmates for accuracy. In this back and forth, she also had prison authorities reading and censoring parts of the letters. In both her preface to the original Turkish and the English translation Kisanak wryly thanks these authorities for being the first readers of the book. As coordinating Translators point out in their Introduction that “just as the original Turkish edition was produced collectively, our translation too is the result of a collective process of feminist solidarity” (8) . Indeed, the translators who contributed to the book are a group of feminists from a variety of academic and activist backgrounds and geographic locations. Throughout the translation project, we have employed nonhierarchical means of organizing throughout the process. During multiple workshops, we provided peer-review and feedback on each other’s translations and reached consensus-based decisions on important Turkish and Kurdish terms. Another way in which the book embodies feminist solidarity concerns the way in which the proceedings of the book’s sales are being handled. The proceedings go neither to the original nor to the English publisher (Dipnot and Pluto Presses, respectively). They go to Gültan Kışanak, who intends to use the funds for a women’s library. This is why translating this book also means “standing in solidarity with its authors as well as those committed to Kurdish women’s liberation” (9) . It also makes it a risky project for those who live under more precarious conditions, where government retaliation is almost certain. One of the translators had to remain anonymous for this reason. I have been involved with this project from the beginning and helped to translate Nurhayat Altun’s story, who was co-mayor of Dersim for eighteen months. A Kurdish Alevi woman, Altun grew up in the 70s and 80s in a leftist “political” family. She was involved in party politics and civil Kurdish liberation organizations for the majority of her life. When we look at the radical democratic practices that her team developed and implemented in the months that she spent as co-mayor of Dersim, we see what anticolonial feminist leadership really looks like: a leader who governs with and for their community, that is, by empowering members to become agents of their own lives. Ultimately, perhaps the most radical aspect of Altun’s leadership was the fact that people in Dersim could stop by the mayor’s office any time to have a cup of tea and discuss their immediate concerns with the mayor. They saw the mayor’s office as a place that produced solutions to actual community problems (10) . Of course, when people stopped by to have tea, they often presumed that Altun was the “daughter-in-law” of the mayor, or another female relative of his--so unusual was it to have a woman mayor in Turkey, let alone in Dersim. Altun also recounts how she had to confront the patriarchal structures of the state and the assumptions of their male comrades simultaneously. Women’s election to office in these large numbers was a result of strong campaigning by the women’s committee of the party. In advance of the 2014 elections, the party had already decided to implement the co-mayoring system in all municipalities. It would nominate two candidates for one position, a man and a woman, and they would govern together. This was a little confusing and led to hilarious situations during the campaigning. People would come up to Altun to ask: “Are you the candidate or is it your husband? Will your husband be the official mayor?” (Note that the male candidate was not her husband.) She would explain that they were nominating two people for each position so that women’s issues would be front and center in the local government. People would continue to ask in disbelief if she was sure that the man would “allow her to govern alongside him” (11) . During the eighteen months that Altun was mayor of Dersim, she made sure that the mayor’s office provided free mobile health clinics for women and children, scheduled adult literacy courses, and oversaw a community garden project led by women. They found an empty lot close to the city center where they could cultivate organic fruits and vegetables, reducing their dependency on exports. From sowing to irrigation, women took care of everything (12) . How menacing women growing their own food must have seemed to the men, that they protested that the mayor was only serving women, not men. How threatening this was to the colonial patriarchal state for Kurdish women political leaders to dare to dream of a self-sustainable economy. As Altun remarks, bothered by the accomplishments of Dersim, the Turkish state arrested her (and other Kurdish leaders) in 2016 and appointed kayyums (trustees) to run the municipality, “invalidating the people’s will, women’s will” (13) . Once elected, Altun would keep her campaign promises, actualizing the political program of Women, Life, Freedom ( J in, Jiyan, Azadî , ژن، ژیان، ئازادی). She built a nonhierarchical feminist governing body, attentive to the needs of the community in Dersim. That she kept her campaign promises is precisely what led to her arrest by the Turkish state in 2016. *** Kurdish feminism is no glass ceiling feminism; it is not #girlboss or #leanin feminism. What these Kurdish politicians achieved is not just increasing women’s representation in the parliament. Rather, it is the audacity to prioritize community needs over the interests of the colonial patriarchal state: it is the commitment to rule of the people by the people and for the people. For this reason, Kurdish feminism proposes an alternative to liberal feminism, and as such, it is an important conversation partner for decolonial women of color feminisms as well as materialist and intersectional feminisms. Kurdish feminist praxis requires that we orient ourselves to the world differently, beyond the logics of capitalist transactionality and beyond the interests of the 1%, the political-economical elite. In this way, it prioritizes community input and well-being. Recently, Aruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser proposed a Feminism for the 99% as the only viable alternative to liberal feminism, stretching back to the radical and transformative path envisioned by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. In solidarity with them , I take the recent feminist theory and praxis articulated by the authors of the Purple Color of Kurdish Politics to be one practical or historical iteration of a Feminism for the 99%. Thus, “Woman, Life, Freedom” or “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” is not (only) a political slogan or a battle cry; it is also a political program that Altun and others have put to practice in Turkey, albeit for 18 months. And now the English-speaking world knows about it, thanks to this book of feminist solidarity. Anyone interested in radical democracy in a feminist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist key would do well to study the Kurdish feminist movement, and this book is an exceptional start. NOTES 1. I thank the Purple Translation Project team for their early review of and suggestions for this article. 2. For instance, both Gültan Kışanak, the convenor of the essay collection, and Nurhayat Altun, whose essay I translated into English, are in sF-type prison and in solitary confinement as of the writing of this piece. Another author, Aysel Tuğluk, who was charged with “leading a terrorist organization and inciting demonstrations and civil unrest” was released only last year due to her deteriorating health condition and as a result of massive public pressure and international campaigning. 3. Gültan Kışanak, ed. The purple Color of Kurdish politics: Women politicians write from prison . London: Pluto Press, 2022. 4. Benedetta Argentieri, “These Female Kurdish Soldiers Wear Their Femininity with Pride.” Quartz , July 30, 2015. http://qz.com/467159/these-female-kurdish-soldiers-wear-their-femininity-with-pride/ . 5. Amnest International. “Turkey: Gezi Park Protests: Brutal Denial of the Right to Peaceful Assembly in Turkey.” Amnesty International , June 2, 2021. https://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR44/022/2013/en . 6. “SES Kaydına Göre, Suriye Ile Savaş Çıkarmaya Çalışmışlar.” Evrensel.net , March 27, 2014. https://www.evrensel.net/haber/81055/ses-kaydina-gore-suriye-ile-savas-cikarmaya-calismislar . 7. See Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History . London: I. B. Tauris, 2017; and Gunter, Michael M. 1989. “Political Instability in Turkey During the 1970s”. Journal of Conflict Studies 9 (1). https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JCS/article/view/14835 . 8. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. ix. 9. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. ix. 10. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. 169. 11. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. 169. 12. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. 170. 13. Kışanak, ed. The purple color of Kurdish politics , p. 170. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post