Alain Badiou | ‘We Have to Break Bourgeois Right’

  In June 2017, Alain Badiou was invited by the ‘Conséquences’ seminar to give a lecture with the title ‘What does a politics outside the state involve?’ The written text was subsequently published by Fayard. Three comrades spoke with him in a preparatory discussion for this lecture; the following text is a partial transcription. Taking stock of the uprisings of recent years on a world scale (from Greece to Egypt, as well as France), Badiou observed that a stumbling block everywhere is the absence of a strategic hypothesis on the question of the state, capable of overcoming the impasse of…

GWENDOLYN BROOKS | RIOT

    RIOT A riot is the language of the unheard. —MARTIN LUTHER KING   John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the Negroes were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in…

Nanni Balestrini | “I close my eyes and start to sing”

NANNI BALESTRINI (1935-2019)     I close my eyes and start to sing threads are entangled and transformed into spots whose dance moves ever more slowly I sang my repertoire then I started monologues with my eyes closed I walked back and forth in the cell four steps forward four steps back I invented dialogues for two characters that spoke different languages like at the cinema when the film ends there are those who make love who smoke there are those who merely exist   Nanni Balestrini, the radical Italian experimental visual artist, poet, and novelist known for recombinatory, revolutionary…

HERE & ELSEWHERE / HIER UND ANDERSWO

[…] Before she too is slaughtered by the Bourgeois (the mob of order), Rosa Luxemburg writes about Bacchanalia, which the bourgeoisie regularly holds upon its victims. From the perverse happiness of the tormentors: the whispering of the pariahs in secret. Gaps of ghastly proportions. Maintained by continuous police work, by the breeding of greenhouse roses, laws & border installations. The liquidation of the poetic word. Chalk circles one makes around a pair of shoes, a bicycle, a pool of blood [the stigmata of capitalism].

Tiqqun | This Is Not a Program

“’77 wasn’t like ’68. ’68 was anti-establishment, ’77 was radically alternative. This is why the ‘official’ version portrays ’68 as good and ’77 as bad; in fact, ’68 was co-opted whereas ’77 was annihilated. This is why, unlike ’68, ’77 could never make for an easy object of celebration.”
— Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro

The Angry Brigade: Communiques and Documents

Introduction The eight libertarian militants on trial in the Old Bailey in 1972 who were chosen by the British State to be the ‘conspirators’ of the Angry Brigade, found themselves facing not only the class enemy with all its instruments of repression, but also the obtusity and incomprehension — when not condemnation — of the organised left. Described as ‘mad’, ‘terrorists’, ‘adventurists’, or at best authors of ‘gestures of a worrying desperation’, the Angry Brigade were condemned without any attempt to analyse their actions or to understand what they signified in the general context of the class struggle in course….

riots and/or poetics [8/2018]

“he is as a neighborhood beauty queen / lauded with ribbons and canes / and with his lapdogs / who lick at the rottenness / seated at the right side / of mama democracy / he dialogues long / with the mouth of a murderer. / he raises his hand in that sustained and easy style / wiggles his fat ass / and with the boyish brilliance of an ephebe / he shits in the country / with all his soul“ Roberto Jorge Santoro | POETRY IN GENERAL (II)   Manson & Mendoza; Windsuckers & Onsetters: Sonnots for Griffiths Andrea…

Two Poets — Anna Mendelssohn & Miyó Vestrini

  Anna Mendelssohn Anna Mendelssohn, also known as Grace Lake, who has died aged 61 of a brain tumour, was principally a poet, and a poet like no other, but was also a painter, musician, actor and, earlier in her life, a political activist. She came from what she described as “a very strict working-class socialistic Jewish background” in Stockport, Cheshire. But what impelled her throughout her life was a 1960s spirit of radical revolt. At first it was political but, after a great turning point in her life, it was artistic. She was educated at Stockport high school and…

Two Poets — Ed Dorn & Sean Bonney

Ed Dorn “He knew that just to wake up in the morning is to be political.“ Jennifer Dunbar “No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political“, writes Robert Creeley: “the range and explicit register of Ed Dorn’s ability to feel how it actually is to be human, in a given place and time, is phenomenal.“ “Ed Dorn (1929-1999) was born and grew up in Eastern Illinois, on the banks of the river Embarrass (a tributary of the Wabash). He never knew his father. His mother was of French-Canadian ancestry, his maternal grandfather a half-Indian Quebecois railroad man (“master pipefitter in…

Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE

  Sean Bonney | COMETS & BARRICADES: INSURRECTIONARY IMAGINATION IN EXILE Let every word indicate the most frightening of distances, it would still take billions of centuries, talking at one word per second, to express a distance which is only an insignificance when it comes to infinity. ¹ Louis Auguste Blanqui; Eternity by the Stars Imprisoned on the day before the declaration of the Paris Commune, in a cell in the Fort du Taureau, ‘an ellipse-shaped fortified island lying half a mile outside of the rock shores of Morlaix at a place where, after briefly morphing into the English Channel, the…

Two Poets — Stephanie Young & Kirill Medvedev

Stephanie Young Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland, California. Her most recent book is  It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, which charts the growing crisis of the new intellectual working class. Revealing important truths about labor in direct poetic form, Young’s work was recently featured on Hyperallergic. Her collections of poetry include Telling the Future Off (2005), Picture Palace (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 2008), and Ursula or University (2013). She edited the anthology Bay Poetics (2006) and is a founding editor of the online anthology/“museum” of Oakland, Deep Oakland. Young and poet Juliana Spahr coedited the book…

Two Poets — Katerina Gogou & Galina Rymbu

Katerina Gogou Katerina Gogou (1940-1993) was a Greek anarchist poetess who is a representative figure of the ‘80s radical political and cultural scene of Exarcheia. The impact of her poems, lately rediscovered and taken into consideration by the mainstream media, has always been influential in the radical movement. Katerina was born in Athens in 1940 and the first years of her life were marked by the famine and the Nazi occupation, the resistance and the civil war. The defeat of the communists was followed by a period of strict censorship, police terror and island camps for political prisoners. Gogou finished…

Alain Badiou | The Rebirth of History | Times of Riots and Uprisings

Alain Badiou; The Rebirth of History | Times of Riots and Uprisings (Full Book)   History and the Sphinx: Of Riots and Uprisings by Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,”…

Kirill Medvedev | My Fascism

“[…] and someone said “I’m always on strike, I’m a poet“ in his 2004 essay MY FASCISM Kirill Medvedev says you can see how a person can become kind of crazy from all the various ideological streams moving through his mind in impossibly quick succession […] MY FASCISM is an essay about the relation of politics and art in 2004 in Russia, how some artists on the far right had made a powerfully vital, syncretic, and dangerous art. Kirill argues against attachment to an idealized past, the old culture: In Russia right now we’re all frankensteins, pieced together from various dead traditions….

riots and/or poetics [6/2018]

“[…] But here: distillation, composition, narrow-mindedness; and the oppressive summers: the heat isn’t without respite, but given that good weather is in everyone’s interests, and that everyone is a pig, I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly. […] The worst is that all of this will bother you as much as it will. It seems for the best that you read and walk as much as possible. Reason enough not to remain confined to offices and homes. Mindlessnesses must be given free reign, far from confinement. I am not about to be selling balm, but I imagine…

GHOSTS ((A-234))

(i) … wir sind nichts als abgegriffene Bilder zeitgenössischer Vorstellungen. Das tragen wir dir nicht nach… aus dunklen Augenhöhlen brennt in eiskalter Berechnung der Tod Rimbauds das Hirn sich weggeblasen mit einem der 1440 Perkussionsschloss-Gewehren die absteigende Karawane ((Soldaten des guten Willens)) / Schauder der Büßermondlandschaft Abessiniens nasstriefende Trepanationen & Vokale ((Licht der additiven Farbmischung)) / die logischen Revolten für den Anfang :: Triebfeder zerschlagener Ideen, langue à langue kartographiert im Schwarz getünchter Schadensregister     (ii) kein Sterblicher der nicht in einem beliebigen Augenblick seines Daseins mit Zittern und Abscheu die seltsame Geschichte betrachtet die Versuche Luxus zu geniessen…

[[das Phantom Lautréamonts]]

                    »Da gab es keinen Zwang mehr. Wenn ich töten wollte, tötete ich; das passierte mir sogar oft, und niemand hinderte mich daran. Die menschlichen Gesetze verfolgten mich noch mit ihrer Rache, obwohl ich die Rasse, die ich so ruhig verlassen hatte, nicht angriff; aber mein Gewissen machte mir keinen Vorwurf…« Die Gesänge des Maldoror   ich hatte angenommen dass wir am 10. die Paläste der Hochfinanz & des Inneren auf den Kopf stellen / du weisst schon : die Rechnung für entlauste, desinfizierte Randbezirke / verarscht & geknüppelt wie wir…

Nanni Balestrini; »If you read this, you must no longer fear anything«

  • We Want Everything • Nanni Balestrini and the Poetry of the Italian Autonomia • Blackout • Carbonia (We Were All Communists) • On Nanni Balestrini, the Most Radically Poet of the Italian Scene     WE WANT EVERYTHING THE STRUGGLE These guys I’d talked to about the struggle couldn’t accept it, they didn’t know what the fuck to do. They didn’t understand what I was proposing. They felt somehow that what I was proposing was right, but they didn’t know how to act on it. They didn’t understand that the important thing was to stir things up all…

Anmerkungen zum Geschehen ((Totenklage))

                    Das griechischtragische Wort ist tödlich-faktisch, weil der Leib, den es ergreift, wirklich tötet. Hölderlin     Ohne Zweifel ist dies von allen widerlichen Momenten der widerlichste : es reicht nicht länger zu sagen : Ziel ist die Aufhebung des Kapitalistischen Realismus : oder Verse an die Tür einer Zelle zu hämmern wie man einen Nagel in eine Wand schlägt, wenn eine enthemmte Politkaste als Urheber täglich neuer Demütigungen, uns die verbliebenen Krumen vom Tischtuch eines inszenierten Abendmahls zuspielt / dass ich auf solch eine Vermessenheit reagieren muss wird dir klar…

Katerina Gogou / AUTOPSY REPORT

  AUTOPSY REPORT 2.11.75 …the body lay face-down in a parallel connecting to the Vatican. One of his hands full of blood gestured in open palm as insult to CPI and the other clutching his genitals to the culture specialists. Blood clotting on his hair as leeches on the veiled homosexual syndromes of all men of earth throughout the realm. His face disfigured by the framework of the class he denied a black and blue volunteer of the ragtag proletariat. The fingers of the left hand broken by social realism thrown away to floodlit trash. The jaw broken by the…

Miyó Vestrini | Poems

  XII (from NEXT WINTER) for Luis Camilo I get up I do not get up They hate me I tie my tubes I hit a motorcyclist with malice aforethought I surrender to the Oedipus complex I wander I carefully study the differences between dysrhythmia – psychosis – schizophrenia – neurosis – depression – syndrome – panic and I’m pissed left alone in the house when everyone is asleep I buy a magazine that costs six dollars they steal my best friend’s purse they grab me I push him I murder him I remember the umbrella of Amsterdam and the…

Galina Rymbu | Poems

UNTITLED I change at Trubnaya metro and see — fire I get off at the university and see — fire I go down the escalator at Chistye Prudy and see — fire when we fall at Begovaya, at Vykhino, we see — fire, fire, fire boys and girls their eyes filled with blood (to hell with ’68) students in hats with pompons walking silently next to me and suddenly they start to shout: “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” suffocating in dark leggings the universities flare up the textbooks of cowardly literature mixed with lusterless works flare up along with me only tonight we became younger and everyone wants to be…

Jean-Marie Gleize; ELEVEN NOVEMBER 2008 / ANARCHY / STATIC SHOTS / CAUGHT IN THE WATER / BEYOND VOICE

  2. ELEVEN NOVEMBER 2008 That night the wind was blowing above the ferns. The sky had fallen like a metal shutter. The scene was almost invisible and mute. One could hear footsteps. * … knocking over, bit by bit, all the obstacles … making each sentence into a fire stand     “the folly of an order” On eleven November at 5 a.m. the police cross Toy-Viam with dogs. The five access roads to the village of Tarnac are blocked. The village is sealed. A helicopter surveys the zone. 150 policemen 60 from the sdat (sous-direction de l’antiterrorisme) 50…

Sean Bonney | Our Death

  Our Death / Abject 2 (after Baudelaire) Great love, that will crush the human world, I wish we could do something to help each other. But today we are separated by so many tedious enemies. They smile at us all day long and ask us about our fever. What is there to say?  That “fever”,  in the way they pronounce it, isn’t much more than a weird reflection of their smile, which in itself is a symbol of their sense of rightness within the so-called world. But that we feel that the five characters that make up the word…

Theater der Grausamkeiten [6.1 / 6.2]

              Ich hätte Blut durch den Nabel scheissen müssen, um zu erreichen, was ich will. Artaud   All das um zu sagen dass Tzara Artauds Stab berührte als berührte er seinen Schwanz wodurch er im Übrigen nur einen weiterer Schrein geistiger Masturbation errichtet, einen Schatten den man mit ein paar Nägeln im Kopf des Suchenden fixiert, dass Artaud während der neun Jahre die das Gesetz ihn festsetzt / einer Justiz die nur als letzter eitriger Ausfluss einer bourgeoisen Krätze auftritt / ihn bindet, 50 Elektroschocks aussetzt und ins hyperglykämische Coma spritzt, dass die Gesellschaft…

PROTEST

  1. aus dem Inneren des silbern glänzenden Berges zwischen Charleville und Aden hört man schwach das schleppende Geräusch von Dampfmaschinen ein heiss-wässriger Dampf entfährt aus einer der Öffnungen des Tunnels der sich in kleinen flockigen Partien zu Wolken verdichtet die in der gleissenden Sonne materialisieren und sogleich wieder sich auflösen überall handelt man mit Bergkristallen oder seltsam anmutenden Stücken von Mineralien die man unten in der Stadt für einen weitaus höheren Preis wieder verkauft aber bei Schnee und zu Fuß den Pass zu überqueren ein solcher Vorsatz dass einem an Bart und Augenbrauen Eiskristalle richtige Zapfen anwachsen ist keine…