The Saved Commune

Marcello Tarì

Other languages: Español

In the darkness of our lives, there is not one place for Beauty. The whole place is for Beauty.

—René Char, Hypnos

It Began Like This 

When Josep Rafenell i Orra suggested I participate in the Care Practices and Collectives seminar, the first topic we thought of for my contribution was autonomy – I suppose because I had recently finished a book on the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. At the time, there were other issues occupying our discussions, such as the meaning of destitution, or of the concept of fragmentation. I think the thread that unites all these terms is the notion of the commune.

This initial reflection on autonomy inevitably brought me back to a text written by Félix Guattari in 1977: “Millions and millions of potential Alices.” It is not one of Guattari’s most important texts, but belongs rather to what one might call “circumstantial” writings — in this case, it accompanied the publication in France of material from Radio Alice, a Bolognese experiment around which many of the subversive tensions that traversed Italy in the second half of the 1970s gathered.

Nevertheless, in this short text I saw a series of elements that related to the three terms mentioned above: autonomy, destitution, fragmentation.

I do not propose to offer here an analysis of Italian autonomy, still less to embark on an exercise of historicization, which is always a sort of “sterilization.” I do wish, on the contrary, to draw inspiration from it and identify certain passages that bring us back inevitably, furiously, to the present. Autonomy, destitution, fragmentation and the commune together constitute a linguistic assemblage, or even a perceptual machine with which to spectralize the present and, at the same time, a war machine to have done with it. 

The Disacclimated Revolution 

Guattari begins with a genealogical consideration:

We have to start historically with the crisis of the extreme left in Italy after 1972, in particular that of one of the liveliest groups — both theoretically and in action: Potere Operaio. One whole sector of the extreme left was to be dispersed during that crisis, but only in order to animate movements of revolt in various autonomies.

The birth of these autonomies was thus nothing other than the counter-effectuation of the fragmentation that affected the organized structures, called “small parties,” that made up the meagre political heritage of the Italian 1968. Of course, crises of structures, organizations and collectives are a constant in the history of revolutionary movements, not an exception. What was exceptional about the Italian 1970s was that, instead of reacting, as often happens, by deserting the political terrain, or by isolating themselves within new structures deemed to be more resistant, or even by returning to the “left” like a prodigal child, some of the movements made the strategic decision not only to assume the ongoing disintegration as a factual evidence, but to weaponize it, that is, to put this fragmentation to an offensive use. Such a decision responded, in fact, to an analysis of the modifications of capitalism, which in those years was entering into a molecular becoming, and took into account the disintegration of the workers’ movement. In other words, to the fragmentation of industry and work in general corresponded the fragmentation of class subjectivity. Pushing this line of reasoning to the extreme, Mario Tronti could claim that the defeat of class identity put an end to the history of the “modern subject” altogether.

While the left — both the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary left, and even the armed left — tried desperately not to recognize this historical transformation, and carried on as if it were still possible to speak of “class,” “state” and “revolution” as hegemonic and unifying principles — an illusion that still persists today — the experience that took the name Autonomia in Italy attempted, on the contrary, to accelerate this phenomenon of disintegration, both inside and outside itself. It is not by chance that, at the time, feminist autonomy proved to be the most powerful ethical element of an insurrection that was at its core molecular, attacking not only the dominant society and the conservative character of the “new,” but likewise everything that still remained of the left in the activism of the “groupuscules” and “splinter groups,” right down to day-to-day life. It can even be said that its gesture of “separ/action” (separ/azione), together with those of the workers and the youth, provoked an immense upheaval that tore the system of left self-representation to pieces, causing a strange archipelago of worlds to emerge, inhabited by those famous “thousands and thousands of potential Alices.” This was the context through which powerful subversive experiments found the strength and language to violently interrupt, for a few years, the hitherto much-vaunted linearity of progress.

I don’t believe in the reassuring legend where May 68 lasted ten years in Italy: an event, if it is one, is not made to last. The autonomies were instead a kind of anthropological leap: between what there was before and what happened after, there is no historicist necessity. Rather, it seems to me that 1968 shattered the unique temporality of progress, thereby allowing other temporalities to emerge. The only real subversive discontinuity that lasted from the 1960s until the end of the 1970s was the subterranean discovery of the inadequacy of Marxism not only to imagine a revolution but above all to make one. And since we are lovers of truth, it must also be acknowledged that many left-wing activists, including from the Communist Party, were not only shaken up by this crazy adventure, but also took part in it.

For all these reasons, we must always speak of autonomies in the plural, and never of one autonomy. On the other hand, one of the fatal errors committed in this respect at the end of the 1970s by a few autonomous fractions under the spell of a certain pseudo-Leninism was to believe that, faced with the counteroffensive of the state and capitalism, what was needed was to fold all these secessionist forms of life into a new working class unity, one comprised perhaps of “social workers,” and therefore to construct from the outside a Whole, an antagonistic totality that would collide with the totality of domination in order to then seize power.

In short, they sought to restore the very constituent dialectic that seemed to have been abandoned in previous years, thanks, precisely, to the explosion of autonomies. And when we reread some of the documents from that time, with their pompous calls to found the Party of Autonomy — where the term “party” was given a rather traditional meaning — it is hard not to think that these calls were simply a symptom of a defeat that had already taken place. For that matter, some epigones are still trying, today after all these years, to construct policies based on this symptom.

Guattari by contrast, in the last sentences of his text, presents an aspect of what can be called the “destituent ethics of autonomy”:

But all this is hardly constructive, it will be objected. Perhaps not — though it would be hard to prove — but that is not the problem. The people who created Radio Alice would say something like this: it seemed to them that a movement that could succeed in destroying the vast capitalist-bureaucratic machine would, a fortiori, be capable of constructing a new world. Collective competence would grow with collective action; it is not necessary at this stage to be able to produce blueprints for a substitute society.

I believe this refusal to elaborate programs for the future, to be constructive or to be good “workers,” as well as the renunciation of all progressive optimism, remains to this day an ethico-political aspect that is fundamental to grasp. Obviously, in this affair, it has to do with what has long been the greatest unthought-of, and is perhaps, precisely because of this, the most important aspect. There is too much to destroy, too much to fight, too much to love, too much to live for now, to waste time in the engineering of the future. 

The character of Alice created by Lewis Carroll curiously acquired considerable importance in the imagination of the 1977 movement. In the context of a famous and bizarre seminar held by Gianni Gelati at the University of Bologna, it embodied the figure of the disacclimated being: “to be disacclimated means occupying a place that is not one’s own, using an official language out of necessity, circulating to the side of institutions” (Alice out of place). Alice became the image of the uprooted singularity in which the young people of 1977 recognized themselves — and today, we could say that this is the case for the majority of humanity, but in a very depressing sense: no one feels at home, and the “smart metropolis” is the universal emblem of this strangeness between oneself, others and the world. A line of flight — had one thought of Bologna — could then be to assume the disacclimation as an imperceptible exit from the capitalist apparatus, from the control of the state and, ultimately, from the humanity of mankind. But, at the same time, disacclimation could be the means of a mad search for intensity. If the word revolution still had any meaning, it should probably be close to this: to bring about an absolute degree of disacclimation; to withdraw, without being noticed, from the functioning of all the institutions in force and, if necessary, to bring them down by a burst of intensity, in any place and in any way. Disacclimating the revolution means, therefore, destituting in advance any possibility that it might itself become an institution: we must do away with the idea of the One Revolution.

The genius of Gelati and his students was to say loud and clear that to conceive of the revolutionary question as if it were a progression toward a goal was now counterrevolutionary and that what was necessary, on the contrary, was to “suspend” every goal, every meaning, every continuity, in order to leave open the possibility for intensities to ply us, that we might escape the prison of present times and enter into a revolutionary becoming. When we begin to think and live in this way, the revolution itself disacclimates. Experiencing it will mean nothing more than destituting present reality as we discover it; surprising history and being surprised in turn by the Event. In this way, the present becomes the actual and, splitting itself open, historical time becomes the time of truth allowing the alleged reality of this world to appear for what it really is: a giant mass of material and spiritual obstacles from which we must free ourselves.

On Depth and the Past

Communism and the future are at odds. I recently wrote that communism has no future, and it never had one. This is not only because I have an innate aversion to this empty category, but also because the very idea of the future as something desirable has been annihilated by capitalism. Capitalism, over the last few decades, has presented us with a terrifying image of the future designed precisely to govern us. This way the government, whatever it may be, can claim to be there to protect us from the future, which is no longer communism but a catastrophe that is humanitarian, ecological, economic, existential, or all of these at the same time, while trying to make us forget that the catastrophe is taking place now and that the face of the apocalypse is in fact its own. Ultimately, all of the reflections on time produced in modernity, including that of the eternal return, only show how the bourgeois gaze turns away from becoming and obsessively focuses on its present, on its own hell. I believe, on the contrary, that communism has value as something that, coming to us from the past — the one with which every present moment that is about to explode is charged —  is both inactual and actual, in potential and in act: we miss communism even while it is still there — communism is missing at the same time that it is always there. It beats as though it were the living heart of the oppressed of all times. But often we are unable to hear it or else fail to recognize it, and this is our drama. Either communism is among us, within us and through us, or it is nothing. It’s like love which, it seems to me, shares many things with communism: we miss it although it is always there, we hear it beating in the depths but we can’t grasp it. And even buried under millions and millions of bits, pixels, lies and pain, betrayals and tears, we still hear it.

Sometimes it seems like we are seeing love and communism in front of us, but we encounter them in inverted or caricatured figures, in externalized forms that we are, alas, most often unable to resist. But let us observe them attentively, these simulacra. Capitalism is obviously capable of mimicking and perverting communism as well as love, but in a way that is surprisingly devoid of fantasy and full of vulgarity. Asymmetries: if evil, despite being a completely historical product, is formless, and the effects of its action are always “collateral effects” that strike indiscriminately, it is also true that its internal limit lies in the confusion it generates and in the fact that it presents as real things that have no reality. By contrast, all that is good in this world, despite its antihistorical character, is always characterized by its determination, by the precision with which it singularizes everything it touches, giving it more reality. It is reality that saves. Fragment by fragment, singularity after singularity. And besides, communism and love are not the kingdom of the collective but of singularities: they are not the future but an encounter, here and now, with a reality possessing some measure of truth in it.

At times we manage to recognize communism or love, to listen to them, sometimes even to touch them, through our experience of an event, in the sense that Gilles Deleuze confers on this term. The event, he said, always concerns something on the order of injury, war, or death, but it must be considered in its double structure by trying to extract from its effectuation a pure event: the splendor that is present even in the wound, the happiness in the melancholy, the love in the loss of love, the hope in its absence, the lightning of communism in the white sky of oppression, thereby passing over its simple accomplishment, which always reduces it to a “state of affairs” (an individual, for example). On the other hand, if this world were not a frozen well of misfortune in the form of the present state of things, we would not need to continue talking about communism. To melt this ice, it is not enough to arm yourself with bars and Molotov cocktails, you have to know how to love. This is what the left, and not only that of the parties, but also the “diffuse” leftism that pollutes individuals, has never managed to do.

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes: 

Only the free man, therefore, can comprehend all violence in a single act of violence, and every mortal event in a single Event which no longer makes room for the accident, and which denounces or destitutes the power of ressentiment within the individual as well as the power of oppression within society.

Note that Deleuze uses the verb “to destitute” in exactly the sense that we are attempting in various ways to conceptualize it today; and he repeats this term a few lines later, referring to what he calls “transmutation” — that is, the alchemical point of condensation where all events are gathered into one, the moment of ethical action in the literal sense, in which even “to die is like the destitution of death.” We could go on: this war that destitutes war, and so on. This point of transmutation is generically called “revolt,” “insurrection” or “revolution.” This mobile and precise point that even destitutes death is what I call the event of communism.

Intensity Condensers

During the 1920s, as Soviet Russia was in the throes of civil war, a group of Bolshevik architects — who believed that one is a communist not because one changes something in the mode of production, or in their case, in the way homes are built, but because one is engaged in the transformation of one’s form of life (byt, in Russian) — developed the notion of “social condensers” to express their conception of inhabiting and dwelling in the revolution.

According to them, the intrinsic aim of architecture, like any other technique in the revolutionary process, could only reside in the diffuse realization of an immense and profane happiness. For Aleksandr Blok, the revolution was about “remaking everything”: “To make everything become new, to make our false, dirty, boring, and monstrous life becomes a just, clean, joyful, magnificent life” (The Intelligentsia and the Revolution). They were perfectly aware that if the revolution did not immediately aim at this objective, without further delay and as furiously as possible, it would be lost, and that is what happened. And indeed, they themselves were purged by Stalinism shortly afterwards. But what they tried to do, which remains exemplary, was nothing less than the destruction of the bourgeois city as a preliminary gesture toward the destitution of its forms of life, while feverishly conceiving of “communes of life.” Anyway, wasn’t it poor Engels who wrote that “urban space is […] space structured by ideology”?

In this way any product, whether architectural or otherwise, was to be designed as if it were a condenser of the revolutionary energies circulating in Bolshevik Russia: they had an idea of habitat and use in which form and content converge at a strategic point, that of the novy byt, the new form of life.

Just like an electric condenser does, the social condenser would work to transform the nature of the social current and thus convert the petty-bourgeois possessive individual into someone for whom private interest was immediately fused with the interest of the commune as a form of life.

The commune that functioned as a material interruption of the ideological space of the bourgeois city was therefore a “social condenser,” a set of places that would facilitate the spiritual intensification of the revolutionary process.

Inside the condenser a passage is opened towards an indiscernibility between individual and form of life, radically displacing the terms of political reference and generating a field of tension within which the communist pole accumulates a strength capable of unfurling itself throughout the terrain of habitat and habitus, that is to say, both at the level of modes of habitation and the daily conduct of existence.

An entire city could, from this perspective, become a “general condenser,” an enormous force field which, by being continuously engaged in division and encounter, would give rise to a continuous repoliticization of space.

In the old Communist Manifesto it is said that, “In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped.” The proletariat is that figure which exists without — without family and without nation.  This means that the dominant form of life can only be destituted by another form of life. The commune, in fact, is nothing other than the means through which the communist form of life asserts itself, that is to say, lives.

The idea and the actual practice of the commune are not foreign to us, because they resurface with each revolutionary event, while continuing to appear each time as the “surprise” that pierces history; we rediscovered it in Oakland, Istanbul, Cairo, Chiapas, in the occupied universities, on autonomous farms, on the various ZADs, in free use, or, and most importantly, even if only in fragments, in the advent of a communism that affects us in an everyday way. The commune is the most powerful condenser of revolutionary energies at our disposal. As with the Russian architects, we must understand that a commune, as a condenser, is not something that only has to do with an idea of life; it is a material structure that does not merely confirm or deny reality, but functions as a matrix of the possible.

We are talking about commune — not community. The only community we could say we have experienced is the immediate community that arises in revolt, which shatters normality like a bolt of lightning, a burst from which nothing is ever constituted, for its tension resides precisely in the fact of destroying all that exists. This is the anarchist moment, whose action has an absolute destituting function free of any mediation. It is akin to what Sorel described with the proletarian general strike: “It must be taken as an undivided whole and the passage from capitalism to socialism conceived as a catastrophe whose development defies description” (Reflections on Violence). It is this that we likewise experience when we abandon ourselves body and soul to the other, when this zone is created where I am no longer me, and you are no longer you. All of this is inexpressible, which is why it must be thought of as a pure “interruption,” in the sense described by Walter Benjamin when he speaks of the “power of the expressionless,” which “shatters […] the false, errant totality — the absolute totality.”

Community cannot be generalized for it only lives in the sporadic and violent suspension of representation. This is not its limit but its specificity, allowing the intensities that have found their place there to accomplish the transmutation of the one who took part in it and thus become the remainder of this nameless community. And it is always this remnant that, remembering itself, reactivates itself with each new revolt, each new love, each true encounter.

It is not the same for the commune, because it is a practical, local experience that creates its own duration, a perpetual recommencement that invests the world starting from that moment when 2, 10, 100 or 1000 people decide to start living according to their own rules — i.e., autonomously. The commune is an interruption in history that begins to have its own rhythm, while also taking root in space. Thus, thanks to its capacity to transform accumulated energy, the event inaugurates a new temporality. The commune’s degree of intensity is not its “content,” but it does give an indication of its degree of existence, the depth of its spirit, and therefore its “communicability.” Intensity is what binds beings and things together internally in a commune-ability [communeabilité] that is “immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is magical (for there is also a magic of matter)” (Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”). The intensity of the commune makes it a form that corresponds to the dissolution of all forms in freedom, as only fantasy is capable of doing.

I therefore call “intensity condensers” all these techniques, material and immaterial, which function as transformers of the energy that all intensity carries in itself — “the more intense a thing is, the more precisely is its relation to Being: the intensity of the thing is its relation with Being” (Gilles Deleuze, from a lecture delivered at Vincennes, Dec. 9th, 1980). Intensities are those affective pulsations that — by passing through these arrangements of fragments of being that constitute forms of life, and thus making them communeable — either increase their strength or annihilate them: either they give them more reality or they take it away from them. This is why the attention paid to the use of intensity is so important, as much in the amorous adventure as in the revolutionary adventure. Every time we misuse this attention, or we are simply negligent, we miss that appointment for which “we were expected on Earth.” And we are punished by the diminution of our own reality.

An intensity condenser is therefore a technique which, seeking to dominate the relationship between individuals, nature and history, makes it possible to communize individual energy currents without eliminating their singularity but, on the contrary, exalting it. In this sense, the condenser can become a means of organization — if by “organization” we mean the ability to communicate and express — of the interiority of the revolutionary field, projected outward.

The organization of intensities in the commune is quite different from the act of organizing individuals through a collective. Whereas collectives are based on “human, all too human” modes of operation, the organization of intensities generates ontological mutations as soon as it comes into contact with a place — the commune — which can never be composed exclusively of human beings, but which exists only insofar as it expresses a certain communeability between individuals, animals, plants, machines, books, music, stories, spirits: in short, a whole world.

Intensity condensers are the magic that operates in the matter of communism.

To Have Done with the State of Things 

Heiner Müller, from East Germany, on the other side of the Wall around the time when Guattari was writing about Alice, spoke of “constructive defeatism,” a beautiful phrase that affirmed that the only constructive thing we could envisage, in the face of both capitalism’s offensive and the shipwreck of the left was to let things disintegrate, to let them shatter into a thousand pieces without concern for saving anything of the old order. What should be saved will be so by virtue of its own strength — “Life will render it to us, because life is beautiful” (Aleksandr Blok) — and without imagining that communism resides in some ulterior metaphysical ground. It can be said that the autonomies have never been merely passive in this situation, but have on the contrary always tried to create momentum in this direction.

Amadeo Bordiga, despite being an engineer, said that communism is not something you build, and that the only thing you should care about is to free the land from what stands in the way of its realization. In the end, he was simply echoing Marx’s thinking in The German Ideology when, before pronouncing the famous definition of communism as “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things,” he stated that “communism is for us not a state of affairs that is to be established.” Which is a rather curious sentence, because if it is not something that needs to be established, then that means that it already exists, at least potentially. How? Where? The only valid answer is that it exists in an unspeakable past that is nevertheless present in the form of splinters, fragments, precisely, in our life, which is itself at the same time replete with all manner of trash. It is its discontinuous and fragmentary presence that ensures that communism still signifies, now and forever, a power “in and against” the present state of things. In and against my own life, too.

The state of affairs is nothing other than the “definitive present,” amputated from its past and its future, whereas communism is always the past and the now that together form a constellation and become an arrow directed against the present. In this sense, we can say that communism is the remembrance of a war that continues to begin over and over again — a primal war, even more primitive than capitalist accumulation, although the latter is obviously still going on — a war that does not advance from the bottom to the top, but from the inside to the outside.

What we call “processes of subjectivation” are entirely implicated in this war against the state of things: the subject exposes its fragmentation under the open sky and, in transmutation, appears as a non-subject. Gilles Deleuze is very clear about this:

One might equally well speak of new types of events, rather than processes of subjectivation: events that can’t be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for a moment, and it’s that moment that matters, it’s the chance we must seize (Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations).

The state of affairs that precedes or follows an event has a very precise name in the traditional jargon of politics: an institution. However, if we are capable, as Deleuze suggests, of grasping the event with our hands — Hölderlin spoke of “grasping lightning with our bare hands” — we will realize that the institution is not a destiny, that the unity it envisages is an illusion and that its function is fundamentally to police. Beyond it lies not chaos, but the starry sky that it prevents us from contemplating. We have to shoot not only at the clocks of the cities, but at the street lights, too. 

This means that the subject, namely subjectivity as a small institution of the Ego, is also seized, at this moment, by the power of destitution, and ousted as the supposedly unitary and constitutive substance. Revolutionary becoming — chance — is in reality an “un-becoming,” a deposing of the will in favor of an urgency of expression, a disappearance of action in favor of a multiplication of gestures, an eclipse of the falsifying light emitted by the present, the positive effacement of the human, the ardent flame that transfigures presence. In the space of an instant. Dialektik im Stillstand: “the dialectic at a standstill.” Everything is one, because the whole is nothing.

The occurrence of the event becomes clearer if we think of the instant — as Giorgio Colli says — as “the memory of a beginning,” but the beginning in itself is always outside of memory and therefore always outside of time and of the subject/object representation (Giorgio Colli, The Philosophy of Expression). Hence the fact that the instant, while rendering the polarities of subjectivation indistinct, manifests itself as “contact.” This is made possible by the rupture of the continuous line by which representation imposes itself on the experience we can make of the world 1.

An interruption that indicates an “in-between” that is a nothingness, but a nothingness, an abyss, that beckons towards what surrounds it, the two segments that precede and follow it. This, once represented, will become precisely the subject and the object. That is why this contact that the moment brings about is, in a certain way, what is missing, even though we remember it, and always commencing once again (the people, community, love…). What we call existence, that is to say, what occurs as an interruption between birth and death, is fundamentally nothing other than the most intense of these “contacts.” Revolution then means restoring dignity to this interruption, by evoking, from nothingness, what is missing. It means being initiated into real life, the “magnificent” life.

The Night, the Commune

The instant of subversion, this contact between the ego and history, is like an infinite night that invades bodies, minds, landscapes, language. It stretches over entire cities and penetrates the interior of our tired, broken lives, which, thanks to darkness, and entering in turn into contact with each other, have the possibility of imperceptibly transforming the world before the light of day returns.

The darkness of the night, if only we welcome it as friends, makes us sensitive to certain affects in the instant of their contact, of their collapse in the void, that is, in their purity: love and pain, nostalgia and joy pursue each other in the dark. They do not see each other, but listen to each other’s whispers and, if they are lucky, touch each other. Night is the poetry of existence, in the face of the harsh prose of the day; it breathes in the depth that emerges from obscurity, then exhales the memories that suddenly make us understand that history is but the shadow cast by the here and now of the world over the past of the defeated. It is revolt alone which gradually makes history transparent and prepares it to be destituted, by breaking it down and bringing us into contact with its truth.

The obscurity of the night protects nameless gestures from the hostile gaze of society and frees lovers from their own subjectivities. Night is the war of millions and millions of battles in which the present state of things is consumed. Night is the destitution of every destiny, and that is why those who have lived in it for a long time can see the “eternal light” Walter Benjamin spoke of, the “image of mankind redeemed,” in which the fragments work together to perfect a drawing valid for all eternity. And only those who have truly experienced the night in their hearts, thus coming into contact with themselves, and thereby breaking their own ego, recognize the true light. This is the alchemical night, the Benjaminian “redeemed night,” in which ideas are stars that operate, invisible, in the day of history, while they shine, magnificent, in the “night of nature” (Benjamin, Letter to F. C. Rang, Dec. 9th, 1923), where the theater of history is destituted and where, therefore, we no longer await the day of judgment. It is no longer the dwelling of humans but of Others, of unheard-of creatures, transmuted by the event and always already redeemed. It is the sky of the sky. And when, suddenly, you realize that this obscurity is the color of your past life and of all the lesser lives that have passed in the whirlwind of history, you will know that this here is the night of the saved commune, which will obviously not be inhabited by “men.”

The reflection of this image of happiness is the pietas that communism feels every day for irredeemable humanity. This pietas is what permeates the destruction of the present state of things.


Note from the author: Among the sources of inspiration for this text, I would like to mention a conversation with the philosopher Ubaldo Fadini, the songs of Baustelle, and a nocturnal meditation on a face that is tired and disenchanted, but from which, despite itself, emanates an intensity that pierces through the darkness like the sword of an angel as it prepares to separate good from evil.

First published in French in Itinérances, ed. J. Rafanell i Orra, Divergences, 2018. 

Translated by Ill Will

Notes

1. On this point, see Giorgio Agamben, “A Philosophy of Contact.” —Trans.