English
The politics of adventure - part 1
It is surely not in vain that I myself am in need of thy words:
those of the future norms of strength,
those of the future norms of a valorous heart,
those of the future norms of fervor.
Nothing now, among all things, inspires my heart with valor.
Nothing now points me to the future norms of my existence.
Guarani prayer, as recorded and translated by Leon Cadogan (1966).
It
It I have often encountered a problem, when talking or writing about anti-work politics. While busy producing my proclamations against the dictatorship of Work’s ‘activity of repetition’, the strangulating theism on which it lies, the unforgivable sacrifice of one’s life which it imposes, and so on, I found that the alternative which I was able to offer did not match the narrative and environmental qualities offered by the ideology I was opposing.
Bio-image and General Intellect: can images transform bodies?
This text results from KAFCA (Knowledge Against Financial Capitalism) conference, which was held in Macba, Barcelona, 1-3 december, 2011.
In spring 2011, hundreds of migrants arriving from revolutionary Tunisia to Paris opened a harsh conflict within the metropolis, reclaiming the right to circulate freely, and the right to have rights. In November 2011, the Central Tunisian Bank decides to state explicitly its independency in the lawconcerning public powers. « If we do nothing, it simply becomes the death of revolution », a Tunisian Comrade says.
But beyond the catastrophe, the « Occupy » global movement - starting from revolutions in Maghreb and Mashrek, until Spanish acampadas, and all the occupations that are taking place all over the world - teaches us, that we experience a new temporality : the temporality of crisis and the temporality of global becoming. How do the « occupy-bodies » struggle against their financial captation, and transform singular micro-politics of resistance in a common power to act against it?How do they re-appropriate, through bodies and images, their wealth and potency and that produced, generated, created by bodies, from within, but against financial capitalism ?
Radical Atheism
in loving memory of Pierre Clastres and Max Stirner
Few places in the world are more secular than the United Kingdom. The laughable origins of the Anglican church, mixed with the centuries-old hegemony of capitalist ethics seem to have finally killed the religious spirit of the people of Albion. Religion, in the UK, is a mark of underdevelopment usually reserved for impoverished ethnic minorities or for the inhabitants of rural areas.
As a migrant from Catholic Italy, when I first arrived in the UK I thought I couldn't have asked for more. Not only were the remnants of the church so liberal and progressive that even homosexuals were allowed to be priests, but also people did not feel the need to fight off the presence of the church by indulging in God-oriented swearing, as is the common habit in Italy. God seemed to have finally disappeared, both as an unrequested father figure and as the millenarian oppressor of all living creatures. Back then, I thought I had arrived in the promised land of ‘really existing atheism’. And yet, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
The State of Connotation
This text derives from a conversation with Federico Campagna
A common criticism of contemporary capitalism is that the financial industry has completely decoupled capital from the materiality of production. The crisis in Europe has achieved such epic proportions because the creation of wealth was no longer inextricably linked to the labour of workers in the eurozone but could be amplified by complex algorithms of a computerised speculation. However there has also been a twin decoupling that has taken place alongside the rise of financial industry from the 1980's; a race to the bottom of signification which has seen a wedge driven between signifier and signified. The rise within advertising of a pure aesthetic of connotation which has created a feedback loop that engulfs the entire cultural sphere.
TODAY #7
TODAY #7: a publication by Through Europe. Featuring articles by Federico Campagna, Toby Austin Locke, Paolo Mossetti, Franco Berardi Bifo, Nathan Witt. Freely available here.
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