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Lien original : par baedan, via The Anarchist Library (onion / non-onion)
Extrait de : baedan — journal of queer nihilism — issue one
Queers Gone Wild
Having exhaustively analyzed the theoretical body of Edelman’s work, our task is to distinguish what is useful to our project from what is hopelessly lost in the abyss of the academy. While the immense weight of Edelman’s cultural criticism and purely abstract engagement with Lacan can surely be discarded, it is the insurrectionary potential of his thought that we wish to cleave out of his books and use as a tool for an anti-political praxis. To do this, we must explore the ancestral queer revolutionary to whom he’s hopelessly indebted. So we now turn to the work of Guy Hocquenghem.
Beyond being a writer and queer theorist, Hocquenghem was a queer revolutionary who participated in the revolt of May ‘68 and was seduced by Deleuze and Guattari’s radical ideas on desire. After being purged from the Communist Party for his homosexuality, he joined the FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire) becoming the first fag to be a member of the group of lesbian separatist militants. Ultimately he forged a critique of the militant left and developed a queer theory which called for nothing less than the destruction of capitalism, the family, the state and ultimately civilization. The vast majority of his work remains untranslated into English, and Anglophone queer theory is all the more impoverished for this absence. The wonder of his work, however, did not elude Edelman, who cites Hocquenghem sparsely throughout No Future. Although Edelman only attributes a handful of pretty phrases to Guy, we’ll argue that Lee’s project of queer negativity is deeply indebted to the former’s work. Queerness as negative, the refusal of reified queer identity, insistence against the succession of generations, the critique of the family as the foundational structure of the social order, the critique of politics, conceptions of a destructive jouissance: all are to be found in Hocquenghem’s theory, and without being diluted by layers of academic bullshit and bad puns. We experience it as a horrible tragedy that Guy died of AIDS before he could shape a more prolific canon of queer theory, and yet it is in his memory that we carry this flame.
Capitalism, the Family and the Anus
“Capitalism, the Family, and the Anus” is the first chapter of the largest volume of Hocquenghem’s work to be translated to English, Homosexual Desire. In it, he lays out a theory of the foundational structures of capitalism as a preface to his theory of a queerness that might annihilate those structures. Hocquenghem’s theory of capitalism is largely engaged the work of his contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their tome Anti-Oedipus. Elaborating on their work, he argues that all of capitalist society is reproduced through the specific relationship of the family—namely, the Oedipal relationship. This concept is used to describe the way in which capital must respond to the fundamental disintegration intrinsic to its reign. While the process of accumulation rips bodies and lives away from the contexts which give them meaning and provide for their ability to sustain themselves, the Oedipal relationship of the family functions to capture the chaos of this unravelling and to reorient human lives into the scheme of reproduction:
The family is therefore constructed as an artificially re-territorialized unit where social control has been relocated and in which forms of social organization can be reproduced. The father becomes a familial despot, and the mother, for example, an image for earth and country. Thus the privatized individual that psychoanalysis studies within the Oedipal family unit is an artificial construct, whose social function is to trap and control the disorder that haunts social life under capitalism.
We’ve already explored at length the symbolic order that the family is called on to defend, but it is worth elaborating that the family is a capitalist form that is made to function as the basic building block of the social order. Discipline, work ethic, duty, law, morality, the gender distinction, sexuality, and of course futurity are all inscribed into children’s bodies through the machinations of the familial matrix. In the following from Hocquenghem we see the germinal seed of Edelman’s entire argument concerning the intrinsic link between the family and reproductive futurism:
By becoming a father in turn, the former child hands the Oedipus complex down to his own descendants like a torch of civilization, and takes his place in the great lineage of Humanity. The absolute need for the Oedipus complex to be reproduced—and not produced—explains why childhood conflicts with the father image are finally resolved by the son’s stepping into his father’s shoes and founding a new family: indeed, the whole progress of society rests on the opposition between successive generations.
We’ll follow Hocquenghem in asserting that civilization, and the class society which is its content, is entirely reliant on the successive reproduction of the familial unit in order to inseminate future generations with its values. The social order is born anew in the body of each child, as it is transmitted from parent to their offspring in an endless forward movement. It is also here that we can locate the uncited source of Edelman’s arguments concerning the figure of homosexuality which must terrorize this familial fantasy:
Homosexual neurosis is the backlash to the threat which homosexual desire poses for Oedipal reproduction. Homosexual desire is the… terror of the family because it produces itself without reproducing. Every homosexual must thus see himself as the end of the species, the termination of a process for which he is not responsible and which must stop at himself…. The homosexual can only be a degenerate, for he does not generate—he is only the artistic end to a species…. Homosexuality is seen as a regressive neurosis, totally drawn towards the past; the homosexual is incapable of facing his future as an adult and father, which is laid down for every male individual.
This terror is the basis for what Edelman describes as the fantasy on which anti-queer paranoia is based; that complex of dread and desire so intrinsically tied to queer sexuality, that bodies might find ways of intercourse which do not produce the child and are not concerned with the reproduction of the social order through its tiny body. For Hocquenghem, homosexuality is not a coherent identity or community, but instead a social category created to capture all the polymorphous and queer desires which cannot fit neatly into the social form of the Family. Queerness comes to figure the catch-all fantasy for all the unnameable nightmares which haunt the capitalist social order.
Hocquenghem describes a growing imperialism of society which functions to attribute a social status and definition to everything, even that which cannot be classified. And so the destructive and polymorphic desires which lurk at the core of social relations are captured into a specific identity rather than being a capacity which could seduce or enchant any body:
Capitalism, in its necessary employment of Oedipalization, manufactures homosexuals just as it produces proletarians, and what is manufactured is a psychologically repressive category…. They amount to a perverse re-territorialization, a massive effort to regain social control in a world tending toward disorder and decoding.
This disorder that homosexuality is called upon to symbolize runs deeper than that which plagues Oedipal reproduction. Beyond the Family as capitalist unit, Hocquenghem also describes the specific way in which the individual is constructed as the subject of capital and the family. For Hocquenghem, the individual in inherently caught up in what he describes the privatization of the anus. He describes the anus as the secret, the shameful, the abject part of every body around which individuated subjectivity must form. It marks the real bodily threshold which separates human individuals from one another.
Freud sees the anal stage as the stage of formation of the person. The anus has no social desiring function left, because all its functions have become excremental: that is to say, chiefly private. The great act of capitalist decoding is accompanied by the constitution of the individual: money, which must be privately owned in order to circulate, is indeed connected with the anus, in so far as the anus is the most private part of the individual. The constitution of the private, individual, proper person is of the anus; the constitution of the public person is of the phallus…
Every man has an anus which is truly his own, in the most secret depths of his own person. The anus does not exist in a social relation, since it forms precisely the individual and therefore enables the division between society and the individual to be made. To reinvest the anus collectively and libidinally would involve a proportional weakening of the great phallic signifier, which dominates us constantly both in the small-scale hierarchies of the family and in the great social hierarchies. The least acceptable desiring operation (precisely because it is the most desublimating one) is that which is directed at the anus.
For Guy, the psychic significance of the anus in self-construction is precisely why homosexual desire links the destruction of futurity in the family to the self-shattering embodied in jouissance. To be fucked in the ass is to sabotage the bodily integrity through which the individual and his realm of the private is constructed. Hocquenghem argues for the deprivatization of the anus and the formation of what he terms ‘anal groupings’—forms of sexual collectivity which destroy the Family and serve no purpose in the social order’s future. In grouping anal desire, queer formations are able to sabotage all the psychic fantasies which lie at the heart of the civilized order.
From Jeffrey Week’s preface to Homosexual Desire:
He argues that since the anus has been privatized by capitalist/phallic domination, we need to group it, which means, in effect, to reject the individualized notion of homosexuality as a problem. Practicing homosexuals are those who have failed their sublimation, who therefore can and must conceive their relationships in different ways. So when homosexuals as a group publicly reject their labels, they are in fact rejecting Oedipus, rejecting the artificial entrapment of desire, rejecting sexuality focused on the Phallus…
He argues that when the anus recovers its desiring functions, when laws and rules disappear, group pleasures will appear without the sacred difference between public and private, social and individual. And Hocquenghem sees signs of this sexual communism in institutions of the gay subculture, where scattering or promiscuity, representing polymorphous sexuality in action reigns…
To fail one’s sublimation is in fact merely to conceive social relations in a different way. Possibly, when the anus recovers its desiring function and the plugging-in of organs takes place subject to no rule or law, the group can then take its pleasure in an immediate relation where the sacrosanct difference between public and private, between the individual and the social, will be out of place. We can find traces of this state of primary sexual communism in some of the institutions of the homosexual ghetto, despite all the repression and guilty reconstructions which these undergo: in Turkish baths, for example where homosexual desires are plugged in anonymously, in spite of ever-present fears that the police may be present.
The Parasites of Society
We’ll turn briefly to another of Hocquenghem’s texts: The Screwball Asses. In it, he levels a critique of the (communist and homosexual) Left that is quite applicable to the various leftist and revolutionary political formations we still encounter.
His simple yet crucial pronouncement is that “to demand the recognition of homosexuality as it is is simple reformism.” This single line foregrounds our entire refusal of identity politics and the quest for intelligibility with which it is solely concerned.
He continues:
Like the women’s liberation movement that inspired it, the revolutionary homosexual platform emerged with Leftism and traumatized it to the point of contributing to its debacle. But while they fissured Leftism by revealing its phallocentric morphology and its censure of marginal sexualities (and of sexuality in general), these autonomous movements, despite their refusal of hierarchy, continued and continue to replicate the conditioned reflexes of the political sector that produced them: logomachy, the replacement of desire by the mythology of struggle.
Politics, even a queer politics, must always be based on the sacrifice of desire in the service and representation of this or that struggle. For Hocquenghem, activist structures and militant organizations are as much a part of the self-constituted prisons he argues against. He goes on to write: “We might have hoped that homosexuality could tear classic activism away from non-desire and create a true celebration of our colluding desires, but that was without taking into account the bad conscience of homosexuals. We must admit that the wildfire was short-lived.”
We’d be wrong to apply this formulation solely to the activity of mainstream LGBT activist groups. This fundamental limit of political activism is applicable to the most radical queer or militantly anarchist individuals. Militancy and activism can only ever guarantee a short-lived wildfire, which cannot ever sustain the flames of an unintelligible drive of queerness and anarchy. Guy writes of militants that “they freeze the event into a role,” and “the militants of the gay movement have just as much of a natural tendency to become specialists on homosexuality as psychiatrists and social workers.”
Guy continues:
Leftism has passed through, and Leftism dries up whatever it touches. Whatever comes from Leftism will remain permeated by terrorism and factionalism. For fear of not following the tacit scripture or counter-scripture that is supposed to unite us, in that environment we always feel as if we were the students or the professors of those who have spoken last, even if this is against our will. We could even say that the desire to deconstruct all relations of power, the uninterrupted lookout for relations of power, creates an additional, hallucinatory power relation. Of course within the FHAR, there are and have been attempts made to reject this whole mechanism of the persecuted and the persecutor, but the crisis has not been resolved. Today, the collective body of revolutionary queers lies emptied, lifeless and useless; and this happened faster to the FHAR than to any other leftist group.
While he situates his critique through his own experience with the FHAR, we can each surely locate mistaken investments of our own energy into similar revolutionary groupings, and the way that burnout inevitably accompanies such an engagement. If are constantly resisting the feelings of emptiness, lifelessness and uselessness, we should pay close attention to the fields of activity in which we’re engaged, and attempt to locate what vampiric forms are depleting our energy. We’ll undoubtedly find that always this depressive ennui is situated in a dynamic where joyous experiments in desire are subjugated to the sacrificial call of “the struggle.”
In his characteristic style of innuendo, Guy goes tackles the anxiety that characterizes activism:
The leftist is nether a player, nor a jouisseur; he just drills people, regardless of whether he wants to liberate homosexuality or the proletariat. Never overwhelmed, the Leftist just saves himself for next time. The Leftist does not have time on his side. He’s always in a rush. He produces speed everywhere so as to force you into hysterics or into a daze. But its not the kind of speed that propels you far away so that you find yourself stunned at having covered so much ground, stunned by the change of perspective and of thinking. Instead, its the haste of the monkey scratching at the same spot till a sore develops.
The Guy [!] describes is located in the terrorizing hold that the Future has upon activists. Because a better tomorrow requires tremendous ‘good work’ today, Leftists of all stripes are caught in a never-ending anxiety of activity, yet never get any nearer to their fleeing utopias. That the revolution is so close on the horizon and yet flees from us means that we can’t afford the immature and irresponsible practices of jouissance which could distract from the sombre struggle at hand. The ideology of Leftism is truly a living death for all who it entrances. Leftists argue that we must destroy power relationships, and yet they leave unchallenged the power relationship of reproductive futurism which necessitates an endless project of self-discipline and self-control.
Hocquenghem argues that opposed to this sombre struggle must be an insurgent project based in joy. “Strangely enough,” he writes, “whenever we speak of joy, professional revolutionaries only hear what churches or ideologies have put there.” We are not professional revolutionaries, nor joyless prophets interested in spreading ideology. Rather we must set our stake on practices of joy and jouissance resonating to unleash an insurgent contagion.
Here is Hocquenghem at his finest:
All revolutionaries will have to become parasites of society, and more and more irresponsibly at that, or they will still be the knights of some morality or another. Our energy is devoted to the destruction of the animal that feeds us.
Only such a project of parasitism could resist the dead ends of activist frenzy and militant escalation. We must live, fight and enjoy at the expense of our enemies. Such a project is a queer in that it must depart from the paths laid out for us and refuse the specialization and captivity to time inherent in activism.
Uncivilized Desire
In Hocquenghem’s work, the negative potential of queerness is intrinsically tied to his conception of desire. In Homosexual Desire, he puts it as follows:
If the homosexual image contains a complex knot of dread and desire, if the homosexual phantasy is more obscene than any other and at the same time more exciting, if it is impossible to appear anywhere as a self-confessed homosexual without upsetting families, causing children to be dragged out of the way and arousing mixed feelings of horror and desire, then the reason must be that for us twentieth-century westerners there is a close connection between desire and homosexuality. Homosexuality expresses something—some aspect of desire—which appears nowhere else, and that something is not merely the accomplishment of the sexual act with a person of the same sex.
Desire, not specifically homosexual, is the tendency within society which also figures its undoing. Desire is the polymorphous and perverse overflowing that refuses to be captured within Oedipal reproduction or locked up in identity. Queerness, in its association with desire, names the negativity which is the nightmare of the social order.
Desire, then, cannot be reduced to sexual attraction or orientation. Desire is a chaotic field which escapes representation, and so the repressive field of normative desire can only refer to it by the figures of those whose sexual practices are outside its matrix of intelligibility. The danger and fear associated with queerness are in relation to this unthinkability.
From Jeffrey Weeks’ introduction to Homosexual Desire:
For the aim is to find unalienated forms of radical social action, and these cannot be traditional centralized structures (especially of the working class), because these, too, are complicit with capitalism. The model of alternative modes was provided by the spontaneous forms of activity developed in France in ‘68, fusions of desire which escape the imprisoning force of the normal. Schizoanalysis provides the alternative: the schizophrenic is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process is the potential of revolution, and only in the activity of autonomous, spontaneous groupings, outside the social order, can revolution be achieved. The result, which is central to Hocquenghem’s project, is a worship of the excluded and marginal as the real material of social transformation.
In this analysis, we can draw important ties between Hocquenghem’s project and the insurrectionary anarchist project as we conceive it. The intertwining of the desires of autonomous groups in the process of struggle is exactly what we understand to be an insurrectionary process. Not the massified expansion of a party, but rather the multiplication and diffusion of anal groupings. Only by avoiding the old-forms of ‘revolutionary’ or ‘working class’ organization can we side-step the traps which are laid out by recuperation. To orient ourselves around desire, and to pursue the ‘blissful enjoyment of the present,’ would mean to disavow the progressive ideologies of reform, inclusion, movement building, or incremental change.
The homosexual does not seek a peaceful and harmonious adjustment to society, and his effusive inclination… leads him along a path of ceaseless struggle. In short, the homosexual has not developed into a partner of human society. Here, human society means of course the Freudian model, in which homosexuality can only find a place according to the sublimated Oedipal mode. On the other hand, the homosexual points the way to another possible form of relationship which we hardly dare call society.
Though the assimilationist tendencies of the homosexual movement have certainly proved that there isn’t anything inherently radical or anti-social about homosexuality, Hocquenghem is endeavoring here to describe a specific tendency within the movement which escaped representation. We might call this the Real of negativity so closely bound up in queerness, the desire for disorder hidden in the social order itself. The anti-social relationships which draw their potential from queerness could be understood as the potential for an autonomous movements against society.
The appearance of autonomous movements, movements which reject the law of the signifier all the more because they create a law for themselves, has completely upset the political world. The confusion is total, since the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of desire, the motor car and the family heterosexuality are one and the same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political logic.
Here Hocquenghem perfectly expresses the way in which desire is bound to a refusal of the future, a purely negative critique, and an anti-political praxis. Politics cannot rationally express why the motor car and the family are the same enemy of queerness. And yet, for us, it is abundantly obvious why these, and literally every other apparatus of modern society must be annihilated. Lacking the means to express this destructive desire through politics, only an anti-politics can elaborate a process by which queer desire can be materialized against the physical arrangement of the social order. The car, the family, the school, the prison, the boutique, the surveillance infrastructure: each an expression of a civilization in the face of which our most potent desire is its annihilation. For him, the undoing of civilization must be linked to a movement based in the uncontrollability of desire.
Hocquenghem again:
They gay movement appears basically uncivilized, and it is not without reason that many people see it as the end of reproduction and thus the end of the species itself. There is no point in speculating whether the class war might be replaced by a war of civilization, which would have the advantage of adding a cultural and sexual dimension to the political and economic struggle. Going to this extent would mean challenging the very concept of civilization, and we must retreat with Fourier to the notion of a struggle against civilization understood as the Oedipal succession of generations. Civilization forms the interpretive grid through which desire becomes cohesive energy. Wildcat movements among workers, actions which take place outside the commonly accepted political frameworks and which make no formal claims, not even for the seizure of power, are part of the disintegration of that coherence. The most honest leftists will cite the desire for a new society as evidence of absence. It is already too much to believe that the “wild-catter” is a future civilized person, as the child is a future adult. The gay movement is a wildcat movement because it is not the signifier of what might become a new form of social organization, a new stage in civilized humanity, but a crack in what Fourier calls the “system of the falsity of civilized loves”; it demonstrates that civilization is the trap into which desire keeps falling…. The great fear of homosexuality is translated into a fear that the succession of generations, on which civilization is based, may stop. Homosexual desire is neither on the side of death nor on the side of life: it is the killer of civilized egos.
And here, long before Edelman ever put pen to page, is the vital link between the fantasy of futurity, the construction of the coherent self, and their intersection in reproductive futurism. To oppose reproductive futurism, and the reproduction of the social order through the endless succession of generations, is to signify the end of civilization as well as the subjects which comprise it. This destruction is to be found in the degeneration and disintegration of social structures into the queer formations which exist in constant pursuit of jouissance and without a care for the future. The proliferation of these queer autonomous groups does not prefigure a better world; these groupings of desire can only confront civilization as a negative, anti-political, wild force.
This finds its echo in Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”:
Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth. If this is your path, as it is mine, let me offer whatever solace you may find in this monstrous benediction: May you discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your rage.
Our queer position against civilization is not based on some notion of naturalness, eternally linked as we are to signifying the outside of any idealized natural order. Queers must always figure those types of unregenerative, non-productive beings which have no place in a natural order. Neither is our struggle to prove the legitimacy of, or attempt to naturalize queerness. Nature itself is a disciplinary category of civilization used to define and classify wild life. Instead, as Stryker insists, we’ll ally ourselves with the ‘chaos and darkness’ from which nature spills forth. This chaos and darkness, being the same unintelligible force which Hocquenghem calls homosexual desire, which Edelman calls the death drive. We locate ourselves in the spilling forth of the same chaos which promises civilization’s undoing.
The Body and Language
In the same way that we’ve shown the indebtedness of Edelman’s critique to Hocquenghem in regard to his refusal of politics and positivity, it is equally important that we demonstrate the ways in which he also draws on Hocquenghem’s critique of language through the lens of jouissance. When Edelman criticizes the logic of intelligibility in politics, this is actually a rather shallow reading of Hocquenghem’s deeper criticism of language in general. For Guy, language is an apparatus within which desire is trapped and which must always fail in its project of representation. It is within this context that we can further explore the relationship of these ideas to anti-civilizational thought.
In The Screwball Asses, Hocquenghem deploys jouissance both as what escapes representation in language and also as the force which can interrupt the domination of language over life. Hocquenghem begins the essay with a small notice:
Let me begin with the admission that what follows is exclusively addressed to those individuals with whom I cannot make love. For everyone else, the festivity of bodies transforms speech into a servant of the body, nothing else. It is not useless to specify this: we only speak of sex in front of people with whom it does not take place or who likewise admit to having no desire for us.
With this caveat, he insists on a fundamental incapacity of language to capture the form of bodily struggle he argues for. Following him, our struggle must also begin from this disjunction. We engage with language insofar as we can deploy it in service of the body. We speak, we put word to paper in order to send a wink to those with whom we have not yet or cannot at present conspire in a practice of jouissance. For if sex is unspeakable, that does not however exclude speaking from being a sexual medium. For our co-conspirators, those with whom we’ve shared unmentionable experiences, these words can only approach the real of our project, can only serve as feeble reminders of a covenant we share in the pursuit of wildness. For the rest, there is seduction.
Hocquenghem indicts all existing ‘radical’ discourses as party to this fundamental disjunction between the body and any attempt to capture its struggle within language:
Both for dialectical materialism and for psychoanalysis, the material is the non-body. All struggles for the return of the body have been so contaminated by the non-body that when they speak of the body they only accentuate its exile. We forget that the content of speech is only the container of our universe.
At several points throughout the text he implores his readers to break from the tyranny of language, “to speak with the body rather than with words, or to live our corporeality rather than speak of sexuality.” He asks, “when will we be able to shatter the power of words by the movement of our skins?”
This contradiction between the body and language is not unique to Hocquenghem’s thought. We’ll return to Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch, wherein she historicizes this contradiction and situates it in the process of the domestication of human beings. She argues that “one of the preconditions for capitalist development was the process that Michel Foucault defined as the ‘disciplining of the body,’ which in my view consisted of an attempt by the state and church to transform the individual’s powers into labor-power.”
She argues that this process of disciplining the body took the form of a conflict between reason and the passions of the body:
The outcome is reminiscent of the medieval skirmishes between angels and devils for the possession of the departing soul. But the conflict is now staged within the person who is reconstructed as a battlefield, where opposite elements clash for domination. On the one side, there are the forces of Reason: parsimony, prudence, sense of responsibility, self-control. On the other, the low instincts of the Body: lewdness, idleness, systematic dissipation of one’s vital energies. The battle is fought on many fronts because Reason must be vigilant against the attacks of the carnal self, and prevent “the wisdom of the flesh” from corrupting the powers of the mind. In the extreme case, the person becomes a terrain for a war of all against all.
Others have described this ‘war of all against all’ as the fundamental condition of an omnipresent civil war that is consistently raging, permeating the social order and interrupting the myth of social peace. This narrative is quite similar to a conception of queerness developed by Hocquenghem and later elaborated by Edelman, which understands queerness to be an ever-present violence, a potential which any body is capable of. If we follow Federici here in understanding the conflict between Reason (and its servant: language) and the Passion of the body, we can situate our queerness as a partisan force within this battle. Federici goes on:
This conflict between Reason and the Body, described by the philosophers as a riotous confrontation between the better and the lower sorts… the battle which 17th century discourse on the person imagines unfolding in the microcosm of the individual has arguably a foundation in the reality of the time. It is an aspect of that broader process of social reformation, whereby, in the age of reason, the rising bourgeoisie attempted to remold the subordinate classes in conformity with the needs of the developing capitalist economy… That battle against the body that has become its historic mark… The reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acquisition “the ultimate purpose of life,” instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs, thus it requires that we forfeit all spontaneous enjoyment of life.
Here we are reminded of Hocquenghem’s explanation of jouissance as “blissful enjoyment of the present.” Federici’s historicism temptingly offers a historical-material structure for the whole of our critique. The desperate struggle of bodies against the future and in pursuit of jouissance is the same struggle which opposes capitalist development from the beginning. The conquest of Reason over Passion corresponds to the domination of the bourgeois order over the rebel body, because it is precisely the same struggle, manifest in each and every body.
The body, emptied of its occult forces, could be caught in a system of subjection, whereby its behavior could be calculated, organized, technically thought and invested of power relations… The development of the body into a work-machine, [was] one of the main tasks of primitive accumulation…. Like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of all broken up, so that it could relinquish its hidden treasures. For while the body is the condition of the existence of labor-power, it is also its limit, as the main element of resistance to its expenditure. It was not sufficient then, to decide that in itself the body had no value. The body had to die so that labor-power could live.
Federici describes how this disciplinary war was waged so as to separate bodies from their capacity for jouissance, in order to commodify them as labor-power.
By transforming labor into a commodity, capitalism causes workers to submit their activity to an external order over which they have no control and with which they cannot identify. Thus, labor process becomes a ground of self-estrangement… This too leads to a sense of dissociation from the body, which becomes reified, reduced to an object with which the person ceases to be immediately identified.
It is this fundamental estrangement, located in the process of primitive accumulation which she says forms the basis of our contemporary alienation from our bodies, our terminal enslavement to abstraction and language.
Federici explains that this disciplinary violence has always focused on the eradication of non-productive ways of being:
The violence of the ruling class aimed at a radical transformation of the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any form of behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-discipline… Nakedness was penalized, as were many other unproductive forms of sexuality and sociality.
Here we see the tyranny of the Child traced back through time and embedded in language itself. The assault upon the body by Reason and Language has always been to eliminate all non-productive desires and capacities. Reproductive futurism then becomes the framework through which certain forms of social engagement are militarily enforced while others are eradicated.
This militaristic and scientific approach to disciplining the body functions through the body’s capture within language. Federici argues that “in mechanical philosophy we perceive a new bourgeois spirit that calculates, classifies, makes distinctions, and degrades the body only in order to rationalize its faculties, aiming not just at intensifying its subjection but at maximizing its social utility.” Here the linguistic and discursive institutions of Identity and Sexuality function alongside all other racializing and gendering apparatuses encode alienated bodies with particular values and functions—values and functions which serve to reproduce society in every body and every instant. Federici argues that this is necessary for the regime of any capitalist future.
From a capitalist viewpoint… here the future can be anticipated only insofar as the regularity and immutability of the system is assumed; that is, only insofar as it is assumed that the future will be like the past, and no major change, no revolution, will upset the coordinates of individual decision-making… The fixation of the body in space and time, that is, the individual’s spatio-temporal identification, is an essential condition for the regularity of the work-process.
She continues later:
Also from the point of view of the abstraction process that the individual underwent in the transition to capitalism, we can see that the development of the human machine was the main technological leap, the main step in the development of the productive forces that took place in the period of primitive accumulation. We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.
If Federici is correct, if our very bodies have been destroyed and re-made into work-machines, and if these machines are the original machines which constitute the capitalist social order, then we must take our very bodies as machines to be sabotaged; our very corporeality, as Hocquenghem argues, must be the field of combat.
The battlefield is within each of us. The war of passion against reason, beyond being an external struggle must also be a struggle we wage against ourselves. We must struggle no less violently within ourselves as individuals than we struggle against the external enemies who seek to enforce the disciplinary regime of society’s future. In the list of managers and police with whom we battle, we must include the managerial and policing apparatuses which operate in our very being.
We can return to Hocquenghem in The Screwball Asses to be reminded that “trying to destroy power is an even greater lure, especially if we neglect to shake off this very particular form of power called self-domination.” Starting from a critique of civilization, we can understand this self-domination as a result of our domestication into subjects. Locating language and symbolic thought as engines of this domestication then as a consequence, our very capacity to think has been colonized from birth onward through this process. As such, we must turn to those forms of struggle which are not justified by Reason. We must turn to that ineffable jouissance as a tool in combat against domestication. Let’s turn again to the critique of domestication so that we might employ their help in elaborating how we might break the forward motion of capitalist time.
To Destroy Sexuality; To Destroy Domestication
In the previous section that deals more closely with Edelman’s work, we cited Jacques Camatte in claiming that jouissance takes place as the destruction of the domestication intrinsic to civilization. In order to further elaborate Hocquenghem’s queer project against civilization, we’ll explore the concept of domestication and what it could mean to undo it.
Domestication, Oedipal to the core, is the process of the victory of our fathers over our lives; the ways in which the social order laid down by the dead continues to haunt the living. It is the residue of accumulated memories, culture and relationships which have been transmitted to us through the linear progression of time through the fantasy of the Child. It is this investment of the horrors of the past into the materiality of our present lives which ensures the perpetuation of civilization. To quote Camatte again from “Against Domestication”:
What is to stop people from transforming all these crises and disasters, which are themselves the result of the latest mutation of capital, into a catastrophe for capital itself? The explanation for this is to be found in the domestication of humanity, which comes about when capital constitutes itself as a human community. The process starts out with the fragmentation and destruction of human beings, and the final outcome is that capital is anthropomorphized.
And so, within the ideological constraint of reproductive futurism, revolt against civilization is unthinkable because capital has so thoroughly colonized our very being, that to imagine our own survival is to always already be thinking about the perpetuation of civilization through the self-reproduction of capital. We have no community to fight for, and no humanity to save, because both are already thoroughly disintegrated and have been replaced with the community of capital and its anthropomorphized subject: the civilized ego. To move on to Camatte’s later essay “The Wandering of Humanity”:
Today the human being has been engulfed, not only in the determination of class where he was trapped for centuries, but as a biological being. It is a totality that has to be destroyed. Demystification is no longer enough. The revolt of human beings threatened in the immediacy of their daily lives goes beyond demystification. The problem is to create other lives. This problem lies simultaneously outside the ancient discourse of the workers movement and its old practice, and outside the critique that considers this movement a simple ideology (and considers human beings an ideological precipitate).
It is a harsh reality to acknowledge that the restructuring which we have undergone through the process of domestication is more horrifying than to merely shape us as subject. Capital reaches to our very biology, the objective fact of our being in the world. Starting from there, we must further acknowledge that a struggle against civilization must also be a struggle against ourselves as we are, to destroy the structuring of our bodies as vessels of the social order. Here we must seek out, following Camatte’s previous insistence on jouissance, that series of self-shattering measures which could constitute a project against domestication. As Camatte puts it, “the human being is dead. The only possibility for another human being to emerge is our struggle against our domestication, our emergence from it.”
Camatte continues to elaborate in “Wandering”:
The phenomenon which emerges today does not in the least destroy the negative evaluation of capital, but forces us to generalize it to the class that was once antagonistic to it and carried within itself all the positive elements of human development and today of humanity itself. This phenomenon is the recomposition of a community and of human beings by capital, reflecting human community like a mirror. The theory of the looking glass could only arise when the human being became a tautology, a reflection of capital. Within the world of the despotism of capital neither a good nor an evil can be distinguished. Everything can be condemned. Negating forces can only arise outside of capital. Since capital has absorbed all the old contradictions, the revolutionary movement has to reject the entire product of the development of class societies. This is the crux of its struggle against domestication.
Here again, the projects of queer negativity and the struggle to destroy domestication intersect. Capital’s capture of every positivity in civilization mandates the purely negative project. And the tautology wherein capital and human beings perfectly express one another emphasizes the need for our project to, queerly, call into question our domestication into the various social roles. As Camatte writes, “each individual must be violent with him/herself in order to reject, as outside themselves, the domestication of capital and all its comfortable self-validating ‘explanations.’” It is for this reason that we concern ourselves with the queer desire to locate subjectivity’s sutures and tear them out.
In Hocquenghem’s work we find words that put so beautifully everything we would want to, so we will quote at length from “To Destroy Sexuality”:
Although the Capitalist order appears to be tolerant, it in fact has always controlled life through its affective aspects, constraining it to the dictates of its totalitarian organization based on exploitation, private property, male dominance, profit, and profitability. It exercises this control under all of its various guises: the family, schools, the work place, the army, rules, discourse. It unfailingly pursues its abject mission of castrating, oppressing, torturing, and mangling the body, all the better to inscribe its laws upon our flesh, to rivet into our unconscious its mechanisms for propagating slavery.
The capitalist state uses retention, stasis, scarification and neurosis to impose its norms and models, imprint its characters, assign its roles, promulgate its programs… It permeates our bodies, forcing its roots of death deep into our smallest crevices. It takes over our organs, robs us of our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, harnesses all of our ‘life’ productivity under its own paralyzing administration. It turns each of us into… a stranger to his own desires.
The forces of capitalist occupation continually refine their system of aggression, provocation, extortion so as to use it along with a massive reinforcement of social terror (individual guilt) to repress, exclude and neutralize all those practices of our will that don’t reproduce those forms of domination. And so this thousand-year-old reign of unhappy gratification, sacrifice, resignation, codified masochism and death perpetuates itself. Here reigns castration, reducing the ‘subject’ to a guilt-ridden, neurotic, industrious being, little more than a manual laborer.
This older order, reeking of rotting bodies, is indeed horrifying, but it has forced us to direct the revolutionary struggle against capitalist oppression there where it is most deeply rooted—in the living flesh of our own body….
We can no longer stand by idly while we are robbed of our mouths, our anuses, our sexual members, our guts, our veins… just so they can turn the into parts for their ignominious machine which produces capital, exploitation and the family.
We can no longer stand by idly while they control, regulate, and occupy our mucous membranes, the pores of our skin, the entire sentient surface of our body.
We can no longer stand by idly while they use our nervous system as a relay in the system of capitalist, federal, patriarchal exploitation. Nor while they use our brain as a means of punishment programmed by ambient power.
We can no longer not ‘come’ or hold back our shit, our saliva, our energy according to their laws with their minor, tolerated infractions. We want to explode the frigid, inhibited, mortified body that capitalism wants so desperately to make out of our living body…
Wanting the fundamental freedom to enter into these revolutionary practices entails our escaping from the limits of our own ‘self.’ We must turn the ‘subject’ within ourselves upside-down; escape from the sedentary, from the civilized state and cross the spaces of a limitless body; live in the willful mobility beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and repertory of normality…
We’re not concerned with simply breaking down [the] official sexuality as one would break down the condition of one’s imprisonment within any structure; we want to destroy it, to get rid of it because in the final analysis it functions as an infinitely repeating castration machine designed to reproduce everywhere and in everyone the unquestioning obedience of a slave…
What we want, what we desire, is to kick in the representations so that we might discover just what our living body is.
We want to free, release, unfetter and relieve this living body so as to free all of its energies, desires, passions crushed by our conscriptive and programed social system.
We want to be able to exercise each of our vital functions experiencing their full complement of pleasure.
We want to rediscover sensations as basic as the pleasure in breathing that has been smothered by the forces of oppression and pollution; or the pleasure in eating and digesting that has been interrupted by the rhythm of profitability and the ersatz food it produces; or the pleasure in shitting and sodomy that has been systematically assaulted by the capitalist establishment’s opinion of the sphincter. It inscribes directly upon this flesh its fundamental principles: the power lines of exploitation, the neurosis of accumulation, the mystique of property and propriety, etc. We want to rediscover the pleasure in shaking ourselves joyously, without shame, not because of need or compensation, but just for the sheer pleasure of shaking ourselves. We want to rediscover the pleasures of vibrating, humming, speaking, walking, moving, expressing ourselves, raving, singing—finding pleasure in our body in all ways possible…
We seek to open our bodies to other bodies, to another body; to transmit vibrations, to circulate energies, to arrange desires so that each is free to play out its fantasies and ecstasies so that we might live without guilt and without inhibiting all the sensual intra- and interpersonal practices we need so our day-to-day reality won’t turn into the slow agony that capitalism and bureaucracy project as a model existence. We seek to rip out of ourselves the festering rumor of guilt that for thousands of years has been at the root of all oppression…
We want to be rid of all roles and identities based on the phallus.
We want to be rid of sexual segregation. We want to be rid of the categories of man and woman, gay and straight, possessor and possessed, greater and lesser, master and slave. We want instead to be transsexual, autonomous, mobile and multiple human beings with varying differences who can interchange desires, gratifications, ecstasies, and tender emotions without referring back to tables of surplus value or power structures that aren’t already in the rules of the game.
Birds of Fire
To conclude our elaboration of queerness as wildness, as a madness attacking the civilized social order, we’ll return briefly to Edelman’s critique in No Future. In keeping with his academic field of cultural criticism, he turns to a series of works of literature and film in order to structure his argument. While we find most of this navel-gazing to have absolutely no application outside of the academy, we’ll critically engage with one such object of Edelman’s work: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
In his engagement with Hitchcock’s classic horror film, Edelman argues that the antagonists of the film, the birds, represent what he describes as the future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive, which is queerness, flying over the San Francisco Bay and interrupting various manifestations of familial order and heteronormativity.
The choice of the children’s party for this first fully choreographed attack suggests the extent to which the birds take aim at the social structures of meaning that observances like the birthday party serve to secure and enact: take aim, that is, not only at children and the sacralization of childhood, but also at the very organization of meaning around structures of subjectivity that celebrate, along with the day of one’s birth, the ideology of reproductive necessity.
Edelman, following Hocquenghem, describes the way in which the birds function against the hegemony of language, erratically singing and screeching, warning of the immanence of their attack. This is not unlike those ancient descriptions of ‘barbarians at the gates’ which depict civilization’s enemies as being horrifyingly incoherent, waging war not only against the material foundations of civilization, but also against its tyranny of reason. Edelman describes Hitchcock’s birds: “The verses they sing perversely veer from sense to nonsense, back and forth, with no clear sense of direction, mixing narrative fragments that allude to a failure of heterosexual domesticity.” He goes on:
We might suggest that the birds in Hitchcock’s film, by virtue of fucking up—and with—the matrix of heterosexual mating, desublimate the reproductive rites of the movie’s human lovebirds, about which, as about the products of which, they don’t give a flying fuck. They gesture, that is, toward the death drive that lives within reproductive futurism, scorning domestication in the form of romance, which is always the romance of the Child…
They come because coming is what they do, arbitrarily and unpredictably, like the homosexuals Keyes condemns for promoting “a paradigm of human sexuality divorced from family and procreation, and engaged in solely for the sake of… sensual pleasure and gratification.” They come, that is, to trace a connection, as directly as the crow flies, between disorder in the family and the rupture, the radical loss of familiarity, unleashed byjouissance.
Edelman works here to tie together, through the symbol of the birds, the irrationality of queerness with the refusal of reproductive futurism. For him, the birds represent the flooding forth of bodies taken by jouissance, bodies without a care for the law or heteronormativity or the mandates of reproductive futurism.
Insofar as the birds bear the burden of [queerness], which aims to dissociate heteronormativity from its own implication in the drive, it would, in fact, be more accurate to say that the meaning of homosexuality is determined by what the film represents in them: the violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance, which find their perfect expression in the slogan devised by Hitchcock himself for the movie’s promotion, “the birds is coming.”
He describes the birds in a way not unlike the terror with which servants of order will always describe resistance to such order: “more and more birds, indistinguishable, all as similar to each other as clones, alight as the visual antitypes to the reproductive future, that the children as figures of increase themselves, should signify and assure.” This moblike anonymity is the hallmark of the ways in which states consistently describe their enemies. Whether foreign or domestic, anti-state resistance is always cast as the faceless, indistinguishable, animalistic mob: the black bloc, fantastic terrorists, irrational rioters, sexual deviants—always the dark formless mass of the Other functions to terrorize a social order predicated on recognition, rationality and normalcy.
Edelman describes the birds as “the unacknowledged ghosts that always haunt the social machinery and the unintelligibility against which no discourse of knowledge prevails.” As enemies of society embedded within it, we obviously find ourselves in this reading. As those whose desires cannot possibly be captured within the fields of political intelligibility, we must see the birds as symbolizing our own struggle. A struggle that Edelman describes as waged against “the domestication, the colonization, of the world by meaning.”
While he never cites it, it is abundantly obvious that in describing this domestication of the world by meaning, Edelman is borrowing heavily from Hocquenghem’s understanding of the body as colonized by language through the process of domestication. Edelman here deploys the birds as a metaphor for the bodily struggle within which Hocquenghem located himself and his comrades, the same which we understand to be our own.
Edelman, one last time: “Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the world because they so hate the world that will not accept them that they, in turn, will accept nothing but the destruction of that world.”
Here we must understand ourselves as the birds or else the text offers us nothing. Our project is to lay waste to the world, and so it cannot base itself upon a tame survey of film and literature. No, if we are to accept nothing less than the destruction of the world then we must indict Edelman’s fields of study as being intimately tied to the self-reproduction of that world. We must dispose of the baggage of art and academy, but in doing so we must expropriate those dangerous kernels of subversion which the academy only holds by having taken them from us in the first place. If we are to take anything from Edelman and his birds, it must be the conception of resistance as a storm-like mass, a de-centralized swarm of bodies ceaselessly attacking their enemies. Pursuant to a reading of the birds, our storm must be irrational, incomprehensible, anonymous, mob-like, offensive, de-meaning, incoherent, and unrelenting.
We can follow Halberstam again in critiquing Edelman’s apolitical attachment to his field and in imagining another monstrous form such resistance could take. Halberstam writes:
In my work on “alternative political imaginaries,” the alternative embodies the suite of “other choices” that attend every political, economic and aesthetic crisis and their resolutions. Queerness names the other possibilities, the other potential outcomes, the non-linear and non-inevitable trajectories that fan out from any given event and lead to unpredictable futures. In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, social historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker trace what they call “the struggles for alternative ways of life” that accompanied and opposed the rise of capitalism in the early seventeenth century. In stories about piracy, dispossessed commoners and urban insurrections, Linebaugh and Rediker detail the modes of colonial and national violence that brutally stamped out all challenges to middle-class power and that cast proletarian rebellion as disorganized, random and apolitical. Linebaugh and Rediker emphasize instead the power of cooperation within the anti-capitalist mob and they pay careful attention to the alternatives that this “many headed hydra” of resistant groups imagined and pursued. We need to craft a queer agenda that works cooperatively with the many other heads of the monstrous entity that opposes global capitalism…
We turn to a history of alternatives, contemporary moments of alternative political struggle and high and low cultural productions of a funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible queer negativity. If we want to make the anti-social turn in queer theory, we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy!
While we appreciate Halberstam’s attempt to situate the monstrosity of queer negativity within Linebaugh and Rediker’s history of insurrection and revolt, we must again criticize Halberstam’s partial critique. While our resistance may very well take the form of a many-headed hydra, those heads are not “alternative possibilities” or “political imaginaries.” Nor are they modes of artistic expression.
If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.
Thankfully, the monstrous tendency we refer to is not something solely trapped up in history books or pitifully represented in various cultural productions. Rather, is a living, dynamic, queer tendency intrinsic to and perpetually at war with the social order. We can see it in the fires across the world, illuminating the reality that everywhere bodies are refusing their enslavement to civilization’s future. We see the monster’s shadow in the strikers in Montreal who refuse the future-oriented appeasement offered by the State and whose attacks have spilled over from a student strike toward social war. We see this also in Seattle, where a mob smashed symbols of capital and law on this May Day. We see it in San Francisco and Oakland where the dispossessed and excluded converge and disperse with an erratic rhythm so as to lay siege to police stations, attack yuppie establishments, burn cars and spread havoc. In New York, we see bodies throwing themselves into the metropolitan abyss so as to snarl and obstruct the unending flows. Across the globe, wild bodies are finding one another and engaging in the timeless conspiracy against the existent. In every nation, they burn, they loot, they sabotage, they maim. The birds continue to fly together, to tear and peck and shred the sinews of a social order they detest.
Some beautiful expressions of this tendency toward wildness are to be found in the actions and writings of individualist anarchists in the territory dominated by the Chilean State. We’ll excerpt one particular communique issued by some beautiful birds within the storm-like fight being carried out there. This is from “The Revolt Continues Until Total Liberation” by the Individualist Cell of Birds of Fire:
There they were, the voracious youth again, destroying everything, erecting barricades, clashing with police, nothing could stop them… There is fire and passion in their hearts, love and hatred in their insides, courage and decision. The beauty of chaos has returned to grace the streets, it is not only fire that adorns the asphalt, it is also the energy of the youth, the abolition of the sexes, everyone in the struggle…
To raze the school is possible today, like was done in… those places intentionally lit ablaze by those beautiful pajarillas who understand that this destruction is a great step towards the conquest of life…
The journey is intense and difficult, it always has been, when individuals fed up with their miserable conditions organize and attack. One cannot be afraid of those who organize only for one specific goal although it is only to destroy, because at this point we know that to build, we must destroy… And all the reasoning these petty politicians supposedly have when they talk about the problem of education does nothing for anyone, because the discontent grows and advances, although the bureaucrats and businessmen almost always end up winning.
And they believe that to repress passion is a simple thing, that with a little tear gas and a little water they will snuff it out, like any other flame, so they will have to be reminded that they are wrong, again and again, those idiots.
The night always illuminates our steps, just like free love allows us unlimited bliss, to find us with the beautiful silence of obscurity, or at the feet of the fresh rays of the rising sun; (rays which don’t caress those awkward workers drooling over the bus windows and subway glass), running into the heat of a barricade, it’s magic, like something supreme, or can only God be supreme? We burn the churches with their pedophile priests inside, we watch those cowardly abusers from the front to spit in their faces… another day comes, but this is one of the beautiful ones, because we will combine the sun that caresses us with its heat with an emancipatory fire full of joy and hope…
Here are the barricades again, with those sensual forms we are drawn by the fire…
The individual who moves toward the greatest happiness possible will never stumble, her journey is unique and without equal, there is nothing that can stop her, not the cops in red who beat her with sticks, not morality imposing its limits, not the police infiltrators who dirty her path, not the din of their sirens to silence her… imposing norms, morals, discipline, gods and their idiotic doctrines, we always forget society and its dominions, and cast ourselves naked into an encounter with our inner beings…
“We feel alive when we shudder with the perfume of the flowers, with the songs of the birds, with the crashing of the waves, the sound of the wind, the silence of solitude,”[1] we feel alive when we tremble with the heat of the fire, with the caress of chaos, with the nights of revolt…
“We rushed into the chasm, to respond to the voices of our dead,”[2] they who died fighting with weapons in their hands and immense golden stars in their eyes, those who are immortal like punky Mauri, like Claudia Lopez, who on any given night found themselves facing death so gracefully. Yes, because those of us who choose to live an intense and dangerous life, death receives us with open arms, caresses us and kisses us…
Why don’t we fear death? Because “we are used to thinking that death is nothing to us, because everything, good and bad, resides within sensation and death is the deprivation of the senses. Death is nothing to us because when we exist, death is absent and, when death is present, then we no longer exist.”[3]
It’s true, we want everything, we dream of huge banquets and shun bread and tea, we want grand orgies and reject monogamy. We believe in free love because we know “that jealousy, and exclusive romance, conjugal fidelity, kills off part of the self, impoverishes sentimental personality, narrows analytical horizons, among other things. And furthermore, in love as in almost everything else, it is only abundance which annihilates jealousy and envy…”[4] We want to run together with the animals in the fields and the forests, we want to bathe naked on the beaches, rivers and lakes and not end up at a precinct for indecency.
“We reassert the right to live naked, to take off our clothes, to wander naked, to join together among nudists without any concern of discovering the body’s resistance to temperature, this is to affirm the right to the disposition of individual corporeality…”[5]
The revolt is here, we must increase our participation, our generous egoism needs to contribute, for now, to the struggle, to gather and organize ourselves for specific ends such as destruction, enjoyment, loving camaraderie, encounters with chaos, advancing towards the dawn of the creative nothing, then returning to our hiding places, to rejoice and dance with the birds, to nourish ourselves with the energy of the trees, to feel the ocean breeze, to hear the lovely melody of the wind…
We have already said it and we’ll say it again: our revolution has already begun, we make it from day to day, making free love, declaring ourselves against every god and religion, deconstructing the dominating language that they imposed on us, openly opposing any society, we make it when we stop being men and women and become unique human beings.
To put it quantitatively: among boundless occupations, ours is the search for total satisfaction, endless joy, pleasure, eternal happiness…
It is the hour of the social tragedy! We will destroy, laughing. We will burn, laughing. We will kill, laughing. We will expropriate, laughing. And society will fall. The fatherland will fall. The family will fall. Everything will fall, since the free man has been born. The time to drown the enemy in blood has arrived…[6]
Contrast the words of these comrades with Hocquenghem’s depiction of professional revolutionaries: “strangely enough, whenever we speak of joy, professional revolutionaries only hear what churches or ideologies have put there… the concept of joy is never brought up.”
It is easy enough here for us to allow the birds to speak for themselves. Everything is apparent in their words: revolt inextricable from joy, the pleasure and beauty of the struggle, the necessary destruction of gendered and sexual roles, the refusal of any morality and constraint on love and bodies, the intrinsic connection of pleasure and happiness to destruction, the association with the death drive, the insistence of jouissance, the refusal of any ideologues or politicians who would seek to manage revolt.
This tendency is not unique to particular territory, whether of the Chilean State or any other. Rather, everywhere that bodies conspire together to revolt against their futures, there will be, insisting against the possibility of a better future, we who take immediate enjoyment in destruction, in feasting, orgy, running wild, and bathing naked, in loving, hunting, dancing and laughter, and all the rest of life.
Alongside them, we must insist that our struggle be all at once queer, wild, destructive and joyous.
We’ll conclude with words that are taken from another communique claming the arson of a bank in Santiago of Chile:[7]
This action gestated in the eternal hatred of a life rotted by a world of adults, a boring life of cement and rules… in every time they categorize us in men and in women, in every day of school, in every punishment, in every childhood dream transformed into adult realism… in each one fallen, each one murdered, in each and every particle of bastard asphalt… Long live chaos, may chaos burn, may chaos smile on our lips, and may all of us who are against every form of oppression, may we every second of our daily lives laugh and dance in the ruins of the cities of the world and of the burning universe and its blazing caretakers… Fire to all the prisons! To all the families! To all the sexual genders! To all authority and all the cities…
[1] Emile Armand, “To Feel Alive”
[2] Renzo Novatore, “Toward the Creative Nothing”
[3] Epicurus
[4] Emile Armand, “Love Between Anarcho-Individualists”
[5] Emile Armand, “Nudism”
[6] Renzo Novatore, “Toward the Creative Nothing”
[7] In February 2012. See waronsociety.noblogs.org/?p=3330.