Uprisings. Jeux De Paume. 2016. George Didi Huberman.pdf

UPRISINGS

Cover:

Gilles Caron Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic demonstrations in Londonderry), 1969 Fondation Gilles Caron Endpapers:

Maria Kourkouta Remontages, 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

Georges Didi-Huberman

UPRISINGS With essays by

Gallimard | Jeu de Paume

Nicole Brenez Judith Butler Marie-José Mondzain Antonio Negri Jacques Rancière

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IV. WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP), 206 To strike is not to do nothing, 208 Demonstrate, put yourself at risk, 212 Vandal joys, 228 Building barricades, 234 Dying from injustice, 244

V. WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE), 254 The hope of those condemned to death, 256 Mothers rise up, 264 They are your own children, 270 They who go through walls, 274

Foreword by Marta Gili, 7 Introduction by Georges Didi-Huberman, 13

By The Desires (Fragments on What Makes Us Rise Up) by Georges Didi-Huberman, 289 Loss and uprisings, 289 The depths of the air are red, 290 Freiheitsdrang, the “upsurge of liberty”, 295 Zeros for conduct, 296 From the depths, 299 A gesture rises, 301 From contrition to uprising, 305 In order to throw your suffering overboard, 307 Potency against power, or the act of desire, 310 Duende of transgression, 315 The time of the revolt, 319 Masses and potency, 322 Even the newborn rises up, 328 Desire, struggle, domination, recognition, 332 Political eros, 336 Refusal, or the potential to do otherwise, 344 Desiring, disobeying, doing violence, 358 The message of the butterflies, 370

Uprising by Judith Butler, 23 Uprising as Event by Antonio Negri, 37 To “Those who sail the sea …” by Marie-José Mondzain, 46 One Uprising Can Hide Another by Jacques Rancière, 62 Counterattacks by Nicole Brenez, 71

PORTFOLIO I. WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED), 94 The elements become unleashed, time is out of joint, 96 And if the imagination made mountains rise up?, 104

II. WITH GESTURES (INTENSE), 116 From burden to uprising, 118 With hammer blows, 130 Arms rise up, 133 The pasión, 142 When bodies say no, 144 Mouths for exclaiming, 148

III. WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED), 156

Bibliographic index (texts cited), 384 Index of artists, 395

Poetic insurrections, 158 The message of the butterflies, 176 Newspapers, 186 Making a book of resistance, 190 The walls speak up, 198

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Marta Gili

FOREWORD

For almost a decade, the Jeu de Paume’s exhibition program has been conceived with the conviction that twenty-first century museums and cultural institutions cannot be detached from the social and political challenges of the society of which they are part. To us, this approach is a matter of simple common sense. The program it has shaped does not monitor market trends or seek complacent legitimacy within the field of contemporary art. Rather, we have chosen to work with artists whose poetic and political concerns are attuned to the need to critically explore the models of governance and practices of power that mold much of our perceptual and emotional experience, and thus, the social and political world we live in. Because the Jeu de Paume is a center for images, we are aware of the urgent necessity—in line with our societal responsibilities—to revise the analysis of the historical conditions in which photography and the moving image developed in modernity and, subsequently, in postmodernity, with all its alternatives, provocations, and challenges. Thankfully, the history of images and our ways of seeing and understanding the world through them is neither linear nor unidirectional. These are the sources of our fascination with images that don’t tell everything they show and with images affected by the vicissitudes of the human condition. Photography, and images in general, represent not only reality, but things that the human eye cannot see; like us, photography is capable of concealing, denying and sustaining. It is only waiting for someone to listen to its joys and its sorrows. The Jeu de Paume’s programming sites its oblique look at history and contemporaneity in this oscillation between the visible and the invisible in the life of images, creating a space for encounter and the clashing of ideas, emotions, and knowledge, accepting that the coexistence of conflict and antagonism are an essential part of community building.

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For these reasons, and from this position, in the superb proposal by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman to form an exhibition from his research on the theme of “uprisings,” we found the ideal intellectual, artistic, and museological challenge. While the notion of revolution, rebellion, and revolt isn’t alien in contemporary society’s vocabulary, the object of its action is replete with collective amnesia and inertia. That is why analyzing the representations of “uprisings”—from the etchings Goya, to contemporary installations, paintings, photographs, documents, videos, and films—demonstrates an unequivocal relevance to the social context in which we are living in 2016. Constructing a chronological narrative or an exhaustive review of “uprisings” is not the aim. Thousands of representations of the gesture to say “NO,” to shout “STOP,” or to raise the banner “THEY SHALL NOT PASS” exist. They are known by women, men, and children, by workers, artists, and poets, by those who cry out and those who are silent, by those who weep, who mourn and those who make them. “Uprisings” is a montage of these words, gestures, and actions, which defy submission to absolute power. The lament of the famous Cádiz poet Rafael Alberti seems fitting here:

Uprisings and submissions: for Alberti, two sides of the same coin. The wind defying gravity, its strength raising up bodies, salt, and sand, all toward the same destination; “the poor children of the sea,” the sailors of Cádiz, stripped of those siren songs, of the promises of a life lived with dignity, between sky and sea. These are the people, the earth’s dispossessed, Georges DidiHuberman refers to in this catalogue’s moving introductory essay. The thousands of human beings that pass through the walls of a society that has lost all transparency, all ability to let light pass through so that other bodies, other souls, may find their way; these visible beings, in flesh and images, wandering our streets, parading on our televisions, who are denied the status of lawful citizens. Uprisings confronts us with these and many other contradictions for which there are no words of consolation or gestures of indignation that could take the place of shared and solidary action, an action of “enough.” If only the elation of the poet’s song could awaken our senses! Cantad alto. Oiréis que oyen otros oídos. Mirad alto. Veréis que miran otros ojos. Latid alto. Sabréis que palpita otra sangre. Sing loud. You shall hear other ears hearing. Look high. You shall see other eyes looking. Beat loud. You shall know that other blood is pulsing.2

… Creímos en las sirenas que cantan entre las olas. Sus cantos nada nos dieron ni ayer ni ahora. … Somos los mismos que el viento nos tiró en las mismas olas. Los hijos pobres del mar, de ayer y ahora. … We believed in mermaids singing in the waves. Their songs gave us nothing not yesterday nor right now. … We are the same as the wind We are pulled into the same waves. The poor children of the sea, Yesterday and right now.1

The Jeu de Paume team wishes to thank Georges Didi-Huberman for his passion, enthusiasm, and involvement in carrying out of this colossal project. His intellectual generosity is without limit: he has not only engaged us all fully in the project, but has enriched and broadened our collective ability to think and to be energized. We wish to express our appreciation and admiration to this catalogue’s authors: Nicole Brenez, Judith Butler, Marie-José Mondzain, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, and Georges Didi-Huberman himself. The sensitivity of their reflections and depth of their thinking constitute a unique contribution to a publication of unprecedented quality. Without partners who firmly believe in the social and artistic relevance of such a project, it is not possible to create an exhibition of this caliber. Thus we are sincerely grateful to the four institutions, and their representatives, which will host Uprisings: Pepe Serra, director, and Juan José Lahuerta, curator, Museu Nacional d’Art de 1. Rafael Alberti, “Canción de los pescadores pobres,” in Ora Maritima, seguido de Baladas y Canciones del Paraná (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1953), 49.

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2. Rafael Alberti, “Balada para los poetas andaluces de hoy,” in Ora Maritima, seguido de Baladas y Canciones del Paraná (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1953), 159.

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Catalunya (MNAC), Barcelona; Aníbal Jozami, director, and Diana Wechsler, curator, Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (MUNTREF), Buenos Aires; Graciela de la Torre, director, and Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; and Louise Déry, director, Galerie de l’Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Guillaume Lafleur, curator of the Cinémathèque de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Jeu de Paume does not have its own collection. The works displayed in our exhibitions are shown thanks to the collaboration of collectors, and public and private institutions. To them we also wish to extend our profound thanks: it is their good will that has made this exhibition a reality. We would also like to express our gratitude to Maria Kourkouta and Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza for the commitment they brought to producing the original works commissioned by the Jeu de Paume for the exhibition; and to Marie Lechner for her exploration of the Uprisings theme on the Internet and social networks. Last but by no means least, we thank the Parisian designer Isabel Marant for her generous support of this project, and, as always, the Amis du Jeu de Paume.

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Georges Didi-Huberman

INTRODUCTION

HEAVINESS OF THE TIMES As I write these lines—March 2016—some thirteen thousand people fleeing the disasters of war find themselves practically arrested, parked as such, in Idomeni in northern Greece. Macedonia has decided to close its borders, but it is officially Europe as a whole, by the opportunistic and strangely cowardly voice of its leaders (but doesn’t history show us that a single political cowardice is very costly in the long term?), which is denying these people the minimum hospitality that any sense of ethics should expect, and that is proscribed, furthermore, by the rules of international law. What fate awaits people when we start to confuse the foreigner with the enemy? The sky, therefore, is heavy, in whatever way we wish to understand it. It is raining in Idomeni today. The people, deprived of everything now, wait for hours in the mud for a single hot cup of tea or for medicine. Members of non-governmental organizations and, even more so, independent solidarity groups work to the point of exhaustion, while soldiers calmly keep watch over the barbed wire. Yet, many Greeks in the region come spontaneously to bring aid: having little themselves, dispossessed by the “austerity” imposed on them by the European government, they give what they can, which is invaluable: consideration, hospitality, clothes, medicines, food, smiles, words, and someone to look with sincerity. It seems they have not forgotten one of their first great poets: Aeschylus wrote The Suppliants 2,500 years ago—a recent French translation was called Les exilées, meaning “the exiled women”—and it is a tragedy that is directly linked to the founding myth of Europe, and which tells how “black” women from the Middle East were received in Argos according to the sacred law of hospitality, which conflicts with the political and governmental calculation that their welcome brought about.1 1. Aeschylus, The Suppliants, trans. Alan Sommerstein, Penguin Classics, London, 2009. Aeschylus, Les Exilées, trans. Irène Bonnaud (Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestifs, 2013).

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commitment to it—this is its hallmark.”3 This diagnostic has lost none of its relevance today. Everyone, or almost everyone, knows that you have no illusions in obscurity, unless you are bombarded with billions of puppets, as on the walls of a Platonic cave filled with plasma screens. It is one thing not to have any illusions in the obscurity, or in front of the puppets in the imposed show, but it is another thing to fall back into the deadly inertia of submission, be it melancholic, cynical, or nihilistic submission.

It’s raining in Idomeni. People want to flee, to find refuge, and they cannot. The sky is heavy over their heads, their feet become stuck in the mud, and the barbed wire would tear the skin from their hands if they dared to approach the border. The sky is heavy over their heads, but I know that there is only one sky on earth, and so we are in direct contact with their fate. Indeed, I have not been to Idomeni: I am writing these words from hearsay and visual testimonies. Furthermore, I am writing this for the introductory section of an art catalogue. Yet I am not off topic, if you accept the idea that art has not only a history but also appears as the “eye itself” of history. Sadly, it is not the presence of Ai Weiwei in Idomeni—with his white piano and his specialized team of photographers—that will help anyone or anything with regard to this gaping question; the refugees showed themselves to be completely indifferent to this “performance,” with their thoughts elsewhere, waiting for something else. I can see that white piano, surreal in the middle of the wasteland of the camp, a derisory symbol of our good artistic consciences: white, like the walls of an art gallery, it merely evokes, in the end, the contrast by which we see, with heavy hearts, in Idomeni as elsewhere, the weight of the dark times on our contemporary lives. “Dark times”: that is how Bertolt Brecht spoke for his contemporaries, and from his own condition as a man surrounded by evil and danger, as a man in exile, as a fugitive, as a perpetual “migrant” who waited for months to receive a visa, and to cross a border. In contrast, Hannah Arendt used the same expression, a few years later, to draw from it a certain notion of “humanity” as such: the ethics of a Lessing or a Heine, that of free poetry and thinking, beyond any dominant political barbarities.2 Dark times. But what do we do when darkness reigns? You can wait, quite simply: you retreat, endure. You say that it will end at some point. You try to manage. At best, in the dark, you repaint your piano white. And as you get used to it—and this will happen soon, for humans are animals that adapt quickly—you start to expect nothing at all. The horizon of expectation, the temporal horizon, ends up disappearing in the gloom, just as any visual horizon does. Where there is limitless darkness, there is nothing more to expect. This is called submission to obscurity (or, if you prefer, obedience to obscurantism). This is called the death impulse, the death of desire. In a 1933 text titled “Experience and Poverty,” Walter Benjamin wrote that “here and there, the best minds have long since started to think in these terms [regarding these burning questions of the contemporary political context]. A total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited

TO LIFT UP OUR BURDENS Before he ever had to recognize the efficiency of the death impulse (it took him the First World War to do so), Sigmund Freud had asserted, at the end of his great book on dreams, that desire was indestructible—a magnificent hypothesis! How that ought to be true! The indestructibility of desire would make us seek, in obscurity, a light in spite of all, however hazy it may be. If you are lost in a forest in the night, the light of a faraway star, or of a candle behind a window, or of a firefly nearby will be astonishingly beneficial. This is when the times rise up. Enclosed in their dark cells from the beginning of the twentieth century, the Andalusian anarchist or the Gypsy thief of three olives had invented a particular style of “prisoners’ songs” called carceleras, in which it was often said that their horizon of aspiration could depend entirely on the glow of a burning cigarette in the blackness: A mí me metieron en un calabozo donde yo no veía ni la luz del día gritando yo me alumbraba con el lucerito que yo incendía.  They threw me in a prison cell Where I could not see the light of day Crying out I made my light Under the little star that I lit for myself.

2. Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing” (1959), trans. Clara and Richard Winston, Men in Dark Times (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983), 3–32.

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3. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 733. 4. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 3. Wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment (1938–59), trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

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And so the voice, in this context, was the best way to desire, to speak to each other, to pierce the darkness, or to cross the perimeter. The little light, for its part, could guide the prisoner towards what Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, called “wishful-images,” that is to say, images that can become prototypes or “guiding figures of venturing beyond the limits.”4 

The “dark times” are so dark only because they knock against our foreheads, press down on our eyelids and offend our gaze. Like limits placed on both our bodies and our thoughts. In reality (if we look at them from a distance) they are gray. Gloomy gray of rainy skies and, above all, anthracite gray of the barbed wire, of the weapons, or the lead used by the cruellest prisons. The dark times are leaden times. Not only do they prevent our ability to see beyond and, therefore, to desire, but they weigh heavily upon our necks, upon our skulls, and as such they suffocate our ability to want and to think. With this paradigm of weight or of lead, the word submission has a more obvious and more physical meaning. But we should understand, then, that the desire against this—the survival of desire in the space that was conceived for neutralizing it—finds its full meaning in the word uprising, and in the gesture that this word suggests. Should we not, at every instant, raise up our many lead screeds? And for this should we not rise up ourselves and, necessarily—for the screed is so vast and the lead so heavy—rise up in numbers? There is no single scale for uprisings: they go from the tiniest gesture of retreat to the most gigantic movement of protest. What are we underneath the lead of the world? We are at the same time vanquished Titans and dancing children, perhaps future victors. Vanquished Titans, like Atlas and his brother Prometheus, who had once risen up against the unilateral authority of the gods of Olympus, then defeated by Zeus and punished, the one to carry the weight of the sky on his shoulders (a sidereal punishment), the other to have his liver devoured by a vulture (visceral punishment). This is how Titans became the “guilty,” punished by Olympian law. According to a fate shared by many uprisings, they failed therefore to take power on Olympus. This is not the story’s only lesson. They had actually liberated humanity by transmitting to humans—in order to share or to pool—a crucial part of the power of the masters: a certain knowledge (for Atlas, the science of the earth and the stars) and a certain know-how (for Prometheus, the mastery of fire). Where the Titans had failed in the confrontation for power, they succeeded in the transmission of a certain potency—the potency of a knowledge and of a know-how that could be extended indefinitely. And God knows if the gods do not like it when their open secrets are shared with everyone. It is enough, for example, to rub two stones together in darkness to obtain the miracle of fire and light. We can imagine that this successful transmission provided the foundations for new confrontations, future confrontations between Titans—allied or mixed with the human race—and the gods of

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Olympus. We can imagine that, one day, the Titan Atlas, having sung his last carcelera, would throw his burden, in a grand gesture of liberating uprising, over his long-bruised shoulders. He could, then, exclaim his desire once and for all: expose his drive for life and for freedom in front and for everyone, in the public domain and in the time of history. Two decades after the French Revolution had ignited minds in Europe, Francisco de Goya was able to give shape to this luminous exclamation in the fabric of the lumpenproletariat, somewhere between the carrier fatefully crushed under his burden ( fig. 1) and the worker claiming—albeit first of all “for nothing,” that is to say to obtain nothing decisive in this history that is only open to him—his revolt ( fig. 2). This is the gesture—a gesture of uprising—that will be the object of my examination and research here.

EVIDENCE OF UPRISINGS

5. Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes. L’œil de l’histoire, 6 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016). 6. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?, trans. Shane Lillis (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010).

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I was already following this line of questioning—all that was needed was the montage between the gestures represented as though successively in the two drawings by Goya, and successive reflections on the representations of revolt in Eisenstein5—when, a few months ago, Marta Gili asked me to imagine an exhibition for the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The evidence of Uprisings: it sufficed that Atlas, the hero of an earlier exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid,6 should find the energy, the free potency to throw his burden—and with it his failure, his sadness—over his shoulders and in the face of his bosses on Olympus. As I write these lines, I do not know, finally, what will come of the montages of works that we are attempting to bring together, in the disjunction that occurs sometimes between what we might have wished and what is actually impossible to obtain for this type of undertaking (with its specific material constraints): it is no easier to move large paintings by Joan Miró or Sigmar Polke than it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or Daumier’s The Uprising. But these possibilities remain immense, given how true it is that the uprising is a gesture without end, continually starting again, sovereign just as we can call sovereign the desire itself or that instinct, the “push towards freedom” (Freiheitsdrang) that Sigmund Freud spoke of. So, the domain of uprisings is potentially infinite. In this sense, the roaming, the traveling that has already been planned for this exhibition—to Barcelona, Montréal, Mexico, and Buenos Aires—will be the opportunity for a constant reformulation or heuristic transformation through which, I hope, new aspects of the uprising—

political, historical , and aesthetic aspects—will be deployed. To this pleasure in research—which is infinite, since learning, discovering, inventing new montages that can give life to new emotions and offer new paradigms for thought are never finished—must be added, nonetheless, the fact that anxiety will also play a part, and even that it will be infinite: “the anxious gay science,” according to what we learned from both Friedrich Nietzsche and Aby Warburg.7 This is because such an endeavor is not without fundamental pitfalls, nor without contradictions: why should a list of works for exhibition be limited when their study is not? The essay offered in this catalogue, though long and armed with an extensive bibliography, is actually only a start to the examination needed of philosophical, historical, political, and aesthetic questions regarding uprisings. It is for this reason that Marta Gili and I believed it was necessary to call upon thinkers or researchers from different horizons—Nicole Brenez, Judith Butler, Marie-José Mondzain, Antonio Negri, and Jacques Rancière, who will be joined by other figures during a planned study day—who have their own experiences and histories with regard to this question of uprisings. One final contradiction, though not the least, could be formulated as follows: do we not betray these very particular “objects”—uprisings that are not only “objects” but gestures or acts—when we make them “objects” of an exhibition? What do uprisings become and what comes of their energy on the white walls of the white cube or in the vitrines of a cultural institution? Does the objection to the white piano not risk turning back on itself in the distance that separates every exhibition from what it speaks of? Some will think perhaps that such a project of aesthetics—since it has to do above all with showing images, many of which are works of art—merely aestheticizes and, as a result, anaesthetizes the practical and political dimension inherent in any uprising. By proposing to bring such images together, in the public space of an exhibition, I am not attempting to create a standard iconography of rebellions (which would undermine them), nor am I attempting to draw a historical tableau, or even a trans-historical “style,” of uprisings either past or present (which, in any case, would be an impossible task). Instead, it is a question of testing that hypothesis, or more simply, this question: How do images draw so often from our memories in order to give shape to our desires for emancipation? And how does a “poetic” dimension manage to be created in the very heart of our gestures of uprising and as a gesture of uprising? It suffices to recall Baudelaire’s words from 1848 in Le Salut public or those of Rimbaud from 1871 in his Lettres du voyant, or the drawings of Courbet or

fig. 1

fig. 2 Francisco de Goya, The Porter, c. 1812–23. Scraper, brush, and sepia ink wash on white laid paper, 20.3 × 14.3 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

7. Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’œil de l’histoire, 3 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2011).

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Francisco de Goya, No haras nada con clamar (Crying out will get you nowhere), c. 1814–17. Ink drawing on paper, 26.5 × 18.1 cm. Private collection.

of Daumier, or the films of Eisenstein or of Pasolini. It suffices to remember the avant-garde phrase from the end of the First World War: “Dada makes everything rise up!” Is the same thing not happening today when, in its modest calendar of 2016—which does not claim to be a work of art—the Social Solidarity Infirmary of Thessaloniki, where the worst off are cared for, those that the state health services no longer want, juxtaposes Joan Miró’s The Hope of a Condemned Man and the No of the Greeks to the current austerity plans, the barricades constructed by the women in Barcelona in 1936 and the great gestures addressed by the rescuers to the Syrian refugees on the Mytilene coast? A poem by Jorge Luis Borges accompanies this particularly current image captured by a volunteer caregiver ( fig. 3): The Just A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess. The potter, contemplating a colour and a form. The typographer who set this page well, though it may not please him. A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, unaware, are saving the world.8

fig. 3 Pages from the 2016 calendar (July 4–10) by the collective of the Social Solidarity Infirmary, Thessaloniki.

We not rise up without a certain force. What is it? Where does it come from? Is it not obvious—for it to be exposed and transmitted to others—that we must be capable of giving it a form? A political anthropology of images should start from the fact that our desires need the energy of our memories, provided we create a form therein, a form that does not forget its origin and that, therefore, becomes capable of reinventing possibilities.

8. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Just” (1981), trans. Alistair Reid, Selected Poems, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Coleman (London: Penguin, 2000), 455.

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Judith Butler

UPRISING

Who rises up when there is an uprising? And what is it that rises up when people rise up? We speak about an “outbreak” of frustration or anger, and yet such visceral moments centrally involve modes of recognition and judgment that a group of humans have reached their limit. Humans rise up in numbers when they are indignant or when they have had enough of subjugation, and that seems to follow from the experience that a limit has been crossed. Something indispensable for living with dignity or freedom has been denied, and for too long. So an uprising usually seeks to end a condition that has been suffered longer than it should have been. Uprisings come late, even as they seek to instate a new state of affairs. They take place past the time when the condition of subjugation should have ended. And when they happen, they expose the limit of what anyone should endure. How do we account for uprisings? What is it that rises up in a group when they are living beyond their limit and an uprising follows? Is it a part of the soul that seeks freedom from constraint? Or does a demand emerge in the course of our life together, borne of our social relations? An individual can surely rise up against an unjust law all alone, heroically defying the mandate of such a law, and yet an individual act, no matter how defiant, is not an uprising. An uprising is not a solitary affair. A political state cannot undertake an uprising, though it can make war against other states, or inflict violence on its citizens or the population under its control. When there is an uprising, it is individuals who form a part of that action, but the action has a shape and meaning that is socio-political, though not embarked upon by state actors. In that social action, no individual acts alone, but neither does a collective subject emerge that denies all individual difference. An uprising does not well up from my indignation or from yours. Those who rise up do so together, recognizing that they suffer in ways that no one should. So an uprising requires a recognition not only that what the individual suffers is shared, but that a group is living

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or to overthrow the regime predicated upon that injustice. To rise up is to stand forth with others against a form of power, to be seen and heard precisely under conditions in which standing forth, being seen and heard are not allowed, and not only for the symbolic value of appearing in public when it is proscribed. One rises up with a certain energy or force, a corporeal and visceral intention that is not just one’s own, but shared—a transitive resolve to overcome a common condition endured for too long. To endure a condition that is unendurable can break a person, fracture a community, decimate a social world, but it can also produce the paradoxical circumstance in which those who have been living with something they should never have had to endure now mobilize to reject that very condition, making a bid for a livable life. They have been crossed, denied, degraded, but now, in the moment of uprising, they gather a certain strength or force from one another, from alliance itself, one formed by a shared rejection of the unlivable, emerging now as bodies whose political strength lies in its growing numbers. Perhaps a series of indignations individually suffered is recognized as a shared condition, a subjugating power is identified for opposition or overthrow; that shared recognition is a first moment of gathering. A gathering is, however, not yet an uprising. Perhaps that gathering takes the form of a community meeting or a set of conversations on the street, or the transmission of a newspaper analysis or a spreading understanding that follows upon seeing a picture widely enough distributed to form a consensus about the unacceptable character of an incident or condition of suffering. Each sees it from his or her own location, or with a proximate set of others, and a group of people gathers there at the site of the image, or the image gathers people across disparate locations, perhaps the loss of innocent life, or the evidence of torture, but also the forcible dispersion of a people from their lands and homes, or evidence that a certain group of lives are treated as dispensable, or that racial inequality has become accepted as the legal and social norm, or that an entire legal or economic system depends upon the disenfranchisement of workers or minorities to work as it does. There does not have to be an elaborate analysis for an uprising. It is not required that everyone reads Karl Marx or follows post-Marxist debates, and yet uprising does involve thinking. All that is required is a sense of living within a particular regime, whether that be political or economic, requires suffering in unbearable ways, and an understanding that this should not be bearable, and that this claim is true not only for oneself but for others who are positioned in a similar situation within the field of power.

beyond a shared sense of its limit. Individuals and groups both undergo subjugation and so in rising up, it is this body with other bodies, and from a shared refusal to live beyond the limit of what can be, or should be, endured. An uprising can be local and directed; it can be against a particular set of laws or polices, such as unfair taxation, segregation, discrimination, lack of shelter, or health care. An uprising can also be directed against an entire legal regime, whether it is one that supports slavery or colonial power, including occupation, siege, and apartheid, authoritarian rule, fascism, capitalism, state corruption, or austerity. What rises up in an uprising follows from a growing resolve that subjugation should not be endured any longer; a shared sense that things must stop and how they must change, drawn from converging individual and group histories. And yet, we would be wrong to assume that if there is an uprising, it is always justified, or that everyone will agree with its political aims. After all, there are sometimes uprisings against democratic regimes. Here we will focus mainly on those uprisings that seek to realize democratic aims. In general, uprisings tend to emerge from indignation—an angry refusal of the condition under which dignity, held in place by the moral limits of what should be endured, is denied or destroyed. And that indignation spreads among people, gathering those who have been lying low, who have kept close to the ground, or who have been “grounded” in some way, those for whom standing up and looking forward embodies the physical risk of asserting dignity. They are no longer making themselves low, keeping themselves down, trying to avoid the eyes of the law. They rise, but they do not simply stand up—they rise up. If they were only to stand, they would make themselves known, exposing themselves to the law—the police, the military, the tribunal. But if they rise up, they are not planning to sit or lay down anytime soon. Their action is reflexive: they rise up, and in this way they take the body in hand and assume an erect posture. Their action has an object: they rise up against something—they know what they wish to overthrow, what condition they seek to bring to an end. Their action has an aim: they are seeking freedom and self-determination, dignity, mobility, justice, or equality. In standing, they are getting ready to act and to free themselves from shackles that have been shouldered for too long. If they stand in public where they are not allowed to stand, especially when freedom of assembly has been suspended or denied, and they allow themselves to be arrested, they are practicing principled acts of civil disobedience, risking punishment and prison. They can do this singly or plurally. But if they rise up, standing forth against power, they signify their intention to challenge a persistent form of injustice

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Of course, not everyone can be on the street or literally rise up. Contemporary uprisings are hardly thinkable without Internet activism. Some people lag behind, or some stay in sheltered spaces where they work the Internet or arrange for lawyers or health care in the course of an uprising, or write an editorial, or engage in reproductive labor. For some, standing may be literally difficult or impossible, so they undertake different tasks. And yet, bodies still have a way of making their presence known through physical or virtual space, even though that form of “appearing” should not be confused with hyper-visibility. An uprising is not the same as a discrete and finite demonstration, but when demonstrations last longer than expected, they can, at some moment, become an uprising. Despite some efforts to designate uprisings as spontaneous and irrational outbursts, they are often the result of long simmering processes of dawning and expanding recognition. They have been forming, taking form, before they take place as uprisings. Those who dismiss or fear uprisings as “outbreaks of the irrational” presume that processes of recognition and judgment are separable from visceral processes of resistance. Some even insist that uprisings are bestial and barbarous outpourings that have to be contained so that more “civilized” modes of deliberation can proceed within established political structures. But what if uprisings are expressions of a popular will, ways of making demands, or exposing the unjust limits imposed by existing political structures? What if those existing structures were responsible for the conditions that could not be endured, and that no one should have to endure? If a set of established political structures do not reflect or represent the popular will, are those structures still legitimate? How much of the popular will must political structures reflect in order to lay claim to legitimacy? Which populations count as part of the relevant popular will? And if those political structures actively seek to break the popular will, then is there not only a crisis of democracy, but the fertile conditions for uprising? Prior to uprising, there are ways of enduring and resisting unendurable situations under conditions of subjugation that remain local and furtive. For there to be an uprising, some set of connections have to be made among those who endure and resist in ordinary life, even if they lack the ultimate power to bring down the political, legal, or economic regime by which they are subjugated. And so, for there to be an uprising, there must first be a set of links, networks, virtual and corporeal gatherings that are not only organized by dialogic or deliberative principles, but in which a group of people are moved and moving. They are moved from a complacent to an active

A shift in perspective takes place in the midst of uprising. It is not only that I suffer, but that you do as well, and that some “we” forms in the course of recognizing the widespread and systematic character of that form of subjugation that has been suffered too long and that calls now to come to an end. So a “we” forms in the midst of that uprising, one that congeals the sense of a shared indignation. But there is also a “now” or a “no more” or a “no longer,” marking that it is past time to throw off this subjugation. In a way, every uprising is both urgent and belated. Many have already submitted to what breaks them or has broken them, often suffering immeasurable losses, and yet still, the uprising signifies that even in the midst of being broken, the people are not fully or finally broken such that rising up proves impossible. A group of already abrogated people rises up, those who lived with those shackles but who now arrive together not only to stand or to gather, but to rise up and shed the shackles they have borne. They throw them off or shake them off. Uprisings tend to rely on an organizing metaphor, a figure of someone who stands up, one for whom standing signifies a form of liberation, one with the physical power to free him or herself from chains, shackles, the signs of slavery, or indentured servitude. Indeed, we may not find anyone who approximates this figure in an actual uprising, and yet the figure is there, casting the shadow of its physicality on the gathering. In German, the uprising is called Aufstand, which can mean outrage, uprising, revolt, or revolution, depending on context, but relying on a sense of standing up and standing forth. In Hebrew, it is hitqomemut ’amamit (popular uprising), usually against an established authority. And in Arabic, it is intifāda, understood not only as a tremor, a shuddering, or a convulsion, but figuring the act of emerging from prone position on the ground, shaking off dust and leaves. In French, soulèvement also implies the idea of lifting, as if suddenly there is strength enough to lift and cast off an enormous weight by which one has been burdened. In any given uprising, there may be no literal shackles, and no individual body suddenly rising up from a protracted prone position can describe the acts of gathering, moving, standing, and resisting that comprise an uprising. And yet, such figures convey a sense of the unprecedented capacity of a group that appears and moves in numbers, gathering popular power as they do. With that corporeal spread and speed a form of resistance is produced, but so, too, a demographic problem of containment for police and the military as human barriers emerge, or traffic rules are set aside, a problem that, if it becomes too large, proves to be uncontainable. The larger they become, the more those shackles seem, for the time being, to be cast away.

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which there is no single collective subject. It is a judgment shared, passed between people, heterogeneous yet concerted, embodied differently and yet in common. When people do appear in this way, their action may well be misnamed by those who oppose their aims or their tactics. Sometimes misnaming is understandable: after all, uprisings, rebellions, and revolts may all seem like one another in certain ways and they can, under certain conditions turn into one another. Other times, however, a misnaming indicates that there is a more fundamental misrecognition in play. Governments and the media may call what they are seeing a demonstration, thinking it is temporary, or a riot, figuring it as a chaotic outbreak with no legible demand, or a breach of national security so that police and military interventions are justified, including violence, detention, arrest, and forcible dispersion. At such a point, the people who engage in uprisings are not understood to be expressing any part of a popular will, but treated instead as a “population” to be managed, contained, and controlled. The police and the prison system is always implicitly there in any uprising; police power awaits the people at the spatial boundary or temporal limit of the uprising, making sure that the uprising resolves as a spatio-temporally discrete event, seeking to block its transitive and contagious effects. At the moment when the police join the crowd or lay down their arms, the uprising starts to become a revolution. More often than not, that is not the case. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings of 1943 were part of a larger Jewish resistance movement in Poland during World War II, directed against Nazi and collaborationist forces on two discrete occasions. In the summer of 1942, the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto rose up against German soldiers who sought to enter the ghetto and deport the Jewish to Treblinka where they were to be exterminated. After 300,000 Jews were deported from the Ghetto to Treblinka, the Jewish resistance organization, Z.O.B., rose up early in 1943 with only 750 resistance fighters to block the entries and resist the Nazis. Their resistance lasted a full month before they were vanquished and tens of thousands more were deported to death camps. Although the uprising was brutally crushed, and so “failed,” the history of the uprising testifies to a willingness to fight for freedom even in the face of near-certain defeat. The story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become iconic for thinking about uprisings after World War II. It tells us a story of resistance, freedom, and the desire for emancipation, and so these principles are clearly articulated by the historical narration. Uprisings give rise to narrative reconstructions after the fact. In the moment,

position, and this gathering of bodies for the purposes of acting together involves a visceral judgment, that is, a way of feeling and thinking that is more or less shared. They are on the move, and as they move from one site to another, they also begin to move from a prostrate to an upright position—upright and mobile, against the odds. As they move and gather, they also rise, and their action, however physical, is not fully summarized in this figure of physicality. Rising up and shedding shackles is a physical figure for a concerted collective movement that seeks frontally to contest a form of power identified as the source of subjugation. It is a way of thinking and acting together against a commonly identified source of subjugation. Whether we approve or disapprove of an uprising, we probably misunderstand the phenomenon if we do not understand it as a collective and embodied political judgment—a visceral judgment incarnated in stance and action. The trace of such a body persists even on the web or with the cell phone: someone typing, someone holding the camera. What is the power of those who rise up? Is this popular power? Who is rising up? What if it is not all of the people? On the one hand, whoever they are, these people are establishing a certain public presence, corporeal and virtual. On the other hand, they are exposing themselves deliberately to a power that can cut them back and beat them down, returning them to a subjugated position or destroying them. Sometimes those who rise up are those for whom basic rights such as gathering and demonstrating under protected constitutional conditions are not available. Other times, those who rise up do so because gathering and demonstration, though permitted, are not enough to achieve their goals. In the case that basic rights of assembly and mobility are restricted or prohibited by a legal regime, then exercising basic democratic rights—assembling, marching, demonstrating, distributing pamphlets—are treated as criminal acts. Those who defend democracy may go silent or pursue furtive or underground forms of resistance. They may go on strike, or seek to bring to a halt the everyday operation of transportation systems, but neither of those tactics are uprisings. They may become insubordinate in what they say and write, but that still is not quite an uprising. An uprising takes place when people start to gather and move and appear and act in ways that seek to dismantle the regime or the power responsible for their subjugation. Their gathering, moving, appearing, and acting is informed by a rejective indignation, a judgment not only that subjugation has gone too far, but that it is unjust. Uprising is an embodied and collective form of that judgment under conditions in

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The iconicity of an uprising can be translated into another place or time, or it can happen in the same place as part of an ongoing movement. The figure of Cuban poet and freedom fighter, José Martí, incited the Cuban struggle to free itself from Spanish colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. His image and verse continues to be invoked in almost all subsequent struggles to preserve Cuban independence and the opposition to subjugation and exploitation. Of course, it can be that uprisings take place and are rapidly or eventually effaced from history. When that happens, the chain of citations comes to an end and the task of politics becomes to fight against oblivion. An uprising is usually a discrete event. It comes to an end. Failure is there as the very condition of its definition. So even when an uprising fails to achieve its goal, it nevertheless “goes down in history,” and that is still a deed, a discursive accomplishment with affective reverberations. A failed uprising can become a historically transmitted memory, an unfulfilled promise taken up by future generations who vow to realize those aims. One uprising cites another, becomes reanimated by its imagery and story. As uprisings start to happen here and there, and again and again, a historical legacy is produced. One uprising fails and another commences, suggesting that at some point a cumulative history of uprisings implies an ongoing movement, a struggle that is larger than any of the uprisings by which it is composed, a struggle that does not end. An uprising can fail, but a movement can continue on indefinitely or become a revolutionary movement and either come to an end (once the revolution has taken place) or continue as a state form that paradoxically understands itself as a “permanent revolution.” The contagious and citational character of uprisings was apparent in the Arab Spring of 2011. The uprisings began with the suicide of a fruit vendor in Tunisia in 2010, who had been defeated in his individual struggle with the state after losing his license to sell his goods on the street. The iconic imagery of that self-immolation incited huge numbers of people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya where rulers were ultimately forced from power. Popular uprisings convulsed Bahrain and Syria. In both Tunisia and Egypt, rulers lost their power once the military started to defect to the popular movement. At this writing, most people believe that the Arab Spring is over, defeated for all time as so many of the affected countries have returned to authoritarian rule, but perhaps the story is not yet over. Perhaps the people rise again, in a different form, for another purpose, continuing the larger citational chain of democratic uprisings.

uprisings are not always practical and calculated. Yet they sometimes embody ideals that live on in the accounts that postdate their failures. Even when they are crushed, uprisings still have the power to articulate ideals. The aftermath of defeat is also the time in which the story of the uprising becomes narratable. Only from the vantage of hindsight does an uprising become a discrete story with beginning, middle, and end, sometimes the story of a valiant struggle that exemplifies principles of freedom and justice. Uprisings are generally understood as discrete or periodic forms of resistance, as bids or demands for emancipation under conditions in which political freedoms and rights have been denied and insupportable conditions endured. For those who rise up, emancipation is transiently embodied by the uprising itself. Uprisings last longer than a minute or an hour. They begin, they have duration, and they end—an indefinite uprising is not quite thinkable, even though an uprising can happen again and again—slave rebellions had to occur many times before slavery came to an end; the intifāda in Palestine takes place in waves and in stages, alternating between periods of time more active and more subdued. The end of an uprising usually comes about not because people are exhausted or they meet an internal limit, nor because political aims have been achieved or opposing forces have prevailed. If an event comes to be called an uprising rather than a revolution, that is because, however valiant it was, the bid for emancipation failed in the end. If an uprising is organized against state power, that possibility of failure is always there: will the numbers and the tactics outwit and overwhelm state power itself? Or will the state’s military power impose its own end on the story of the uprising, vanquishing those have sought to contest its authority or jurisdiction? From the start an uprising is a risk: will those who rise up against a power be vanquished by that very power or will the uprising become protracted, converting into a revolutionary situation that leads to emancipation? Uprisings are always trying to lose their name, become more lasting insurrections or revolutions that inaugurate an emancipatory future. Those who rise up may know full well that the uprising will not “work” and that “failure” may well become the end of the story—or, at least, one way of ending the story. And yet, the story of the failed uprising can become an important historical marker and precedent for those who rise up again. A valiant uprising that fails nevertheless produces heroes, martyrs, stories of national self-sacrifice, images of hope; it is through failure that an uprising stands a chance to become iconic and so to mobilize future uprisings.

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by democracy, or equality, women’s rights, gay marriage, or the concept of “gender,” what are we to make of their rising up? Who are they? Are they “the people”? It is always difficult to say whether an uprising represents all the people, the essence of the people, or a pure democratic demand. So that is one reason why it is not possible to simply affirm all uprisings as democratic. And sometimes uprisings take violent forms that are important to condemn. Our judgments about violent uprisings might become more precise if we distinguish between aims and tactics. An uprising may begin with lofty ideals and end up destroying property or murdering people, at which point we would be right to condemn those destructive consequences. This does not mean, however, that all uprisings have destruction as their aim. Indeed, many uprisings, most of the slave rebellions in the Americas that took place from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, were poorly armed uprisings—slaves in the early seventeenth century rarely had recourse to arms. Anti-colonial struggles have famously differed on the use of weapons to achieve goals of independence. We see this in the very different approaches to anti-colonial struggle in Frantz Fanon, who affirmed the necessity of some kinds of violence to overcome colonialism, and Mahatma Gandhi, who sought to establish practices of nonviolent disobedience to bring down colonial rule. So uprisings raise the question of whether violence is a legitimate means for achieving the goals of freedom and emancipation. And if violence were to be deemed legitimate in some cases, is it possible to “contain” violence as a means to an end, an instrument that is set aside when the aim is realized? Can the violence deployed by an uprising to free itself from violent oppression successfully distinguish its own violence from the violence it opposes? Of course, uprisings seek to dismantle oppressive forms of power, and that “dismantling” may well seem destructive in one sense, but surely it remains possible to distinguish between violent and nonviolent modes of dismantling power. Jack Goldstone tells us that most uprisings are undertaken by unarmed or poorly armed groups of people. And yet, those engaged in uprisings have been constantly confronted with the dilemma of violent resistance: they have had to come to terms with the question of whether violent resistance is any less wrong than violent subjugation, and if so, why. Slave and prisoner uprisings take place within a context in which citizenship has been denied or suspended, and political participation in a polity has been foreclosed through the exercise of institutional and legal violence. Violent resistance is often the result. Nevertheless, it would be an error to conflate all uprising with violent

In the Arab Spring, one uprising was quickly followed by another, but the interval between uprisings can take much more time. We are more conscious of the contagious and quick model of transitivity. Actions prompt new actions very quickly when an uprising takes on a life on the Internet and works its effects in a complex network of physical and virtual space. The uprising is reported, and the report gives the event its virtual life, becoming a virtual part of the event. That very event, reported on the web, becomes communicable once it starts to spread in this way. The event takes leave of its own space and time, determined as a communicable event, inciting those who receive and relay the news and so become part of the action. And yet the Internet alone cannot spread the uprising. An uprising has to happen again and again, relying on the concerted physical actions of those who rise up. The representation of the event incites desire, and sometimes, as Ernesto Laclau has shown, a key term, such as “democracy” or “freedom” or “independence” comes to name and incite a fundamental longing transmitted from one group of people to another, linking them to one another as it spreads. Of course, iconic uprisings commend a story of admirable courage and they function as paradigms that distinguish between the kinds of uprisings that are considered valuable and those that are demeaned or dismissed. There is something odd about distinguishing just from unjust uprisings, but, of course, there can be an uprising of racists who are “indignant” that foreigners are entering the country. In 1676, there was “Bacon’s Rebellion” in America: a group of settlers rose up against their governor for failing to slaughter the native people who had attacked their post in an effort to defend their land. It is surely not possible to condone the aims of every uprising. And yet, once an event is called an “uprising,” it appears as if “the people” are rising up, and that the uprising is an expression of the popular will, one that should be honored. But if a group rises up, claiming racism to be their right and that group even feels “indignation” about having to live in a racially diverse society, we have every reason to condemn that uprising. We may even find ourselves siding with a state or international authority that seeks to embody and secure principles of racial equality over and against a populist rejection of those principles. Confusion gathers for those who believe that, in principle, uprisings are a pure expression of the popular will and the most purely democratic form of expression. After all, if an uprising implies that subjugation is in the process of being thrown off, then those who oppose an uprising appear to be in favor of subjugation, and that cannot be good. And yet, if a group understands itself as “subjugated”

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expression of the popular will, we always have to ask: which version of the popular will, and who is not included in that version, and for what reason? Is it some people or “the people” who rise up in an uprising? Is it the popular will in a pure form that rises up? What rises up in people when people rise up? And what histories rise up again when there is an uprising? What historical forces act on the people when they rise up, and does history itself rise up when they do? In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx famously claimed that the “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” It is especially at moments in which people come together to create something new, to make revolution that the past surges up in unexpected ways. For Marx, this unconscious way that the past surges up proved to be a nightmare or, rather, was itself a nightmare lived out in the light of day. He writes, “precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world-history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language” (MER1 595). Marx terms this a “world-historical conjuring up of the dead.” What Marx called a decidedly bourgeois revolution in France (1848–51) drew its imagery and self-understanding from the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, from “a need of heroism, of sacrifice, or terror, of civil war and of national battles” (MER 596). Marx explains this strange resurrection of the dead as serving the purpose of “glorifying the new struggles … of magnifying the given tasks in imagination …” For Marx, the nightmarish return of Roman grandeur in the figure of Napoleon is, indeed, a nightmare, for Napoleon rallied “the conservative peasantry” by giving them the opportunity to be property owners, breaking any potential ties with revolutionary workers. For the conservative peasant, “war was their poetry.” The revolutions that Marx approved had no need to reanimate the imperial past to lend grandeur to their proper aims. They were “critical” and “revolutionary” and so he claimed: “the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future” (MER 597). And yet, is Marx right to assume that the revolutionary movements draw their inspiration only from the future, and not from the past? If we consider uprisings as discrete outbreaks of the popular will or, at least, one version of the popular will, it follows that they take place time and again, often drawing on the unfulfilled promise of the former episodes. However transient they may be, uprisings that are sequential, episodic, and cumulative invariably draw upon past uprisings, or find themselves animated by images and stories of valiant struggle as they

resistance. Most of the uprisings that belonged to the “Arab Spring” were nonviolent: those assembled in public squares exposed their unarmed bodies to a surrounding military threat, with many injured or killed in the process. One problem with the debate on the justifiability of violent tactics is that it is not always easy to identify “violence.” Calling an uprising “violent” can be a discursive instrument of its suppression. For instance, a state may well call any uprising “violent” if it challenges that state’s own monopoly on violence, evidenced by its police and military powers. The state may call an event an “outbreak of violence” only because power is seized and police force is mitigated or neutralized for the duration of the uprising—not because of any physically violent acts. The upsurge of the people is not the same as an “outbreak of violence” even though an uprising can lead to violent resistance. That situation is surely different from the state calling an uprising “violent” as it invokes ”security” to unleash police or military forces against the very people who are rising up against a government or a state or a colonial condition or a mode of imprisonment. When an uprising is named by the state as violent rather than, say, a democratic resistance movement, then the state can suppress any uprising on such grounds, justifying an attack on its own people or on those people it disavows as its own. Whether or not an uprising should turn to violence is an abiding ethical question for resistance movements. But that important debate can hardly take place if uprisings are presumed always to be violent. The scene of rising up is one in which non-authorized freedom is seized to contest an authority that seeks to deprive a group of the freedom they exercise. If we take the object of an uprising to be an essential aspect of what it is, then an uprising is a rising up against authority or power or systems of violence or disenfranchisement. Seen in this way, uprisings are concerned with popular self-determination in the course of resisting some existing form of power. We would be partially right to claim that uprisings belong to popular power and that they manifest the popular will. But quite apart from the question of “who” counts as the people in any given popular uprising, we mistake the oppositional aim of the uprising if we see it only as popular self-expression. Uprisings are formed in opposition to an unendurable condition. Although uprisings claim to represent the will of the people, there is usually another set of people who decline to be represented by the uprising. Laying claim to the popular will is an ongoing struggle, a struggle for hegemony. So though an uprising seems to be an

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978).

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seek to continue a movement, or complete a project of emancipation. Those uprisings that eventually lose their name and turn into a revolution succeed in time. Uprisings are a set of failures, then, that succeed through finishing off the series, transforming into revolutions. In 1831, slaves in Jamaica went on strike, demanding to be paid for their labor. When their owners refused, they burned down homes and warehouses filled with sugar cane, damaging the economic holdings of their owners. Under the leadership of Samuel Sharp, 20,000 slaves seized ownership of more than 200 plantations, and though they were finally subdued, imprisoned, and many were executed, that uprising has been credited with helping to bring an end to British slavery in 1834. All the uprisings failed, but taken together, they succeeded. Marx made historical note of “premature revolutions,” suggesting that revolutionary promise emerges in partial and episodic forms, and that the past can resurge with a promise of the future. Perhaps the past does not only weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the living. If every discrete uprising is a repetition, a citation, then what happens has been happening for some time, is happening now again, a memory embodied anew, in events episodic, cumulative, and partially unforeseeable. Those exhilarated by uprisings often find themselves left with a terrible disappointment and sense of loss. In hindsight, we can ask whether that failure has a history—and a future.

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Antonio Negri

UPRISING AS EVENT

Do you know the sport where athletes lift increasingly heavy weights? There is a pause, an exceedingly long instant, between their lifting the weight from the ground, the clean, and pushing it high, the jerk. This pause or interval is what we need to think about when speaking of uprising. Only when the weightlifter, the haltérophile, has completed the lift is it possible to say lifted. The up-rising is accomplished, a noun replaces a verb, a term substitutes an action. The pause we must pay attention to is not a pause but a short movement, almost a stop, a temporal contraction. The athlete’s veins bulge on neck and muscles: this effort is immeasurable. The athlete can no longer choose, only decide; he or she gesture knows of no alternative; it’s an expiration, a “blow.” Like the creation of the world. A God? When the Olympic Games were first held this is what was believed. But no: it can fail to succeed. We need to find out where the movement stops and the effort fails; the difference between a pause and an interruption. Once the difference is discerned, we must try to experience it from within, comprehend it, act within it. Images chase one another. And here comes Atlas. He carries the sky on his shoulders, he lifted it but would like to lift it even higher. He can’t. There, in the heavenly garden of Hesperides, the pause has turned into an interruption. Ananke imposed herself over Titan’s effort: just as Zeus wished. Another side, this, between lifting and uprising, a necessity that blocks. Ananke, the force that translates weight into a limit and then turns limit into an insuperable mark of human misery, death always lurking around the corner. In the Iliad, Zeus conceives the Keres, who carry Achilles’s and Hector’s souls, and on the scales Achilles’s goes up while Hector’s descends into Hell. Is there, then, a gravity that only a gigantic force can overcome? Let us try to turn that interruption back into a pause, rather than a break, a brief suspension. Only a concentrated effort can affect

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the gesture. There was an event, and a surplus of being arises out of the extraordinary power of that gesture. It is a powerful gesture, but we can see, it comes out as a breath, a blow, a waft, a whiff, a puff.Let us see the plot from a collective standpoint. Can we grasp this being, this surplus, this “breath” as a collective experience? Of course we can. In fact, it only becomes powerful when produced collectively. Uprising is plural; the event is collective. Sure, each collective is constituted by individuals and the uprising is made up of a multitude of singularities, but the “true” collective is the shift that turns the heaviness and unbearableness of life into the choice of rising up, into the effort and joy of doing it. Political science attests to this fact and demands that the sovereign avails him or herself of the tools necessary for the repression of the revolt around the corner. The science of capital knows that the eventuality of a riot is present in every place of production, and that there is only valorization when that power is wrenched away from the uprising, and discerned and ordered. When there is an uprising, before exploding, the collective tension gathers up in a moment of pause, an interval that betrays an undecided effort that precedes the decision to open up to action. Altogether. When this happens, time becomes joyful. Even poets and philosophers displace the analysis of this interval onto a social plane. Here the event of the lifting is mistaken with that of the uprising and becomes a powerful collective “breath.” “Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or guilty of vile atrocities … I have never liked the crowd except on days of riot, if even then! … On those days there is a great breath in the air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature, but more ardent.”1 “What makes a riot? Nothing and everything. Electricity released a little at a time, a flame suddenly shooting out, a roving force, a momentary breath of wind. This breath of wind meets beings that think, brains that dream, souls that suffer, passions that burn, howling torments, and carries them away. … Anyone who nurses in their soul a secret grudge against some act of the government, or of life or fate, lives on the brink of riot and as soon as it shows, begins to quiver and feel themselves lifted up by the vortex.”2 “People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it.” 3 I pointed out the difference between a pause/interval in the gesture and an interruption/rupture of the gesture. Now, the interruption can

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1. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, March 31, 1853. 2. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Part IV, Book 10, June 5, 1832, trans. Julie Rose (London: Vintage, 2008), 861. 3. Michel Foucault, “Inutile de se soulever?,” Le Monde, May 11–12, 1979. “Useless to Revolt,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Penguin, 1994), 452.

become the place of utopia. A negative place, portrayed precisely by the rupture: when the weight of lifting becomes unbearable and one escapes from the materiality of that operation. What is left is a sad and fearful desire that has been won over and frustrated: a reparatory idealness has come undone from it. The episode of the rupture is tied to the dramatic importance of the insolubility of the link between the awaiting and the uplifting, and the self-delusion that the stoppage might be minimized in the consolatory perspective of apocalypse and exodus. In other words, if this world irresistibly runs towards the catastrophe of meaning, the destruction of nature, and the end of history, if it is corrupted to such an extent, it cannot but end in apocalypse. The denunciation that comes with this desperation takes on mystical or cynical semblances, and that expectance of the tragedy of the world sees itself as exodus. A mystical exodus, new—or, less often, a political exodus: “You want to make us govern, we will never give into this provocation.”4 But where, how and when to exodus? The answer is missing. Those subjects who have not planned to rise up in revolt fool themselves that a magical hand will lift them up from the pending catastrophe. They move towards exodus as a salvation, actually building an anxious flight and forcing themselves into a sort of containment of the will. This is the place of negative ontology. The time of the pause and the space of expectation are occupied by a malevolent angel who destroys their substance. Utopia is the apology of a flight into the idea, an impatient flight that does not measure the heaviness and the danger of doing and making. What remains of the thought of uprising? Memory, suffering, regret, repentance ... and where has subjectivity gone? Nostalgia takes away the desire to start again and deposits tired residue of that ancient experience into the soul. The perception of the crushing of desire replaces the uprising. The soul transpires cowardice before difficulties, the refusal of the concrete. Parallel to it, mythologies develop—utopias of insurrection and revolution ... “They are coming!” But where do they come from, and how? These insurrections avoid subjectivation. The vain “I’d like” of childish games and the atrophy of adults’ desire. The revolution comes after the catastrophe. The “breath” of the uprising becomes the flame of a dragon that sets everything on fire, and there is no Saint George to come to liberate us. More than lugubrious, it is funny to gather, enveloped in the same destiny, “desk Marxists” and Dadaist libertarians. For the former, uprising presupposes a fall (of capitalism) that ends reasonably well; for the latter, it is a concession to a catastrophic precipice from which they will resurface with a pure soul!

4. “Nos quieren obligar a gobernar y no vamos a caer en esa provocación.”

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The apocalypse is central and necessary, on this they all agree. There is no more subjectivation and the ability to fight to change the world, to rise up not for the pleasure of the gesture, but for the urgency of a transformative action, has come away. Thus it appears that only when subjectivity is introduced in the pause, in the interval, as a motor of lifting, is it possible for the tension of the shift from clean to jerk, from lifting from below to rising up to the sky, to produce action.A negative ontology of uprising: we have already touched on its definition. But we will understand it better once we answer this question: What is a positive ontology of uprising? Or rather, what does a definition of uprising demand so that a positive ontology can develop from it? First, it requires to be planted in the ground, enervated by passions and interests, radical will and desires for the future. Second, it needs to make itself a machine producing subjectivity that pulls together, in an active “we,” a whole of singularities. There is always a shift between the first and the second moment: an ontological shift of spirit and passions, materiality and needs between a moment of rupture and an act of building. Negative ontology, conversely, separates these two moments and vainly takes on the semblance of either one or the other. Positive ontology is that which conjoins the two moments and roots to the ground what rose to the sky. Let us ask ourselves: Is it possible to think following the rhythm, and placing ourselves within, these uprisings? The 1977 New York Blackout, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the youth revolt of the French banlieues in 2005, and the English riots of 2011, for instance? All these episodes are the same: those who rise up are young people confined in apartheid areas condemned to poverty, working in brutal conditions, stigmatized for facies or religion, discriminated by the law and persecuted by the police. But these episodes are all different because they are linked to the specificity of the forms of state repression and the anger and violence of the subjects revolting. In each of these episodes, moral and political indignation are liberated: the field is freed from the forces of repression, and then there is an appropriation of consumer and leisure goods. Looting and arson. A scandal? Not really. They are no angels, they are proletarians; their wings are heavy but they can still fly. Or they are migrants who break the law, migrants out of need or political dissent, or refugees fleeing war. Again, a scandal. Why? They exercise their right to flee, a sacred demand, linked to the law of survival that cannot be denied to anyone. They flee misery, they live as clandestine sans papiers, having furtively or forcedly crossed borders. And yet it is a scandal:

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“They steal our jobs, they tarnish the nation’s homogeneity,” the wealthy protest! Well, that flight is an uprising. The multitudes rebel against austerity and the debt neoliberalism imposes on subjects. Here too, the uprising is rooted in the harsh materiality of need, and this is what the multitude wishes to satisfy. To rise up to change the earth in which we are rooted, to occupy squares to free them from the control and fear that domination produces, to attack Wall Street to divest debt of its legitimacy, to denounce the media and its invasiveness in order to build, against it, truth, to demystify political representation to rise up to self-government. The uprising does not easily turn into insurrection, and the revolution remains beyond the horizon. The difficulties pertaining to migration are ever more insurmountable. The command of money and financial capital has risen to such a level that it seems impossible for the march of contestation to reach it. Spontaneity without blockages, then? No, because cupiditas, the desire for freedom and happiness, are not exhausted in arson and looting, in border crossings and clandestine existences and occupations. On the contrary, they are excited, they suffer their not-making it as a harsh limit that must be overcome at all costs, not as a form of impotence. We will win next time. Venceremos! The intensity of desire is so strong in the ontology of uprising that it produces extreme subjectivities. It does not train consciousness, it changes it. If consciousness simply matured, there would be evolution, but there is no evolution. There would be someone in charge of an ultimate truth who guides it, but there cannot be anyone, because that ultimate end is not something to discover and reveal, but something to build in struggle; it is not truth, it is veridiction. Uprising transforms consciousness; in this movement consciousness is reconstituted by it. It gathers needs together and turns them into demands, it turns affects into desires and wills, it positions them in a tension towards liberty. A red thread links the attempt to break the existing order and the project of a future world: this thread is not a process but a leap, it has no end; it produces it, just as it produces ever new subjectivities that are adequate to it. From rupture to construction, the uprising moves beyond the space that separates them. It withstands the pause of a gesture that is not automated: the lifting is not blind. Ask anyone -who has experienced this and participated in the passions of revolts. They will tell you: every time it happens, the revolt is unpredictable, but we always organized it. This is what is positively revealed about the ontology of uprising: the fact that the “breath,” however sudden, was built towards in the collective practice of suffering and desire.

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As we have seen, there is a limit: defeat. The experiences of defeat are burning. However, it is not from the limit that one can grasp the distance covered. There is the defeat of the uprising, but there is also the point of arrival, the field that has been conquered, the interruption that is challenged. There is always a limit to the uprising: the athlete lets the weights fall. But that limit is also the sign of something that has been built, an ontological stratum. It is an engine that must be restored and reignited. We have almost two centuries of workers’ uprisings behind us. They go from 1848,, those damned days for the bourgeoisie, as Karl Marx called them, to the Commune of 1871. From 1905 to 1917, to the cycles of struggle that still mark our existence: from the latest alter-globalization movements to the “Springs” of the indignados movements. Those struggles represent the paradigm of a movement that grows, continues, and intensifies even through defeats. How much negative dialectics has been thrown upon this path of struggles: a past of catastrophes? No, our reasoning cannot stop here. The Angelus Novus is not a theology of the past, but an ontology of the present, of the not-yet. There is a sort of secular training that leads the multitudes to shake the limits of power with growing force. The defeats are a stratum, a deposit, and a living one. They are not inert, they are passions that keep producing subjectivity, productions that cannot be stopped. Defeat is also an indication of a subterranean power always capable of rising up to the surface. Indignation is spoken of as the spark of uprisings. This is true only when the sad passion of the indignant comes across the ontological power deposited by lives of struggle. Only then is the uprising realized, and it is enthusing for the militant to see how in that concrete historicity and in the productive imagination, the relay is handed over from the peasants’ jacqueries to the workers’ insurrections, from the uprisings of second-generation migrants to the occupations of the indignant precarious class. In the continuity of uprisings lies a common content, an urge for liberty: the “breath” of a body that no longer accepts its suffering. The workers’ paradigm of uprising demands for its accomplishment a constituent action. This shift from uprising to constituent desire is rooted in ontology, and thus it is a joyous passion. In Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, unhappy passions cannot be the engine of a production of a new being, whereas joyful passions determine the shift from the hatred caused by indignation, from the pain of the defeat, to the constructive explosion of cupiditas and its constituent affirmation.

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Indignation can be the basis, but never the end point; it can be an occasion but not an engine. Indignation still participates in a negative ontology. Instead, what speaks of a positive and constituent ontology is the paradigm that blows from the Commune to the Soviet, from the metropolitan insurgencies to the “Springs” of the new proletariat. This paradigm produces institutions. But what is an institution in the movement of an athlete who is lifting weights? It is the intellectual concentration, the muscular tension that prevents the pause from becoming an interruption of the gesture. It is the inner development of power. Not even the haltérophile had expected to reach such a high score … but they had organized it. Organizing means discovering the surplus of ontological stratum and putting it at the service of the uprising, of the constituent expression. Uprising then unleashes survival needs, ethical resistance, and political indignation against power; it inaugurates processes of subjectivity that produce intense ruptures; it aims to fix the outcome of struggles by inscribing them into a constitution. This is the only way for it to overwhelm and defeat the enemy; when it cannot do this, it disseminates indestructible desires of liberation all over the territories, and builds ontological strata for a new uprising. “Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike,” said an anonymous rebel in Machiavelli’s account of the Revolt of the Ciompi against the popolo grasso (the wealthy townsmen). “Dress us then in their clothes and them in ours,” the anonymous agitator continues, facing the rich owners of wool manufacturing, “without doubt we shall seem noble and they ignoble. There is no reason for the poor to feel remorse for the violence of their rebellion, “for when, like us, men have to fear hunger, and imprisonment, or death, the fear of hell neither can nor ought to have any influence upon them. … Faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor. … Now then is the time, not only to liberate yourself from them, but to become so much superior, that they will have more causes of grief and fear from you, than you from them.”5

5. Niccolò Machiavelli, Historiae fiorentine, History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy. From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent (Washington, DC: M. Walter Dunne Publisher, 1901). 6. Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” 453.

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“My theoretical ethic is … ‘antistrategic’: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. After all, that is my work; I am not the first or the only one to do it. But that is what I chose.”6 This is how Foucault replied to accusations of being an apologist for the perverse revolution in Iran. That revolt

self-determination”, “the right to have rights”: this is the giant leap forward that nourishes the uprising. And the impenetrable border, the forbidden frontier will rightly be crossed by migrants, who thus constitute a “right to flee.” And the “right to the common” against private property: this is another great objective for uprisings. In the uprising, private property is always pointed to as what it really is: egoism, indiscriminate violence, use and abuse of things and people, possession and subjugation of all goods. The destruction and looting of private property that manifest themselves in the excesses of the uprising thus reveal an inviolable demand of the common, for a “right to the common” that legitimizes every just social need. The uprising is a “divine power,” as Benjamin says, an irrepressible power of freedom. Why can we not imagine constitutions that affirm as their premise the priority of singular self-valorization in collective work, and the construction of the common and destruction of private property?

might end badly we know. History does not leave any room for the smallest error; it is made of imperceptible and contiguous differences. It is the “breath” that makes up singularities, gives meaning to their project and turns the uprising into a creative power. But if the “breath” fails, the smallest errors become destructive agents. And yet, we keep searching for its constituent spirit in the experience of the uprising, and various elements come together here. First of all, a practice. A practical kairos blooms, an arrow is launched, an avalanche composes no one knows what exactly. As in the parrhesia of the Cynics, where making the truth means producing it, building through the engagement of subjectivity a “we” that is active in history. A complex “we” because it is an ensemble of singularities, a multitude of differences: in this lies its power. This activity is not generic: telling is generative of the “we,” the generative making of subjectivity. Secondly, taking the floor. When uprising, one always needs the word. The uprising is linguistic, performative, and a shift from saying to doing, but without the saying, it would not exist. A manifesto, a text, a message, a symbol, a flag, or a simple shaking of the hands to ask or approve, or a clenched fist: these are words. Third, the exercise of force. The practice of the gesture and the taking of the floor attack and transform, overcoming the limits of our existence. This production of subjectivity generates violence. A violence addressed to the destruction of the legitimacy of every institution that insists on exercising inhuman command on our humanity. This is a different kind of violence; Walter Benjamin claims it is detached from the wrath of the state and the master, it is an immediate violence, destructive of power, yet pure and purifying. “By the absence of all lawmaking … it is justifiable to call this violence, too, annihilating; but it is so only relatively, with regard to goods, right, life, and suchlike, never absolutely, with regard to the soul of the living.”7 The taking of the floor that built a “we” in the uprising and showed its transformative violence wishes to turn, again, from doing to saying, to establish a constitution. But what constitution can be spoken of, if by constituted power we mean a blockage and fixation of the constituent activity? If the relation between uprising of liberty and efficiency of an ever renewed taking of the floor is closed up in the tight webs of a presumably indestructible organization of power? As a power to resist and change the context of life, an uprising cuts short all links to fixed power. The discipline of the organization of labour will be destroyed, violently even, by the self-valorization of singularities established within social cooperation. “The right to

We got lost in the stars. Let us descend to where the uprising is the salt of the earth. Uprising = resistance, as we have seen. But let us also reconquer the nuances of these gestures. The uprising produces performances that go, going down and rising up again, from the expression of a constituent counter power to the most minute “no” uttered against command. We integrate the simple “difference” to our framework: difference = resistance = uprising. Can it be a smile? Alexis de Tocqueville’s Memoirs tell of a day in June 1848. We are in a beautiful apartment on the Parisian left bank, the seventh arrondissement, at lunchtime. Tocqueville’s family is gathered there and yet, in the calm of the evening, the cannons drawn by the bourgeoisie against the workers in revolt suddenly resonate, distant noises from the right bank. The diners pale, their faces darken. A young waitress serving their table, fresh from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, instinctively smiles. She is immediately fired. Wasn’t there, in that smile, the real mark of the uprising? Wasn’t that what really terrified the Czar, the pope ... and the lord of Tocqueville? Wasn’t there a “breath” of the joy that is also a spark of liberation?

7. Walter Benjamin “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 297–298.

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Marie-José Mondzain

Beckett’s characters inhabit a vibratory space that wrenches them free of the ground but forbids them to fly. To stand up or not stand up, unaided, is that the question? Uprising, soulèvement, Aufstand, sollevazione, levantamiento—all these words vibrate with the same summons to get up, straighten up, stand up. “Rise up and walk” is the injunction of miracle workers bent on conquering death, exhorting us not to take things lying down, submissively and passively. It is surely not a matter of resuscitating, though, but rather of triumphing over the weight and gravitational pull of everything that hampers the power and lightness of the dance of bodies that are free, living, thinking, and desiring. An emancipatory uprising, inevitably situated between the excesses of disorder and the painful order of the fall. Midway between chaos and fall, the insurgent arises between what he or she is to be severed from and what he or she seeks to bond with. But uprising stands unaided in this interspace of supposedly unlimited possibility—of freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche issued the warning in his rhyming prelude to the soarings, careerings, and volcanic dances of The Gay Science:

TO “THOSE WHO SAIL THE SEA …”

UPRIGHT Are we living through a general ebbing of mental and physical vitality? It’s possible. Given the current political slumbrousness that numbs all capacity for dreaming, is not a sense of a crushing global powerlessness imbuing certain words with a kind of ethereal, magical energy? I pronounce the word uprising and I seem to hear a murmur swelling in the distance, so far off that I cannot tell if it is the exhilarating return of some old memory or the ultimate muttering of a fading, receding voice doomed never to return. True, I did say energy; but this energy has to escape the skepticism that drags us back to a sense of futility. “Uprising” has to lose its intimations of some bereaved passion. It makes audible the susurrus of storm and wind and wave rolling in from the horizon, then conjures up the ageless memory of all insurrections, of nature’s wild, spectacular unleashing of the sublime, and of peoples who put their urge for revolution into practice. But while the up-rising of the sublime offers an intimate savoring of intoxicating limitlessness, of a terrifying frisson of excess, popular insurrection seeks to put an end to the excesses of oppression and so install freedom’s new order. Yet insurrection retains of the sublime the inherent residue of the contradictory tensions underlying any uprising. This is because, paradoxically, uprising takes place within boundaries: it seems to seek self-containment within a territory where its movements defy all restriction. Consider Samuel Beckett’s superb irony in Endgame:

Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.1 He concludes his book with a song to dance to, dedicated to the Mistral, the power of waves and the unfettered gallopings that enchant and liberate both the body and the mind. This is an ode to all uprisings: Mistral wind, you rain cloud leaper, Sadness killer, heaven sweeper, How I love you when you roar! … Through the heavens’ threshing basin I could see your horses hasten, … Dance on myriad backs a season, Billows’ backs and billows’ treason— We need dances that are new! Let us dance in myriad manners, Freedom write on our art’s banners, our science shall be gay.

CLOV: I can’t sit. HAMM: True. And I can’t stand. CLOV: So it is. HAMM: Every man his specialty.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 43.

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… Let us whirl the dusty hazes right into the sick men’s noses, flush the sick brood everywhere!2

journey beneath the earth.”4 Every uprising is a battle in which the fall is conquered. But not all gallopings are desirable, even when they are the burning daughters of desire. The elevation of souls calls for the uplifting of bodies when the aerobatics of the body owe everything to the acrobatics of the soul. Creative thinking is an athletic act, but one that involves no lifting of weights.

This is all about what uprising owes to wind and waves, to inspiration and respiration. Those who do not dance cannot stand, and joy is part of the uprising.

GRAVITY, WEIGHT, COUNTERWEIGHT … INSPIRE, DESIRE? PNEUMA, LUNG When silence stifles the eloquence of desire, the outbursts of reason and the exultations of unreason, the real or imaginary spectacle of any unleashing alerts us to the rising of our own lungs. It makes our respiration the body’s most intimate response to the world’s upheavals. No insurrection without the swelling of lungs that set words and songs ringing out, triggering images that unfailingly signal all-shattering seismic events and movements. The body’s rhythmic inner din couples with public clamor and the vox populi. Chests swell with what is first called the birth cry and later song. Then rises inspiration. What fills us is weightless, just as in the holy delirium of enthousiasmos, which swells the poet’s heart and body, and which Socrates discusses with Ion, the performer of poetry: the force that draws iron filings to the magnet is the same as the one that affects the lover of beauty uplifted by the sacred fire of poetic creation: “The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art … there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings … In like manner the Muse inspires the poet, who communicates inspiration to others … For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing.”3 What lightens and gives wings begins by filling us with an impalpable ether in which the words, images and sounds called up by breath intermingle. Body, mind, and soul are uplifted by the divine energy of desire. Pneuma, spiritus—philosophers have not shrunk from ethereal metaphors and evocations of flight in their descriptions of the forces that intensify thought and direct it towards skies as astral as they are noetic. In these skies horses have wings. For those who have ears to hear, the silence of an angel’s passing rings with the clatter of hooves. The noble chariot and horses of the soul that Plato speaks of in Phaedrus are pulled in two directions: on a “heavenward pilgrimage” and towards the “darkness and the 2. Ibid., 306 3. Plato, Ion, trans. Benjamin Jowett, http://classics.mit.edu/ Plato/ion.html (translation modified).

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4. Plato, “Phaedrus,” in Six Great Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover, 2007), 118. 5. Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 2006), 45. 6. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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An impetuous passion wrenches us free of the earth, but with a thrilling, perilous price to pay: the price of the uncontrollable. At the core of the word uprising there stands firm the weight—the value, the price—of lightness itself: Old English rīsan, at once “to make an attack” and “to wake, get out of bed.” Experienced in all its lightness, the power of being can be the “unbearable” movement of something that refuses all assigning to a fixed, identifiable place. Milan Kundera has worked through its desireful and political manifestations. The uprising is a form of enantiosemy in that it gives voice simultaneously to weight and lightness. Everything brings us back to earth, everything subjects us to gravity, everything reminds us of dust. When the burden of living becomes too heavy, fable and myth are there to recount the vigorous effort demanded by the lifting of the load in a movement that defies gravity. Such is the task of the Titan: Atlas, Hesiod tells us, was condemned to hold up the sky for eternity as a punishment for having rebelled against Zeus. He who rises up against Zeus incurs the heaviest penalty.5 Thus did “atlas” become the name of the first cervical vertebra, whose function is to uphold the weight of the head, while its companion, “axis,” allows the head to move and pivot. Atlas is at the head of column, but the burden is so heavy that from Dürer’s Melencolia to Rodin’s Thinker, Atlas’s neck asks for aid and support from the hand. The image of the thinker cannot separate the hand from the skull, from that weighty site of speech that the helping, acting hand upholds. Raising the head requires the assistance of the hands. Thus does André Leroi-Gourhan describe the birth of speaking, acting humanity:6 the foot freed the hand and together they straightened up a body asking only to be raised, to lift its face and look upwards at the infinity of the heavens and the flight of birds. Then humans became able to speak and produce a world of signs and techniques. Birth is an uprising: it is a straightening up, a lifting up of oneself and a maintaining of the upright stance of something that threatens to

buckle, fall and sink under its own weight. Later “atlas” came to mean a book containing a summary of the images of the earth and the heavens. The lightness of signs and images delivers us from the crushing weight of the universe. And then there was Sisyphus, also punished by Zeus, endlessly condemned to raising, after each fall, a rock unremittingly obedient to the laws of gravity: “Then I saw Sisyphus, suffering bitter torments, trying to roll a gigantic rock with his hands. Bracing himself, constantly straining with all his might, he would push the huge rock straight up toward the top of a hill; but just as he came close, its weight would roll it back, and the pitiless rock went bounding down from the top of the hill to the valley below. And once more he would descend and begin to strain back up the hill, with the sweat pouring over his body.”7 Neither the Titan nor Sisyphus had access to Archimedes’s marvelous engineering, whose levers could move crushing weights with the aid of a single finger: “Give me a fulcrum and a lever,” he declared, “and I shall move the world.” Archimedes reversed the energy of lifting by using downward forces to achieve elevation. Lifting became an art of balance, a science of equilibrium based on opposing forces. The art of the lever, able to lift the heaviest weights, is that of weight and counterweight, without which there is neither equality nor justice. It is the strength of the weakest that lifts up the masses. The truth of fable and myth, though, has nothing to do with the ingeniousness of intellectuals or the engineers of social and political balance. The uprising driven by the energies of disequilibrium has no fear of conflict. Moreover, no lever has ever succeeded in freeing anybody from the weight of reality, from the encumbrance of the shamings and adversities handed out by gods or demons. The uprising shares the history of all our burdens and throws the scales out of kilter. It wants to have done with the weight of destiny. Even if the heaviest of all our burdens is quite simply death, our perception is of a burden as weightless, insubstantial, invisible, and impalpable as time itself. No image of it exists. Only fable and the metaphors of shadow seek to lift us far above the ground, far from all place and outside time. The poetics of flight. Resurrection, ascension, levitation: nothing but exercises in the eternal. The uprising is a constitutive fiction out to escape all constituted gravity. The experience of eternity was a Spinozist formulation. In his commentary on Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze illustrates the three kinds of knowledge with the metaphor of the wave: the wave slaps and submerges the person who cannot swim—this is the precipitate of the shipwreck; if you meet the wave it lifts you up and if you can swim it joins forces with you—this is the mastery provided by reason and knowledge;

but when the wave meets you and lifts you up you become one with it, “feeling and experiencing eternity.” Beatitude in the immanence of uplift.

BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY Uprising rhymes with realizing, but it seems to hesitate, not to say negotiate, between the ongoing movement that smoothly and unbrokenly “shifts the lines” upwards and the eruptive force of the leap that takes its chances with vertigo and the risk of falling. The uprising can blend with a slow, patient, gradual lift-off from some point of constraint—with a solemn composure aiming at sovereignty over the heights so effortfully conquered. But like every conquest, this one weakens the driving force of the uprising by endowing some overarching fiction with the privilege of well-earned rest. Once the goal has been attained, the status quo loses the energy demanded by a permanent uprising. Dialectically speaking, there is a real temptation to reduce the uprising to a mere step, a stage in the liberatory shift towards the pleasure of the concept and regal glory. Dialectical thinking tends to skip the leap—the break—in favor of considerations of process. The uprising’s temporality is discontinuous within the zone of radical indeterminacy without which there can never be revolution. The uprising is an adventure that defies the loci of power, be it the power of reason or of truth. It flees exposure. On the uprising’s shifting ground, the fluidity of waves is equally receptive to storms, cataclysms, and seismic fractures. The uprising has given birth to mountains, to ignited volcanoes. Our political history shares a radical intimacy with subterranean geology: both have darkness at their center. The deities of forge and fire, of the netherworld and of vengeance, reside below ground, ever ready to rise to the surface.

LEVITATION Far from the dialectic in quest of power, what of the surprising power held by those uninterested by power in any form? If we return to those celestial elevations that bear souls and bodies off into the territories of the birds, we must take account of the spiritual exercises that bear and bear off the soul and the body of the one who feels called, irresistibly drawn, towards supraterrestrial, saving places. Levitation is the singular

7 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Atria, 2013), 330.

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experience of a body flying towards the ether, attested to by the entire mystical tradition from East to West. In her autobiography, Saint Teresa of Avila makes a distinction between union and rapture: “I wish that I could explain, with God’s help, the difference between union and rapture (arrobamiento), or elevation (elevamiento), or flight of the spirit (vuelo que llaman de espíritu) or transport (arrebatamiento)—for they are all one … these are all different names for the same thing, which is also called ecstasy (éxstasis).”8 Thus does Teresa, uplifted, distinguish different experiences of the phenomenon according to the degree of violence and joy she feels. Far from always surrendering to the ecstasy of these upliftings, whose rapture Bernini’s statue of her seizes but does not immobilize, she remains plaintive even in the midst of the most exquisite emotional volatility. Her description of this ethereal spiritingaway by the deity illuminates the paradoxical tension of a state whose grace is as eroticizing as it is embarrassing. The spectacular visibility of the invisible forces that bring her to climax is barely tolerable, barely acknowledgeable. “But rapture is, as a rule, irresistible. Before you can be warned by a thought or help yourself in any way, it comes as a quick and violent shock; you see and feel this cloud, or this powerful eagle rising and bearing you up on its wings … very often I should like to resist, and I exert all my strength to do so, especially at such times as I am in a public place … At other times resistance has been impossible; my soul has been carried away, and usually my head as well … It seemed to me when I tried to resist that a great force, for which I can find no comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet. It came with greater violence than any other spiritual experience, and left me quite shattered.”9 What Teresa experiences is an uprooting, a leap that separates her not only from the ground, but from the community as well. The supernatural order of the miracle is a rupture with the natural and the social orders. Repudiating the upward leap, but following the mystical path of uplift, Simone Weil speaks of the elevation through grace as an experience of gravity, as acceptance of the “law of descending movement.” Refusing the prideful pleasure of ascending ecstasies, she defends a “second degree of grace” that rejects all upward movement towards a higher state. “To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral gravity makes us fall towards the heights.”10 Spiritual uplift is not without its contradictions, and a recurring feature of the texts is the fundamental principle of a counterbalance. “Equilibrium alone destroys and annuls force,” Weil writes.11 “If we know in what direction the scales of society are tilted, we must do

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what we can to add weight to the lighter side. Although the weight may be something evil, if we handle it with this motive we shall perhaps not be tainted by it.”12 No uplift to be achieved, then— including by grace—if one steers clear of the worst. If Teresa fears in her elevation the ruses of the devil, Weil, on the contrary, sees hers in the form of a descent towards the real world of work and war. In London, during the winter of 1943, she wrote The Need for Roots after publishing La condition ouvrière (The condition of the working class) in 1937. For her, what uplifted was the commitment of spirit and body to uprisings: in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Durruti Column. Andrei Tarkovsky was another who was committed to resisting the two worlds he rejected: Stalinism and capitalism. Tarkovsky used the cinema to meet the near-mystical but nonreligious responsibility of putting images of uprising into action. In three films he achieved the union of the mystical fable and political thinking. In Andrei Rublev, the peasant, Yefim, has made a kind of hot-air balloon out of animal skins, intended to fly him over fields and forests. As Tarkovsky tells it, “The script includes an episode in which a peasant, who has made himself a pair of wings, climbs up on to the cathedral, jumps, and crashes to the ground … Evidently it was a case of a man who all his life had been thinking of himself flying … Then he jumped … In order to dispel the Icarus overtones we decided on an air balloon … we felt it rid the episode of spurious rhetoric and turned it into a unique happening.”13 This kind of pivotal event recurs in Solaris, as the levitation of the cosmonaut’s dead wife in the orbiting space station. In the depths of interstellar space, Tarkovsky confronts a dual torment: the raising of the dead and the stirrings of the primordial magma. Ultimately, in Stalker, he endows a child’s gaze with the power to lift objects and thwart the law of gravity. And now is the moment to let Guillaume Apollinaire restore its enigmatic lightness to divine grace: It’s Christ who goes up in the sky better than any pilot could He holds the world record for altitude.14

RAISING? 8. Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 136. 9. Ibid., 38. 10. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von den Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 11. Ibid., 171.

12. Ibid., xvii. 13. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989), 79–80. 14. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” Zone: Selected Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: NYRB Poets, 2015).

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It may be that paths like these distance us from the initial energy that in every uprising acknowledges the effects of an exercising of the body and of reason. This is because there exist other elemental forms of thought and imagery that demand we pay homage to the gravity

of lightness. Gravis, heavy. The law of gravity seeks to deter all birds, all who laugh and dance, all poets, and all who believe in the insurrectional forces of revolution. Gravity is what makes every upward movement weighty. Is not the first phase of this uplifting the raising of a child as a subject full of gravity who, through the power of play, invents dramatic scenarios of his or her own existence as a desiring subject, in defiance of the world’s let-downs and failings? To teach the pupil to transform the absence of things into a ferment of signs is to offer the resources inherent in all uprisings, and to use this ferment to trigger an endless, limitless interplay of volatile images and words. Raising does not consist in teaching the pupil to walk and talk and do everything others have already done before in our relationship with the ground beneath our feet, language, and time. Raising immediately betokens the power of flight. In enabling pupils to do what none have done before, the master gives them wings.

STASIS: INSURRECTION

FLYING This winged child is also Cupid. The archer of desire also takes flight. Lacking gravity, Eros shares the space of the angels and that of butterflies. “Light as a feather,” flighty woman defies volatile man and the lightness of libertinage. Desire lifts veils but often prefers to intuit what lies hidden. There is room here for everything ascendant, for the “subterranean” rush of air that blows Marilyn Monroe’s skirt sky high, and for French chansonnier Georges Brassens’s celebration of the “haphazard, roguish wind” that sets youthful petticoats aflutter. But desire’s flurryings can also betray their chance origins and veer into the systematic. When photographer-jumpologist, Philippe Halsman got Marilyn and lots of others to perform leaps and bounds, it was probably with the secret hope of capturing a truth revealed when bodies are wrenched free of the ground. Here we have an odd trade-off with dance and its endless challenging, defiance, and denial of gravity. But when photography yields to the capture fantasy, the very act that catches the up-rising annihilates it by freezing it. The dancer and the acrobat are in constant opposition to the image: fixity is impossible. This up-rising is necessarily a fleeting conversation with the “moment of our death.” The performer is on the brink, like every tightrope walker. 15. Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache with Jeff Fort (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2001). 16. Ibid., 105. 17. Ibid., 106. 18. Ibid., 41.

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It is to the Greeks that we must turn now, with uprising becoming an immanent menace to democratic peace. Stasis is the word they used for the paradoxical insurrection/equilibrium dyad of the “Divided City,” to quote the title of a remarkable book by Nicole Loraux.15 At issue here is that state of insurrection inherent in the social bond and peace. The section of the book dealing with the fundamental ambivalence of stasis is titled “A Gegensinn,” a German term referring to the use of the same word for something and its opposite. Stasis embraces both the fixed, stable state of what stands firm, and the insurrectional movement about to trigger civil war. “We could, of course,” Loraux writes, “disregard the opposite meanings of words. We could pretend that nothing of the sort is happening and shelter behind an etymological dictionary that glosses stasis as ‘stability, place, action of standing, hence insurrection’… But I suggest that we complicate the double meaning even further by adding to the opposition (between movement and rest) the tension between what is upright and of a piece—stasis, then—and the representation most commonly associated with stasis in daily life, namely, division.”16  Whence the author’s hypothesis, which does indeed complicate the question of insurrection by illuminating its non-dialectical force: “Civil war is stasis inasmuch as the clash between two equal halves of the city erects ( just like a stēlē) conflict in the meson.”17 The Athenian city is not the fantasy model of a peaceful democracy that has only external enemies against whom it makes war and with whom it makes peace. On the contrary, there is no internal peace, no inner equilibrium without stasis, an energy at once insurrectional and stabilizing. Stasis is affiliation and disaffiliation. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides it is clear that the Erinyes have their abode beneath the law court, and that hatred and discord are the subterranean coals underlying the exercise of justice. At any moment the Kindly Ones can revert to being bloodthirsty hounds surging out of their lair to claim their due. What Loraux so vividly points up is the place of memory in the distribution of the forces that make and unmake bonds. Should the uprising of memory reactivate the desire for revenge and once again cause hideous crimes, political life will cease to be possible. And so, in order that this threat should no longer weigh crushingly on the city, the wording of contracts and oaths must be given a performativity rooted in amnesty without amnesia: “The establishment of the Erinyes at the foot of the Areopagus indeed symbolises the domesticated yet always threatening presence of terror and wrath in the city.”18

The uprising is, as language was for Aesop, “the best and worst of things.” Without the founding threat of insurrection and civil war, there can be no contract and no peace. This is why Loraux calls on Hesiod for the epigraph to her chapter on stasis: It was never true that there was only one kind of strife. There have always been two on earth. There is one you could like when you understand her. The other is hateful.19 The insurrectional uprising is a revolutionary energy without which there could be no order other than bureaucratic dictatorship. If this threat of violence were defused and ceased to fuel the conflict between dominators and dominated, the community would be deprived of the radical possibility of the event. Liberty can be continuously exercised only at the cost of the possibility of violence—and much worse. Only the forces of knowledge and creativity can address this intractability and by their actions bring about popular, democratic emancipation. This is what led Gramsci to say that there would never be a political revolution without the shaping and development of intelligences through the practice of ideas and creativity. Emancipation of the citizenry is both the raison d’être and the prerequisite for the permanence inherent in any true political uprising and thus for any transformation of the relationships involved in production and power sharing. The workshop for insurrection is the zone of perilous, exhilarating creativity, for which celebrations and the carnival are the seminal models.

THE LEAP Turnarounds, overturnings, mask dances, and the practice of confusion: these nourish the uprising’s political energies. Thus hatred of ideas and art is what drives the wars all dictatorships declare on those who stand up and those who wrench themselves free of the ground solely through their power to leap. This is doubtless what made Kafka write in his diary: “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place. This occurs by a higher type of observation, a higher, not a keener type, and the

19. Hesiod, Works and Days, 11–13. Quoted in Loraux, Divided City, 89.

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20. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1988), entry for January 27, 1922, 406–407. 21. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 232, 241. 22. Supra, note 18. 23. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire Heidegger : L’être 3 - Figure du retrait (1986-1987) (Paris: Fayard, 2015).

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higher it is and the less in reach of the ‘row,’ the more independent it becomes, the more obedient to its own laws of motion, the more ascendant its course.”20 The leap differs from flying in that it needs no oneiric or thaumaturgical conduit. It is impossible without solid ground, a base—a launchpad if you like—but the question of the leap remains inseparable from the movement in which it is completed by fulfilling (or not) some real or imaginary end or purpose. For Kafka writing is “a leap out of murderers’ row,” the invention of the solid ground on which life is spared. While not endowing the leap with saving or redemptive overtones, he effects it as a gesture towards life and liberty. This necessarily makes the point of departure tenebrous and criminal. It is not simply a matter of escaping the violence of the murderers, but also of escaping one’s own criminal future. This is why Heidegger’s use of the leap in his Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) is problematical in that for him, one leaps in order to “be projected”: “Da-sein as a projection of the truth of beyng [sic] … The task is an original projection and a leap that can draw its necessity only out of the deepest history of mankind … The transcendental way (through a different transcendence) is merely provisional, in order to prepare the turnaround and the leap.”21 Dating from 1937–38, this text raises the issue of the leap in terms of immemorial truth and thus powerfully foregrounds the event as a bringer of the truth of being—the truth of humankind itself. The wrenching-free is return, refounding, a rooting in the historical explosion of that which is going to throw the subject out of indifference. Even so, writing has not removed the writer from murderers’ row. So what leap are we talking about? And how, then, are we not to return to stasis and Loraux’s quotation from Hesiod?22 The uprising embodied in the leap must resign itself to the loss of truth and face the risk of the form that will be given to the movement not of return but of venturesome encounter and sharing. It is the encounter with the Other that gives the curve of the leap its firmness. No point in torturing language to avoid the part of truth that takes root in the encounter with whatever Other: here violence is spotlighted by the fact of the absence, the elision, of what founds the event, in this case the coming, the arrival of the first-comer, of whatever other wrenches us out of indifference. As Alain Badiou has so neatly put it, “There is this German inclination ultimately to prefer birds to people.”23 Badiou continues his analysis by seeking the exit from indifference not, like Heidegger, in differential evaluation, but in the “composing of an indiscernible.” Seen in this light the uprising has less to do with metaphors of breaking free and taking flight, than with

the movement that raises the eyelid of the sleeper, opens the ear of the deaf person and gives speech to the mute person when our gaze, listening ability, and voice refuse to submit passively to the tyranny of fear. The “composing of the indiscernible” it quite simply our putting into action of the imaging power at work in every encounter. To see for the first time, to hear for the first time, to speak for the first time … this is the creative leap, the perilous upsurge of the unprecedented. In Timaeus, Plato suggests the disturbing but necessary hypothesis of a third kind (triton genos) of existence lurking unseen in the matrix where every image can be born once it takes on the appearance of the underlying idea. In this indiscernible locus are played out the testing of our discernment and the upsurge in our acts of the unprecedented, the unheard of. The unheard of making itself heard used to be called an annunciation. To those who have ears to hear, an angel says “Hail”; that is how the image has its arrival announced even before eyes can see it. But to hail is not to save. The fable is beautiful and mystery free: it announces the arrival of the first comer, of one who arrives for the first time and who, thus, will never cease arriving. Moreover, in this birth there must be the declaration of a birth, that is to say of the inventive program of every revolutionary event; nor must the fable become a tale for good children and for adults dozing during this seismic annunciation.

contemplation of venerated artifacts, against docile grammar, against established differences and distinctions. Not that he was in the grip of some hyperbolic, truth-seeking doubt; there was a quite different hyperbole at work, scandalizing and subverting respectfulness in the name of the tiny energies that set space imperceptibly seething with Brownian motion. But enduring patience is required, and time too, if, colorlessly and noiselessly, the dusty trace of countless, incessant turbulences is to settle. In 1920, Man Ray photographed the Large Glass that Duchamp had left to gather dust, and called the result View from an Aeroplane. Duchamp, the genius of the uprising, called it Dust Breeding:  transformer designed to utilize the slight, wasted energies A such as: the excess of pressure on an electric switch. the exhalation of tobacco smoke … sighs, etc.24 This slow accretion of gray matter forms the fuzzy, indecipherable shadow of time itself. Dust Breeding raises the impalpable substance of any event by letting it settle. Duchamp’s meditation on weight and gravity underpins his conception of the infra-thin—the gravity of whatever is without weight or thickness. Art of traversal, virginal uprising of membranes, accretion of the fall. Here the art of the fall is a redundancy. Thus arises “Song of the revolution of the bottle of Bened”:

WAKE-UP CALL To preempt visual, aural, and oral shutdown on the part of mystery gulpers, image gobblers, and other indiscriminate gorgers, we have to leave room for those who change the subject on the grounds that the only thing to bring up is the problem. Sooner or later the uprising problem produces the rising-up of its own enigma. It certainly seems, going down this road, that Marcel Duchamp most deserves our homage. The question has already been raised here of upbringing and well or badly brought-up pupils. When pupils rise up to make it clear that they cannot be brought up if they are enslaved, what happens is what Jean Vigo filmed: the gleeful explosion of pillows and eiderdowns that turns the dormitory into a flurry of feathers, and the pupil telling his principal, “And I say to you: Shit!” It’s party time—and soon the down of birds carpets the floor with white and the children march over it in resolute revolt. This is exactly how Duchamp, the talented scion of painting and art history, chose to rise up and march against everything upraised under the banner of the picture, against the

—After having pulled the chariot by its fall, the bottle of Benedictine lets itself be lifted off by the hook C; it falls asleep as it goes up, and is woken with a start at dead center, head downwards. It pirouettes and falls vertically according to the laws of gravity.25 Even more than the leap, the start sets the revolutionary refrain going. No uprising without falling, and vice versa. Duchamp’s statements function as annunciations: he states the diaphanous divide separating the visible from the invisible; through the osmotic grace of a membranous locus, incarnation becomes the work of a bachelor machine and a virgin bride. Diaphanous hymen, intact screen on which all images can appear. The visible veils the invisible and manifests it without unveiling it. On this osmotic veil the invisible offers itself to the eye. The Christian fable of the Marian birth of the image draws on Platonist thinking in this osmotic treatment 24. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Boston, MA: Da Capo, 1989), 191–192. 25. Ibid., 61–62 (translation modified).

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Though the shadow and the mystery Had not broken the threads that bound me to the ground In my head, laid bare to the winds of terror, I felt a strange and terrible oblivion well up, In the dark shape that I sense myself to be, That mist drifting around in the problem …30

of the khôra, described by Plato as the receptacle and invisible mother of the visible.26 The virginal receptacle brings the image into the world by consenting to be only the pure screen for the projection of the invisible into the visible. The hymen is infra-thin and becomes the locus of all apparitions of the possible.  e possible is/ an infra-thin … The possible implying/ the Th becoming—the passage from/ one to other takes place/ in the infrathin.27

Darkness, strange welling-up, drifting, solitude, and doubt: these are the words that speak to us of what uplifts the speech of poets and, at best, a few philosophers. Things waver when waves are involved, which is why it is only right to leave the last word to Anarchasis, who supposedly said, “There are three kinds of men: the living, the dead, and those who sail the sea.”

No question, Duchamp is the iconic insurrectional artist, signaling in an utterly radical way that an artistic act has no point other than to disturb the viewer with a problem at once exhilarating and anguishing. Uplifted by powerful gusts, the gray, dusty matter conjures up simultaneously the infinite, turbulent life of the invisible particles that make up the world and the deathly pallor of the ashes reminding us of our dust. A recent exhibition in Paris featured a tribute to Dust Breeding and took as its epigraph a quotation from T. S. Eliot: And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.28 Might rising/uprising generate fear? Is it not, rather, a matter of giving tangible form to what raises the problem and its power in every speaking, desiring subject. Raising the Problem demands the spectator advance to meet the enigma of his or her own visibility, experience the foundering of unifying certainties and plunge into the multiplicity of temporalities, the reversibility of all positionings. To raise the problem is to welcome the ever-perilous fecundity of a loss of bearings. Infra-thin is one name for the place where this loss of bearings happens. Amazingly, in a remarkable tribute to Victor Hugo by André du Bouchet,29 whose title—L’œil égaré dans les plis de l’obéissance aux vents (The eye lost in the folds of obedience to the winds)—is a dazzling phrase from the master’s Postscript to My Life, we learn that well before Duchamp, Hugo was haunted by the question of discontinuity and uprising: In the silent, unheard, impalpable darkness, I was alone, but no longer myself;

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26. Plato, “Timaeus,” in Timaeus and Critias, ed. and trans. Thomas Kjeller Johansen (London: Penguin, 1977), 70. 27. Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1983), 1. 28. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), quoted in the exhibition catalogue A Handful of Dust (Paris: Le Bal, 2015). 29. André du Bouchet, L’œil égaré dans les plis de l’obéissance aux vents followed by L’infini et l’inachevé (Paris: Seghers, 2001).

30. Victor Hugo, Post scriptum de ma vie (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). This excerpt translated by Jeremy Harrison.

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Jacques Rancière

returned so often that we no longer really know if it is the images on the screen that we see or those that are born from his words.2 The erudite and scrupulous analysis by Didi-Huberman focuses the reader’s attention on every articulation of the montage and editing, and on the jump that occurs at every moment. Yet, the reader feels carried off on the compelling movement of a continuous flow. On the Odessa bridge, there is the morning mist that already contains the bright daylight in its sails; there are reflections dancing on the waters that prefigure the storms of emotion: the tears of a lamentation called upon to become a plaint against the murderers; the emotion of the crying that becomes a movement of fists, clenched tightly against the waist before rising up and calling for the uprising of the bodies; the pain of the individuals that is transformed into the action of the crowd. Thus, the stases of emotion are transformed into the ecstasy of revolt, thereby refuting the doxa that always pits the passivity of the first against the active energy of the second. In the same way, the montage that links everyone’s emotions in a sequence, and that turns this sequencing into the potency of a collective, rejects the facile oppositions between identifying passivity and reflective distance, or the platitude of the obvious sense and the poignant singularity of the obtuse sense. From the movements of clouds or waves flowing with the mobilized crowd, through the tears that fall from the faces, it is the same uprising that seems to transform the pathos into praxis and to bring revolutionary dialectical action into the continuity of ancient forms of pathos. And this uprising seems to continue in the phrases of the commentator where, in order to speak of the uprising of images, the words constantly lean, as though pushed by the movement they intend to extend and transmit. Yet, the old problem of the active and the passive is not so easily solved. One must first of all know just who must be made to rise up and for what action. This is the question asked by Eisenstein, who was not concerned with becoming the passer of emotions from the depths of the ages, but was concerned instead with representing himself as the inventor of attractions destined to produce the emotions of a specific crowd, a cinema audience. He was able to imagine—above all during the years in which the writing was a compensation for the impossibility to film—a thousand models for his work, from the calculation of the Golden Section to primitive rites of passage, the architectures of Piranesi to Japanese theater or to the Chinese musical landscape. But during the period when he filmed Battleship Potemkin, he emphasized that the important emotions for him were not those that belonged to the screen but those to be felt by the spectator who

ONE UPRISING CAN HIDE ANOTHER

There are words that seem to have already accomplished what they refer to, and, better still, that seem to indicate the path from words to things because they already went from things to words, because the breath that emits them belongs to the movement of universal life. “Uprising” is one of these words. What in the world does not rise up? This is how life is recognized: the beating under the skin, the breathing that makes a sheet rise up imperceptibly, the wind that moves the dust that is the symbol of nothingness, and of the wave that is the symbol for everything, showing just as much the calm of its regular movement as the unleashing of storms. How, then, could we not include, in the great breathing of life that rises up, the moment when waves of people, whose breath and whose blood beat silently behind the walls of houses, loudly flood the streets behind raised fists or flags flapping in the wind? How could we not link the movements of the lines on the canvas and the breathing of sentences in books with the great continuity of life that rises up? No doubt the novelist who strove to be an aristocrat would claim that men are no more brothers than the leaves in the woods are alike. “They torment themselves together, that is all.”1 But the words “that is all,” which suffice to arouse in him a love for a little dust that rose up under a door, indicates the path that goes from the swirling of the leaves to the torment of the souls, and from the storms in our skulls to the insurrection in the streets. For the visitor to the Phillips Collection, the raised fists in Daumier’s The Uprising naturally occupy their space between those little children of Soutine that run on the path after the storm, the waves that have risen up in The Mediterranean by Courbet or The Wake of the Ferry II by John Sloan, the elation of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, or the abstract volutes in the Equivalents by Stieglitz. This path seems to come, quite naturally, to the reader’s mind when he or she follows the way in which Georges Didi-Huberman returns to the sequences in Battleship Potemkin, to which Eisenstein himself

1. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, May 26, 1853, in Correspondance 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 335.

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2. Georges Didi-Huberman, Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2016).

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must be “created in the desired direction through a series of calculated pressures on [their] psyche.”3 The tears as well as the raised fists, rifles that descend in a line, a mother coming back up carrying her dead child, hanging eyeglass frames, or a pram hurtling down the stairs are all stimuli intended to work on the brain of the spectators, who are all too ready to believe the war ended with the defeat of the White armies. Battleship Potemkin is a film from that time of the NEP when the watchword was to fight the bourgeois with their own weapons. Eisenstein calls, therefore, upon the activity of the communist producers by using “all the procedures of passive art: doubt, crying, sentimentality, psychology, maternal sentiment, etc.”4 You never know, of course, to what extent the filmmaker’s provocative declarations are to be taken seriously. But one pattern remains constant throughout: it has to do with producing an effect (activity) by means of its opposite (passivity), and this assumes that the opposites, even if they must overturn each other, are indeed opposites. This is why the intended effect of the montage of images can be said just as easily in terms of a consciously manipulated contagion of “bourgeois” emotions or of formal use of the Marxist logic of opposites. In both cases, the straight line from the tears to the weapons is broken. The structure of the “third act” illustrates this perfectly, but so does the overturning that it undergoes in the following act. The movement of the crowd that culminates in the red flag being raised to the top of the ship at the end of this act must be the opposite of the morning lamentation of the old women and not merely its transformation. But in the following act the contradiction works in the opposite way. The mobilized people is not a people up in arms. It has become, on the contrary, a crowd of spectators in their Sunday best, greeting the battleship from the staircase steps. And the dialectical inversion of rest into action is the work of the guards, who make them rush down the steps, to throw them into the arms of the Cossacks. An action, then, is always needed; a master of operations to transform the pathos into action. But the problem is not only that this master describes not the effect of this manoeuver, but merely the image made of it. It happens that there are several different ways to make the passive and the active indistinct. The uprising is, perhaps, less a becoming-active of pathos than a way to unite movement and rest. The diversity of commentaries that Eisenstein gives of the passage from the mists to the revolt, and from the “melancholic surface” of the sea to the “uprising embracing the whole city,”5 evokes a more ancient history of the relation between the movement of the waves, the energy of the bodies and the freedom of the people. Winckelmann had already

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formulated the paradox of inactive activity or of active inactivity when he described the muscles of Hercules of Belvedere, headless and without arms or legs, melting with each other like waves rising up and falling. The perfection of this immobile movement is, he said, the fruit of another perfection; it expressed the freedom of a people. The freedom of a people is its capacity to depend upon itself alone, which does not mean merely to be independent of any exterior domination but rather to be the always renewed source of its own movement. It is in this way that the wave can be a symbol of freedom: not by its ecstatic impetuosity, but by falling and rising endlessly, by the repetition that removes its movement from the opposition between the active and the passive, because it takes it away from what normally commands the activity of the active and bases its privilege on the passive, in other words the pursuit of an end. It is not unimportant that this freedom of the wave, which would seem more suitable to Apollonian nobility, should appear on the back of the hero of the Twelve Tasks. The Hercules that symbolizes Greek freedom is not only a fighter at rest, a worker who completed the cycle of his tasks. He is also a hero who stopped wanting. He went over to the side of the gods; more precisely to those antique gods that the modern age invented: gods that want nothing and that, for this reason, are ready to embody the freedom of a people that wants nothing—for every want reveals a lack—but merely deploys the potency which makes it be: a playful people, as Friedrich Schiller would say, redirecting the ancient opposition between paidia and spoudè to make the game the sensible state in which the opposition between the form that commands and the matter that undergoes is voided. The characteristic of the game, like that of the wave in movement, like that of freedom, is that it has no end beyond itself. That freedom, which neither imposes nor submits itself, has disappeared from peoples’ lives. But its idea is preserved in the indifference of these stone faces that emotion can stir up and which force no one to look upon them with any determined emotion. And this freedom of the gaze that neither exerts nor suffers any mastering is perhaps, says Schiller, the principle of a new art of living and of a new sensible community. In this way the uprising is divided into two: the wave of freedom that rises up is opposed to the ends of the enterprising will. This paradox is not only the preoccupation of an artist or a philosopher who dreams of new communities by contemplating ancient marble statues. We find it everywhere the acting of freedom is at stake, and therefore at the heart of the uprisings of the people, or rather of the uprisings that make a people be. It is not enough to be numerous

3. S. M. Eisenstein, Au-del. des étoiles, trans. Jacques Aumont (Paris: UGE-10/18, 1974), 127. 4. Ibid., 35. 5. S. M. Eisenstein, La Nonindifférente Nature, vol. 2, trans. Luda and Jean Schnitzer (Paris: UGE-10/18, 1975), 69.

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and active. Some inactivity, some finality without end must also come into play. The stones of the Parisian barricades would seem to have nothing to do with the torso in the Roman museum. And yet, they too assume a certain standstill. At the end of June 1848, the Illustrated London News offered its readers an image of the insurrection that had just pitted the workers against the Republican power. The engraving shows the great barricade obstructing the entrance to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. But it looks more like a scene from an opera. At the summit of the barricade, the workers seem to pose in front of an artist, just as many of the combatants were to later pose for the photographers of the Commune. On each side of the barricade, two groups of three combatants are arranged symmetrically. Behind one of these groups, a kind of organized cave between the stones reveals another trio that look like conspirators in an operetta. And, at the top of the barricade, at the feet of the man with his arms outstretched and holding a red flag, we read on a placard the word Complet—“full.” Did the artist really see this placard? In any case, the message that it transmits to readers is clear: these terrible insurgents, whose imaginary atrocities are recounted by the newspaper, are false men of action, actors in the theater. This is both correct and incorrect at the same time. The link between the workers’ uprising and the theater is not a matter of spectacle, but rather it touches upon the division of times and spaces. The fact is that these men have nothing to do at this time in this place. Plato said it clearly: their place is in the workshop where the work does not wait; and even if work in those troubled times was instead waited for, this was undoubtedly not the place to find it. In 1848, like in Plato’s city, the Republican order wanted everyone to be in the place that their work demanded and to which their capacities sent them: the workers in the workshop, the legislators at the Assembly, and the guards where the defense of the community called them. Unfortunately, there is a place—a place that is material and symbolic— where roles and identities are mixed, for the work consists in making oneself into something other. This place is called theater. It is its example that pushes workers to build this scene in which they play the role of the people in arms fighting for their freedom. Before becoming a military tactic, the barricade was a disorder of places and of their use. More visionary than the artist in the English newspaper, Victor Hugo later described the barricade as a monstrous hurly-burly upon which were piled “roofing-ridges, fragments from garrets with their coloured wall-paper, window frames with panes intact set upright … amid the rubble, uprooted fireplaces, wardrobes, tables, benches piled in clamouring disorder, a thousand beggarly objects disdained even

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6. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, part five, book one, trans. Norman Denny (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), 989. 7. Louis Auguste Blanqui, “Instruction pour une prise d’armes” (Paris: Sens & Tonka, [1868–69] 2000), passim.

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by beggars, the expression of fury and nothingness.”6 More than just Hugo’s ritual fraternity between Olympus and the cloaca, the disorder of the barricades is made of an upheaval in the distribution of places and occupations. It is built with stones that normally pave the streets and that turn them into a space of circulation, with carts used to transport goods, with furniture and mattresses used for family life. The workers’ uprising is neither the wave of emotion that swells up, nor the earth that moves and projects into the daylight the chaos of its underworld. If it refutes the share of the active and the passive, as did the workers’ recently invented action, the strike, it is because it undoes the normal order that assigns activities to specific places and times. It is because with this very disorder it constructs the time and the places for the appearance of a people that is different from that which was incorporated in the existing order of occupations. However resolved this might be, the people’s rising up in arms is also, in its way, a suspense. The revolutionary strategist does not make a mistake here. The action of the people of the barricades is, for him, an inactive activity, disconnected from the calculation of ends. What then, he asks, is a movement that begins by barring the ways for movement of traffic? Is it not a wave rising up simply to fall until the troops—who do not at hesitate to move—end it? Seventeen years later, while assessing the June insurrection, Blanqui denounced the anarchy of these uprisings in which a few dozen men, united by chance on a street corner, overturned wagons and piled up the pavestones whichever way they wanted in order to build these barricades that “waste time, obstruct the roads and impede the traffic necessary for all parties.” He commanded that the lesson of the defeat be learned. It was no longer time for the pandemonium of chance combatants or of motley constructions. In order to defeat the enemy, it was enough to no longer “shut oneself away in one’s own part of town,” but to create an organized, trained and disciplined army like any army and to “act with the whole apparatus of a governmental force.”7 This reasoning has no reply: only an organized army can beat an organized army. Regrettably, the people that have risen up are not an organized army. And it is not merely question of means. It is the vey relation between means and ends that is in question. If the popular uprising prevents traffic on the streets, it is not merely the result of a lack of knowledge of military art; rather, it is because it is that stopping of the traffic, that re-appropriation of places that constitutes an act of uprising and creates a people. The most difficult thing is not to go from tears to arms, but rather to go from arms to an army. There is no straight line from the people risen up in arms to the victorious army.

Five years later, the Communards were to verify this while Blanqui meditated in prison on the eternal return: the recovery of the cannons from the Montmartre hill is not the “taking up of arms” by a revolutionary strategist. If in 1925, it was necessary to make a film about the victory/defeat of 1905, it was also because the taking of the Winter Palace by a detachment of revolutionary soldiers was not yet the victory of the people, and that the latter was yet to come, even if it was for artists to inscribe it into the order of the sensible. Behind the idea of the line, albeit a broken line, drawn from pathos to praxis, there is the gap between two forms of revolution of the sensible world: that which suspends the order of places and of identities, and that which makes forces converge towards a central point or a paroxysmal moment. Reconciling Schiller (the aesthetic revolution that delivers human action from the subordination of means to ends) and Blanqui (the strategy that meticulously prepares the means of the end and chooses the right moment to put them to work) remains the impossible program of the Marxist revolution. It is true that what is impossible in politics is frequently what is possible in art. And conciliations exist apparently for those who added to the study of German philosophy the study of the philosophy of the streets of Paris, and who discovered that the theoretician for taking up arms was also the dreamer of eternal return. “Dialectics at a standstill” and “dialectical image” are the notions through which Walter Benjamin attempted to think about the explosive potency of the standstill, a potency that Georges Didi-Huberman attempts, in turn, to combine with the survival of Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln. But the artist who organizes the images of popular uprising in order to make public emotions rise up knows that, on cinema screens as on museum walls, there are no emotions. There are only images. And images do not rise up. Eisenstein had imagined the premiere of Battleship Potemkin, during which, at the end of the film, the prow of the battleship would have torn the screen. At that time, they did not have the technological means that we have today. But the harm, if there is any harm, is deeper still. Mobile images only ever exist for a spectator in front of whom, on the screen, they hunt or chase after one another just as much as they follow each other in a chain. No engineer knows just how the spectator synthesizes them, nor what this produces. This can be seen from the comparisons and the metaphors of Eisenstein: he sometimes makes a comparison between the counterpoint of shock images that must work on the brains and a primitive carpet made of tangled wool. Yet we know how much our exhibitions, today, include such “tapestries” in which the images of violence and revolt that shake our world are

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fig. 1 The great barricade at the entrance of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Illustrated London News, July 1, 1848.

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Nicole Brenez

brought together in a harmonious calm. And, on the contrary, the “Chinese musical landscape” of mists, of rowboats floating on a calm sea, and seagulls flying around the buoys that open Potemkin’s “third act” can have an effect, not by anticipating the unleashing of the passions of pain and revolt, but on the contrary, by distancing reality, in the same way as the ancient chorus as Schiller saw it: not the people intervening on the stage but the ideal barrier separating the audience from the play. The crying and the raised fists have an effect, then, insofar as the spectator who is separated from them by the chorus of mists is not forced to respond to their solicitation and that the suspense forges a gaze that is generally free to respond or not to the solicitations that educate the ordinary way of seeing and of inhabiting the world. To raise up and to rise up, to move physically and to move emotionally, and to mobilize, all of these things can be said in different ways, the alignment of which is always problematic. It may be useful, therefore, to rethink their interlacing and to suggest hitherto unseen figures for applying attention anew, for displacing the gaze, the thoughts, and the gestures that they induce, and to remember that the order of things is no more necessary today than it was yesterday.

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COUNTERATTACKS

Images of uprising in the history of class struggle

The main challenge in political cinema is historical effectiveness: there are three facets to this, and each individual film overlays them according to the requirements of the specific combat. The short-term concern is to strike in the present of the assault. René Vautier used the term “cinema of social intervention” to describe this performative immediacy, which aims at the success of the struggle in question and the concrete transformation of a situation of outright conflict or structural injustice. In the medium term, the task is to disseminate counter-information and trigger reactive energies: such is the case of Masao Adachi’s Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War (1971), for example, which describes the everyday life of armed resistance fighters in occupied Palestine and calls for the creation of an anti-imperialist Red Army. The long-term point of filming is to record historical facts, to document, to bequeath an archive, and to transmit the memory of the struggles to future generations. This is the underlying stratagem of Douglas Bravo, Georges Mathieu Mattéi and Jean-Michel Humeau’s 1970 account of the guerrilla war in Venezuela: the film sets out not only to support the struggle for liberation being waged by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), but also to preserve as faithfully as possible the words and the aura of Douglas Bravo, then living under as great a threat in the jungles of Venezuela as that which Ernesto Che Guevara faced in those of Bolivia. This same urge to perpetuate permeates Tobias Engel’s No Pincha!, a long black-and-white documentary shot among the National Liberation Front units in 1972, in what was then still called Portuguese Guinea. The film follows the fighters’ daily lives, but, heeding the tragic example of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, also sets out to preserve the image of their leader, Amílcar Cabral. In a more intimate, but equally effective vein, Yolande du Luart’s Angela Davis: Portrait of a Revolutionary (1971), was not originally intended to support Davis during her

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imprisonment—she was arrested between the shooting of the film and its editing—but was meant to portray the ideas and everyday existence of a young, militant philosophy teacher, unknown to the world at large but already drawing fire from her academic superiors. Activist cinema recognizes the rights of representation as much as the duties, for it is well aware of the potential ethical and political price—as distinct from the financial cost—of an image: a price that can be somebody’s life, as in the case of Raymundo Gleyzer, the documentary filmmaker and member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party murdered by the Argentinian junta in 1976. Speaking in 1974 of his film Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973), Gleyzer said, “The artist is an intellectual worker, who, as part of the people, must choose. Either use his skill in service of the people, urging on their struggles and the development of a revolutionary process, or openly side with the dominating classes, serving as a transmitter and reproducer of bourgeois ideology. … We must therefore serve as the stone which breaks the silence, or the bullet which starts the battle.”1 Since the beginnings of cinema, and in every country, filmmakers working alone or collectively have devoted their energies to revolutionary initiatives and sided with revolts by peasants, workers, the colonized, and oppressed minorities and individuals. In the tradition of Joris Ivens, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Ousmane Sembène, Masao Adachi, Safi Faye, Jang Sun-woo, Ken Jacobs, and a host of collectives around the world, I want to summon up an anthology of films often less famous, when not completely unknown, but just as critically potent. Following the activist model of Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and Holger Meins’s Molotov Cocktail (196 ), there follows an itinerary in the form of a practical user’s guide—bare of hope, but not of joy—paying tribute to two monuments of effectiveness: Victor Serge’s What Every Revolutionary Should Know about Repression (1921–26) and Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969).

fig. 1 Aaron Nikolaus Sievers, Flacky et camarades. Le cheval de fer (Flacky and friends. The iron horse), 1978–2008. Still frame.

1895–1996. To invent the resources for visual diagnosis. Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory): Auguste and Louis Lumière, Peter Tscherkassky, Harun Farocki, Siegfried Fruhauf (France/Germany/Austria). A seminal image haunts the cinema. Starting with the three versions of the Lumière brothers’ century-old film, Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995) accumulates

fig. 2 Ivora Cusack, Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up in Subcontracting), 2008. Still frame.

1. Terry Plane, “Three Interviews with Raymundo Gleyzer in Australia,” Adelaide, June 1974.

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sequences showing the permanence and the evolution of the workingclass theme. Emerging from the factory, workers not only hurry off: they also fight, argue, obstruct each other, and sometimes die. Analyzing the sequence and the details of the Lumière shots, Farocki detects in them the programmed oppressions and movements of resistance that were to structure the twentieth century. The terrain the Lumières had so blithely put their stamp on—and which had been crisscrossed since 1909 by philanthropist Albert Kahn’s cameramen, as they transformed the little artisanal factory’s joyful, largely female group into a substantial, industrial crowd—is dotted with the history of workers’ crusades, becoming in the process the bloodily symbolic locus not only for the class struggle and social control, but also for sexual conflicts. Farocki’s compilation transforms cinema into visual diagnosis. Siegfried Fruhauf’s 1998 Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik does not borrow a single take from the Lumière film, but reuses its title to show that the workers will in fact never manage to leave the factory: instead of exiting out of shot, as in the Lumière versions of 1895, their paths from background to foreground, and then from right to left, form a shifting cross, in a referencing of their own deaths. The harmonious Lumière orchestration of a dynamic if humdrum existence is succeeded here by a funereal elegy. Fruhauf’s film forms a diptych with Peter Tscherkassky’s Motion Picture : La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (1984). Projecting a single frame from the Lumière film onto fifty unexposed strips of film laid side by side, Tscherkassky reduces the cinematic system to its photographic determinants, turning the initial image into an abstract, black-and-white scrolling that shows the concrete focal point of working with film: the intermittence between mobility and immobility. Missing from Farocki’s compendium is one of the emblematic images of the working-class condition and the radical reverse shot of the Lumière employees leaving: the woman screaming that she doesn’t want to go back to the factory after the failure of the general strike of 1968 and the betrayal of the working class by the CGT trade union, filmed by Jacques Willemont and Pierre Bonneau in La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (Resumption of work at the Wonder factory). In 1996, Hervé Le Roux took this short film as a starting point, hunting down each character and each detail as he shaped an overview of working-class ideals and disillusionment: Reprise. Un voyage au cœur de la classe ouvrière (Resumption: Journey to the heart of the working class) recounts three decades of struggle and the first waves of the deindustrialization that would trigger the gradual disappearance of the First World’s industrial proletariat.

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1913. To seize the means of production. Le Vieux docker (The old docker), Le Cinéma du Peuple (France) October 1913 saw the creation of an anonymous film collective, Le Cinéma du Peuple (The people’s cinema), and its call in the pages of the weekly Le Libertaire for “a cinema belonging to the working class … Our aim is to make our own films, seeking in history, everyday life and the dramas of the workplace, scenarios that will make up for the sickening fare served up nightly to the working audience.”2 Among the collective’s seven films are the rushes for the fiction Le Vieux docker, an account of the death from exhaustion of a worker forced to cling to an inhuman occupation because the labor legislation of the time included no provision for retirement for the proletariat. Made all the more eloquent by their status as filmic residues—as escapees from destruction—these modest images evoke entire generations of laborers dying on their feet, literally worked to death by their employers, and in this respect even worse off than the slaves of old, whose masters at least ensured they were fed.

1928.

2. Laurent Mannoni, “28 October 1913: création de la société Le Cinéma du Peuple,” L’année 1913 en France, special issue of 1895, Revue d’histoire du cinéma (October 1993): 100–107. 3. Quoted by Mamoru Makino in “Rethinking the Emergence of the Proletarian Film League in Japan (Prokino),” trans. Abé Mark Nornes, in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honour of Makino Mamoru, eds. Abé Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow (Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford/Kinema Club, 2001), 37–38.

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To expand polyphonia. Genjū Sasa (Japan) Japanese filmmaker Genjū Sasa was responsible for one of the first proletarian manifestoes recommending the use of simple equipment to cooperatives aiming at counter-information. In his article “Camera—Toy/Weapon,” published in the magazine Senki in June 1928, he laid down the practical approaches that still characterize cinema seeking to break free of the mass-market rationale: “It is the worker farmer style entry into daily lives of photography through amateur cameras … More than anything, our films at our present stage should be ones that awaken class consciousness, expose the elements of present-day society, and thoroughly gouge out all the various social contradictions. The unorganized masses will become conscious participants; the organized masses will understand that will to struggle … Then all materials must be arranged and transferred according to the desires of the working class. Consequently, the ‘editing’ of documentary film (jissha eiga) means the gravest settlement of that mission’s accomplishment.”3 Genjū Sasa later helped found Prokino, which, until its dissolution by the imperial authorities in 1934, made forty-eight fiction, documentary, and animated movies, of which to date only six have been found. In the wake of Le Cinéma du Peuple

and Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, Prokino paved the way for numerous revolutionary collectives, often Communist and backed by the Comintern in the 1930s—think the Workers Film and Photo League in the United States—and Marxist-Leninist or anarchist in the decades that followed.

it calls for a struggle. And like Vautier’s Une nation, l’Algérie (One nation, Algeria) of 1955, with its prediction of the ineluctability of independence, Afrique 50, with the collective optimism of its closing thrust, stands equally as the making of an appointment with history. The extraordinary prescience that characterizes Vautier’s oeuvre simultaneously has its roots, like all his films and everything else he did, in geopolitical analysis, his experience in the Resistance, and his unassailable confidence in the power of popular revolution.

1950. To make an appointment with history. Afrique 50 by René Vautier (France) In 1947, the “Zhdanov Doctrine” proclaimed that the Soviet Communist Party must support the struggles of the colonized countries of Asia and Africa against the “capitalist bloc.” Viscerally committed to all battles against oppression, exploitation, and racism, the young communist René Vautier set off to French West Africa under the auspices of the Ligue de l’enseignement (Education League), whose members already included many future leaders of Africa’s liberation struggles. Among them was Ouezzin Coulibaly, head of the League’s branch in Treichville, Ivory Coast, where Vautier stayed. In October 1946, Coulibaly co-founded the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (African Democratic Assembly), a seminal emancipation movement whose action is signalled by the demonstrations in the closing sequences of Afrique 50. The RDA’s first major political events were organized in 1949, only to be systematically met by increased repression: a tax strike, for example, was violently put down by the army. In Vautier’s account, “Coming down from Bamako to Abidjan, Raymond Vogel and I followed in the footsteps of one of these punitive military columns”:4 the film records the bloody evidence, making a comparison with the crimes committed by the Nazis in French villages; and while the soundtrack recites the profits accruing to French and other Western companies, the accompanying images tell of European exactions: the structural, organized plundering of resources and the crushing of any resistance by the army. In less than twenty minutes, Afrique 50 leads us from timeless Africa—its plains and rivers, its crafts and farms, its family life and its children playing—to an examination of the damage wrought by colonialism; and concludes with the contemporary emergence of African emancipation movements—whose initial political successes would have to wait until 1956. Afrique 50 thus marries the various aspects of visual polemic: it recounts a situation of economic and political repression; it dismantles the ideology of progress, and exposes its racist presuppositions; and

1965. To give up on the audiovisual. Three films by Ulrike Meinhof (West Germany) Committed journalist, political analyst, and editor in chief of the magazine Konkret, Ulrike Meinhof devoted her attentions to the dark side of Germany’s “economic miracle.” In 1965, she wrote three documentaries for German television; broadcast as part of a series titled Panorama, they sank into oblivion but were exhumed in 2010 as experimental filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot worked on A German Youth (2015), his documentary on the Red Army Faction. Arbeitsplatz und Stoppuhr (Factory and stopwatch) studies the introduction of a US method of labor monitoring, MTM (methods-time measurement), into German factories. On August 9, 1965, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) viewers in Germany heard the following: “It has been observed that each manual act can be broken down into several basic movements: reaching out, bringing, seeking, inserting, letting go. Thousands of film takes enabled us to establish constant time values for each movement; these were then tabulated, making it possible to time each hand action to within a thousandth of a second. Economically speaking, the gains offered by this process are unquestionable; but we must ask ourselves, are they humanly acceptable?”5 Meinhof’s analysis implicitly leads back to the scientific-military origins of cinema’s invention, to the research of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Georges Demenÿ into what is termed “anthropotechnics,” the measurement of human and animal movements to optimize their use by army and industry.6 The filmmaker’s concrete example—“For four years Waltraud Voss’s job has entailed making the same five hand movements for eight hours”— describes the fate of millions of anonymous twentieth-century workers. But in contrast with those “workers leaving the factory,” the harshness of the average day, timelessly allegorized by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1937), was virtually never documented: filming inside factories

4. René Vautier, Caméra citoyenne (Rennes: Apogée, 1998), 36.

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5. Ulrike Meinhof, Arbeitsplatz und Stoppuhr, 1965. 6. See Christian Pociello, La Science en mouvements. Étienne Marey et Georges Demenÿ (1870-1920) (Paris: PUF, 1999).

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was forbidden, except for promotional movies commissioned by the owners. Thus for the realities of industrial labor we have to go mainly to covertly shot material, such as Bruno Muel’s masterpiece, Avec le sang des autres (With the blood of others, 1974), or images from factories on strike, as in the Medvedkine Group’s Sochaux, 11 juin 68 (Sochaux June 11 ’68) of 1970. Meinhof’s second TV film, Arbeitsunfälle (Industrial accidents), looks at workplace safety shortfalls, and the third, Gastarbeiter (Guest worker), offers a step-by-step description of the situation of immigrant workers in the German Federal Republic: the difficulty of finding housing, unsanitary conditions in hostels, and the obstacles to family reunification. The three films document and denounce the living conditions of the working class in a booming West Germany still partially under the thumb, politically and economically, of former Nazi leaders and collaborators. When her public call for a democratically driven improvement of workers’ and migrants’ lives went unheeded, Ulrike Meinhof turned to the possibilities offered by revolutionary individualism.

beginning to close. In 2003, this long-forgotten footage was taken in hand and edited by Aaron Nikolaus Sievers: “The first thing to do was to home in on what the miners had to say, to home in on their memories and bring them back to the surface. The film takes the time to sit down and chat with them in the local bar. To have a drink, listen to a poem, listen to their stories about work, and anger, and struggle— and love as well. And what endures amid the hoarse voices of the silicosis sufferers is the memory of Flaczynski, Flament, Jules, and Marguerite Grare, the Debarges, Paul Beaulieu’s laugh, the wives of the Polish miners, Moreels who was in the resistance, and the other trade unionists whose names we don’t know.”7

1969. To come up with preventive images. Nicht Löschbares Feuer (The Inextinguishable Fire) by Harun Farocki (Germany) The core of Harun Farocki’s project was the confrontation of dominant representations with critical analysis. Eschewing words wherever possible, his works observe the ways bodies are attacked, trained, tamed, and voided by techniques of of control: a mutilation formally characterized by simply putting sequences end to end, in series. Die Schulung (Indoctrination, 1987) shows a seminar where company executives are learning persuasion techniques; Leben – BRD (How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1990) observes the ways behaviour is standardized in different occupations (police training, midwifery, insurance); and in their descriptions of mutilated administrative existences Die Bewerbung (The Interview, 1997) and Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of the Shopping Worlds, 2001) are the ethnological films the West, whether capitalist or communist, deserves. But embedded between the psychic lines in each frame is Farocki’s gesture, in Nicht Löschbares Feuer (The Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), of stubbing out a cigarette on his arm in an asymptotic representation of the sufferings of the Vietnamese people bombarded with napalm. This act provides the preventive image, one of a sovereign simplicity capable of shattering in advance all the directives of domination; as does, for example, the moment of hesitation by the rifleman in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), when his refusal to fire on his comrades triggers all-out mutiny.

1967–2003. To bring the stories back to the surface. (Brittany, Franche-Comté, Nord-Pas-de-Calais) In France, the high point of proletarian cinema—cinema created by workers themselves—came with Chris Marker and Mario Marret’s encounter with René and Micheline Berchoud of the Centre Culturel Populaire de Palente-les-Orchamps, near Besançon; with Pol Cèbe, librarian at the Rhodiaceta factory in Besançon; and with workers from the factory. The upshot was the creation of the Medvedkine groups in Besançon, then in Sochaux, with backing from, among others, René Vautier, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruno Muel, and Antoine Bonfanti. Less well known are three other significant cinema experiments in workingclass settings: in Brittany, Quand tu disais Valéry (When you said Valéry, 1975), jointly directed by René Vautier, Nicole Le Garrec, and the workers of the Caravelair caravan factor in Trignac, near Saint-Nazaire, which methodically outlined strike tactics for other factories. In Montbéliard, the experiment carried out by Armand Gatti, Hélène Chatelain and Stéphane Gatti between 1975 and 1977, Le Lion, sa cage et ses ailes (The lion, its cage, and its wings), a series of self-portraits from among the immigrant workers at the Peugeot plant. And in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the films made by miners during training courses organized by Pierre Gurgand in the late 1970s, as the pits were

7. Aaron Sievers, Flacky et camarades (Le cheval de fer). Le cinéma tiré du noir de Aaron Sievers (Marseille: Commune, 2011).

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Povo Português (The Good People of Portugal, 1980)­, addresses these fundamental issues in an intermingling of portraits—of crowds, groups, and individuals—with scenes of political debate and descriptions of the condition of workers and peasants. As in Raymundo Gleyzer’s La Tierra quema (The land burns, 1964), a terrifying, age-old abyss of poverty is revealed through the handful of individuals who have their say. Most of them are women, but it is a child who has the last word. In this old Catholic country where, as in Spain, the Church backed the dictatorship, a teacher is shown questioning a class of small boys: “Why do you think they died?” (The anonymous “they” referring to all the unspecified human beings around them). In turn, the children reel off their replies: “Because God called them home,” “Because they had sinned,” and so on. The film closes with the answer of a small, timidly smiling boy: “Because they worked a lot.” People dead of exhaustion, like the old docker in 1913, and like the billions of humans and animals swallowed up in the long history of exploitation.

1970. To ensure free circulation of images. Repression, LA Newsreel (United States) “We have to unite as one people led by the working class: black, brown, yellow, red, and white, man and woman.” Thus concludes Repression (1970), a Marxist-Leninist broadside made by the Angeleno branch of the Newsreel collective, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. This internationalist stance was supported by a use of images extending to scenes lifted from other films, notably Jean-Pierre Sergent and Bruno Muel’s Rio Chiquito, shot in the Colombian jungle in 1965, when “the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) was a poor, peasantled guerrilla movement, but one capable of standing up to air and ground attack by the Colombian army.”8 The free circulation of images between activist collectives—embodied in the practice of René Vautier, who lost quite a few films that way—foreshadowed a time when tangible and intangible goods, especially of the cultural variety, would be available to all and no longer just the property of a few.

2007. 1974–1980. To turn a film into a collective platform. Pere Portabella (Spain), Rui Simões (Portugal) After a dictatorship that lasted thirty-six years, Franco died in 1975. In 1977, Pere Portabella finished a wide-ranging documentary that exemplifies the principle of political responsibility in the cinema. Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (General report on some questions of interest for a public screening) literally implements the practice it advocates: drawing up a concrete discussion platform for facilitating the transition from fascism to democracy. Initially solipsistic, tormented, and taciturn, Portabella’s films suddenly became swarming, noisy, and crowded, bent on clarity and explanation—although still as free-wheelingly polymorphous as ever. Informe general is utterly unique in its portrait of a people in the throes of self-organization in a context of conflict, uncertainty, fragility, and the need for democratic process. On April 25, 1974, after forty-eight years of dictatorship and thanks to a handful of courageous army officers inspired by the struggles for freedom in Africa, Portugal saw the blooming of its Carnation Revolution. How can a long-suffering people become a historical agent? And how can it allow the confiscation of its revolution by political parties? Or how, on the contrary, does it make that revolution work? Combining the visual and the musical, Rui Simões’s masterpiece, Bom

8. Bruno Muel, in “Bruno Muel ou l’humanisme critique,” program at the Cinémathèque Française, Paris, October 2007.

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9. John Gianvito quoted by the author in “John Gianvito and Productive Contemplation,” trans. David Davidson, Toronto Film Review, April 10, 2013, http://torontofilmreview. blogspot.fr/2013/04/johngianvito-by-nicole-brenez.html.

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To bring a collective perspective to the history of struggle. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind by John Gianvito (United States) In his prior and sometimes simultaneous incarnations, John Gianvito has been curator and programmer at the Harvard Film Archive and at MIT, a professor of film production and direction at the University of Massachusetts, and a film critic. In other words, when he films he knows his images’ context, their antecedents, and the artistic and social sources they can draw on for their impact. Marrying the influences of Howard Zinn and of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Trop tôt trop tard (Too Early/Too Late, 1980), Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007) is a visual hymn to the history of emancipatory struggles in the United States, from resistance by Native Americans to the demonstrations against the Iraq War. “To talk about politics, for me,” he says, “means talking about the politics of images.”9 In the ongoing battle between free media and the conglomerates, and contrary to the habitual rhetoric about art’s ineffectiveness, Gianvito accurately pinpoints cinema’s responsibilities: to foster “productive contemplation,” to hand on the memory of struggles whatever their causes, to restore collective perspective in an era of identity fragmentation, to fortify those taking part in struggles, and to ignite debate. “If films were unable to bring about any change,” Gianvito asks, “why have so many of them been banned and censured in so many countries? Why was there so much effort put into stopping

the production of Herbert J. Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954) at each of its different stages? Why did Raymundo Gleyzer ‘disappear’? Why is Jafar Panahi under house arrest and under surveillance? Why was the Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen imprisoned and tortured?”10

captions the whole of one of the two episodes made up of TV images: Barack Obama’s victory ceremony, refilmed from a giant screen and edited into jump-cut snorts of scepticism. The overall logic is one of sedimentation, as the Polish miner puts it in On a Clear Day: phenomena don’t exist in isolation; they’re part of bigger temporal stratigraphies that move like alluvia, mutually intermingling and fertilizing, then abruptly sliding away all together, like the episode icons on the camerawar.tv home page. Most times, Kowalski is saying, a bit of reality only shows through when, for example, a hurricane tears the sheet iron roofs from social invisibility. With its panoramic shots, aerial zooms, and quick-cut editing, its ways of accosting passing bodies and catching them up in its energy, its leaps from one continent to another, Camera War is the swirling gale that peels back belief systems and lays bare a seething life that is all rough edges, particularities, unexpected shifts—but does so with no need to destroy. From this point of view, the enterprise closest to Kowalski’s is less that of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)—they too question passersby within a precisely defined temporal framework—than of Albert Londres who, in an obscure prison colony, was able to note the wording of all the prisoners’ tattoos and graffiti: words and symbols wrenched from the utmost depths of a social hell.11 Because the tattoos, the graffiti and the body that has wound up on the pavement in President Obama are his starting points, when Kowalski offers us nettle soup, an Amish in Manhattan, bisons, a comical concert, Cuban cigars, a Republican, or two Roma eating a hamburger—not to mention himself explaining his poetics in The Eye—the descriptive method is in itself a gesture of protest, collecting and combining these harsh singularities and ranging them against the mechanical crusher of figurative simplifications and slanders. In this respect, Lech Kowalski fulfils one of the ideals of popular cinema: a cinema by and for a people not defined in advance according to some geographical or national affiliation, but rather getting itself together and shaping its identity according to signs whose mix of expression and depression the author gathers in with no presuppositions about consistency.

2008–2009. To explore the polymorphic. Lech Kowalski, Camera War (world) Lech Kowalski is the embodiment of punk in the cinema: maximum elation in the discovery of ungovernable weirdnesses that will compel the great sluggish body of society into movement, hyperlucid confrontation with social, mental, sexual, and other forms of misery, rejection of self-preservation, stunning stylistic crudeness, and trash as the critical resurrection of naturalism. Art not as emotional product but as productive riot. In 2008, Kowalski set up his Camera War enterprise, an exemplary application of today’s logistic and artistic guerrilla possibilities in the visual field: on the site, he posted weekly chapters of his film fresco, ending up with a total of seventy-nine episodes. Camera War is at the same time a spontaneous synthesis of the classic forms of protest cinema and an extension of what they allow in terms of greater flexibility. Individual portraits (Kellyann, for example, is in the tradition of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason); giving people their say (the very structured “prisoner” coming out of prison); all-in descriptions of natural and urban landscapes (Apartment Building); critical readymades based on archival material (Holy Year 2000); accounts of demonstrations whose mass of slogans fill the need for political analysis (the blistering “Jump, you fuckers!” sign at the bottom of the buildings on Wall Street): followed by scenes of activity, such as the travels of the ballot papers, ethnological studies (the roof-dwelling tribe of Before the Crisis)—and more. In its sampling and transformation of the present as a historical dotted line, Camera War has room for all kinds of internal structuring: the division of a situation or an encounter into various episodes (the trip to Italy; Kellyann); series (Fuck, The Stations of the Cross); recurrence—the returns to the Domenico, the utopian café which, you might say, is to space what Camera War is to time: a place “that changes the collective ambience,” as Lech Kowalski puts it; not to mention the juxtapositions of the unica episodes—situations, moments, people, gestures, all of them fleeting and incomparable, adding up to the “imponderability” of life so dear to Jean Epstein and Henri Langlois. In general terms, Camera War is an exploration of the stylistic beauties of rule-breaking as a way of fighting the “Corporate Reality” that

2008–2012. To auscultate resignation. Doméstica (Housemaids) by Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil). Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up in Subcontracting) by Ivora Cusack (France)

10. Ibid.

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11. Albert Londres, Au bagne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1923).

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In Doméstica (Housemaids, 2012), Gabriel Mascaro explores an area of experience utterly unrewarding and devoid of any scope for the unexpected, adventure, or positive or negative heroism: that of resignation. Through a system of delegated image-making—teenagers were asked to film their families’ housemaids—Mascaro sums up the forms of oppression undergone by seven domestic servants: physical saturation occasioned by dull, repetitive tasks, affective saturation occasioned by constantly meeting the needs of others, psychic and imaginative saturation wrought by radio and television; plus endemic poverty, exploitation by employers whose niceness only makes matters worse, exploitation by spouses who have mostly abandoned them, and exploitation of their image by the teenagers who are filming them. These housemaids often weep, sometimes break down completely, sing to forget and to comfort themselves, dance for a brief moment of pleasure. The seventh episode loops back into the first, generating a political trajectory extending from telenovelas and their images of reification to family photographs and their harsh testimony to an economic fate foretold. Two small girls grow up the closest of friends, and one ends up as the other’s housemaid; and as the middle-class employer says in a terrifying moment of symbolic violence, bad conscience, and hypocrisy, “I had to assert myself as the boss.” In the course of the film, we see the actual concept of “domestication” taking shape: self-alienation due to the latent force of family obligations, tacit consent, psychic self-mutilation. And this among both masters and slaves. When the mother of a family admits to having taken her servant to hospital, but also to leaving without waiting for her to give birth, her tears of contriteness, shame, and self-pity are shot through with all the everyday violence not only of class conflict, but also of the way each spinelessly complies with the demands of her social status. This, not the housemaid’s condition, is true servility: enslavement to class interests, identification with an economic situation, compliance with social status rather than loyalty to one’s own feelings. We would like to be able to show activist Ivora Cusack’s documentary Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up in Subcontracting, 2008) to the protagonists of Doméstica. For four years, two film collectives monitored the struggle of twenty Paris cleaning women from Senegal, Mauritania, and Martinique. Exploited by a subcontracting firm and weighed down by all the social handicaps of tradition and the injustices triggered by globalization, these women learned to stand up for themselves and fight for their rights—for their own benefit and for others as well. Supposedly there to ensure

cleanliness and order, they have learnt to sow disorder: in their subservient status as wives and mothers, in the lobbies of the hotels that employed them and where they returned to enjoy strike picnics, and in the social and economic system that assigned them the role of mute, invisible slaves. We would like to see the jubilation of women who, like Fatoumata Coulibaly, succeeded in overcoming exploitation, dismissal, personal timidity, ignorance of the labor laws and the French language, become contagious. We imagine those Brazilian servants discovering the path followed by their immigrant counterparts in France. We see them, perhaps in the company of the marvelous son in Doméstica—the one who brings such political pertinence to the filming of a housemaid signing an image rights authorization—turning off the TV and surfing the Internet in search of the International Labor Organization.

1974–2009. To create a heritage for the disinherited. Grève sauvage (Wildcat Strike) by Ratgeb (Belgium), revisited by Chaab Mahmoud (France) Since when has the status of filmmaker ceased to embody the social privilege described in Luc Moullet’s 1967 article, “Le cinéma n’est qu’un reflet de la lutte des classes” (Cinema is just a reflection of the class struggle)?12 According to Moullet all directors came from the middle class. Today directors like Guillaume Massart, of Dragons n’existent pas (Dragons don’t exist, 2009)—a brilliant film about the last days of industry in France’s Ardennes region, and the sellout that sealed its fate—assert their sub-proletarian roots as both an aesthetic force and a legitimate vantage point for an account of the nightmare of contemporary pauperization. Thus do efforts to shape a political and cultural heritage by and for those who deny all value to possession become hard-hitting affirmations. A self-described “image worker,” Franco-Syrian-Madagascan Chaab Mahmoud is seeking here to provide a visual echo of one of the twentieth century’s most biting pieces of satirical writing: De la grève sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée (From Wildcat Strike to Total SelfManagement, 1974), by “Ratgeb,” a pseudonym of Raoul Vaneigem. “Has it ever happened,” Ratgeb asked, “that, outside your place of work, you have felt the same distaste and weariness as you do inside the factory? … Haven’t you ever felt the urge to burn some distribution factory i.e. supermarket, giant store or warehouse) to the ground? … Is it not your intention, on the first opportunity that arises, to bawl

12. Luc Moullet, “Brigitte et Brigitte,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 187 (February 1967): 44.

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out your boss or anyone else, who talks down to you? … Aren’t you dismayed by the systematic destruction of the countryside and urban green spaces?”13 In continuous black-and-white shots of deindustrialized wastelands and outlying housing estates where society’s rejects accumulate, Mahmoud’s Grève sauvage (la genèse)/ Wildcat Strike (Genesis) offers a word for word visual translation of Vaneigem’s belligerent, cutting questions, which have become steadily more relevant in the era of financial capitalism. The texts are in English as well as French, to increase their range as weapons of reason in our globalizing age.

2010. To draw on savagery. The Silent Majority Speaks by Bani Khoshnoudi (Iran) “Each face could be that of a political prisoner or a martyr,” explains Bani Khoshnoudi in The Silent Majority Speaks, shot in Tehran during the “green revolution,” and circulated clandestinely as the work of “The Silent Collective” until 2013. To film a popular uprising against the dictatorship while taking care not to endanger the participants; to summarize a century of more or less insurrectional political upheavals, systematically and bloodily crushed; and to reflect the pernicious, lethal—or, on the contrary, emancipatory—functions of images: the way The Silent Majority Speaks carries out all these tasks is an immediate pointer to what drives this artist, filmmaker, and producer. Eschewing dogmatism, Khoshnoudi practices what might be called “issue activism,” which she has successively applied to popular uprisings in Iran, anti-immigration policy in France, and the Zapotec culture in Mexico. In Les Sauvages dans la cité (The savages in the city), a book on self-emancipation—whose title chimes neatly with La Pensée Sauvage (The savage mind), the Claude Lévi-Strauss-inflected name of Khoshnoudi’s production company—French historian René Parize makes a distinction between “the knowledge of submission” (a single form) and “the knowledges of revolt” (many forms).15 In dealing not only with political-religious censorship but also strategies of selfcensorship, Khoshnoudi develops both the knowledges and skills of revolt, taking as her first target the way personal oppression somatizes and reinforces political repression.

2006–2010. To develop forms of conviviality. Regardez chers parents (Look dear parents) by Mory Coulibaly (France); Sou Hami. La crainte de la nuit (Sou Hami: The fear of night) by Anne-Laure de Franssu (France-Mali) The work of Jean Rouch and Direct Cinema (in Canada in particular) gave rise to a rich tradition of forms of collaboration and participation by the subjects. Now, however, we can speak of convivial forms, in Ivan Illich’s sense:14 there are more and more films putting other people’s images into circulation, as has already been done by Clarisse Hahn (Prisons – Notre corps est une arme [Prisons—Our body is a weapon], 2012, for Kurdish activists), Bijan Anquetil (La nuit remue [Night’s drifters], 2012, for Afghan refugees), and Pilar Arcila (Le Pendule de Costel [Costel’s pendulum], 2013, for a Roma family). In 2006, in the midst of evictions in Cachan, France—a thousand people caught up in the pitiless snare of the French government’s anti-immigration policy—Mory Coulibaly, an Ivory Coast refugee and the representative of the expelled families, filmed what happened, helped by Anne-Laure de Franssu and her association, II mots en images. The result, Regardez chers parents (Look dear parents), documents and reflects on an ongoing struggle. The following year, de Franssu and Coulibaly toured villages in Mali, screening Regardez chers parents for audiences staggered by its account of police-state violence; often less dismayed by its own content than by the state of contemporary France, the film is one of the most powerful critiques so far of European biopolitics. Sou Hami. La crainte de la nuit (Sou Hami: The fear of night, 2010), the film of the tour and the debate in the wake of the events at Cachan, is a splendid essay on the role of images in social struggles.

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1926–2011.

13. Raoul Vaneigem, From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management, trans. Paul Sharkey, Situationist International Online, 1974, http:// www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ postsi/ratgeb01.html. 14. Conviviality: “Autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment … [allowing] the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others.” (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row), 11.

15. René Parize, “Savoir de soumission ou savoirs de révolte? L’exemple du Creusot,” in Les Sauvages dans la cité. Auto-émancipation du peuple et instruction des prolétaires au xixe siècle, ed. Jean Borreil (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1985), 91–103.

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Not to wait to be in position of strength. Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time) by Alberto Cavalcanti, Maàlich by Thomas Jenkoe (France) In 1926, Alberto Cavalcanti set out to restore the movie camera’s status as a recorder of contemporary events; the result was Rien que les heures, the first of the cinema’s urban symphonies. Cavalcanti’s goal was to shred the clichés and start from scratch in the name of the very real suffering of society’s rejects. A beggar woman traverses the film, a small, dark silhouette in a desolate wasteland, a slender compass needle symbolically signalling the film’s direction. In 2011, Thomas Jenkoe’s Maàlich took up the torch lit by Cavalcanti, and handed on by such other visual poets of the urban as Kenji Mizoguchi, Peter Weiss, Masao Adachi, Lionel Rogosin, and Jérôme Schlomoff. Instead of the

Paris of the 1920s, with its center and its gates—Maàlich comes to earth in Chinagora, an unlikely hotel complex in the distant suburbs that denationalizes a site transformed into a hideout for the human flotsam of economic globalization. Instead of Cavalcanti’s allegorical ragpickers, people embedded in concrete crannies the way Algerian migrants were buried in the caves along the banks of the Seine in René Vautier’s Les Trois Cousins (Three cousins, 1970), are seized in a complexity— powerfully separate, sometimes even repellent—that the film makes absolutely no claim to plumb in its entirety. Instead of a sovereign author picking and choosing among image systems, we find a filmmaker very likely far more lost than the people he encounters, plunging into conversations like someone throwing himself off a building towards a hallucinated pair of saving arms. Instead of extensive exploration of the descriptive forms appropriate to the cinema during the hours of daylight, Maàlich forces the unaided viewer down into the optical resources of night, and only night, the welcoming night that strips away social constraints and confronts us with the elemental necessities: sleeping, eating, loving and, in spite of everything, finding reassurance. Night as existence reduced to tangible nightmare. Maàlich: gleams of humanity, flickers of light on the threshold of meaning.

government since the late eighteenth century. Images of Russia in Chechnya, Russian images of Chechens, old ethnographic films: this is a video record of a present simultaneously experienced and meditated on, as if Stendhal’s Fabrice del Dongo were watching the Battle of Waterloo in extreme wide shot and extreme close-up at the same time. Itchkéri Kenti, a subjective history of a collective situation, takes the time needed to outline and describe the different kinds of conflict— palpable, cultural, temporal—that structure a popular struggle. In 2000, Marcie made Saïa, an experimental documentary shot on a front line in Afghanistan, and in 2015 he finished the other two segments of his trilogy on men at war in Chechnya, Libya, and Afghanistan. The second of them, Commandant Khawani, is a portrait of a young Afghan officer at Bagram Airfield when Kabul was captured in 2001, while the third, Tomorrow Tripoli, describes the struggle of the Libyan rebels during the revolution. A group of ordinary Libyans, organizing gradually, began by breaking the pro-Gaddafi forces’ siege of their city, Zintan, in the Nafusa mountains, then made its way down towards the coastal cities of Zawiya and Tripoli, advancing over mined terrain through a nonstop hail of rifle and mortar fire. Accompanying the column every step of the way, Marcie was risking his life with almost each shot as he composedly documented the guerrilla war in the mountains, then the street-by-street fighting in the cities. He recounts, too, startlingly unexpected encounters, including a Zintan fighter who has read his copy of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three almost to extinction, and maps Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings about the German Occupation onto his situation in Libya, as well as an astonishing Darfur mercenary whose first name is Gaddafi. Even more than the final taking of the presidential fortress by the Zintan fighters, some of the shots taken during the column’s advance on Tripoli suffice on their own to justify the existence of contemporary recording equipment, despite its habitually reifying effect: in the suburbs, entire families, including women and children, pour out of their neighbourhoods to fraternize with the combatants, waving and crying victory, jumping with joy and enthusiasm as the rebels respond by blowing their horns, as if setting the seal on a marriage with their newly regained freedom.

1999–2015. To create Ur-information. Tomorrow Tripoli, Florent Marcie (France-Libya) The popularization of digital tools for making and diffusing films means that creators and statement-makers of all kinds now enjoy total autonomy, in the sense of controlling every link in the chain from concept to circulation. To the traditional pairing of Disinformation and Counter-information must now be added Ur-information, the original information which precedes the official version, which simplifies, distorts, and betrays it. The late 1990s saw the simultaneous flowering of Counterinformation collectives such as IndyMedia, and political lone wolves practicing visual assault as freely as Albert Londres had literary journalism. Florent Marcie, an exemplary master of the long haul, made his first trip to Chechnya in 1996; finally edited in 2007, Itchkéri Kenti (The sons of Ichkeria) was the outcome of ten years of travel and close observation in the heartland of Chechen resistance—a length of time reflecting the history of a people struggling against the central

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PORTFOLIO

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I. WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

To rise up, as when we say “a storm is rising.” To reverse the weight that nailed us to the ground. So it is the laws of the atmosphere itself that will be contradicted. Surfaces—sheets, draperies, flags—fly in the wind. Lights that explode into fireworks. Dust that rises up from nooks and crannies. Time is out of joint. The world upside down. From Victor Hugo to Eisenstein and beyond, uprisings are often compared to hurricanes or to great, surging waves. Because then the elements (of history) become unleashed. We rise up first of all by exercising our imagination, albeit through our “caprichos” (whims or fantasies) or “disparates” (follies) as Goya said. The imagination makes mountains rise up. And when we rise up from a real “disaster,” it means that we meet what oppresses us, and those who seek to make it impossible for us to move, with the resistance of forces that are desires and imaginations first of all, that is to say psychical forces of unleashing and of reopening possibilities.

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THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Victor Hugo Toujours en ramenant la plume (Always coming back with the quill), 1856 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Henri Michaux Sans titre (Untitled), 1975 Private collection

Man Ray Élevage de poussière (Le Grand Verre de Marcel Duchamp), New York (Breeding dust [Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass], New York), 1920 Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris

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THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Jean Veber Le Dompteur a été mangé (The animal tamer has been eaten), 1904 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Dennis Adams Patriot, “Airborne” series, 2002 Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris

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THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Man Ray Sculpture mouvante or La France (Moving sculpture or La France), 1920 Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris,

Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz Parangolé – Encuentros de Pamplona (Encounters in Pampeluna), 1972 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

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WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Roman Signer Rotes Band (Red tape), 2005 Roman Signer/Art : Concept, Paris

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THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

Jasmina Metwaly Tahrir Square: Cut Skin, 2011 Open Gallery, London Jasmina Metwaly Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, 2011 Open Gallery, London

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WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

William Hogarth The Battle of the Pictures, 1744–45 Private collection

Anonymous (French) Le Torrent révolutionnaire (The revolutionary deluge) Published in Le Charivari, no. 192, vol. 3, July 12, 1834 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

Pedro Motta Natureza das coisas #024 (The nature of things #024), from the “Natureza das coisas” series, 2013 Pedro Motta/Galerie Bendana Pinel, Paris

Francis Alÿs, with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 Photographic documentation of an event, Lima, Peru Francis Alÿs/Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich

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AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Francisco de Goya Los Disparates (The follies), 1815–24 Third edition, 1891, plate no. 1 Sylvie and Georges Helft collection

Francisco de Goya Los Caprichos, 1799 Second edition, 1855 Sylvie and Georges Helft collection

Francisco de Goya The Disasters of War: “Que valor!,” 1810–20 First edition, 1863, plate no. 7 Sylvie and Georges Helft collection

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AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Tina Modotti Bandolier, Cob, Sickle, 1927 Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

Pere Català Pic Aixafem el feixisme (Crush fascism), 1936 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

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AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Saburô Murakami Passing Through, 1956 Performance at the Second Gutai Exhibition, 1956 Photography: Kiyoji Otsuji

Robert Morris Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969 Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris

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AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)

Eustachy Kossakowski “Panoramic Sea Happening – Sea Concerto, Osieki” by Tadeusz Kantor, 1967 Anka Ptaszkowska collection

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Tsubasa Kato Break it Before it’s Broken Tsubasa Kato collection

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II. WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Rising up is a gesture. Before even attempting to carry out a voluntary and shared “action,” we rise up with a simple gesture that suddenly overturns the burden that submission had, until then, placed on us (be it through cowardice, cynicism, or despair). To rise up means to throw off the burden weighing down on our shoulders, keeping us from moving. It is to break a certain present—be it with hammer blows as Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud sought to do—and to raise your arms towards the future that is opening up. It is a sign of hope and of resistance. It is a gesture and it is an emotion. The Spanish Republicans—whose visual culture was shaped by Goya and Picasso, but also by all the photographers on the field who collected, the gestures of freed prisoners, of voluntary combatants, of children and of the famous La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri—fully assumed this. In the gesture of rising up, each body protests with all of its limbs, each mouth opens and exclaims its no­-refusal and its yes-desire.

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Germaine Krull Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly (The Dancer Jo Mihaly), 1925 Museum Folkwang, Essen

Germaine Krull Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly in “Revolution,” Paris [Dancer Jo Mihaly in “Revolution,” Paris, 1925 Museum Folkwang, Essen

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Lisette Model Metropole Café, New York, c. 1946 Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid

Lisette Model Valeska Gert, “Olé,” 1940 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Käthe Kollwitz Losbruch (Assault), 1902–03 Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne

Käthe Kollwitz Aufruhr (Riot), 1899 Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Tina Modotti Worker, Mexico, 1928 Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

Tina Modotti Woman with Flag, Mexico City, 1928 Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

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FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre. Entrée des troupes de première ligne revenant de la guerre sur la Pariser Platz (The November Revolution: Front-line troops returning from the war enter the Pariser Platz), 1918 Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin

Alberto Korda El Quijote de la Farola, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana, Cuba (Don Quixote of the streetlamp, Plaza de la Revolución, Havana, Cuba), 1959 Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection

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FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Claude Cattelain Video Hebdo 41 (Weekly video 41), 2009–10 Claude Cattelain collection, Valenciennes

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Claude Cattelain Video Hebdo 46 (Weekly video 46), 2009–10 Claude Cattelain collection, Valenciennes

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

WITH HAMMER BLOWS

Hammer used by Antonin Artaud at Ivry for “trying out” his texts and stressing his diction, 1947 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Joseph Beuys Unbetitlet (Untitled), 1971 Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München. Leihgabe Sammlung Klüser, Munich

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

ARMS RISE UP

Jack Goldstein A Glass of Milk, 1972 The Estate of Jack Goldstein/ Galerie Buchholz, Cologne

Maria Kourkouta Remontages, 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

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ARMS RISE UP

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Gustave Courbet Révolutionnaire sur une barricade, projet de frontispice pour “Le Salut public” (Revolutionary on a barricade: draft frontispiece for “Le Salut public”), 1848 Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris

Willy Ronis Rose Zehner, grève aux usines Javel-Citroën (Rose Zehner addressing strikers at the Javel-Citroën plant), 1938 Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

ARMS RISE UP

Marcel Gautherot Sanctuaire diocésain du Bon Jésus de Matosinhos (The shrine of BomJesus de Matosinhos), c. 1947 Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo

Leonard Freed Residents of Guernica in front of a mural replica of Pablo Picasso’s painting, 1977 Magnum Photos, Paris

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ARMS RISE UP

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Gilles Caron Manifestation paysanne à Redon (Farmers demonstrating in Redon), 1967 Fondation Gilles Caron Gilles Caron Manifestation paysanne à Redon (Farmers demonstrating in Redon), 1967 Fondation Gilles Caron

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Gilles Caron Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic demonstrations in Londonderry), 1969 Fondation Gilles Caron Gilles Caron Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic demonstrations in Londonderry), 1969 Fondation Gilles Caron

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

ARMS RISE UP

Pascal Convert Soulèvement (Uprising) Left to right: Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Charles Michels, Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 2015 Pascal Convert/Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris

Julio González Mà dreta aixecada (Right hand raised), c. 1942 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

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Julio González Mà esquerra aixecada (Left hand raised), c. 1942 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Paul Vaillant-Couturier was born in 1892 into a family of lyric artists: his mother, Marguerite Vaillant, was a famous opera singer. Decorated five times during the First World War, he later became a pacifist and socialist. A lawyer, journalist, writer, and politician, he helped found the French Communist Party and became editor in chief of the Communist daily, L’Humanité. On February 2, 1937, he survived an assassination attempt, but a few months later he died suddenly, at the age of forty-five.

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Born in 1903, Charles Michels, the eldest of four children, lost his father at the age of eleven. Later, while working as a labourer, he made ends meet as a boxer at the Folies-Belleville cabaret. He was elected permanent secretary of the CGTU trade union in 1929 and as a Communist member of parliament in May 1936. Deprived of his seat on January 21, 1940 because of his membership of the Communist Party, he was interned in May 1941, in the camp at Choisel, Brittany. After the execution of a German officer by the

Resistance, General Stülpnagel ordered the shooting of 50 hostages: Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy minister for the interior, chose 27 internees from Choisel, all of them with trade union and Communist Party connections. Charles Michels was first on the list, and was shot on October 22, 1941. His comrade Jean-Pierre Timbaud, born in 1904, a bronze worker and secretary of the CGTU Metalworkers Federation (1931–34), then of the Paris region CGT trade union (1936–39), was shot alongside him.

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

David “Chim” Seymour Federico Garcia Lorca, Dolores Ibárruri, 1936 Magnum Photos, Paris

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THE PASIÓN

Élie Faure “Portrait de passionaria” (Portrait of La Pasionaria) in Regards, no. 134, August 6, 1936, p. 9 Private collection

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

WHEN BODIES SAY NO

Agnès Geoffray Métamorphose II (Metamorphosis II), “Métamorphoses” series, 2012–15 Agnès Geoffray collection Agnès Geoffray Catalepsie (Catalepsy), “Incidental Gestures” series, 2011–15 FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand Following page

Paulo Abreu Conde Fereira, 2003 Paulo Abreu/Light Cone

Agnès Geoffray Laura Nelson, “Incidental Gestures” series, 2011–15 FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

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WHEN BODIES SAY NO

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

Jochen Gerz Calling to the Point of Exhaustion, 1972 Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris Previous page

Annette Messager 50 Piques (50 pikes), detail, 1992–93 Annette Messager and Marin Karmitz collection/Marian Goodman Gallery

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Hiroji Kubota Manifestation des Black Panthers (Black Panthers rally), Chicago, 1969 Magnum Photos, Paris

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MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Julio González Cap cridant (Shouting head), c. 1936–39 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Julio González Cap de Montserrat cridant (Head of Montserrat shouting), c. 1942 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Julio González Montserrat cridant, núm. 1 (Montserrat shouting, no. 1), c. 1936–39 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

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MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

Graciela Sacco from the “Bocanada” (A breath of fresh air) series, 1993–94. Posters in the streets of Rosario, Argentina Graciela Sacco collection

Wolf Vostell Dutschke, 1968 Haus der Geschichte der Bundensrepublik Deutschland, Bonn

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WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)

MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

Lorna Simpson Easy to Remember, 2001 Lorna Simpson collection

Art & Language Shouting Men, 1975 MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona

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III. WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Arms have been raised, mouths have exclaimed. Now, what are needed are words, sentences to say, sing, think, discuss, print, transmit. That is why poets place themselves “at the forefront” of the action itself, as Rimbaud said at the time of the Paris Commune. Upstream the Romantics, downstream the Dadaists, Surrealists, Letterists, Situationists, etc., all undertook poetic insurrections. “Poetic” does not mean “far from history,” quite the contrary. There is a poetry of tracts, from the protest leaflet written by Georg Büchner in 1834 to the digital resistances of today, through René Char in 1943 and the “cine-tracts,” from 1968. There is a poetry particular to the use of newspapers and social networks. There is a particular intelligence—attentive to the form—inherent in the books of resistance or of uprising. Until the walls themselves begin to speak and occupy the public space, the sensible space in its entirety.

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Victor Hugo “Anniversaire de la révolution de 1848” (Anniversary of the revolution of 1848), 1855 In Actes et paroles. Pendant l’exil Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Champfleury, and Charles Toubin Le Salut public, no. 2, 1848 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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Philippe Soupault Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts everything), 1921 Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Raoul Hausmann Portrait d’Herwarth Walden à Bonset (Portrait of Herwarth Walden at Bonset), 1921 Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Archive, RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, La Haye

Federico García Lorca Mierda (Shit), 1934 Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

POETIC INSURRECTIONS

André Breton et al. La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, 1924 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Georges Bataille and André Breton Contre-Attaque : union de lutte des intellectuels révolutionnaires (Counter-attack: United front of revolutionary intellectuals), 1936 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Henri Michaux Émergences-résurgences [Emergences/Resurgences] Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972 Jeu de Paume, Paris

Henri Michaux Sans titre (Untitled), 1971 Private collection

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Antonin Artaud Notebook no. 326, 1947 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Antonin Artaud Notebook no. 321, 1947 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Pier Paolo Pasolini Iconografia ingiallita (per un “Poema fotografico”) (Yellowed iconography [for a “Photographic poem”]) Turin: Einaudi, 1975 Jeu de Paume, Paris

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POETIC INSURRECTIONS

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Marcel Broodthaers Soleil politique et Fig., Fig., Fig. (Political sun and Fig., fig., fig.) (diptych), 1972 Estate Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers Carte d’une utopie politique et Deux petits tableaux 1 ou 0 (Map of a political utopia and Two little pictures 1 or 0), 1973 Private collection

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POETIC INSURRECTIONS

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Gil Joseph Wolman Prague occupée par les Russes ou Art scotch (Prague occupied by the Russians or Tape art), c. 1968 Les Abattoirs, Toulouse

Bernard Heidsieck Machines à mots, no. 10 (Word machines, no. 10), October 1971 Handwriting and collaged press photograph Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Giselle Freund International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, 1935 IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

Anonymous (French) “La jeunesse française répond : Merde !” (France’s youth says: Shit!), Call to action in Libération, no. 20, March 1, 1943 Private collection

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Anonymous (French) Collection of leaflets Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

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THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

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THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Joseph Beuys Diagramma Terremoto (Diagram of an earthquake), 1981 Isabel and Agustín Coppel collection, Mexico Previous pages

Joseph Beuys So kann die Parteiendiktatur überwunden werden (Thus can the dictatorship of parties be overcome), 1971 Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Anonymous (French) Cinétracts (Film tracts), 1968 Iskra collection, Paris

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

Hélio Oiticica Seja Marginal Seja Herói (Be an outlaw be a hero), 1968 Private collection

Asger Jorn Fin de Copenhague (End of Copenhagen), 1957, Paris: Allia, 2001 Jeu de Paume, Paris

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THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Gérard Fromanger Film-tract no. 1968, 1968 Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Cildo Meireles Inserçoes em circuitos ideológicos 2: Projeto Cédula (Insertions into ideological circuits 2: Banknote project), 1970 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

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NEWSPAPERS

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Félix Vallotton L’Âge de papier (The age of paper), cover illustration for Le Cri de Paris, no. 52, January 1898 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Man Ray Cover, Mother Earth, IX, no. 6, New York, edited by Emma Goldman, 1914 David and Marcel Fleiss collection, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris

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Man Ray Cover, Mother Earth, IX, no. 7, New York, edited by Emma Goldman, 1914 David and Marcel Fleiss collection, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris

NEWSPAPERS

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Carl Einstein “Unes declarations sensacionals de Carl Einstein” (A sensational statement by Carl Einstein), 1938 Article by Sebottomtià Gasch in Meridià. Setmanari de literatura, art i política: tribuna del Front Intellectual Antifeixista (Meridià. A weekly of literature, art and politics: the voice of the Anti-Fascist Intellectual Front) Private collection

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Tina Modotti Peasants reading “El Machete”, 1927 Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Anonymous (Catalan) CNT-FAI, Barcelone, 1936 Private collection Rosa Luxemburg Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie [The Crisis of Social Democracy], Zürich: Verlagsdruckerei, 1916 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Nachlassbibliothek Bertolt Brecht

Jean Alloucherie Noches de Sevilla. Un mes entre los rebeldes (Nights in Seville. A month with the rebels), Barcelona-Madrid, 1937 Private collection

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MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

John Heartfield Art for the dustjacket of John Reed’s 10 Tage, die die Welt erschütterten [Ten Days That Shook the World], Verlag für Literatur und Politik, Vienna-Berlin, 1927 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin

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John Heartfield Artwork for the magazine Jahrbuch für Politik, Wirtschaft, Arbeiterbewegung, Verlag Carl Hoym Nachf., Hamburg-Berlin, 1926 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin

John Heartfield “Benütze Foto als Waffe!” (Use photography as a weapon!), AIZ magazine, no. 37, Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Berlin, Jg. VIII, no. 37, p. 17, 1929 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin

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MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Álvaro Sarmiento, Fina Torres, Neruda. Entierro y testamento (Neruda: Burial and tribute), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Inventarios Provisionales, 1974 Jeu de Paume, Paris Alfredo M. Bonanno La Gioia armata [Armed Joy], Edizioni di Anarchismo, 1977 Jeu de Paume, Paris

Anonymous (Mexican) Ojo! Una revista que ve (Eye! A magazine that sees), Mexico, 1958 First issue of a magazine self-published by Héctor Garcia Alexis Fabry collection, Paris

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Anonymous (French) Appel, 2003 Private collection

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MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE

Anonymous (French) Tiqqun, 2001 Private collection

Artur Barrio Livro de Carne (Meat book), 1978 Artur Barrio collection

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THE WALLS SPEAK UP

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Anonymous (French) Manières de dire (Ways of speaking), 1880 Département Patrimonial du Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles (SMAC) de la Préfecture de Police de Paris

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Anonymous (French) Élections à la commune. Gustave Courbet candidat du VIe arrondissement, scrutin du 10 avril 1871 (Elections for the Commune. Gustave Courbet, candidate for the 6th arrondissement, election April 10, 1871) Documentation, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

THE WALLS SPEAK UP

Raymond Hains OAS. Fusillez les plastiqueurs (OAS. Shoot the bombers), 1961 Private collection

Raymond Hains Sans titre (Untitled), 1952 FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Dunkirk

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THE WALLS SPEAK UP

WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)

Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection

Gil Joseph Wolman Sans titre (la tragédie) (Untitled [tragedy]), 1966 Natalie Seroussi gallery, Paris

Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris

Following double page

Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris

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Sigmar Polke Gegen die zwei Supermächte – für eine rote Schweiz (Against the two superpowers – for a red Switzerland) (1st version), 1976 Ludwig Collection, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aix-la-Chapelle

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IV. WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) And so everything flares up. Some see only pure chaos. Others witness the sudden appearance of the forms of a desire to be free. During strikes, ways of living together are invented. To say that we “demonstrate,” is to affirm—albeit to be surprised by it or even not to understand it—that something appeared that was decisive. But this demanded a conflict. Conflict: an important motif of modern historical painting (from Manet to Polke), and of the visual arts in general (photography, cinema, video, digital arts). It happens sometimes that uprisings produce merely the image of broken images: vandalism, those kinds of celebrations in negative format. But on these ruins will be built the temporary architecture of uprisings: paradoxical, moving, makeshift things that are barricades. Then, the police suppress the demonstration, when those who rise up had only the potency of their desire (potency: not power). And this is why there are so many people in history who have died from having risen up.

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Ruth Berlau American Strikers, 1941–44 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv

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TO STRIKE IS NOT TO DO NOTHING

Henri Cartier-Bresson École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, May 1968 Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

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TO STRIKE IS NOT TO DO NOTHING

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Jean-Luc Moulène Series: 39 objets de grève (39 strike objects), 1999–2000 Jean-Luc Moulène/Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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Manivelle de pédalier de cycle dit « Le casse-tête » La Pantinoise

La Bobine Novacore Les Souliers de la lutte

Holgeir Meins Le Costume Novacore

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Dirty Protest Casse-tête

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Félix Vallotton La Charge (The charge), 1893 Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. On loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Georges Grosz Blutiger Karneval (Bloody carnival), 1915–16 Private collection

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Hans Richter Revolution, 1918 Private collection

Hans Richter Orator-Rebellion-Revolution, 1916 Private collection

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

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Agustí Centelles Rioting after the victory of the Popular Front at the elections of February 16, 1936. Plaça de la República (Plaça Sant Jaume), Barcelona, February 17, 1936 Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona Herbert Kirchhoff Revolución en La Paz (Bolivia) (Revolution in La Paz, Bolivia), 1946 Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection

Arpad Hazafi Budapest, 1956 AP/SIPA Agency

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Ernesto Molina Sín título (Untitled), 1977 Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection

Ernesto Molina Sín título (Untitled), 1977 Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

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Héctor López Poblado la Victoria, Santiago, Chile (Village of La Victoria, Santiago, Chile), c. 1986 Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection

Jesús Ruiz Durand Lima, Pérou (Untitled, Peru), 1969 Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection

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Henri Cartier-Bresson Funérailles des victimes de Charonne, Paris, France (Funeral of the victims of the “Charonne massacre,” Paris, France), February 13, 1962 Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson Manifestation pro-Castro, New York (Pro-Castro demonstration, New York), September 1960 Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

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Allan Sekula Two images from the installation Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black, 1999–2000 Institut d’Art Contemporain, Rhône-Alpes, France

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

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Sigmar Polke À Versailles, à Versailles! (To Versailles, to Versailles!), 1988 Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart

Chieh-Jen Chen The Route, 2006 Chieh-Jen Chen/Lily Robert gallery

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DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Robert Filliou Optimistic Box no. 1, 1968 Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Ismaïl Bahri Film à blanc (Blank film), 2012 Ismaïl Bahri collection

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VANDAL JOYS

Jules Girardet La Colonne Vendôme après sa chute (The Vendôme Column after being torn down), 1871 Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris

Edmond, successor to Charles Marville (presumed photographer) Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Cour des bureaux (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. The office courtyard), c. 1871 Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

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VANDAL JOYS

Anonymous (French) Postcard “Reste du Christ de l’avenue Baudin détruit à la suite des troubles de Limoges” (Remains of the crucifix on Avenue Baudin, destroyed during the disturbances in Limoges), May 8, 1905 Jeu de Paume, Paris Anonymous (French) Postcard “Tergnier – La Grève des Cheminots [III] – Les deux machines tamponnées sur la plaque tournante” (Tergnier – The Railway Workers’ Strike [III] – Collision on the turntable), 1910 Jeu de Paume, Paris

Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X. Tesauro : Vandalismo (Thesaurus: Vandalism), 2005–16 Private collection

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VANDAL JOYS

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Asger Jorn Brisez le cadre q[u]i [é]touf[ fe] l[’] image (Smash the frame that stifles the image), 1968 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

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Asger Jorn Pas de puis[s]ance d[’]imagination sans images puis[s]ante[s] (No power of imagination without powerful images), 1968 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

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BUILDING BARRICADES

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Thibault La Barricade de la rue Saint-MaurPopincourt avant l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière, le dimanche 25 juin 1848 (The barricade on Rue Saint-MaurPopincourt before the attack by General Lamoricière’s troops, Sunday June 25, 1848) Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Thibault La Barricade de la rue Saint-MaurPopincourt après l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière, le lundi 26 juin 1848 (The barricade on Rue Saint-MaurPopincourt after the attack by General Lamoricière’s troops, Monday June 26, 1848) Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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BUILDING BARRICADES

Armand Dayot Journées révolutionnaires 1830-1848 (Revolutionary days), Paris: Flammarion, 1897 Private collection

Armand Dayot Journées révolutionnaires 1830-1848 (Revolutionary days), Paris: Flammarion, 1897 Private collection

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BUILDING BARRICADES

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Anonymous (French) Postcard “Grèves de Limoges, 15 avril 1905, Barricade Ancienne” (Strikes in Limoges, April 15, 1905, old barricade) Jeu de Paume, Paris

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Anonymous (French) Postcard “Raon-l’Étape – L’Émeute du 28 juillet – Barricade de la rue Thiers, 1907” (Raon-l’Étape – The July 28 riot – Barricade on Rue Thiers, 1907) Jeu de Paume, Paris

Anonymous (Mexican) Jesús Carranza acompañado de varios hombres observan una vía destruida (Jesús Carranza and others inspecting destroyed rail track), “Revolución Zapatista,” Coahuila, Mexico, c. 1914 Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico

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Voula Papaioannou Barricades During the Civil War of December ’44 (Dekemvriana), Athens, 1944 Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens

BUILDING BARRICADES

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Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre: occupation du quartier de la presse. Barricades faites de papier journal. Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The November Revolution: Occupation of the press district. Barricades made of newspaper, Berlin), 1919 Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin

Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre: occupation du quartier de la presse. Barricades faites de rouleaux de papier journal. Devant la maison d’édition Rudolf Mosse, Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The November Revolution: Occupation of the press district. Barricades made of newspaper. Outside the Rudolf Mosse publishing house building, Schützenstrasse, Berlin), 1919 Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin

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John Heartfield Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Germany, Germany above all else), 1929 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin

BUILDING BARRICADES

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Agustí Centelles Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca

Jerzy Piórkowski Miasto Nieujarzmione (City unbroken), Warsaw: Iskry, 1957 Private collection

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DYING FROM INJUSTICE

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André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri (attributed to) Insurgés tués pendant la Semaine sanglante de la Commune (Insurgents killed during the Commune’s “Bloody Week”), 1871 Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris

Édouard Manet Guerre civile (Civil war), 1871 Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris

Anonymous (Mexican) Fusilados por tropas zapatistas en Ayotzingo (Men shot by Zapatist troops at Ayotzingo), c. 1913–17 Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico

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DYING FROM INJUSTICE

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Anonymous (Mexican) Fortino Sámano fuma un cigarro antes de ser fusilado (Fortino Sámano smokes a cigar before being shot) Mexico City, 1917 Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico

Manuel Álvarez Bravo Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Murdered striker), 1934 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

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DYING FROM INJUSTICE

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Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 4) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 4]: “Scientific progress”, published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 5) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 5]: “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 19) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 19]: “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 12) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 12]: “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)

DYING FROM INJUSTICE

Dmitri Kessel Greek National Liberation Front rally, Athens, December 3, 1944

Dmitri Kessel Greek National Liberation Front demonstrators gathered around the bodies of three fellow protestors shot by police during a rally, Athens, December 3, 1944 Getty Images

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DYING FROM INJUSTICE

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Anonymous (South African) African National Council demonstration, Fordsburg, 1952 Anonymous (South African) Dead and wounded outside the police station in Sharpeville, March 21, 1960 Getty Images

Malcolm Browne Self-Immolation by Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc, Saigon, 1963 AP/SIPA Agency

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V. WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)

But potency outlives power. Freud said that desire was indestructible. Even those who knew they were condemned—in the camps, in the prisons—seek every means to transmit a testimony or call out. As Joan Miró evoked in a series of works titled The Hope of a Condemned Man, in homage to the student anarchist Salvador Puig i Antich, executed by Franco’s regime in 1974. An uprising can end with mothers’ tears over the bodies of their dead children. But these tears are merely a burden: they can still provide the potencies of uprising, like in the “resistance marches” of mothers and grandmothers in Buenos Aires. It is our own children who rise up: Zero for Conduct! Was Antigone not almost a child herself? Whether in the Chiapas forests or on the Greece–Macedonia border, somewhere in China, in Egypt, in Gaza, or in the jungle of computerized networks considered as a vox populi, there will always be children to jump the wall.

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WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)

Anonymous (Greek member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando) Women being driven towards the Crematorium V gas chamber, Birkenau and Burning the bodies of gassed prisoners in the open-air cremation pits outside the Crematorium V gas chamber, Birkenau, 1944 Archival collection of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim

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THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

Joan Miró L’Espoir du prisonnier (The prisoner’s hope) Preliminary drawings for L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), 1973 Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona Joan Miró Preliminary drawings for L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), 1974 Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

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WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)

Joan Miró Homme torturé s’évadant (Tortured man escaping), 1973 Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

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THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

Joan Miró Prisonnier crucifié (Crucified prisoner), 1974 Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

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WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)

Joan Miró L’Espoir du condamné à mort, I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), February 9, 1974 Fundacio Joan Miró, Barcelona

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THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

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Voula Papaioannou Prisoners’ notes written on the wall of the German prison on Merlin Street, Athens, 1944 Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens

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MOTHERS RISE UP

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Honoré Daumier Les Femmes socialistes (Women socialists), in Le Charivari,  April–June 1849 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Honoré Daumier Les Divorceuses (Divorced women), in Le Charivari, August–October 1848 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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MOTHERS RISE UP

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Bertolt Brecht Modellbuch [Model] for Mother Courage and Her Children, January 11, 1949–April 4, 1961 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv

Jerónimo Hernández Soldaderas en el estribo de un tren en la estación de Buenavista (Women combatants on the steps of a train in Buenavista station), “Tropas federales” (Federal troops) series, Mexico, 1912 Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico

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Anonymous (Mexican) Soldaderas en posición para disparar contra las gavillas de José Chávez García (Women combatants ready to fire at the forces of José Chavez García), c. 1914 Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico

MOTHERS RISE UP

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Eduardo Gil Niños desaparecidos. Segcunda Marcha de la Resistancia (Murdered children. Second Resistance March), Buenos Aires, December 9–10, 1982 Eduardo Gil collection

Ken Hamblin Beaubien Street, 1971 Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan

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Eduardo Gil Paraguas. Segunda Marcha de la Resistancia (Umbrellas. Second Resistance March), Buenos Aires, December 9–10, 1982 Eduardo Gil collection

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THEY ARE YOUR OWN CHILDREN

Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv

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Agustí Centelles Children playing, Montjuic, Barcelona, 1936 Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca

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THEY ARE YOUR OWN CHILDREN

Solidarte México Desaparecidos políticos de Nuestra América (Solidarte Mexico, the political disappeared of our America), 1984 Two posters (Paulo Bruscky, Manuel Marin)

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Eduardo Gil Siluetas y canas. El Siluetazo (Silhouettes and cops. The silhouette action), Buenos Aires, September 21–22, 1983 Eduardo Gil collection

THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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Bruno Boudjelal Sur les traces de Frantz Fanon (In the footsteps of Franz Fanon), 2012 Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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Taysir Batniji Gaza Journal intime (Gaza diary), 2001 Taysir Batniji/Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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Mat Jacob Chiapas 2, 1996–2001, 2016 Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Mat Jacob Chiapas 1 (marche 1997) (Chiapas 1 [March 1997]), 2016 Mat Jacob/Tendance floue

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Mat Jacob Chiapas 7 (marche 2001) (Chiapas 7 [March 2001]), 2016 Mat Jacob/Tendance floue

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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Marie Lechner Forms of Digital Resistance, 2016 Screenshot of the online project “Anonymous: Shared identity in the era of a global networked Society” by Robert Sakrowski (2011) Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

Hugo Aveta Ritmos primarios, la subversiòn del alma (Basic rhythms: subversion of the soul), 2013 Hugo Aveta/NextLevel Galerie, Paris

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza Et ils vont dans l’espace qu’embrasse ton regard (And they go into the space taken in by your gaze), 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

Enrique Ramírez Cruzar un muro (Passing through a wall), 2013 Enrique Ramírez/Michel Rein gallery, Paris, Brussels

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Francisca Benitez Garde l’Est, 2005 Francisca Benitez collection

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THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

Maria Kourkouta Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. Frontière gréco-macédonienne (Idomeni, March 14, 2016. Greek–Macedonian border), 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

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Georges Didi-Huberman

BY THE DESIRES

(Fragments on What Makes Us Rise Up)

LOSS AND UPRISINGS Forces make us rise up. Forces that are neither exterior to us nor imposed upon us: involuted forces in everything that concerns us most essentially. But what are they made of? What are their rhythms? On what sources do they draw? Could we not start by saying that they come to us, that they appear and reappear, more often than not from a loss. Is it not true that losing uplifts us, makes us rise up when loss has brought us to the ground? Is it not true that losing makes us desire when mourning immobilized us? So, let us begin with loss. Two sisters—one four years old, the other six—have just lost their mother. Pierre Fédida observed what happened between them. It is something extraordinary or, quite simply, something vital: a game was played to imitate the dead woman, to imitate her immobility under the bedsheet that represents the shroud. And then the game suddenly changed when the white sheet fluttered and rose up, while the little girls themselves came to life with “arguments,” cries, and “joyful jumps”: “A few days after her mother’s death, Laure, aged four, played at being dead. With her sister, two years older than her, she argued over a bedsheet that she asked to be covered with, while she explained the ritual that was to be scrupulously accomplished to help her disappear. The sister carried this out until the moment when, seeing Laure no longer moving, she began to scream. Laure reappeared, and, in order to calm her sister, now asked her to be dead: she demanded that the sheet she had used to cover her remain impassive. She continuously rearranged it as her sister’s screams suddenly transformed into laughter, making the sheet wave with joyful jumps. And the sheet, which was a shroud, became a dress, a house, a flag raised at the top of a tree, before being finally torn amidst the laughter of an unbridled dance in which an old stuffed rabbit is put to death with Laure bursting open its stomach.”

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“Clearly,” the psychoanalyst concluded, “mourning puts the world into movement. … The world is shaken with a new mobility as soon as death suddenly appears evident through a game that symbolically accomplishes the desire for it.” We should even say that loss, which overwhelms us initially, can also, thanks to a game, a gesture, a thought, or a desire, make the world rise up entirely; and this is the principle force of uprisings.1

THE DEPTHS OF THE AIR ARE RED The person who tells you that “the depths of the air are red” is no doubt suggesting that a storm—a “red” communist storm—is going to rise and is going to raise everything up and carry it away. This is a meteorological way, a very old one as it happens, to speak of movements that affect the history of human societies: there are magnificent pages in Les Misérables on this theme, where Victor Hugo compares the Paris insurrection to a gigantic ocean turmoil. We could even go back as far as Lucretius and his description of social turbulence at the time of the Plague of Athens. In the wonderful prologue to his film, Le fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), Chris Marker made recent images—linked to the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s—rise up, as he did too with the famous, reedited shots from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which tell of the 1905 uprising in Odessa, starting with the collective mourning around the body of Vakulinchuk, the murdered sailor whose death “calls for justice.” With Simone Signoret’s inimitable voice and Luciano Berio’s Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid, we see a clash between the crowd going down to view the corpse in Battleship Potemkin and the burial of the dead from the Charonne metro station in 1962: “Burial of the dead of Charonne,” wrote Marker in the cut, “A woman wipes her eyes. Potemkin: close-up of a woman wiping her eyes, finishing the gesture of the woman of Charonne” ( figs. 1–2). What does this extraordinary—aesthetic, and no doubt political, even anthropological—hypothesis tell us, a hypothesis according to which a gesture filmed in 1925 could “finish the gesture of the woman of Charonne” in 1962? It tells us, firstly, that uprisings, in Marker’s view, assume a very profound solidarity that links the subjects with their mourning and their desires; but which also joins the times themselves with their interposed images. It is for this reason that we see a crowd of fists raised in Battleship Potemkin, like those that were raised on

fig. 1 Chris Marker, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), 1977–88. Still frame (burying the Charonne massacre dead, 1962).

fig. 2 Chris Marker, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), 1977–88. Still frame (woman weeping in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin).

1. Fédida 1978, 138.

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March 4, 1972, around the coffin of murdered Maoist worker Pierre Overney, which was followed through the streets of Paris by around two hundred thousand people. Or like those fists raised in Chicago, in the same years, by the Black Panthers. And this is how montage, in Le fond de l’air est rouge, takes the shape of an atlas of conflicts where, starting with Odessa (the premise of the October Revolution), the struggles seem to scatter to every point of the globe, and to every moment of history, as though to give the multiple image of a whole world rising up: “Close-up of a woman with disheveled hair lifting her head [Potemkin] towards a helmeted US national guard with a grenadelauncher in his fist, who is turning his mask towards the panicked crowd that is running down the stairs at Odessa. Flight of the demonstrators who have come to knock against the line of US police holding up their truncheons with both hands, encircling two terrorized women [Potemkin] who are watching an approaching line of French gendarmes holding rifles, followed by a detachment of the US National Guard, with fixed bayonets, advancing quickly towards a sit-in on a street in Berkeley. Potemkin: the first bodies roll down the steps. The face of a woman, stupefied, facing the mask of a riot-policeman. An extreme close-up of the finger on the trigger. In Berkeley, the tip of a bayonet threatens the neck of a demonstrator with naked chest. Potemkin, Berkeley, India, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Pentagon, charging, fleeing, hand-to-hand fighting, confusion, bloodied face.” I am not surprised that one of the first images of Potemkin summoned by Marker was that of a large white sheet: it is the tarpaulin that an officer ordered to be thrown over the sailors before shooting them—a great shroud whose cruel drama is created by Eisenstein—but it is exactly what the sailors would soon throw over their heads, in a desperate gesture for freedom, which would appear to be the very first in the film ( figs. 3–4). It would be followed by the headscarves torn off by the old women in mourning, the shirt torn by the young rebel when the mourning has yielded to collective anger, to the “fraternal” sails of vessels that have come to aid the mutineers, awaiting the hoisting of the red flag atop the mast, even the tearing of the cinema screen planned by Eisenstein for the film’s premiere in December 1925. Between the shroud and the sheet, the sheet and the flag, the flag and the tearing, it is as though the storm of the rebellions found its clearest emblem in the rising up of all the surfaces. Eisenstein himself established a direct relation between the idea of political uprising and physical rising up of surfaces, giving as an example—as the iconographic premises for his own Potemkin—the revolutionary

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fig. 3 Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Still frame (the tarpaulin thrown over the sailors).

fig. 4 Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Still frame (the tarpaulin thrown by the sailors).

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flag associated with the dress in movement that reveals the breast of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, a figurative strategy itself, imagined as a “relief” from the despair expressed by Théodore Géricault in The Raft of the Medusa, with its derisory and tragic sail.2 ( figs. 5–6)

FREIHEITSDRANG, THE “UPSURGE OF LIBERTY” A white shroud laid motionless on a body, but which suddenly stirs, rises up, becomes a wedding dress or a flag hoisted to a treetop, before being torn joyously: that is what shows in the surfaces—or in what Aby Warburg called the “accessories in movement,” in reference to what traveled through the history of art as one of the most ancient “aesthetic formants,” by which I mean the drapery—the force of uprisings. This force is therefore manifested in the forms in movement: it is the forms that make it palpable, however profound its psychological source. In his essay on mourning and melancholia in Metapsychology, Sigmund Freud remarked that loss—if it is the loss of a beloved object—arouses a fundamental psychological movement: “Against this demand a struggle (ein begreifliches Sträuben) of course arises. … This struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis (durch eine halluzinatorische Wunschpsychose).” Freud did not yet imagine, in this text, that the “struggle” when faced with loss might create a new reality corresponding to desire rather than undergoing a vain hallucinatory satisfaction of this same desire. We cannot bring back someone’s dead mother. But we can, perhaps, rebel against some of the constraints of the world that killed her. Freud, in any case, allowed the possibility to understand the polarity between “contrition” (Zerknirschung) and “uprising” (Auflehnung) from the perspective of a dialectics between “the plaint” alone and the act of “complaining,” that is to say, between the passion experienced and the passion to act, and to act against. It is the same dialectics that brings into play all uprising—of which the Potemkin can offer a first paradigm—born of a plaint in front of a dead body that “calls for justice.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud could therefore imagine that this Freiheitsdrang, this “drive for freedom” —or this “push towards freedom”—fully contributes to what he called a “development of culture,” in spite of a spontaneous aversion to collective creative processes, above all when they are destructive:

fig. 5 Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People), 1830 (detail). Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

fig. 6 Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1819 (detail). Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

2. Hugo 1845–1862, 827–854. Lucretius [2007] Book 2. Marker 1978, 17–20. Eisenstein 1945, 146–148. Didi-Huberman 2016, 376–395.

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“What makes itself felt in a human community as a desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and so may prove favorable to a further development of civilization.” What makes us rise up? Let us start with the hypothesis that it is the strength of our memories when they burn with those of our desires as they are kindled—images that must enflame our desires from our memories, our memories in the hollows of our desires. Jacques Lacan noted that, in Freud’s texts, the “genesis of the moral dimension does not take root anywhere else than in desire itself,” just as Antigone’s brilliance, l’éclat d’Antigone, that ancient insurrection, showed its political incandescence. We must then understand—and it is something that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler have already suggested—that there would be no uprising worth anything without the assumption of a certain “radical inner experience” in which desires are carried so far only because they take note of, or even take their starting point in, their own buried memories.3

images and words at the same time—a magnificent calligramme from the term “mierda.” Whatever the case, in the courtyard of the boarding school in Zéro de conduite, a “child’s scheme” takes shape, as Vigo described on a title card. It is, firstly, the extraordinary scene of a “pillow rebellion” in the dormitory: “In the middle of the night, they mess up the beds. The fever spreads, and each pupil wants to mess up his neighbor’s bed. Once all of the beds have been thrown into the air, they read the proclamation. Tabard, holding his death’s head flag in his hand, will read the proclamation amidst the uproar of the children crowded around him, all in their night attire”: Proclamation text. “War is declared. Down with the supervisors! Down with punishments! Long live the rebellion! … Freedom or death … Raise the flag on the roof of our school. Tomorrow, everyone stand with us. We swear to bombard with old books, old cans, old shoes—the ammunition’s hidden in the attic—the ugly old mugs on national holidays … Onward! Onward!”

ZEROS FOR CONDUCT And the scene continues: “Carrying the banner through the whole dormitory, Tabard drags his friends into action. All the beds are undone. … The children increasingly run riot and end up using the pillows until they burst. The eiderdown is spread over the dormitory and falls like snowflakes (fig. 7). The beds are turned upside down, the chamber pots are dragged along the ground. It is through a thick cloud of feathers that Parrain, the supervisor, exhausted, looks for a chair to sit down. His chair is taken away from him and he falls on the ground. The door of the dormitory opens. The school supervisor appears and, seeing the clouds of feathers, closes the door immediately. Return to the dormitory, which is increasingly overrun with feathers from the pillows and comforters. A child does a dangerous double somersault …. The film then takes place in slow motion, giving a heightened impression of a dream and a fantasy.” This explosion of childish revolt saturated with feathers is an unforgettable image, so full of future. Joy with slowness, lightness with depth. A pupil majestically rises up in space, like an angel still flying in spite of the scattering of his wings into thousands of softly falling feathers ( fig. 8). The demonstration of the half-naked children attacking an imaginary Bastille happens in the phantasmagoria of the slowed movements, before the “four rebels,” as Vigo calls them, actually bombard the school courtyard from the roof with pieces of wood, shoes, and even—as we see coming from Tabard’s hands—a spring,

In the repressive boarding school in the film Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), we see an endless conflict between a small group of undisciplined children and the adult personnel supposed to supervise the students. It would be an oversimplification to see no more in this conflict than a contrast between the two poles of “desire” (on the side of the children) and “power” (pouvoir) (on the side of the adults). Power itself is made of desires, like when the stout and libidinous professor of natural sciences caresses the hair of the pupil Tabard, before placing his hand a little too heavily upon the child’s: a desire to hold, something that Tabard would soon depend on through an about-turn (an uprising of the gesture) and through an insult (an uprising of words): “Et moi, j’vous dis merde !” (Shit, I say!) (Thus, through Jean Vigo—the anarchist Vigo—an energy became native, an energy that was to take shape in his film through what he called the “collective uproar” of the children who were rising up. Perhaps he was remembering how adults who had just come out of the great massacre of the First World War had sought to rediscover and reconfigure this energy of uprising in their images and in their tracts, in which there phrases such as “Merde!” or “Dada soulève tout !” (Dada makes everything rise up!) often appeared. He was most probably unaware that in the 1930s, the poet Federico García Lorca was also creating for himself—in order to play or to think, to make

3. Freud 1917, 126 and 154–155. Freud 1929, 49. Lacan 1959–1960, 11 and 285–298. Kristeva 1997, 21–22. Kristeva 1998, 31–32. Butler 1997, 167–200.

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which is both a divine and derisory object ( fig. 8). Everything here bears the mark of an uprising—gestural, verbal, psychological, and atmospheric—from the slightest gestures of revolt to the “proclamation text” and the insurgents’ final ascent to the roof of the school, not to mention the flags thrown in the air and the burst pillows.4

FROM THE DEPTHS To make the world rise up we need gestures, desires, and depths. The child who raises up his sheets or who bursts his pillow becomes—along with his rebel friends, both real and imaginary— himself a surface to be raised up and a body to be disseminated throughout space. Joy is spacious, as we know: it is as a fundamental joy that an uprising broadens, expands the world around us and gives us its same rhythm. In his psychical or “psychotropic” experiences, Henri Michaux discovered similar movements: “Whiteness erupts, colour of chalk. … The gushing begins from white springs at all points around me. … White sheets, a shaking of white sheets, if such they are, seized with giddy shudderings. Like entering a new country where, in place of tricolour, colours and whatever else besides, an insane quantity of white flags were hoisted, diamond white, no other colour—a strange new country where the most favoured occupation is the waving of white linen high in the air in delirious and unending celebration.” And it is once again in L’Infini turbulent, in 1957, that the poet spoke of these profound uprisings in which the exaltation itself occurs only through what he beautifully called “the confidence of a child”:

fig. 7 Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), 1933. Still frame (the pillow fight).

Exaltation, abandon, above all, confidence: the approach to the infinite necessitates these. You should have the confidence of a child, a confidence which goes before you in hope, which surges upwards, carrying you with it, a confidence which, upon entering the seething tumult of this universe … surges still upwards, prodigiously, extraordinarily, in a way never before known, surges and surges upwards, beyond itself, beyond everything miraculously surging and at the same time acquiescing with a limitless acquiescence which brings appeasement and excitement, which is an overflowing and a liberation, which is contemplation thirsting for further liberation and yet which gives birth to the fear that the heart will not stand up to the strain of this blissful, excessive joy which cannot be housed and came unmerited,

fig. 8 Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), 1933. Still frame (the attack from the roof).

4. Vigo 1933, 133, 149, 177, 181, 185, and 187. Le Bon, ed. 2005, 286, 333, etc. Hernández 1990, 167 and 207.

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all the more radical when it has nothing to do, first of all, with any sort of “will for art.” One rises up in order to demonstrate one’s desire for emancipation, not to display it like an ornament in a window, a garment on the catwalk, or a “performance” in a contemporary art gallery. The power and the depth of uprisings come from the fundamental innocence of the gesture that decides it. Innocence is in no way an aesthetic quality. Henri Michaux’s “way to insubordination” is related here to what Federico García Lorca had already written regarding the cante jondo or “deep song” through the popular— immemorial and surviving—category of the duende, which is not unrelated, from an ethnological perspective, to the “hitting spirits” of the more northern traditions. Depth and uprising of the duende: “The duende rises inside you” (el duende sube por dentro), a phrase that García Lorca claimed he heard from an old guitar maestro from Andalusia. It is important to remember the distinctions established by the author of Romancero gitano: if the angel was created to elevate us and the muse to amaze us, the duende raises us up from its unknown depths, which are our own interior motions, and our most extreme desires: “It is in the ultimate dwellings of the blood that it must be awakened,” wrote the poet, by which he meant that, far from any (religious) transcendence or from any (artistic) ideal, the cante jondo owes its strength of uprising to the very depth of its duende as a desire to be free—immanent and free to the point of rupture in which there are “neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry that we have learned, that he smashes style, that he leans on human with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumen,” those blacks that come from the depths and then become the very matter of those cries, all of those dark mouths through which the painter was able to show us, figuratively, what was the “black sound,” the sonido negro of the song through which rise up plaints, anger, and the energy of suffering people’s insubordination.5

this over-abundant joy of which one knows not whether one is the giver or the receiver, and which is excessive, excessive, ex … cess … ive … Regenerating, ineffably dilating, increasingly dilating, outside of oneself, breathing, being breathed. This is how Henri Michaux opens Une voie pour l’insubordination (A voice/way for insubordination [a play on voix/voie in French, voice/ way]): a strange text that he also wanted to call Voie pour l’exaspération or pour l’essentielle contestation-insubordination (“Voice/way for exasperation” or “for basic challenge-insubordination”). It deals with the question of “striking spirits” and of “ghost sounds,” everything that makes up the matter of certain popular beliefs and certain fantasy, ancient, or contemporary literary genres. Everything that also makes up the psychical truth of certain gestures that are considered abnormal or asocial. Doesn’t the shaking of the sheets tell us, from the beginning, that a specter haunts all of this choreography of uprisings? “Objects suddenly move by themselves, drawers open, utensils rise up, furniture, even heavy furniture, and heavy chests change places … stones fall thrown from somewhere, pieces of tiles with crazy trajectories, quite unpredictable to the very end.” All of this emanating from a fundamental force that, above all, is a psychical revolt: the insubordination of a child who wants to escape from the parental frame and is eager to “move freely.” It is Zéro de conduite but in a gory version, it is like a beginning for what George A. Romero called, regarding these films, “zombie politics,” that of riots (émeutes) and ghostly packs (meutes). Michaux described the evil, “hitter” and “insubordinate” little girl in Poltergeist: “For as long as we can observe her, we do not see her make any suspicious gesture. She usually stays still. No effort appears at all on her face. No contortion. No tension. Nothing strange in her composure. [But] she is capable of insubordination, and a famous insubordination with the force of a giant. Tired no doubt of the constraining attitudes, she upsets the unbearable interior in which nothing happens. This is not art—which is a register that does not interest her—nor farce, nothing moving towards the funny or the tragic, or towards theater. … No plan. Only scattering. … She carries out attacks. A response to the daily life by the objects of daily life, she violates the order of furniture, the apparent law of things inside a home. Attacks on quietude, on the peaceful, bourgeois atmosphere, and on the old prohibition on moving.” The poet is quite right to remark in these pages—as Pier Paolo Pasolini did, in his own way, too—that insubordination becomes

A GESTURE RISES Before ever claiming to be acts or actions, uprisings surge forth from the human psyche as gestures, corporeal forms. They are forces that make us rise up, no doubt, but it is indeed forms that, anthropologically speaking, make them perceptible, convey them, direct them, implement

5. Chrétien 2007, 7–31. Michaux 1957, 16–17 and 40–41. Michaux 1980, 987–992. Thoret, ed. 2007, passim. García Lorca 1930, 51.

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them, or make them plastic or resistant, depending on the circumstances. Against any “anti-expressive” or any “anti-pathetic” vision of politics, which we find in Alain Badiou for example, Giorgio Agamben sought to give to the human gesture an intrinsic and even “integral” political dimension: “Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.” It is a magnificent conclusion to a text whose premise is nonetheless debatable, and according to which “by the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitively lost its gestures.” Yet gestures are things that we make every day, all day long, and without even realizing it. We no more lose our gestures—whether we are bourgeois, proletarian, or anything else for that matter—than we lose our “experience” (as Agamben wrote, apocalyptically, in Infancy and History) or our unconscious desires. If we do not master our gestures to the end, it is the sign that we have not lost them (or that they have not let go of us). Gestures are transmitted, surviving in spite of us and in spite of everything. They are our own living fossils, like a duende that “rises inside us.” The Spanish who fought against the French occupation in 1808, raised their arms—notably in the images of Francisco de Goya's Disasters—just as the workers raised their arms in Eisenstein’s Strike in 1924 ( figs. 9–10). And just as the Black Panthers raised their arms in Chicago in 1969. Or, in 1989, as the Romanians raised their arms when they came to realize their victory over Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, as we can see in Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution. The examples are infinite: every minute that passes, somewhere, there are, I imagine, a thousand arms raised in the streets, in a factory on strike, or in a schoolyard. In our dreams our arms are raised when our emotions are peopled and become riotous. It happens even that people in utter despair fall from high up with their arms raised in a final protest against the order of the world. Aby Warburg forged the notion of Pathosformel—or ‘”pathos formula”—to account for this survival of gestures throughout the duration of human cultures. Gestures are inscribed in history: they make up the traces, or the Leitfossilien, as Warburg liked to say, combining the permanence of the fossil with the musicality and rhythmicity of the Leitmotif. Gestures are related to a dynamic anthropology of corporeal forms, and as such the “formulae of pathos” would be both a visual and temporal way to examine the unconscious at work in the infinite dance of our expressive movements. What Warburg sought was to create a history and a cartography of the cultural “fields” and “vehicles” through which our most fundamental

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fig. 9 Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, 1924. Still frame (worker).

fig. 10 Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, 1924. Still frame (hands raised).

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gestures take shape. One of the most important polarities of those “cultural formants” is found, no doubt, in the psychical and corporeal dialectics of contrition and uprising. At first glance, Aby Warburg appears to have been very concerned with contrition but very little concerned with uprisings. In Mnemosyne, his atlas of images, a central place is given to the motif of the lament (plate 42). The introductory plates give us the idea of a humanity that is unable to escape the frames by which traditional knowledge determined the very notion of cosmos (plate B). The Titan Atlas is shown only in his suffering and punishment, having to bear the entirety of the sky on his shoulders (plate 2). In plate 5, we see women fleeing a fate that we know is ineluctable and, in plate 6, Laocoön cannot escape the serpents. Plate 41 shows the “pathos of annihilation” (Vernichtungspathos) where we see Orpheus being slaughtered by the furious Maenads. The dead and the injured in Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios are slumped in a corner of plate 77. And if anything like a popular fervor—not to mention uprising— appears in Mnemosyne, it seems to be included only in the carnivalesque releases (plate 32), the resurrected of Michelangelo or the deified victors (plates 54–56), even the Roman crowds gathered in 1929 to celebrate the concordat between Pope Pius XI and the dictator Mussolini (plates 78–79). It seems, therefore, that Aby Warburg neglected the Pathosformeln of the political uprising—and this is no doubt because he was, himself, very afraid of it, unable as he was to distinguish between the monstra (the formidable depths of impulse) and the astra (the beneficent leaps of reason). Thus in the Warburgian collections of fundamental gestures it is difficult to find images of social and political struggles contemporaneous to him, the 1917 revolution in Russia or the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. Yet we know how lucid Warburg was when considering the history of culture as a “tragedy” or an immense field of conflicts. This is revealed in his works on the imagery of political propaganda at the time of the Reformation (since updated by Robert W. Scribner, then broadened in such exhibitions as Krieg der Bilder, curated by Wolfgang Cillessen). They coincide with his passionate interest in the iconography of the First World War, which of course led him to the monstra of a psychosis into which he fell repeatedly between endless phases of being totally overwhelmed, contrition, and very violent episodes of what we could call uprising.6

FROM CONTRITION TO UPRISING Like in Nietzsche and Freud, there is in Aby Warburg’s work an extraordinary capacity—and even a theory—for inversion of values applied to the cultural sphere in general. His public work had begun with the beautiful “uprising” of the mythological Graces of Botticelli, and the famous Ninfa fiorentina in Ghirlandaio: nothing more innocent, it seems. Yet, as with Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress that rises above a subway grating in Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch, it already had to do with “erotic pursuits” and, therefore, with a dialectics of desire from which violence was never completely absent, as in the case of Botticelli’s Spring or Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. Furthermore, Warburg’s Ninfa carries with her, over and above her fundamental grace comparable to that of Freud’s Gradiva, a critical function capable of “inverting all values” attributed to images and to gestures in the traditional practices of historians or art historians. The “light step of the servant girl,” with her moving “imaginary breeze” in the fresco by Ghirlandaio, brings with it, then, something like a great critical wind, or a kind of methodological storm destined to revolutionize our historical and philosophical approach to images and gestures. Warburg had immediately understood that gestures have a remarkable ability to reverse or overturn: physical inversions, while maintaining their general meaning (as with those caresses that become violence within a loving gestus), or inversions of meaning while maintaining their general form. This is the case studied by Warburg in 1927, when he showed the survival of the gesture of the Niobids in that of Andrea del Castagno’s David: a survival doubled with an inversion of meaning, since in one case the gesture indicates the state of the vanquished, the approaching death, while in the other case it indicates that of the victor and approaching triumph ( fig. 11). Plate 42 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, for its part, dealt not only with the iconography of the lament, but rather it bore even in its title—as well as in its montage—the more profound and dialectical idea of an “energetic inversion of the pathos of pain” (Leidenspathos in energetischer Inversion); that which Eisenstein had masterfully staged in Battleship Potemkin through an “energy inversion” of the contrition before the body of the sailor Vakulinchuk into the uprising of an entire people. It is remarkable, then, that the “testamentary” plate of the Mnemosyne Atlas—on which Warburg was still working when he died in October 1929—should have been presented as both an archaeological and prophetic questioning of absolute powers in politics: on the one

6. Badiou 2005, 67–87. Agamben 1992, 58 and 49. Agamben 1978, 15. Didi-Huberman 2002, 115–270. Warburg 1927–1929, pl. B, 5–6, 32, 39, 41–41a, and 77–79. Warburg 1920, 597–697. Scribner 1981, passim. Cillessen, ed. 1997, passim. Korff, ed. 2007, passim. Didi-Huberman 2011, 175–296.

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hand, the throne of Saint Peter (a theocratic emblem) and, on the other, the triumph of Mussolini (a fascist hero). Between the two, an allusion to the entire history of Western anti-Semitism, which made the work of Warburg, according to Charlotte Schoell-Glass, seem like a genuine plea for a “politics of the spirit” (Geistespolitik). It should not be surprising that, far from the pseudo-innocence of Botticelli’s nymphs, Warburg’s methodology found its most fertile use in what German disciples of the author of Mnemosyne ended up calling a political iconology, as we can see in the creation of a library, beginning with Martin Warnke up to Uwe Fleckner, dedicated precisely to these problems inside the walls of Warburg’s house in Hamburg. Around Martin Warnke’s pioneering works on iconoclasm and the role of images in political conflicts, we have seen Klaus Herding go through the history of revolutionary propaganda, Wolfgang Kemp create the iconology of the “multitude,” Horst Bredekamp interpret “visual strategies” at the time of Jan Hus and Thomas Hobbes, James R. Tanis and Daniel Horst collect images from the time of the Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), Dietrich Erben study figurative production at the heart of Masaniello’s uprising in Naples (1647–48), Christoph Frank examine the image of the Fronde (1648–53), Godehard Janzing discover the “figure of the partisan” in the representations of war in Goya, and Michael Diers develop this type of analysis for the whole contemporary period. All in all, different ways to recognize in figures—in the visual history of peoples and their gestures—a capacity to make tangible the very dynamics of real or imagined uprisings.7

IN ORDER TO THROW YOUR SUFFERING OVERBOARD

fig. 11 Aby Warburg, Lamentation, 1927. Detail of a plate from Urworte leidenschaftlicher Gebärdensprache (Primeval vocabulary of passionate gesticulation), exhibition presented at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg.

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7. Warburg 1893, 597–697. Warburg 1900, 198–210. Didi-Huberman 2012, 177–206. Didi-Huberman 2015, passim. Warburg 1925–1929, 88–89. Warburg 1927–1929, pl. 42 and 79. Didi-Huberman 2016, 169–395. Schoell-Glass 1998, 215–346. Warnke 1973, passim. Warnke 1986, 796–804. Warnke 2011, 280–287. Herding, ed. 1992, passim. Herding and Reichardt 1989, passim. Kemp 1973, 249–270. Bredekamp 1975, passim. Bredekamp 1999, passim. Tanis and Horst 1993, passim. Erben 1999, 231–263. Erben 2011, 103– 111. Frank 1999, 264–275. Janzing 2003, 51–65. Diers 1997, passim. Didi-Huberman 2013, 77–114.

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Our desires are of course what make us rise up. But why are our desires intent on becoming aggravated in the uprising? Why not calmly await the hoped-for satisfaction? Why are our desires deployed almost always in rupture, in a forcing of limits and of such an acute anxiety that we would call it tragic? This is because what makes us rise up is detached from the depths of an inextinguishable pain that is its birthplace, its place of origin. This place of origin, wrote Georg Simmel, is something that “humanity … tears loose from itself” and “opposes” through a “tragic opportunity” that he called, quite simply, culture. Aby Warburg undoubtedly prolonged, in his exploration of formulae of pathos, the idea that was dear to Simmel—and Nietzsche too—of an unavoidable “tragedy of culture.” It happened that he spoke, for example, of his field of iconological study as a vast “treasury of suffering” (Leidenschatz),

which that anarchist of sorts, Walter Benjamin, for his part, was not without. But we should be careful: the “destruction” evoked in the famous text from 1931 is not simply a tabula rasa, the annihilation of everything, for it clearly contains that element of prophetic memory and children’s game that Jean Vigo was about to stage in Zero for Conduct: “The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room (Platz schaffen). And only one activity: clearing away (räumen). His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful (jung und heiter). For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own condition (Radizierung).” Clearing away, making “a complete reduction” in our own condition, making room and letting fresh air into present history: this is what the “destructive character” does. We must, therefore, in order to rise up, know how to forget a certain present and, with it, the recent past that put it in place. But Benjamin also wrote—in the same year or the next—a magnificent text titled “Excavation and Memory,” in which he outlined how clearing away our fields of actuality assumes that we bring to light and discover a certain past that the present state sought to keep prisoner, unknown, buried, or inactive. In uprisings, in short, memory burns: it consumes the present and with it a certain past, but also discovers the flame hidden under the ashes of a more profound memory. It is childish in that children know very well how to kill the fathers while reconnecting the thread with the grandfathers and grandmothers. This is why Benjamin did not exempt his character from a “historical consciousness,” quite the contrary: “The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.” “The destructive character sees nothing permanent,” Benjamin wrote finally: “But for this reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads.” Whether Atlas casts off his burden, or Prometheus is unchained, or Eve becomes autonomous, in every case characters will find themselves at the crossroads—a crossroads far more open and dangerous than in the traditional, humanist choice of Hercules between vice and virtue. When we rise up, there is no simple

whose images were, to some extent, nuggets or precious stones. There is a philosophical tradition at work here that makes history as such a history of the pain of humanity. This is exactly what Walter Benjamin said in his book on German baroque theater, presented as a study on the baroque exposition of history as a history of the world’s sufferings (Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt). The fact that this suffering was “distanced” from an author like Bertolt Brecht did not prevent Hannah Arendt from claiming that “what brought Brecht back to reality and almost killed his poetry was compassion (Mitleid). When the famine occurred, he rose up with the hunger.” And Arendt cited these lines from Brecht (whose poetry will have survived, despite the risks): “I am told: You eat and drink—be glad you do! But how can I eat and drink when I steal my food from the man who is hungry, and when my glass of water is needed by someone who is dying of thirst?” Meanwhile, in Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno did not neglect to push this dark diagnostic to the full, saying that the historical dimension of things is nothing other than the expression of the sufferings of the past. This element of suffering is so widespread, so easy to observe, and daily for so many people, that it seems to need mythologies that would sing its fatality and universality: so, here is poor Atlas under his immense burden and, at the other end of the world, his brother Prometheus tied to Mount Caucasus, his viscera being torn out. We know the mythical explanation for such sufferings: they are punishments, but we might even say political condemnations. Atlas and Prometheus made the mistake of rising up against the gods on Olympus, but here they are tamed for good, that is to say, forever. From Pagan to Judeo-Christian mythologies we encounter the fate of Eve, for example: having renounced the eternal satisfactions of Heaven, she now knows desire and knowledge, but with these she has gained—we must understand that she is punished—suffering and mortality. This is how our traditions present things: the gods are the archè, the beginning and the authority of everything. You will be punished severely if you violate their eternal laws. But should we not imagine that some kind of mythological class struggle might begin again? Should we not imagine an Atlas rising and, by an extraordinary effort that would suddenly change the course of things, imagine him throwing his burden overboard? Should one not hope for a Prometheus unchained returning among men with the great fire that he transmitted to them? Should one not wish for an Eve delivered from any guilt and from any obeisance towards her regulatory authority? Perhaps what Warburg was missing was that “destructive character,”

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innumerable holes filling the space ( fig. 12). To exceed, therefore, to throw your burden over your shoulder, to come out of the hole you fell into. But to exceed what, exactly? Yourself, or another? Alone, or with another? To exceed, towards what? And how to exceed? Is it not mad to claim, as Michaux did here, that “one defenestrated flies away at last”? Or should we not ask the question differently, and ask ourselves what kind of realism, perhaps, such a phrase could express? To rise up is to break a history that everyone believed to have been heard (in the sense in which we speak of a “case that has been heard,” meaning “closed”). It is to break the foreseeability of history, to refute the rule that presided, as we thought, over its development or its preservation. The political reason through which we understand a history is often expressed in terms of power (pouvoir): for many, history can be summarized in the passages of power (pouvoir) between people. And so the French Revolution was needed, that “historical moment” if ever there was one, for a monarchic power (pouvoir) to find itself overturned by a republican power (pouvoir). But let us approach things from a different angle, from their state of emergence: when a people rises up (or even, in order for a people to rise up), the people must always start from a situation of “unpower.” To rise up would then be the gesture through which the subjects of unpower would give rise, in themselves, to something like a fundamental potency (puissance) that would erupt or re-emerge. A sovereign potency that would be marked, however, by a tenacious unpower, an unpower that would seem to be marked in turn by inevitability: no less than 8,528 uprisings were needed, between 1661 and 1789, to be able to trigger the revolutionary process as such, as Jean Nicolas showed in his masterwork, La Rébellion française. Uprisings, then: potencies (puissances) of, or in, unpower itself. Native potencies (puissances), without, as often happens, the least aim or idea of power. Thus, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, never sought power (pouvoir), but rather news of their children and grandchildren ( fig. 13). Yet, they made a whole society, and even the political consciousness of everyone around, rise up. We must recognize, then, as the necessary premise for any reflections on the form of the uprising, the conceptual distinction between potency (puissance) and power (pouvoir). We can already sense, albeit confusedly, that potency (puissance) relates to the resource and the source, as though it indicated the way in which a torrent creates, by its intrinsic force, the form that the riverbed will take. We can sense that power (pouvoir) relates more to the canal or the dam, as a very different way to grasp, from the source and its resources, an energy that is more useful, easier to master, and, all in all, easier to govern.

choice between vice and virtue: there is a “swarming of what is possible”— this is Henri Michaux in Miserable Miracle—“as if there were an opening, an opening which would be an assembling, which would be a world, which would be something that might happen, that many things might happen …” To rise up, then, would include—as Michaux suggested in Face aux verrous (Facing the locks) —throwing your pain overboard and following, with others, the dynamics of this launching capable of turning the whole world upside down: one defenestrated flies away at last one torn from bottom to top one torn apart all over one torn apart never again retied … movements with multiple jets movements in place of other movements that one cannot show, but that dwell in the mind of dust of stars of erosion of crumbling and of vain latencies. feast of stains, range of the arms movements one jumps into the “nothing” turning efforts being alone, one is a crowd what incalculable number is advancing increasing, spreading, spreading! Adieu, fatigue … Gestures of exceedance Of exceedance above all of exceedance.8

POTENCY AGAINST POWER, OR THE ACT OF DESIRE “Gestures of exceedance,” wrote Michaux. I have often considered drawings that illustrated his works—Emergences-résurgences, for example—to be like clamors in India ink, uprisings of forms, riots of graphic signs, public demonstrations of beings that we would hitherto not have noticed, and who, suddenly, come noisily out of 8. Simmel 1911, 27 and 75. Warnke 1980, 113–186. Benjamin 1928, 103. Arendt 1966, 235. Adorno 1951, 13. Benjamin 1931, 541–542. Benjamin 1932, 576. Michaux 1956, 9. Michaux 1954, 435 and 438–439.

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Potency, or potentiality, was defined by Aristotle as “the principle of process and change” in everything. Everything moves, everything changes, and the intrinsic motor must be called dynamis, potency or potentiality (puissance). What is very significant for us here is the example that Aristotle gave when he said, in the same sentence, that it is for art (technè) to assume such a function for all things that will be created by the human hand. If we jump forward a few centuries to when this question was passionately debated, to the Middle Ages when God, the supreme artist and creator, was questioned regarding His “omnipotence” (toute puissance)—Can God only do what He does? Can God only do the best? Can God make the past not have happened? etc.—and we can return at once to that phrase “human, all too human” with which, in his conclusion to Traumdeutung, Sigmund Freud claimed something essential regarding the indestructibility of psychical potency (potency), that is to say desire: “By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dream pictures as the present, has been molded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.” Could we not say regarding the one who rises up what Freud says here regarding the dreamer? (We should not smile at how little consistency there is in this: did Freud not tell us just how much the potency brackets [puissance] of our dreams makes us “rise up”—like the duende for García Lorca—and transforms, without our knowing, the very consistency of our most active, most concrete reality?) Could we not say that the uprising “leads us into the future” by means of the potency (puissance) of the desires that it realizes, knowing too that that future—which has become “present” for the one who has risen up—is itself modeled by the dynamis of the “indestructible desire” in the image of a past? Whether it was through clinical experiments on unconscious desire or by his philosophical readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Freud saw in the dream and the symptom how the psychical dynamis makes them processes that are both different—new, native, unexpected, unpredictable—and repetitive because they are moved according to the “eternal return” of our most fundamental desires. It should not be any surprise that Gilles Deleuze—taking it from Freud, with a view to taking it quite far—should also have constructed his thoughts on difference and repetition in the wake of his readings of Nietzsche and Spinoza. His 1962 book on Nietzsche, already contested the idea that the will to potency (puissance) was to be understood in terms of power (pouvoir), which is what a whole tradition—definitively refuted by Mazzino Montinari—had tried to suggest. Nietzschean potency (puissance) is first of all, pathos, “power to be affected”; and

fig. 12 Henri Michaux, Émergences-résurgences (Emergences/Resurgences), Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972. A drawing from the book.

fig. 13 Silvio Zuccheri, Marcha de la Resistencia, Buenos Aires (Resistance march, Buenos Aires), 1983. Photograph.

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it is then “an essentially plastic principle,” that is to say an emergence of forms perpetually metamorphosing; in this way Deleuze was to call it “creative and giving,” and consequently tending towards anything but a power over someone else. This “power to be affected” would reappear in Gilles Deleuze’s great book on Spinoza and the problem of expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza). To be affected does not mean to be passive: there is an essential potency in feeling affected in us, which we see, not quite written out in black and white, but written out in gestures in films like Battleship Potemkin or A Grin Without a Cat, and which presides over, preludes all of our gestures of uprising. It is another way to recognize, after Spinoza, that potency (potentia) is in no way a power (potestas), while it may be in tune with that “force of existence” that the author of the Ethics called conatus or impulse, “effort,” that very energy—an indestructible energy—of our desires. Spinoza claimed that this energy or potency (puissance) formed an “actual essence” (actualis essentia) in which, however paradoxical it may appear in our traditional categories, the potency (puissance) is the act itself and not its privation. The potency (puissance) of desire is never exhausted, except in death (or in the death impulse). It does not oppose the act to which it never ceases to offer new forms. And itis in such a potency (puissance) that Spinoza found the fundamental principles for what makes our desires the desires for freedom. It is in the name of reason—a reason that did not turn its back on desires or emotions—that Spinoza hated power (pouvoir) exerted as a form of political tyranny. How then, if God exists, can His power (pouvoir) reasonably be obliged to serve us or to tyrannize us? Would it not suffice to have the potency (puissance)—that freedom of potency which, consequently, also characterizes the human spirit or mind as such? A government that would seek to “command minds” (and it seems today that these forms of government are legion) is, according to chapter twenty of the Theological-Political Treatise, merely a “violent government,” the most detestable of tyrannies. Poor Spinoza, who had to experience such institutional terror himself, and who, among his many braveries, sought to cover the walls of The Hague with a poster—on which could be read Ultimi Barbarorum, “the worst of barbarians”—who wanted to raise up peoples’ minds against the assassinations of the republicans Johan and Cornelis de Witt, on August 20, 1672. Spinoza, the philosopher of uprising? It was not until the courageous and rigorous work of Antonio Negri that the capital disconnection between potency (puissance) and power (pouvoir) was developed as far as possible, that is to say towards emancipatory goals to which we will need to return.9

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DUENDE OF TRANSGRESSION So in 1921 we could read, all over Europe, this impertinent and optimistic phrase: Dada raises everything! After the inaugural gesture of the Dadaists, it is on the potency (puissance) and the indestructibility of desire that Surrealism founded its own poetical and political tendency towards uprising. As though Une vague de rêves (A wave of dreams), the title of a work by Aragon published in 1924, surged onto peoples’ minds in order to “win the revolution of forces of drunkenness” and of the unconscious, as Walter Benjamin showed so well from 1929 on: “Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that ‘freedom, which on this earth can be bought only with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.’” This is what Benjamin finally called “poetic politics” (dichterische Politik) which, beyond the familiar injunctions of the Communist Manifesto, founded the possibility of an “anthropological materialism” (anthropologischer Materialismus) capable of grasping—or even producing—that moment when “revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation” from its intrinsic potency (puissance), which is desire and its freely invented “image space” (Bildraum). Thus there will be successive publications, gathering around André Breton, of La Révolution surrealists between 1924 and 1929, then of Surréalisme au service de la Révolution between 1930 and 1933, publications in which—as shown by authors, following Walter Benjamin, such as Rosalind Krauss, Michel Poivert, and Clément Chéroux—the photographic image played a paradigmatic role: the role, we might say, of an operator of transgression. But no one went as far in this direction as Georges Bataille regarding visual forms, inner experience, desire and, even, political economics. The journal Documents, published in 1929 and 1930, appeared already like a fireworks display—feux d’artifice, beauty born of explosions—of forms risen up or unswervingly “rising.” Bataille thus saw the black dancers in the Blackbirds at the Moulin Rouge as “sleazy and charming feux follets” (not unlike duendes) who “dance and cry” as though they were rising up above the “immense cemetery” that will have been built by their cultural domination ( fig. 14). Dust in Bataille’s eyes? It does not “rise” exactly the way Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray had said in 1920: rather, it “rises up” against the order and the tidiness of the bourgeois houses it continues to haunt in

9. Michaux 1972, 588–602. Nicolas 2002, passim. Aristotle [1998], XII, I, 1019a. 131. Boulnois, ed. 1994, 21–66. Freud 1900, 615. Montinari 1972–1982, passim. Deleuze 1968a, passim. Deleuze 1962, 50, 62–63, and 85. Deleuze 1968b, 83–96, and 217–234. Deleuze 1970, 101–109. Spinoza 1675, III, 6–7 (217). Alquié 1959, 347–368. Ramond 1994, 129–172. Revault d’Allonnes and Rizk, ed. 1994, passim. Sportelli 1995, passim. Rovere 2010, 2–6 and 105–141. Karaoui-Bouchoucha 2010, passim. Spinoza 1670, 896–897. Negri 1981, passim. Negri 1992, passim.

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spite of the “maids” recruited to get rid of it. The large toenails, photographed for Bataille by his friend Jacques-André Boiffard, come to the surface on the pages of Documents (in our hands) and rise, though disproportionate and turgescent like sexual and dangerous organs. If “the dislocation of forms leads to that of thought”—as Bataille saw in Picasso—then it would follow that their “lugubrious game” is as subversive as a writing of Sade called up for the occasion. And if space is capable of “staying roguish” as Bataille wrote, isn’t it because it manages to rise up against architecture itself the moment when, for example, the walls of a prison collapse ( fig. 15)? Benjamin was quite right, then, to recognize the fecundity of this “anthropological materialism.” Bataille showed, more than anyone else, both its relevance and its transgressive value when he went, in a few lines, from the “deviations of nature” to the uprisings in Battleship Potemkin—according to a fundamental paradigm that he called the “dialectics of forms” —in spite of his comparison of man to a volcano that rises (erection), rises up to project its lava (eruption), before letting himself go in a “vertiginous fall.” On the ethnological level, from 1933 on, Bataille made potlatch the principle of an “expenditure” envisaged as “debauchery” and “rising of pleasure” over and above any utility—which he would call an “insubordination of material facts” against the fixed order of things reduced to their exchange value. Thus, for him, experience in the radical sense then has the value of an uprising against any rules imposed. Such is the “potency of unpower” that is inherent in sacrifice—that “joy facing death” Bataille often invoked—and, above all, in the gesture of revolt. But what revolt exactly? Firstly, it is the revolt carried out as a counterattack against fascism between 1932 and 1939. Bataille participated in the works of the Democratic Communist circle directed by Boris Souvarine, and in 1933 examined the “psychological structure of fascism” before editing Contreattaque with André Breton, a journal in which he argued for “violent outbursts of potency (puissance)” in the streets against the “impotence” of political hesitations facing fascist movements. In the context of the Collège de Sociologie, between 1937 and 1939, he would seek a position that was neither fascist nor bourgeois, nor communist, by focusing —in the footsteps of Marcel Mauss—on developing what he then called a Sociologie sacrée du monde contemporain, founded entirely on a philosophical and political notion of the “heterogeneous.” These were agitated episodes in Georges Bataille’s political course before the Second World War, on which specialists have not finished commenting. In any case, it is in the retreat and silence of writing that, between 1939

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fig. 14 Anonymous, Kanaks from Kroua, Koua-oua, undated. Photograph illustrating André Schaeffner’s article “Les ‘Lew Leslie’s Black Birds’ au Moulin Rouge” (Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds at the Moulin Rouge), Documents, 1929, no. 4, 223.

fig. 15 Anonymous, Collapse of a prison in Columbus, Ohio, 1930. Photograph illustrating Georges Bataille’s article “Espace” (Space) in Documents, 1930, no. 1, 42.

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and 1945, Bataille sought the duende of revolt deep within himself. It is the period of the Coupable (the “guilty”), in which human existence was said—given the state of war—to have risen to the “summit of a disaster”; then of Inner Experience, in which he attempted to tell about his “journeys to the ends of the possible” from a “critique of dogmatic servitude” inherent in traditional religious ideologies and mysticisms. Consequently, what is it that makes us rise up so radically in the types of experiences described by Georges Bataille at that time? Something that “rises within.” A hitting spirit of sorts that does not overrun as such but exceeds everything, “like in a fall where one shouts out.” It is “something immense, exorbitant [that] frees itself in every way with the noise of a catastrophe,” of telescoped trains or violent riots. Here, for Bataille, is what could be “the most profound revolution”: an experience in which time itself becomes “unhinged.” Once again, we are close to Nietzschean potency (puissance) as well as the duende according to García Lorca. Was Bataille not, precisely in this period, in his text on Nietzsche titled Volonté de chance, one of the first to understand the innocence and playfulness of Nietzschean potency (puissance)? That Dionysian dance is a real potency (puissance), that baile jondo that raises souls and bodies far from any “will to power (pouvoir).” It should be no surprise to see that in 1945—the year he attempted to tear Nietzsche away from his use by nationalists and fascists—Georges Bataille returned to the duende as a fundamental political potency (puissance), one which, close to an “ethos of revolt” that inspired French Surrealism, led him from Guernica to the peñas flamencas and to anarchist villages in Andalusia, things that he wished to call “Free Spain,” even while Europe was freed from Nazism yet Franco ruled Spain, more than ever, with an iron fist. Naturally, then, Bataille, after Nietzsche and Warburg, was fascinated by the immoderation or the excess of Dionysian processions as potencies (puissances) unfamiliar to any form of government or power (pouvoir): “It is necessary for me to represent the divinity Dionysus as the strangest with regard to the need to imbue the divinity with authority. … It would seem to be the divine in its purest state, which has not been altered by the obsession with eternalizing a given order. The divine in Dionysus is the opposite of the Father of the gospel: he is omnipotent, he is the innocence of the instant … Poetry—which he embodies—is not the melancholia of the poet, nor the ecstasy of the silence of a solitary person. It is not the isolated person but rather the crowd, being less than a being and more of an overturned barrier. The air around him is filled with strident cries,

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10. Le Bon, ed. 2005, 326, and 333. Aragon 1924, passim. Benjamin 1929, 215, and 217. Breton et al., eds. 1924–1929, passim. Breton 1930–1933, passim. Krauss 1985, 197–235. Poivert 2006, passim. Bajac and Chéroux, eds. 2009, 20–61. Didi-Huberman 1995, passim. Bataille 1929a, 186. Bataille 1929b, 197. Bataille 1929c, 200–204. Bataille 1929d, 212. Bataille 1930a, 227. Bataille 1930b, 228–230. Bataille 1930c, 11–47. Bataille 1933a, 302–320. Bataille 1933b, 339–371. Bataille 1932– 1939, passim. Bataille and Breton, eds. 1935–1936, passim. Hollier, ed. 1979, 245–251. Bataille 1938b, passim. Marmande 1985, 39–126. Surya 1992, 353 89–93, 195–233, 266–277, 318–330, and 385–387. Kunz Westerhoff 2013, 30–42. Pic 2013, 81–109. Besnier 2014, passim. Bataille 1939–1944, 241. Bataille 1943, 15–17, 19, and 58–59. Bataille 1945a, passim. Bataille 1945b, 17–18. Bataille 1945c, 24–25. Bataille 1945d, 11–24. DidiHuberman 2008, 147–177. Bataille 1946, 68. Bataille 1948, 322–331. Bataille 1947a, 405. Bataille 1949, 28–33, and 79. Bataille 1951a 74–103. Bataille 1957, 35–162.

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laughter, kisses, when the smoking torch of the night veiling the faces lights the …! Because there is nothing that the mad procession does not trample.” As in the Andalusian celebrations, it would be necessary every time to recreate the Dionysian mix of religious ecstasy and the “drunkenness of taverns.” Who better than Bataille to have expressed the transgressive value of desire as the potency (puissance) of uprising. It is significant, for example, that in L’Alleluiah, written in 1947, he was able to describe sex acts with visual close-ups—“sex organs copulating like naked “guenilles,” some bald, others like pink caves”—illustrated also with sound close-ups: yet, it is only rumors of riots (“rumeurs d’émeutes”), he said. From there, political economy itself (of commerce and conflicts inherent in human societies) is entirely regulated according to a psychical economy of fantasies, desires, and impulses. Hence the crucial place given to a notion like “expenditure.” It is in the same movement, therefore, that the two parts of La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share) were written, the first part concerned with an economic history of expenditure—or “consumption”—and the second with a cultural history of eroticism. In each case, it is a question of the same “exuberance,” the same “revolt,” the same “exceeding energy,” and the same “transgression,” all of which are notions that Bataille was to return to scrupulously in 1957, in his text Eroticism.10

THE TIME OF THE REVOLT In 1951, Albert Camus’s L’homme révolté (The Rebel) was published, with its well-known existentialist phrase: “I rebel—therefore we exist.” To rebel is a mix of refusal (of the current state of things) and of assent (regarding a future movement of things). “What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself.” The rebel is, above all, the one who says yes to a desire, the desire to make an about-turn, to be a turncoat: “In the etymological sense, the rebel is a turncoat. He acted under the lash of his master’s whip. Suddenly he turns and faces him. He chooses what is preferable to what is not. Not every value leads to rebellion, but every rebellion tacitly invokes a value.” It is in this way, Camus wrote, that “an awakening of conscience, no matter how confused it may be, develops from any act of rebellion” when, awakening, it “liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent.”

neither a professional philosopher, nor a professional historian, but who wanted to “grasp the coherence of this excessive and hurried movement which made the recent centuries a sequence of staggering destructions and creations.” But Bataille already exceeds Camus’s humanistic position, for we have moved, here, from living creation in general to the hard historical chain of uprisings like so many staggering creations. The author of La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share), for his part, placed “the revolt of the oppressed,” who stagger and overturn their state of submission, on the same level as the “flotsam and jetsam of language,” which creates the cultural and psychical conditions for political uprising (the first examples given by Bataille were Sade and Nietzsche). We understand, then, that the “coherence of these movements” of revolt is nothing other than a gesture capable of creating by overturning or of overturning by creating. Bataille acknowledged that André Breton’s early Surrealism achieved this, as though in order to find a common ground which, despite the polemics on the surface, would unite the avant-gardes of the 1920s and the existentialism of the 1940s: “For Albert Camus, as well as for Surrealism, it is a question of finding within revolt a fundamental movement in which man fully takes on his destiny.” To fully take on this destiny? How difficult a task! How it divides us, how it exceeds us and twists us around. Bataille would describe this image with absurd intention: “As though we wanted, through an act of violence, to tear ourselves out of the morass that linked us and (the absurdity of this image alone answers the movement) holding ourselves by the hair, tore us and threw us into a world never seen before.” But what is the nature of this difficulty (which is also, perhaps, the source of the debate between Camus and Sartre)? Bataille called it a dilemma or, better still, “discordances of revolt”: “It seems often, with regard to revolts, that there are only whim, sovereignty of unstable humor, and unrestrainedly multiplied contradictions. In fact, enough to submit revolt indefinitely to the spirit of submission. This necessity is inscribed in the destiny of man: the spirit of submission has the efficiency so lacking in the spirit of in-submission. The revolt leaves the rebel facing a dilemma that depresses him: if it is pure, untreatable, he renounces the exercising of any power [pouvoir], and pushes impotence [impuissance] to the point of nourishing facilities of unrestrained language; if it participates in a search for power [pouvoir], it links up with the spirit of submission. Hence the opposition between the man of letters and the politician, the former a rebel at heart, and the latter a realist.”

The time of the revolt would then be the time of a desiring present, of a protended present, set in motion towards the future by an aboutturn: a present that challenges itself from the inside through the potency (puissance) of desire which escapes from it. Camus suggested that this is exactly how time becomes, and how history is constituted: “The history of man, in one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions.” It is also the history of their betrayed revolts, and the “Soviet bloc” offered Camus the most striking example: “Dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue. Abstraction, which belongs to the world of power and calculation, has replaced the real passions, which are in the domain of the flesh and of the irrational. The ration coupon substituted for bread; love and friendship submitted to a doctrine and destiny to a plan; punishment considered the norm, and production substituted for living creation.” And it is in this way that the Russian Revolution, unfortunately, turned against the origins of its revolt. That Camus should speak to us here of “living creation” against any kind of productivist logic reminds us clearly of the role he wished to give to artistic creation as the ultimate paradigm of any revolt: “Art should give us a final perspective on the content of the rebellion,” even beyond its “metaphysical” foundations (explored in the first part of the book) or its “historical” incarnations (explored in the central part). Was Camus recalling the lessons of the Dada and Surrealist avantgardes here? Not quite, as we can see in this critique addressed to the “chief poet” of the Révolution surréaliste: “André Breton wanted, at the same time, revolution and love, which are incompatible. Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.” To which Breton replied that “a few rigged cards have slipped into Camus’s game.” Before Jean-Paul Sartre violently consummated, in Les Temps modernes, the political rupture with his old friend. Georges Bataille, who had already had a dispute, and a harsh one, with Sartre as well as Breton, was attentive to what was stirred up by the publication of L’Homme révolté. In 1947, he saw in La Peste (The Plague) a kind of “slippage,” through which an “ethos of revolt” could make the novel’s protagonist return to a “depressed ethos.” But, in 1951, Bataille—as though to reply to the attacks made by Sartre and Breton—acknowledged L’Homme révolté as “a capital book.” Adding immediately that “one would need to be blind or to be of bad faith to deny it,” he seems to suggest the principle protagonists of the polemic: André Breton in the role of the blind visionary par excellence, and Jean-Paul Sartre in the role of the philosopher of bad faith. To begin, then, one must pay homage to an author who was—like Bataille—

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anthropology of the potency of the masses (Masse und Macht). Freud, of course, started—but, for once, he did not go far enough—with positivist and reactionary studies, like those of Honoré Antoine Frégier (1840) or Scipio Sighele on The Criminal Crowd. The latter, like the criminologists of his time such as Cesare Lombroso or Alphonse Bertillon, attempted to find the laws for a police theory of “complicity” that would open onto a whole arsenal of repressive measures aiming to anticipate and to eventually get rid of any kind of popular uprising. Today, these works read merely like manuals of police paranoia. As in the classic book by Gustave Le Bon titled Psychologie des foules (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular) (1895)—on which Freud leaned—the masses remain, more or less, in this type of discourse, condemned to be seen either as “beasts” (imbeciles) that can easily be led by the nose, exploited, or sent to slaughter, or as “beasts” (animals) that must be put in a cage because they are wild, dangerous, and enraged. Freud saw in the masses a desire that he called, paraphrasing Le Bon, “impulsive” and “changing” (and of course hysteria is not far off): “Nothing about it is premeditated. It may desire things passionately, but never for long; it is incapable of any long-term intention. It cannot abide any delay between its desire and realization of the thing desired. It has a sense of omnipotence; for the individual in the mass the concept of impossibility vanishes.” Freud was the contemporary and the overwhelmed spectator of warlike nationalism between 1914 and 1918, and then of the great National Socialist masses in Munich, Nuremberg, and Vienna. This is probably one of the reasons why he felt incapable of detecting an authentic “potency” (puissance) of desire at work in society at the time: in it he saw only the “discontent” and immoderation of an “omnipotence,” the Allmacht. The tidal wave of nationalism and of totalitarianism made him envisage the psychology of masses according to a paradoxical agglomeration of a “gregariousness” (Herdentrieb) and a “devotion to the ideal” (Hingebung an ein Ideal): the worst of the monstra on the one hand, the worst of the astra on the other. Perhaps the masses follow their instinct like a watchword and follow the watchwords of their leaders like an instinct inherent in their very constitution. Hence the radical pessimism expressed in 1929, at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontent, regarding values—or, rather, “false standards” (falschen Maßstäben)—which, according to Freud, almost inevitably corner the masses, societies, and collectives in general. Elias Canetti shared this fundamental pessimism, which came from the same historical torments. Yet this did not prevent him from developing a genuine passion for understanding, which was supported

It is not difficult to recognize, in all of these “discordances,” the fundamental opposition between potency (puissance) and power (pouvoir). There is indeed within potency something that Bataille calls “the first movement of full immoderation,” which is the movement of insubordination or transgression; while power (pouvoir), even for the one who exerts it, assumes a logic of submission and of imprisonment in its rules. Yet it is neither as a slave nor as a master that one must act, but rather as a rebel: and even if the rebel finds him or herself “in the most equivocal situation,” as Bataille said in 1952, in a conference titled “Le non-savoir et la révolte” (The unknowing of the revolt). Perhaps the affair concerning The Rebel gave Bataille, in the end, the opportunity to imagine, beyond Warburg’s Atlas or Camus’s Sisyphus, the radical gesture of an Atlas rising who, recognizing the weight of things, would refuse it just as easily by throwing it far away. “It is essential for people,” said Bataille to André Gillois, “to manage to destroy that servility to which they are tied, by the fact that they built their world, the human world, a world to which I hold, a world that gives me life, but that nonetheless carries with it a kind of load, something infinitely heavy that is found in all of our anxieties and that must somehow be lifted.” In 1958, in his unpublished notes for Le Pur Bonheur (Pure happiness), Bataille wrote: “The infraction is all that counts.”11

MASSES AND POTENCY So, there is happiness in violating the rules. Perhaps, then, the potency (puissance) of transgression (a word that primarily means, the crossing, despite everything, of a closed border, disobedience towards a rule that limited our freedom of movement) would give its style to desire. And perhaps the infraction (a word that means, primarily, breaking a frame or shackles) would give its movement to desire, though its form may be broken, breaking, or zigzagging. It is no doubt only a first approximation regarding the gestures of uprising: potency (puissance) as desire or desire revealing, in the end, its potency (puissance). In historical uprisings, this potency animates, they say, the masses. This is a word whose history—like the history of the word people—seems to have been condemned to the unanimity of revolutionary slogans as well as to the authoritarianism of totalitarian governments. As a result, the masses, the crowds, frighten: they even frighten the psychoanalyst (Sigmund Freud) when he questions the possibilities of a “psychology of the masses,” just as they frightened the cosmopolitan writer (Elias Canetti) when he risked writing an

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11. Camus 1951, 28, 19, 20, 23, 78, 78, 120, and 253. Breton 1951, 1049. Sartre 1952, 90–125. Bataille 1947b, 248. Bataille 1951b, 149–160. Bataille 1952a, 212. Bataille 1952b, 230–236. Bataille and Gillois 1951, 98. Bataille 1958, 530.

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moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” Canetti emphasizes, however, what he sees as the “fundamental illusion” in such a feeling of liberty: “the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal for ever.” Moreover, Canetti describes that way in which one hundred thousand people can become one body from which “every arm is thrust out as though they all belonged to one and the same creature”: “They all stamp the ground and they all do it in the same way; they all swing their arms to and fro and shake their heads. The equivalence of the dancers becomes, and ramifies as, the equivalence of their limbs. Every part of a man which can move gains a life of its own and acts as if independent, but the movements are all parallel, the limbs appearing superimposed on each other. They are close together, one often resting on another, and thus density is added to their state of equivalence. Density and equality become one and the same. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing, a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all performing exactly in the same way and with the same purpose.” It often happens that the crowds dance in a unanimous movement under the baton of a dictator. But it happens too—as Canetti knows— that they dance their refusal to be led by the baton. Consequently, they dance their desire to overturn everything. “Prohibition crowds,” crowds of “refusal” (Verbotsmassen), wrote Canetti: “A large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly.” The best example is the strike in which “they are equals in relation to this common moment of starting and stopping work,” which they generally are not in the hierarchy imposed by their tasks. We can think also of the “reversal crowds” (Umkehrungsmassen) for which everything is like a “storming of the Bastille,” that very destruction calling upon the ultimate, transgressive joy of “feast crowds” (Festmassen). But the feast will be a cruel one, and even a terrifying one. Canetti does not seem to have imagined—unlike Eisenstein in Strike, for example—that an uprising of the masses could be at the same time fully liberating and innocent. The destiny of uprisings appears to him to take shape in what he calls “baiting crowds” (Hetzmassen), as though every riot (emeute) needed to end in the deployment of a pack (meute), a terrible word that signifies a pack of wolves, hunting dogs, mad militiamen, or lynch mobs. Canetti does not want to see that a riot hunts, first of all, what has oppressed it, to throw it literally outside of itself; whereas a pack only hunts in order to trap a prey that is more fragile or more a minority than itself. The riot hunts in order to relinquish and to free itself, while the pack hunts in order to capture

by his genius for description: the anthropology of Crowds and Power is presented as a grand phenomenology of the gestures of the crowds. Starting from the assumption that “there is nothing that man fears more than the touch with the unknown,” Canetti immediately wonders what the gesture of liberation might be outside of that fear. Unlike Georges Bataille, he does not envisage any role for eroticism in overcoming this fear of touch, for example. He does not envisage anything other than the socialized crowd: “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched [von dieser Berührungsfurcht erlöst werden kann]. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite.” That opposite is effusion and fusion: the great celebration—however cruel and violent it may be—of contact between humans. Canetti describes the masses or the crowds as a formation: a morphogenesis. “The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together—five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is a determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is t here before they can find words for it. This goal is the blackest spot where most people are gathered. … As soon as it exists at all, it wants to consist of more people; the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach; anything shaped like a human being can join it. The natural crowd is the open crowd.” At the same time as it opens and spreads, the crowd vibrates rhythmically. It has spasms—as Victor Hugo described so well in Les Misérables—or has what Canetti calls the “discharge” (Entladung). The discharge is liberation from any load or burden. This liberty produces, through its dynamics, something like a reign of equality: “Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed

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and to kill another. In Battleship Potemkin, the lamentation scene transforms into a revolt in which a member of the Black Hundreds— an extreme far-right anti-Semitic militia that raged throughout Russia and that fomented the great pogroms of 1905—was lynched by the crowd. But the surfaces rise up towards the sky as bodies rising up towards a surplus of life, unlike the “lamenting pack” (Klagemeute) described by Canetti as a process going from death undergone to death given. This is what he calls also the “destructiveness” (Zerstörungssucht), the principle emotion of any mass movement: “The crowd particularly likes destroying houses and objects: breakable objects like window panes, mirrors, pictures and crockery; and people tend to think that it is the fragility of these objects which stimulates the destructiveness of the crowd. It is true that the noise of destruction adds to its satisfaction; the banging of windows and the crashing of glass are the robust sounds of fresh life, the cries of something new-born. … But there is more to it than this. In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries. He wants what is happening to him to happen to others too; and he expects it to happen to them. An earthen pot irritates him, for it is all boundaries. The closed doors of a house irritate him. Rites and ceremonies, anything which preserves distances, threaten him and seem unbearable. He fears that, sooner or later, an attempt will be made to force the disintegrating crowd back into these pre-existing vessels. To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille.” The crowd is therefore a monster, which is something Aby Warburg would not have denied. Canetti saw Europe ransacked by totalitarian masses. As a result, he only understood collective uprisings as preliminary steps in a process of crushing any “distance” and any authentic freedom. Historically, the limits of this approach—however admirable it may have been—were a result of an inability to think about certain phenomena of riots (émeutes), rather than of packs (meutes), such as the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 or the Kronstadt Commune in 1921. It is no surprise that, philosophically speaking, this limit was expressed by Canetti in his way of understanding the relations between “force and power” (Gewalt und Macht). For Canetti, in fact, potency is not at all the opposite of power. Instead, it appears to him to be a sort of super-power allegorized by the image of the cat playing with the mouse it has just captured:

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12. Frégier 1840, passim. Sighele 1891, passim. Sighele 1894, passim. Le Bon 1895, passim. Freud 1921, 14, 16, and 55–60. Freud 1929, 10. Canetti 1960, 15, 16, 18, 49, 32, 55, 56, 19–20, and 281. Saar 2013, 177–179. Friedrich 1999, passim. Holloway 2002, passim. Zibechi 2005, passim.

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“When force gives itself time to operate, it becomes power, but when the moment of crisis arrives, the moment of irrevocable decision, it reverts to being pure force. Power is more general and operates over a wider space than force, it includes much more, but is less dynamic. It is more ceremonious and even has a certain measure of patience. The difference between force and power can be illustrated very simply by the relationship between cat and mouse. The cat uses force to catch the mouse, to seize it, hold it in its claws and ultimately kill it. But while it is playing with it another factor is present. It lets it go, allows it to run about a little and even turn its back; and, during this time, the mouse is no longer subjugated to force. But it is still within the power of the cat and can be caught again. If it gets right away it escapes from the cat’s sphere of power; but, up to the point at which it can no longer be reached, it is still within it. The space which the cat dominates, the moments of hope it allows the mouse, while continuing however to watch it closely all the time and never relaxing its interest and intention to destroy it—all this together, space, hope, watchfulness and destructive intent, can be called the actual body of power, or, more simply, power itself.” Now, Macht is indeed the German translation for Spinoza’s potential; but this word suggests to the German ear, spontaneously, something like the exertion or the possibility of a force, including military force (as in the Wehrmacht), or a political power (as in the Machtergreifung, the “seizing of power” claimed by the Nazis). It will not therefore be inevitably contrasted with Gewalt, which is the translation for Spinoza’s potestas. We should not be surprised that Martin Saar, in his study on the politics of Spinoza, should have critiqued the opposition established by Antonio Negri, and before that by Gilles Deleuze, between a “power” (pouvoir) and a “potency” (puissance), which is closer to a German word that appears to be quite different yet is etymologically related, and that is the word Vermögen. Elias Canetti’s philosophical and textual system, according to Peter Friedrich’s detailed analysis, was therefore linguistically prepared, if I may say, to direct potential towards the political monster, that mix of power and potency animated by a gregariousness as much as by a blind obedience to a leader, to an idealized Führer. How, then, can we find a coherent place for this politics of desire as found in the work of Georges Bataille, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze, or Antonio Negri, and even in political thinkers like John Holloway (who suggests “changing the world without taking power”) or Raúl Zibechi (who suggests “dispersing power” rather than exerting it)?12 

with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason.” In the Lose Blätter, made up of pages taken from posthumous works by Kant and cited by Rudolf Eisler, political freedom is said to “consist in the fact that everyone can seek his own salvation according to his own designs, and that it is, moreover, out of the question that he may be used as a means [even] for his own happiness by anyone other than himself.” It is for this reason that the famous text, Towards Perpetual Peace, published in 1795, would outline the “republican constitution”— necessary yet uncreated, according to the philosopher—as the most “sublime” constitution around, agreeing with the principles of cosmopolitan law and “universal hospitality.” The moment he introduced the phrase “republican constitution,” Kant interrupted its elaboration with a long note on what founded it, in his view, which is “freedom by right” (rechtliche Freiheit). Popular opinion is incorrect in its reasoning when it defines this freedom as the authorization to do anything you want, so long as you do not cause any harm to anyone else. Kant saw that this cliché contained a sophism, or, rather, a tautology (“one does not cause harm to anyone … so long as one does not cause harm to anyone” when one must, on the contrary, implement the principle according to which freedom “is the right or privilege of not having to obey any laws except those that I could have consented to.” This is indeed how the “state of peace” must be created (gestiftet): in other words, it is in no way a state of nature. Consequently, the rights of citizens to rise up against a despotic government will not be considered “natural” either, as Rousseau had claimed in a famous passage from his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men: “The despot is only master for as long as he is the strongest; as soon as he can be expelled, he has no right to protest against violence. The insurrection which ends with the strangling or dethronement of a sultan is just as lawful an act as those by which he disposed the day before of the lives and property of his subjects.” Kant cools our enthusiasm in reading these lines by Rousseau, for, in “The Doctrine of Right” from the Metaphysics of Morals, written in 1797, he went so far as to refute the legitimacy of a “right to rebellion” (Aufruhr, rebellio), as well as that of the “right to sedition” (Aufstand, seditio), even if it gives a tension—a compromise, or perhaps a form of self-censorship, as Domenico Losurdo suggested—to his own enthusiasm for the French Revolution. There are several ways to read a great writer. With the work of the author of Critique of Practical Reason, it is possible to find restraining that which engages a certain legalism of reason. But we

EVEN THE NEWBORN RISES UP We do not exercise power the moment we rise up. No doubt the task of “taking” power—of setting it up and exercising it—falls to a revolution in due form (but exactly what that “due form” might be is another question). In an uprising we deploy a potency (puissance) that is both desire and life. Even Kant was ready to accept it and to join the three words I have just emphasized together: “Life is the faculty (Vermögen) of a being to act in accordance with laws of the faculty of desire (Begehrungsvermögen).” This “faculty” or this “potency [puissance] to desire” will be defined as the dynamic capable of making a subject rise up so as “to be by means of its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations”; which means, its freedom to produce in reality what will have appeared to him or her in the imagination, under pressure from a desire. I have just cited a note from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. It is fitting to add certain developments by Kant in his wonderful Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View regarding, in particular, desire as the “self-determination of a subject’s power (Kraft) through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation.” There is, of course, “passion” or “emotion” in every desire, and it requires the critical use of reason to temper or to direct it all. If we observe a popular revolt, for example, we understand how Kant might have considered a “passion” (Leidenschaft) what he called the penchant or the “tendency towards freedom” (Freiheitsneigung) that the revolt expresses. But this kind of a passion is not like any other: it is fundamental, perhaps even a founding passion for the human subject, to the extent that Kant wished to interpret the newborn’s cries as the very expression of this tendency for freedom: “Even the child who has just wrenched itself from the mother’s womb, seems to enter the world with loud cries, unlike other animals, simply because it regards the inability to make use of its limbs as constraint, and thus it immediately announces its claim to freedom [Anspruch auf Freiheit].” Human life, then, is indeed a desire for freedom. In Kant’s view, it is the task of reason—and the famous “enlightened” thinkers of the Aufklärung—to find the legitimate forms for desire. However, something like a “thrust for freedom”—or Freiheitsdrang as Freud was to write later—runs through a number of, if not all, Kantian texts. In the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781, the freedom of reason is posited as the potential to begin from itself beyond any imposed or outside determining forces. In the Critique of Judgment, in 1790, the “freedom of imagination” is justified in the “agreement of the latter

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can also see things more generously, as Françoise Proust did when she revealed in Kant that “outburst” against reason as a “potency of freedom.” After 1784, Kant would reply to the famous question “What is Enlightenment?” by referring to the image of the child placed under the authoritarian tenderness of tutors: the child’s “state of nature” is in no way savage, but rather it is the state of an imprisoned subject, whereby the “docile creatures” have been “prevented from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied [by their parents].” It is exactly the same case with the political subjects whose governments “show them the danger if they try to walk unaided.” And yet “they would certainly learn to walk eventually,” Kant affirms, even if the jealous concern of their governments intimidates them and “usually frightens them off from further attempts.” It is in this way that Kant claims the term “Enlightenment” (Aufklärung) as an expression, if not of an uprising in the strict sense, then, at least, of a liberating emergence: “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” In The Conflict of Faculties, in 1798, the famous “progress of human reason” was to be thought about only in the dynamics of such an “emergence”—a notion in which we can already sense the harmonics of evasion, escape, of crossing borders, of transgression out of the “leading-strings,” everything from which uprisings can be inferred. The most pressing philosophical question, before even knowing “how to direct one’s thoughts,” would be the question of “how to bring thought itself” out of that immaturity or guardianship that precedes and oppresses it. The question then becomes, again in the Conflict of the Faculties, how to give content and a form to our desire for freedom. How, Kant asked, should we give ourselves the “prediction of free actions”? It is a difficult question. We can predict the revolution of the stars thanks to the laws of astronomy, but who can predict that of peoples in history? What German philosopher was not surprised by the event of the French Revolution? Moreover, what is an “event”—the taking of the Bastille, for example—when the one who observes it from Königsberg does not know what outcome to expect? What is a historical event that bears the mark of such an “emergence” and that functions, then, as an integral “historical sign” (Geschichtszeichen)? This, Kant claimed, is not to be judged only by the current efficiency of the event—meaning, whether or not and by whom the Bastille has been taken—but by a complete temporal beam whose “sign” must be the bearer: “signum rememorativum demonstrativum pronosticum” wrote Kant in Latin;

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13. Kant 1788, 7 note 4, 54. Kant 1798a, 149 and 168. Kant 1781– 1787, 535. Kant 1790, 288. Eisler 1929, II, 626. Kant 1795, 7, 11, 6, and 10. Rousseau 1755, 135. Kant 1797, 55. Losurdo 1983, passim. Renaut and Sosoe 1991, 369–387. Proust 1991, 5–38. Kant 1784, 43–44. Kant 1798b, 149–153. Foucault 1984, 32–50.

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that is to say, with the authority given to the most fundamental precepts. In other words, a sign is not “historical” unless it is those three things: carrying a memory, showing an actuality, and announcing a desire, which Kant called a fundamental “tendency of the human race viewed in its entirety.” It is clear that for Kant the French Revolution provided the major “historical sign” of its time, memorial of very long-term efforts towards emancipation—the innumerable uprisings during the Ancien Régime or the memory of the Roman Republic, for example; it was current in its political adventures; and it was prognostic in its capacity to open a universal future for this “tendency of the human race” to emerge from its plurisecular immaturity and guardianship. It is here that we see the return of that fundamental “enthusiasm” that the peoples’ uprising is capable of producing beyond itself—beyond even, says Kant, its factual success or failure: “The Revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost—this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race. This moral cause inserting itself [in the course of events] is … first, that of the right, that a nation must not be hindered in providing itself with a civil constitution, which appears good to the people themselves.” Michel Foucault commented on these lines and proposed to join the question “What is Enlightenment?” with the following, equally burning question: “What is Revolution?” His intention was to insist on what Kant called the moral predisposition of humanity, which increases the enthusiasm in all hearts when a people rises up against tyranny—and regardless of the outcome, whether great or small, successful or failed, of the event which is then understood as an uprising of historical time itself. An uprising whose potency (puissance) would need to be imagined—potency in the sense of force and virtuality—rather than merely the capacity to seize power (pouvoir): “The Revolution, in any case, will always risk falling back into the rut, but as an event … its existence attests to a permanent virtuality that cannot be forgotten.” It is for this memory to reconfigure our desires with regard to Foucault’s eloquently formulated question: “What is the current field of possible experiences?”13

in its oneness.” In the end, therefore, the struggle and the relation of domination-servitude occurs in “this moment of recognition, viz. that the other consciousness sets aside its own being-for-self” and attains the ethical status par excellence—and even the political status—of being for the other. It is an innate moment for all human and social existence: as though Hegel’s grand constructions of the System of Ethical Life and the Principles of the Philosophy of Right could be developed from there. The philosophical narrative of the Phenomenology of Spirit is so seminal—or so abyssal—that it has been read, interpreted, and torn apart in the most diverse ways. Should we, in particular, read this text from the point of view of potency (puissance) or of power (pouvoir)? In other words, are domination and recognition aspects of or counterparts to desire? Or inversely, are desire and recognition aspects of or counterparts to domination? Alexander Kojève, in his famous seminar on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études—a seminar that was attended by the French intelligentsia, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Raymond Aron, Jean Hippolyte, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roger Caillois, Michael Leiris, Raymond Queneau, and Henry Corbin—redirected his reading, in light of the political situation, towards power (pouvoir) and domination, made clear by the exergue to his lessons that he borrowed from Karl Marx. No doubt, he wrote, “the human being is formed only in terms of a Desire directed towards another Desire, that is—finally—in terms of a Desire for recognition.” But the struggle to the death and the domination-servitude relation will then engage this desiring potency (puissance) in a relation of force or a relation of power (pouvoir). As Judith Butler described in her book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France in 1987—before Michael Roth in 1988 or Allan Stoekl in 1992—the French reception of Hegel, although directed by the lessons of Alexandre Kojève, tended towards an “ontology of desire” rather than a political anthropology of domination, for example. It is a pattern that we encounter from Sartre to Derrida, and includes, of course, Jacques Lacan. The latter, in his famous article from 1960, titled “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” sought to take at face value the Hegelian dialectic as Kojève explained it in 1933, when he spoke of a “Desire directed towards another Desire.” Then he distributed it, to an extent, in the two concomitant directions of the unconscious, potency (puissance) and the intersubjective power (pouvoir): unconscious, desire “tied to the desire for the Other,” but

DESIRE, STRUGGLE, DOMINATION, RECOGNITION Anyone who examines the question of desire, in the context of Western modernity, cannot avoid returning to Hegel. It is in the chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit on the constitution of “self-consciousness” that we see desire irrupt. The Other is presented in front of the Self, and the philosopher will tell us what happens then, even if it appears to be slightly abstract. On the one hand, writes Hegel, “self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding (durch das Aufheben) this Other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life”; on the other hand, that “superseding” is not entirely a superseding, since it is a dialectical operation of “raising” (Aufhebung) that signals towards the constantly reviewed force of “desire” (Begierde): “Thus selfconsciousness, by its negative relation to the object, is unable to supersede it; it is really because of that relation that it produces the object again, and the desire as well. It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of desire.” The fact that this relation of desire is at the same time a principle element, a reproducible one, and one that can be launched ad infinitum in the tension that it creates, reveals its fecundity, its power, and, as Freud was to say, its “indestructibility.” But we know too what, in the Hegelian drama, this relation of desire becomes: a “life and death struggle” (Kampf auf Leben und Tod), a struggle through which the potency (puissance) of desire engages with the most prototypical of power (pouvoir) relations: the relation of “domination and servitude” (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) in which, of course, the position of the master will be defined as that of “potency [puissance] that dominates” the Other. We might be surprised, in Spinoza’s terms, when such a “potency” (puissance) (Macht), being dissatisfied with expressing itself by itself or in the desire that links it to the Other, should finally, as Hegel wrote, be raised “above” (über) the Other. Doesn’t an authentic desire place us at the same height as, and on an equal level with, the Other? It is, however, in a different—and crueler—direction that things go in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it becomes the fate of potency (puissance) to be raised by a relation of power (pouvoir), and the fate of desire to be raised by a relation of domination. What threw us, formerly, towards one another and with one another, now throws us against one another or over one another. But this implacable dialectics would finally see its moment of reconciliation: Hegel calls it “recognition” (Anerkennung). It is when the Self and the Other recognize each other and initiate the “duplicating of self-consciousness

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the “negation of negation” manages always to reinitiate the reign of the positive. It is no coincidence that, in a text from February 1938, Bataille sought to situate this “negative potency [puissance]” around unconscious desire and around what psychoanalytic experience can bring to light. Clearly, this is a rather unconventional reading of Hegel, and it was enough to irritate numerous philologists and philosophers all too familiar with Hegel’s text—notably because they were no longer surprised by the asperities of his language or the boldness of his theoretical imagination. Thus, Jürgen Habermas criticized a relation to Hegel in Bataille that was regulated on “his own efforts to carry the radical critique of reason with the tools of theory.” Furthermore, it was only made worse by the fact that he did this through writing, in the way that his reader is “assaulted by obscenity, gripped by the shock of the unexpected and unimaginable, is jolted into the ambivalence of loathing and pleasure.” It is difficult, then, to join Inner Experience by Bataille with The Theory of Communicative Action by Habermas, The Accursed Share (Bataille) with Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Habermas), or The Tears of Eros with Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Habermas seeks norms for social relations where Bataille invoked the enormity of a desire understood both as a matrix and an irreducible negativity of social relations and political standards. It is a new return to Hegel that drives the work of Axel Honneth— major figure, after Habermas, of the Frankfurt School today. A study from 2008, titled “From Desire to Recognition,” clearly shows the distance that separates the French reception of Hegel, directed by a wide anthropology of desire, and this new approach destined to make recognition itself the central concept of social, moral, and political sciences. While Lacan, for example, defined desire and recognition very strongly in his reading of Hegel and in his reconceptualization of psychoanalysis, Honneth firmly separates them, making desire a mere “failure” of self-consciousness, a process of “self-referentiality”— which is very surprising—or “satisfaction” of “animal or ‘erotic’… organic needs”; something well beyond, in fact, any ethical or political sphere. For Honneth, desire would be purely “egocentric,” deprived of that reciprocity that characterizes recognition. It is essentially a matter of knowing whether recognition is a moment that is inherent to desire itself (as Kojève, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault thought) or if, as Honneth thinks, recognition can only be understood as separated from desire as such.

initiating also, symbolically, a position of “Absolute Master” for “the Other as preliminary site of the pure subject of the signifier.” This is a position taken recently by Slavoj Žižek in his exploration of Hegel in the light of Lacan, and Lacan in the light of Hegel. Yet, there is another position available, one that is less “pure” and more risky, for it leaves many a possibility, plasticity, and even conceptual erraticism to the imagination, and that is the position adopted, or rather experimented, demanded, and approached painfully by Georges Bataille. This is very clear, after numerous sketches that could already be glimpsed here and there in Documents, through a text titled “La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne” (Critique of the foundations of the Hegelian dialectic). Written with Raymond Queneau for the journal La Critique sociale in March 1932— before Kojève’s seminar had begun—the context was clearly political. And yet, it was already a question of playing potency (puissance) against power (pouvoir). To do this, it became necessary to contest the philosophical power of ideas developed in systems, even if these ideas were, as in the case of Engels, notoriously “materialist.” Surrealism made necessary the renouncing of the certainties of the general idea, and to reclaim the sovereignty of experience against the authority of doctrinal constructions. This assumed a return to a younger, more romantic Hegel: a dreamed Hegel, perhaps, one that in any case believed in the “fall of the idea” from the moment when he accepted that negation was not a mere operation of logic, but, as Bataille wrote later, that it was “at the same time a revolt and a nonsense.” Five years later, when Kojève was commenting on the imposing edifice of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Bataille composed the extraordinary “Lettre à X, chargé d’un cours sur Hegel” (Letter to X, in charge of a class on Hegel). It was of course addressed to Kojève himself, and concerned the continuation of a discussion that had perhaps been severe since, in this letter, Bataille mentioned that he wanted to give the philosopher his reply to the “trial that you have put me through.” But it was Bataille, in reality, who was putting the Hegelian system through a trial that professional philosophers would call absurd or even mad: “The open wound which is my life—constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s system.” This radically subjective position, regulated on the existential sensation of a wound, paradoxically reveals a great potency (puissance): it has the very notion of potency (puissance) at stake, albeit the “potency [puissance] to be affected” as we find in Nietzsche. That would be negative potency (puissance) as such, a potency (puissance) that Bataille calls “negativity without use”: an unrecoverable negativity in the dialectical synthesizing in which

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This choice of paradigm, in Honneth’s thinking, implies an explanation with the contributions of the post-Hegelian and Marxist traditions —focused, notably, on Georg Lukács, inventor of the concept of “reification”—and a particular attention to the journey that unites, in Hegel himself, the struggle with recognition, something that is therefore also, as Honneth calls it, a struggle for recognition. In this conflict—visible everywhere in life in society—Honneth pertinently identified what he called the “pathologies of freedom,” even if this means redefining, by this choice of words, the relation to the histories of Critical Theory and of Freudian psychoanalysis; even if this means suggesting that we should—but who would that life-saving “we” be?— cure such pathologies rather than rise up against the unjust and aberrant norms of the societies we inhabit. The fateful reification of consciousness and social relations, on which Honneth wrote an entire study, would be the central “pathology” against which the ethical norms and the “right to freedom” would stand up. We get the impression, however, that the conflict, introduced in a remarkable way by Honneth in his interpretation of the “struggle for recognition,” leaves room, in the end, for a consensual issue of “recognition of norms” intended to “institutionalize social freedom,” as explained recently by Louis Carré or the researchers brought together in 2014 by Mark Hunyadi. But what is a recognition when unilateral positions of domination persist? The Hegelian horizon of reconciliation, with which the master also ends up “recognizing” his or her slave, is far from the real historical world in which our masters are very unwilling to recognize or acknowledge the smallest amount of dignity in their slaves. What, then, in these circumstances, does the notion of ethical norms become, a notion that is inherent in the theories of Habermas and Honneth? Paul Audi explained it recently when he wrote that “the issue could be summarized as follows: what is to be said about the respect (and, therefore, the recognition) that we owe to those who say no to the common rule or general regulations, and who experience their constitutive freedom in the subversion of the norms in effect, or in the refusal to reinforce the armature of the social and political order that they cannot tolerate and that oppresses them?” Shouldn’t this respect and this recognition be torn from those who refuse from their master position?14

POLITICAL EROS Would it not be necessary, then, to rise up—a gesture of desire, and of refusal too—for even the least amount of recognition on the part

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of those in front you who want to preserve their dominant position? In a recent preface to the French edition of his texts, Axel Honneth emphasized that in the French readings of Hegel, from Kojève to Derrida, Bataille to Lacan, “the struggle triggered by the desire for recognition can [never] open onto a superior stage of integration or freedom … which is something we could describe as a negativism.” It is as though desire maintained its negative position—all the more negative when the unconscious is involved—and regardless of its “stage of integration or freedom,” as Honneth calls it. It is not impossible that this difference in philosophical traditions is the result of the acceptance (with Honneth) or the refusal (with the French) of AngloSaxon developments in psychoanalysis, “positive” works, or even “positivist” works, bitterly criticized by Lacan as normative illusions and attempts to place unconscious desire outside of the playing field—that desire which Bataille never stopped elaborating, right up to Tears of Eros, the “lugubrious game,” the rebellious game, or the game of the negative. Facing this negativity of Eros, the position taken by the theorists of the Frankfurt School was not at all unanimous—as we can see in the great histories of that movement, those by Martin Jay, Rolf Wiggershaus, and Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin. For example, negativity does not at all have the same status or the same use value in Adorno, on the one hand, or in Habermas or Honneth on the other. Just as desire itself does not have the same place in different people. But why is this so? It is because the function given to desire is the result, every time, of a crucial philosophical decision which was itself determined by the anthropology that supported it. All of the members of the Frankfurt School more or less agreed to undertake a relentless critique of the “reification” diagnosed in 1923 by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness: inherent in the commercial structure of capitalist society, “reification” touches all social relations and engenders a “dislocation of the subject,” as though the “fetish character of commodities,” analyzed by Karl Marx in the first book of Capital, were able to spread to the most intimate or spiritual domains—those of psychology and culture in particular. It is no coincidence that Lukács chose, as the exergue to his central chapter on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” a phrase by Marx from his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”: “To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself.” In short: tell me what your anthropology is and I will tell you (or I will have an idea) who you are, not only on the philosophical and psychological levels, but also on the ethical

14. Hegel 1807, I, 109, 114, 112 and 116. Hegel 1802–1803, passim. Hegel 1821, passim. Hegel 1822–1830, passim. Kojève, 1933–1939, 7 and 14. Butler 1987, 61–100 and 175– 238. Roth 1988, passim. Stoekl 1992, passim. Lacan 1960, 683. Žižek 2012, passim. Bataille 1932, 279. Bataille 1937, 369–371. Bataille 1938a, 321–322. Habermas 1985, 237. Habermas 1981, passim. Habermas 1991, passim. Habermas 1992, passim. Honneth 2008, 76–90. Honneth 1981, 80–96. Honneth 1989, 23–37. Honneth 1990, 79–90. Honneth 1992, passim. Honneth 1994, 39–100. Honneth 2001a, passim. Honneth 2001b, 151–180. Honneth 2001c, 231–238. Honneth 2003a, 231–252. Honneth 2003b, 325–348. Honneth 2005, passim. Honneth 2006, 263–288. Honneth 2011, passim. Carré 2013, 101–113. Hunyadi, ed. 2014, passim. Audi 2015, 26.

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independence of Life can realize itself only in and through this being-for-another,” wrote Marcuse regarding Hegelian desire, while subtly delivering the conditions for his own philosophy, a “philosophy of emancipation” as Gérard Raulet called it. It is worthwhile recalling how Marcuse, in 1919—when he was twenty-one-years old—participated in a soldiers’ council during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Disgusted by the compromise with the far right, he had left the Social Democratic Party after the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Then, because he was both Jewish and leftist, he had to leave Germany from 1933 to go, after Switzerland and France, to the United States, where he became involved in the Institute of Social Research in New York under the direction of Max Horkheimer. In 1939, he published, in English, his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, a work in which he developed, against “fascist Hegelianism,” his commentary on Hegel on the level of a “birth of social theory” that prefigured the contemporary positions of Critical Theory. It was then that the explanation with Hegelian desire was succeeded—via an anthropological and political point of view inspired directly by Marx—by an explanation with Freudian desire. Eros and Civilization appeared in 1955 as a double response, if you will, to Hegel’s Reason in History and to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. The opening line of the book claims that the “psychological categories” employed by Marcuse will be used with the critical awareness that “they have become political categories.” It is not a question of “applying psychology in the analysis of social and political events” but the contrary: “to develop the political and sociological substance of the psychological notions.” In this way we are informed that to speak of desire will immediately be to speak about politics; and thinking about politics will not be done without thinking about desire. How can a history and how can social relations be possible without the process of desire? But how are these very processes used, directed, reconfigured by political relations, choices, or events? It is a crucial question, one that is both practical and theoretical, in which it is not difficult to see, once again, the alternative between potency (puissance) and power (pouvoir). With regard to power (pouvoir), here is how things appear to Marcuse: first of all, Freudian theory assumes a generally admitted equivalence between the process of civilization and the “methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions.” But socially useful to whom? Freud does not seem to ask the question and appears to overlook, beyond the class struggle in general, any relation between sacrifice of subjects

and political levels. Consequently, the notion of reification depends entirely on how we understand the human subject from the start, and, above all, how we understand its fundamental desires. This is how Axel Honneth claims his return to Lukács, which was something that certain critics, like Yves Charles Zarka, would challenge nonetheless. This is how Herbert Marcuse took an extremely original approach, which went from a psychological critique of reification to a flamboyant political assumption of desire. It required the reconstruction of a more general anthropological hypothesis taken—unsurprisingly—from Hegel’s phenomenology as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity appeared in 1932, and was based on Marcuse’s own thesis, written under the direction of Martin Heidegger. It is an attempt to formulate, from Hegel, a historical ontology already at odds with Heideggerian notions of being and time (since temporality, for Heidegger, is in conflict with historicity). It offers close commentaries on the Logic and the Phenomenology of Mind. It defines “being as motility,”“happening as movement,” and “motility as transformation or perpetual dialectical metamorphosis.” Then, at the heart of this “universal motility of life” (allgemeine Bewegtheit des Lebens), we discover the fundamental instance of human desire that engages us, as an “originary” (ursprünglich) mode of being, well beyond any strictly psychological matter. Desire does not require a psychology alone, but rather, at least, a metapsychology or an anthropology. Desire, writes Marcuse, appears for the human being as the “essential becoming” (wesentlich), indicating “the actual task lying ahead of Life, namely, to become ‘essential’ for itself”: “The desire for being expresses the longing for one’s own proper being.” This longing is nothing less than a movement of assumption towards being for the other, as Hegel said. And Marcuse describes, in his particular way, the famous master-slave dialectic, with the image of the struggle, of domination, and of recognition. This would be to say that such a model remains imperfect so long as history itself has not yet created the political conditions for what Hegel called, later in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the “free nation” or “freie Volk”—which made him write, in turn, that “in a free nation, therefore, Reason is in truth realized.” There are therefore many different ways of “being for the other”: we can be so by submission or by domination: to be underneath or above. We can be so through emancipation or liberation too: we can rise up—be against—in order to construct the historical conditions to accomplish being-towards or being-with. “The free and true

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of desire): “In a world of alienation, the liberation of Eros would necessarily operate as a destructive, fatal force—as the total negation of the reality principle which governs the repressive reality.” If the famous “reality principle” has become a prison guard destined to block any new reality, and therefore to preserve our state of alienation or “unfreedom,” then we must wonder what might be “Beyond the Reality Principle,” which is the title of the second part of Marcuse’s text. What is to be done? First of all, it is necessary to assure a critical and precise consciousness of the conditions of our servitudes: the way, for example, in which the “performance principle” in contemporary societies leads to what Marcuse calls a “repressive organization” which touches our infra-subjective structures—in the intimacy of our sexuality—as well as our social relations. It is necessary, in the end, to move towards potency (puissance). Marcuse claims that we will find in the imagination, “phantasy,” all the premises for a liberation that should not be limited to the private sphere or the mere personal “fantasy.” It is a matter, for him, of introducing—via a reference to Theodor Adorno speaking on contemporary music—the question of the work of art as “negation of unfreedom.” For Marcuse, there is a true “critical function of phantasy” as soon as desires, including sexual desires, find a form that can liberate from the barriers of social domination: a form both of affirmation and of “great refusal” as he says. A form of “protest.” An image of the “struggle for the ultimate form of freedom,” he will say. And it is as though the “tears of Eros” were making room for Eros himself, understood as a decisive arm against our contemporary servitudes. In 1964, Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, an indictment against modern capitalist society. After the forced, brutal integration of classic totalitarianisms, capitalism proceeds with its social integration by other means. In so doing it brings back a type of closed society; and it is a closed society because, as Marcuse explains, it curbs and integrates all dimensions of existence, including the public and the private. It is closed because it becomes a society without any opposition, capable of diluting every thought into the torpor of criticism. And Marcuse examines—before Foucault and Deleuze—the “new forms of control” by which a “state of well-being” agonizingly coexists with a “state of war,” immobilizing any attempt at social change, absorbing any antagonisms into a general indifference that is no weaker than future indifferences in the postmodern age. Marcuse then endeavors to dismantle the logic inherent to the “language of total administration,” which he calls

and domination of those whose subjects they are. This is where Marcuse focuses his work: in the space of this paradox—one that is inherent in the modern history of the West—according to which “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom.” The impulsive renunciation becomes renunciation of desire, that is to say of repression, and the latter becomes a large structure of alienation or mental reification, leading to an ethos of slaves that was fomented and demanded by the masters of the social game. We can then understand how Marcuse was able to dispute the evidence according to which “civilization demands a more and more intense repression.” The paradox is cruel and in a way leads to the conclusions found in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, published ten years earlier by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. It recognizes the bitter truth that the safeguard of the “reality principle,” or the psychical structures of guilt, easily becomes the prison guard of our desires and thoughts. Perhaps it is the mental necessity of repression? No doubt. But should this necessarily develop into the political scandal of repression? Is the only choice left one that is between a first-level barbarousness (one that is regressive and instinctual) and a second-level barbarousness (which is rational and progressive), both of them coming from unhealthy uses of desire and repression? Between the two, everything is, of course, a matter of dialectics—or politics—of desire. This is what appears very clearly when the potency (puissance) of uprisings is diluted into the power (pouvoir) of counter-revolutions, recurrent phenomena that Marcuse saw in Freud’s perspective, that of guilt: “At the societal level, recurrent rebellions and revolutions have been followed by counter-revolutions and restorations. From the slave revolts in the ancient world to the socialist revolution, the struggle of the oppressed has ended in establishing a new, ‘better,’ system of domination. … An element of self-defeat seems to be involved in this dynamic (regardless of the validity of such reasons as the prematurity and inequality of forces). In this sense, every revolution has also been a betrayed revolution. Freud’s hypothesis on the origin and the perpetuation of guilt feeling elucidates, in psychological terms, this socio-logical dynamic: it explains the ‘identification’ of those who revolt with the power against which they revolt.” It is as though things were fixed, reified only on the level of relations of identification and power (pouvoir). But Marcuse sought to re-examine his approach by returning to Hegel’s idea of desire (domination and recognition), and Nietzsche (pleasure and joy). Before proposing this (which cannot be reduced to Wilhelm Reich’s idea

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the “closed universe,” in pages that, once again, suggest Michel Foucault’s future analyses on the discursive order of power (pouvoir). But in this analysis of systems, Marcuse never abandons the point of view of desires. He does this, logically, through Hegel first of all (for example, when analyzing what he calls “the conquest of the unhappy consciousness”) and then through Freud (when he returns, for example, to the question of guilt). If it is true that desire is indestructible, then it is necessary to find what, in the folds or in the holes of this “onedimensional society,” in the shadows or in the fractures of these “reified forms,” allows for a possibility for desire to create, not a mere phantasm, but a reality, an alternative to common servitudes. Eros, therefore, is the Marcusian way to take back and to return to the motifs of hope in Walter Benjamin (cited at the very end of the work) or of utopia in Ernst Bloch. In so doing, Marcuse created a bridge between the Critical Theory of his Germanic culture and the practices of the “Great Refusal,” as he called it, in those he observed in the American social and political struggles of his time: “However, underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force that violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. When they get together and go out into the streets, without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most primitive civil rights, they know they face dogs, stones, bombs, jail, concentration camps, even death. Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.” Marcuse, as we know, followed his critique of “one-dimensional society” to the very end, castigating, with regard to power (pouvoir), the hypocritical “repressive tolerance” of contemporary democracies; and seeking, with regard to potency (puissance), the way to a “liberation” that would be possible through the “subversive forces” inherent in the assumption of Eros and all the “new revolutionary sensibilities” that he will decry, in 1972, in Counter-Revolution and Revolt. It is no surprise then to find that Marcuse was a leading figure in the student uprisings of 1968. In a series of photos taken at the Freie Universität in Berlin by

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fig. 16 Michael Ruetz, Freie Universität, Berlin, August 5, 1968. Photograph.

fig. 17 Michael Ruetz, Herbert Marcuse in the main lecture theater, Freie Universität, Berlin, May 13, 1968. Photograph.

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trust what you assert. Do not let yourselves be dissuaded by fear.” Fear, indeed, seems to be the greatest enemy of uprisings: it imposes silence and immobility on bodies, gestures, desires and the will. It is when they get rid of their fear that people produce a murmur first of all, that “dull sound” or that “dull plaint” that, in the expression “the murmuring of the people,” used to mean entering into rumor, that is to say into sedition or uprising itself, as Jean Nicolas showed, citing the Encyclopédie, in his important book La Rébellion française. Murmur, rumor: soon an exclamation, a great clamor. The shout must however not be lost in the desert. We must, therefore, know how to work our shout, to give it shape, and to labor over it, long and patiently. Our cries can come in thousands of different forms. One form is the book, that banal, discreet form, reproducible and extremely mobile, with its black letters on a white background, its words and phrases wisely—in appearance—arranged on the rectangle of the page. When the shout is worked in this way, the act of refusing consists in fusing together new images, new thoughts, or new possibilities of action in the public consciousness, which receives it in this form. To refuse only has meaning if it invents new forms of living and acting. One example among many others: on June 27, 1957, Germaine Tillion’s L’Algérie was published by Éditions de Minuit, followed by two collective works—Pour Djamila Bouhired and La Question algérienne— then, followed, in early 1958, by Henri Alleg’s La Question and L’Affaire Audin by Pierre Vidal-Naquet. “Between 1957 and 1959,” wrote Anne Simonin in Le Droit à la désobéissance, “Éditions de Minuit confronted, almost single-handedly, the denunciation of the Algerian War, relayed by the La Joie de lire bookshop, which was just as small and stubborn as they were, founded and directed by François Maspero, who circulated the books of Éditions de Minuit even (and above all) when they were banned. … Among the twenty-three books published by Éditions de Minuit concerning Algeria between 1957 and 1962, only nine were seized, three of which were seized twice, making a total of twelve confiscations … for reasons as serious as an attack on state security or inciting disobedience among the military.” We know how much Jérôme Lindon made Éditions de Minuit into a perpetual “actualization of the resistant past”—an expression used by Anne Simonin in another work, titled “Le devoir d’insoumission”— which traced the clandestine adventures of this publishing house between 1942 and 1944. It is as though, before even publishing Leon Trotsky’s La Révolution permanente, Lindon had sought to regulate all of his activities according to a permanent resistance that in 1957 the Algerian War and the behavior of the French army made more

Michael Ruetz, we can see two very interesting images. The first, dating from May 8, 1968, shows a student demonstration at the Konvent, the university “parliament”: on the blackboards all kinds of slogans are written, including Studium ist Opium (Study = opium) and alle Professoren sind Papiertiger (All professors are paper tigers) ( fig. 16). In a photograph taken five days later, we can see numerous dissenting students speaking together in the university’s large auditorium, after listening to Herbert Marcuse on the theme of “History, transcendence and social change”: the old philosopher is in shirtsleeves, seated in the middle of his students (on his left we see Jacob Taubes), and attentive to everything that is being said ( fig. 17). As though something powerful is going on between the old Spartacist in exile and the young students from Berlin—but modestly, since Marcuse was not there in a position of mastery nor of prominence—a common desire for liberation.15

REFUSAL, OR THE POTENTIAL TO DO OTHERWISE The evidence of uprisings is perhaps, first of all, that of the gesture by which we refuse a certain state—one that is unjust and intolerable—of things that surround us, that oppress us. But what does to refuse mean? It is not simply not to do. It is not, inevitably, to enclose refusal in the realm of mere negation. To refuse, a fundamental gesture of uprisings, consists above all in using dialectics: by refusing to do what one has been abusively prescribed, we can and indeed we must not leave it at that. We do not refuse a certain mode of existence by choosing not to exist. We only refuse, therefore, to decide to exist and to do otherwise. Where some think they refuse by merely not, taking away—depleting —their potency (puissance), others take the risk of exposing their refusal to the point of giving potency to do something other. And when I say that they expose themselves, I mean that they do not fear—from their minor position, the place of “unpower”—“to do something” in the public sphere in spite of all. It is probably what Walter Benjamin wanted to show by his phrase “to organize our pessimism.” This often starts with arms being raised: despair, indignation, then anger, then a call “to do something.” This starts also with a clamor, a shout. In 1793, in the wake of the French Revolution, Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote a Revendication de la liberté, which appealed directly to a shouting out as a first way, or a first voice, towards political emancipation: “Shout, shout out on every level to the ears of our princes, until they hear it, that you will not let them take away the freedom to think, and show them by your behavior that they can

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15. Honneth 2013, 21. Bankovsky and Le Goff, eds. 2012, passim. Bataille 1961, passim. Jay 1973, passim. Wiggershaus 1986, passim. Durand-Gasselin 2012, passim. Marx 1867–1883, 152–167. Lukács 1923, 83, 84, and 110–256. Honneth 1990, 79–90. Honneth 2005, 21–32. Zarka 2015, 39–53. Marcuse 1932, 243, 256. Hegel 1807, I, 214. Marcuse 1932, 256. Raulet 1992, passim. Marcuse 1939, passim. Marcuse 1955, xxi, xxii, 3, 4, 91, 95, and 149. Marcuse 1965–1968, passim. Marcuse 1969, passim. Marcuse 1972, passim. Ruetz and Sachsse 2009, 8–9, and 60.

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necessary than ever. Between 1944 and 1956, intellectual and literary life in France was haunted by that dreamed revolution whose hope the Resistance had outlined, as shown in the major study, Révolution rêvée by Michel Surya. The books published by Jérôme Lindon between 1957 and 1962 undoubtedly deserve to be read as argued refusals of a situation that saw, a decade or so after the Liberation, the French army using techniques that were similar to those of the Gestapo. It required the full rigor and doggedness of someone like Pierre Vidal-Naquet to show that in June 1957, Maurice Audin—a university member of the Algerian Communist Party—died under torture at the hands of French soldiers. Beyond even their patiently argued refusal, the small works published by Jérôme Lindon at this time appear like active refusals or acted refusals, kinds of tracts whose editor knew well, from experience, that they risked, as soon as they appeared, disappearing from all bookshops. Three things remain striking when we see—before even opening them—these works: they are small (good for hiding in a pocket), their titles are written in red (like miniscule political posters); and the words of their titles appear like political strategies that are very simple, very subtle, and very efficient. For example, La Question ( fig. 18) appears at once in what it questions as a principle (is it possible that a republican army carried out torture?) and in the thing it designated (the “question” of the inquisitors signifying the torture itself). Similarly, La Gangrène, an anonymous work published with a postscript by Jérôme Lindon in 1959—it was composed of seven direct testimonies of torture—shows in red letters the notorious word turned against the military authorities that used it to indicate the dispute within the army itself; but, moreover, it plays phonetically with the word vulgarly used for the instrument of torture that was most common at the time, the gégène, the hand-operated electrical generator for field telephones. We could say the same about the work by Charlotte Delbo—another important figure, along with Germaine Tillion, of the Resistance—and published in 1961, under the somewhat ironic title Les Belles Lettres. Somewhere, therefore, between the freedom of any self-respecting literature and the faculty of refusal of any political thought attentive to state compromises and lies, and said with words that doubtless strike the reader with their persistent relevance:

fig. 18

fig. 19 Henri Alleg, La Question (The question), Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958. Cover. Private collection.

Why do we write letters? Because we burst with outrage. Is this anything new? Have there not always been reasons to be outraged? Undoubtedly. But whereas before—if we think of the years before

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Provocation à la désobéissance (Call for disobedience), Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1962. Cover. Private collection.

characters in the novel by Maurienne. And it was decided finally that by allowing them to express such opinions in a book, the author and the publisher were guilty of public provocation to disobedience. I appealed against this judgment.

the war in 1939—the outrage exploded into demonstrations and collective actions, and transformed into acts by means of the unions and political parties, it has no more ways to express itself today. The Parliament no longer exists but by name, elections are but gratuitous acts. Citizens are called upon to answer yes or no to questions to which they would like to be able to reply: yes but. The Ministerial Councils are secret gatherings. There is no more political life. … Deprived of any means to react, we write letters.

We know that meanwhile—in July 1960—a Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie (Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian War), signed by a group of 121 artists and intellectuals, was a landmark in the historical and political context, relayed by an important publication by Éditions François Maspero (of which Julien Hage recalled the essential elements in a “brief history” of the publishers). The text was written collectively, by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Schuster, Dionys Mascolo, and Maurice Nadeau. It is reprinted in Maurice Blanchot’s Écrits politiques, where we quickly sense the right to uprising which the “121” saw as a right for the Algerian people against the colonial police operations carried out by the French army:

In 1961, Jérôme Lindon was indicted for publishing Le Déserteur, a novel published under the pseudonym “Maurienne”—a choice equivalent to that of “Vercors” in the time of the Resistance. The final judgment, ten pages long, had the following conclusion: “The public prosecutor … declares [Jérôme] Lindon guilty of the offense of public provocation to disobedience.” The answer—the acted refusal—by the publisher was, the following year, the work Provocation à la désobéissance ( fig. 19), a title that could not be attacked since it cited the judgment itself, and became a call and, in fact, a provocation. The political genius of the publisher leaned, once more, on the experience of the Occupation for contesting the very principle contained in the accusation by the Public Ministry:

In fact, with a decision that was a fundamental abuse, the state firstly mobilized entire classes of citizens with a view to accomplishing what it considered a police task against an oppressed population, which had rebelled only for reasons of basic human dignity, since it demanded to be recognized at last as an independent community. Neither a war of conquest, nor a war of “national defense,” the Algerian War has more or less become an act proper to the army and to a caste that refused to yield before an uprising whose meaning even the civil authorities, becoming aware of the general collapse of colonial empires, seemed to acknowledge.

Every French person knows that, since June 18, 1940, disobedience does not necessarily constitute a crime in itself, and that one even risks in some cases—this was seen during the Liberation, for example, or after April 22—being sentenced for not disobeying one’s superiors. This is because there exist some illegal orders. Torture is one. … Particularly significant was the exchange between the president and the witness Jean Clay who had just explained the circumstances under which he assisted at the interrogation, by the gendarmes, of a young Algerian he had just arrested for not having his identity papers on him: Jean Clay: – … Then they attached him to a bench and began to torture him. The President. – Did you not protest? Jean Clay: – I did protest, but these men were fifty years old, and had been in charge of the region for a long time … The President: – You could have left, protesting! To leave in protest. It was perhaps the only possible solution. Yet what the advised in the particular case that Lieutenant Clay brought to the bar, was condemned, in absolute terms, by the

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Georges Bataille did not sign the “Manifeste des 121,” as he was already suffering from his illness and, above all, claiming an “unconditional refusal” that characterized his political position statement, since the anti-Franco publication Actualités in 1945, on the basis of a refusal to take part. He had explained this in advance in a private letter to Dionys Mascolo—whose 1953 work Le Communisme can be read, in part at least, as an essay on politics in the style of Bataille—who echoed the message in the first issue of the journal Le 14 Juillet in July 1958. With a text titled “Refus inconditionnel” (Unconditional refusal), Mascolo learned about Bataille’s position: it supposes, firstly, that to refuse is an “enterprise,” that is to say a long-term project, and not simply a way to say no. But he answers his friend by saying that this

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refusal—“against everyone”—is not in any way a position of ascetic or aristocratic solitude: “This [your ‘unconditional refusal’] is not solitude. This is said in a certain way about being together, being numerous. We are less alone than ever.” This was a way for the militant to pay his or her respects to the solidary form of this solitary position—although not a haughty or patronizing position—that Bataille has adopted. The fact that this act of refusal should be founded on a solitary decision capable nonetheless of engaging a solidary “enterprise,” is something that Maurice Blanchot wanted to indicate, in an article in the second issue of the journal Le 14 Juillet, in 1958. It is titled “Le Refus” (The refusal):

base. In 1964, Herbert Marcuse sought to conclude One-Dimensional Man on the theme of the emancipatory “Grand Refusal,” in order to give homage to both Maurice Blanchot (for his “refusal” in 1958) and Walter Benjamin (for his “hope of the hopeless” in the 1930s). As Christophe Bident explained—in a biography with the evocative title: Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible (invisible partner)—the 1960s were first of all, for the writer, a time of “personal distress” made worse by illness. A moment of exclusion. Thus, towards the end of 1967, “the personal renunciation of any presence in public seems stronger than ever.” But it is from within this solitary position that the solidary moment par excellence arose: May 1968. “With Blanchot, during those few weeks of the ‘May revolution,’” wrote Bident, “the least surprising element is not his health nor his continuing energy despite weakness and fatigue, which were to make him live, in the complicity between his body and his mind, through nocturnal confrontations, diurnal protests, interminable committee sessions, and hugely crowded meetings. He rarely shouted, and those close to him often had to support him, even wait anxiously during police proceedings. But he liked running riot with the students, in his short runs, started to the sound of Go! Go! Go!, which regularly accelerated the pace. He spoke at assemblies, presided over committee meetings, with a gentle authority, a slow and dry voice, often out of breath but that, thanks perhaps to that weakness, immediately captured its listeners. He scrutinized events, observed movements of bodies and the bodies of graffiti, writings on leaflets, and spoke on familiar terms with everyone except his friends. Every day he walked along the streets with Dionys Mascolo, Robert and Monique Antelme, Louis-René des Forêts, Maurice Nadeau, Marguerite Duras, and often Jean Schuster and Michel Leiris. This is how he walked until exhaustion, from République to Denfert, on May 13, in the biggest demonstration Paris had seen since Charonne and the Liberation” ( fig. 20). Blanchot was to participate in this way in the occupation of the Société des gens de lettres, on May 21. He asked his friend, Jacques Derrida, to write a few leaflets. He sought titles for a bulletin to be published: Non, or l’Impossible, or Rupture, or even Commune … or, of course, Le Refus. He published, on June 18, 1968, a declaration that began with “the power of refusal” and continued with “the incessant movement of struggle” necessary for the “revolutionary demand.” Another text from this period is titled “Affirmer la rupture” (Affirming the rupture). It concerns taking refusal out of its merely negative position by giving to theoretical discourse—but outside of any doctrinal or dogmatic program—that precious affirmative task: “The theoretical

At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. The refusal is absolute, categorical. It is not disputed, nor does it give its reasons. Yet it remains silent and solitary, even when it is affirmed, as it must be, in the open. Those who refuse and who are linked by the force of the refusal know that they are not yet together. The time of the common affirmation has been taken away from them. What remains is the irreducible refusal, the friendship, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No, which makes them united and solidary. In the act of refusal, therefore, it is a solitude that exclaims No! How could the “frankness that no longer tolerates complicity,” as Blanchot called it, not be solitary in its principle decision? Refusal becomes engaged then alone, and solitarily engages the moment of the no. But it does much more: it engages solidarily, inclusively, an “enterprise” that is the work, if not of everyone, at least of an us. It is a solidary act founded, according to Blanchot, on the “very poor beginning” of suffering experienced by “those who cannot speak,” those that Walter Benjamin had called in 1940 the Namenlosen, the “nameless.” Those of whom Blanchot spoke in 1958: and it is of course the Algerians as a people oppressed by the police operations carried out by the French army. “When we refuse, we refuse by a movement without contempt, without exaltation, a movement that is anonymous, as much as it can be, for the power (pouvoir) to refuse is not accomplished by us, nor in our name, but rather by a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” That insubordination should be considered a right and not a duty, as Blanchot said in 1961, means perhaps the same thing again from the viewpoint of what is supposed by the act of refusal. The duty is at once collective, when the right allows everyone to avail, or not, of a common

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does not consist in developing a program or a platform, but consists instead, outside of any programmatic project or of any project at all, in maintaining a refusal that affirms, and in freeing or maintaining an affirmation that is not resolved, but rather that disturbs and that disturbs itself.” This has brought us from the “unconditional refusal” to the “refusal that is affirmed.” It is a path along which Blanchot continued, in 1981, in a reply to a questionnaire on artistic engagement titled “Refuser l’ordre établi” (Refusing the established order). But let us dig a little deeper into this paradox: what exactly does the refusal affirm? In Blanchot’s experience, it is nothing other than that community imagined ethically and ontologically—in the wake of Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas, with a number of tumultuous interferences from elsewhere—as friendship. If there is a political thought that is worth noting in Blanchot, from L’Amitié to L’Entretien infini, it is indeed here that it is to be found, in the bridge constructed between the potency (puissance) of refusal and the recognition of the friend:

fig. 20 Anonymous, Ciné-tracts (Film tracts), 1968. Still frame.

We must give up knowing those with whom something essential links us; that is, we must welcome them in the relation to the unknown in which they welcome us too, in our distance. Friendship, that relation without dependence, without episode and in which comes nonetheless all the simplicity of life, passes by recognition of being strangers both, which does not permit us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make them a theme of conversation (nor of articles), but the movement of the entente in which, speaking to us, they maintain, even in the greatest familiarity, the infinite distance, that fundamental separation from which that which separates becomes a relation. Jacques Derrida made no mistake regarding the political profundity of this lesson— “the recognition of shared strangeness”—by situating the origins of a whole development of his Spectres de Marx in Blanchot’s L’Amitié, or by titling two of his later works Politiques de l’amitié (in 1994), and Politique et amitié (in 2011). We know that, meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy, a disciple and friend of Derrida—but not of Blanchot—devoted a very important essay to the question of both refusal and community: written in 1983, as an article for the journal Aléa and published as a volume in 1986, La Communauté désœuvrée (The disavowed community) began with the “dissolution, dislocation, or conflagration of the community.” A far cry, then, from “communism as the unpassable horizon of our time” announced previously by

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(désœuvrement).” We must therefore know how to refuse even works that we believe strongly built: but we must also know how to work (œuvrer) even on the refusals that we think we make against the world. Jean-Luc Nancy perhaps pays homage to this dialectic in La Communauté affrontée (The confronted community), a book dedicated to Blanchot in recognition of the “reproach” contained in La Communauté inavouable: “Blanchot means for me, or rather signals, the unavowable. Appended to but contrary to the inoperative [désœuvré] in my title, this adjective suggests we think that under the uprising there is still the work, an unavowable work.” He then published, under the title Maurice Blanchot: passion politique, the famous “letter-story” of 1984, concerned with the writer’s activities as a “far-right insurgent” between 1936 and 1939: “the project of gathering non-conformists from the right and non-conformists from the left— what I called dissidents—was quite familiar to me at that time.” “Neither right nor left”? We know, clearly, from the historical works by Zeev Sternhell, that this was a founding and central motif in fascist ideology in France (Sternhell evoked Blanchot twice in his study). We know too that following the special issue of the journal Lignes devoted to “Politiques de Maurice Blanchot” in 2014—with articles in which the notion of “impossible politics” shifted from an elegiac value in the mode of Bataille, to a much more critical viewpoint— and with Michel Surya’s book, L’Autre Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy wished to finish, quite recently, battling with the author of L’Amitié: thus, in La Communauté désavouée, he situated the “unavowable” in politics according to Blanchot near a “return to myth”—which was a severe way to judge the writer when we imagine the prior work of Nancy (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) titled Le Mythe nazi. It is a way, as he said himself—yet what a strange subjective position—to “help Blanchot with his avowal,” his avowal of fascism or quasi-fascism. His avowal or his admission at least, of an “aristocratic and anarchic” position (Nancy does not say “anarchistic”), that is, in any case, a fundamentally anti-democratic position. And this is what allows Nancy to speak, with regard to Blanchot, of an “evaporation of politics” in the doing nothing of the inoperation (désœuvrement) or—as we can read in the interview with Mathilde Girard titled Proprement dit (Well said)—of an impossible that would call upon the myth, the “appeal to a foundation”: “This is called, in political terms, a right wing, even extreme right-wing thinking.” What does all of this tell us, to finish, about the economy of refusal in Maurice Blanchot? And of the refusal of this kind of refusal in Jean-Luc Nancy? I am struck, in this debate—which seems far from

Jean-Paul Sartre. And, furthermore, lost are the “immanence and intimacy [of our] communion.” All of that written through a rereading of Bataille, whose notion of experience founded an essential disavowal: “The community cannot come from the domain of the work. We do not produce it, we experience it (or its experience makes us) as an experience of the finitude.” If it remains a “voice” of the community, it can only, however, be the voice of “interruption,” suggests Nancy: “a voice or a music withdrawn.” An “unavowable” voice, in short. This voice is called literature. What unusual urgency pushed Maurice Blanchot to publish his reply to Nancy in La Communauté inavouable in 1983? We cannot deal with this at length here, but it is suffice to note, in order to examine the “reproach,” or even the “differend” that Blanchot held against Nancy, how much the latter spoke of community according to Bataille, without ever embodying it in what was his friendship with Blanchot (but also Michel Leiris, Dionys Mascolo, and still others). Furthermore, Nancy spoke of disavowal and of literature without ever having recalled the motifs that are nonetheless everywhere, even in their theoretical conjunction, in the texts of Blanchot. Consequently, Bataille’s phrase— “the community of those who have no community”—used as the exergue for La Communauté inavouable, is a reply, perhaps, not only to “the name of Bataille,” but above all it would refer “negative community” that the author of Expérience intérieure had shaped with Blanchot himself, and that Nancy had neglected to bring into play in La Communauté désœuvrée. Blanchot probably did not intend to retrace Bataille’s thinking—a task that Jean-Luc Nancy did so well—so much as bear witness, directly, in his own name, to a politics of friendship in his own life: his life as a writer for whom “literature” meant Part du feu and “right to death,” a work exposed to its own disavowal, as we read everywhere in L’Espace littéraire, Le Livre à venir, and L’Entretien infini. The latter, moreover, opens with texts that are as radical as “The most profound question” (which is a political question) or the “Great Refusal” (which concerns “the absence of a work” in the literary work), and it reaches into extraordinary essays like “L’insurrection, la folie d’écrire,” meaning “insurrection, the madness of writing” (on the uprising of language and of thought in all literature worthy of the name). The challenge for Maurice Blanchot was, therefore, at the same time that of a politics of friendship and a politics of literature, which, as he wrote at the end of La Communauté inavouable, “makes us responsible for the new relations that are always threatened, always hoped for, between what we call work (œuvre) and what we call lack of work

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It is a refusal that allows existing and not one that imposes itself authoritatively, but that exceeds any fixed position: it is a potencyrefusal (refus-puissance). It is linked to the “impossible” as desire or ethical demand, and not to the mythical foundation of everything. That is exactly what Blanchot said he admired in the uprisings of May 1968:

its conclusion—by the fact that the position of the writer becomes progressively isolated and immobilized as it is questioned. Should we not imagine a questioning that would not be the “question” in the sense that Blanchot himself, writer and signatory of the Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoummision, radically disputed in 1960? With the author of Thomas l’obscur, there is not only a dialectics of “writing of the day” (of the extreme right) and “writing of the night” (extremely profound). His “writing of the day” itself—its political position—followed the dialectical path, the transformation of a type of refusal into another, quite different from the first, and which completely overturned it. Blanchot’s political path could, from this viewpoint, teach us something more about a possible dialectics of refusal. On the one hand, we would find the refusal that hates: that refusal is a refusal of what is hated, of any possibility of existing. It is an aggressive refusal, a power-refusal (refus-pouvoir). It is imposed upon the other, and wants to be total and destructive. It is totalitarian, claiming to found its rejection on an “impossible” thought like “myth,” as Jean-Luc Nancy showed in his analysis. This would probably correspond to everything that Blanchot, in his texts from the 1930s, communicated to his readers: “traditionalism,”“feverish passion for France,”“obsessive anticommunism,” and a “certain anti-Semitism (in the sense of certain anti-Semitism and moderate anti-Semitism …),” as Michel Surya put it. But something else would happen: something that doubles first of all, like an invisible hem, Blanchot’s participation in the maréchalistes journals during the Occupation; something that would become, soon, “the turning over of all value” (to echo Nietzsche) and a conversion of thought. It has to do with his friendship with Georges Bataille. In the 1930s, Bataille and Blanchot were at opposite extremes: “The very moment Bataille critiqued the idealism of all materialism, Blanchot critiqued the materialism of all idealism,” writes Christophe Bident. But, from the beginning of the 1940s, the meeting between these two writers began an essential, profound, transforming friendship for each of them; a literary and philosophical friendship; a political friendship, for indeed, the basis of friendship is political. It is this friendship with Bataille—and that with Emmanuel Levinas—which would, forever, disorient Blanchot in his positions as a “far-right dissident.” And it this too, curiously (because they know all of this by heart), that neither Jean-Luc Nancy nor Michel Surya wanted to explore more deeply. Yet, the consequences of this meeting and this friendship—recounted in detail by Christophe Bident—were that a refusal was followed by a very different refusal: a refusal that exceeds and not one that hates.

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May 68 showed, without any plan, without any plot, in the suddenness of a happy encounter and like a celebration that shook the accepted or wished-for social forms, how explosive communication could be affirmed (affirmed beyond the usual forms of affirmation), the opening that allowed everyone, without distinction of class, age, gender, or culture, to befriend the first person they saw, as though with a loved one, precisely because he was the unknown familiar. “Without any plan”: that was the characteristic, one that was both worrying and fortunate, of a kind of incomparable society that did not let itself be seized, that did not let itself be called to subsist, to settle, even through the multiple “committees” with which a disordered order, an imprecise specialization was simulated. Unlike “traditional revolutions,” it was not only about taking power to replace it with another, nor about taking the Bastille, the Winter Palace, the Elysée, or the Assemblée Nationale, which were unimportant objectives, nor about overturning an old world; instead it was about allowing to show, outside of any utilitarian interest, a possibility of being together that gave everyone the right to equality in fraternity through the freedom of speech that raised everyone up. Everyone had something to say, sometimes to write (on the walls)—what that was didn’t matter. The Saying took precedence over the said. Poetry was daily. And when Blanchot speaks here of a “presence of the people in limitless potency [puissance],” when he says that this potency, “in order not to be limited, accepts doing nothing”—he does not mean that its manifestation is composed of thousands of Bartlebys preferring not to, so that “politics evaporates,” as Jean-Luc Nancy stated. What is meant is simply that doing otherwise led the Parisian people, for a moment between two conflicts, on February 13, 1962, to “make a procession with the dead of Charonne [in] immobility, in a silent multitude” of collective mourning: this is what Chris Marker, in A Grin Without a Cat, sought to compare with the great lamentation scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin ( figs. 1–2). It is, finally, what Blanchot wished to call

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a “declaration of impotence” as “supreme potency, because it included, without feeling diminished, its virtual and absolute potency.” No, then, the refusal did not do “nothing”: to go on strike, for example, does not in any way amount to “doing nothing.” This refusal simply suspended the carrying out of its own desire for a moment, a moment of suspense, in which the gesture of mourning in order to “walk in a procession with the dead” helped even more to announce the gesture of future uprisings.16

DESIRING, DISOBEYING, DOING VIOLENCE There is nothing more ancient, in its very urgency, than desire. If it is true that desire constitutes us—not in the sense in which it might give us a stable “constitution,” a nomos, but rather in the sense that it raises us, gives us the very force of our dynamis—then we could say that there is nothing more ancient than desire, even though it is what always gives the rhythm to our present, to every instant, in our movements to what will happen, towards the future. When he published his explosive (although genuinely neutral and “objective”) book, Provocation à la désobéissance ( fig. 19), Jérôme Lindon remembered perhaps a clandestine leaflet printed by Libération and circulated in France during the Occupation. In the republication of the book by Pierrette Turlais, we can read: “Disobedience is the wisest of duties” ( fig. 21). And the subsequent text clarifies many things: You will sabotage the enforcement of German law by all means; You will slow the census operations by delaying and giving inexact declarations; You will use any excuse regarding health and family to avoid your deportation to occupied territory, then to Germany. You will be professionally downgraded if necessary; You will oppose to the very end any requisitioning by passive and absolute disobedience. Against a general disobedience, the police will be impotent. to vanquish the enemies of the homeland: disobedience, again disobedience, and always disobedience. To disobey: here is a verb that works well with the verb to desire. To disobey is as ancient, and often as urgent, as to desire. Lindon knew this well, having translated in 1955 the biblical Book of Jonah, a major prophetic text—which is read, during the celebration of Yom Kippur,

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16. Benjamin 1940b, 350. Fichte 1793, 82. Nicolas 2002, 27. Tillion 1957, passim. Alleg 1958, passim. VidalNaquet 1958, passim. Simonin 2012, 9–13. Simonin 2008, 309– 324 and 474–504. Trotsky 1923– 1936, 245–439. Surya 2004, 7–33. Evans 1997, passim. Vidal-Naquet 1958, passim. Vidal-Naquet 1998, 13–160. Alleg 1958, passim. La Gangrène 1959, passim. Delbo 1961, 9–10. Maurienne 1960, passim. Provocation à la désobéissance 1962, 136–139. Le Droit à l’insoumission 1961, passim. Hage 2009, 106–112. Blanchot et al. 1960, 28–29. Mascolo 1953, passim. Mascolo 1958, 81–83. Blanchot 1958, 11–12. Blanchot 1961, 38. Marcuse 1964, 279 and 281. Bident 1998, 469, 471–472, and 479. Blanchot 1968a, 87. Blanchot 1968b, 105. Blanchot 1981, 151–153. Blanchot 1971, 328. Derrida 1993, 39–66 (reference to Blanchot 1971, 109–117). Derrida 1994, passim. Derrida 2011, passim. Nancy 1986, 11, 35, 78, and 156–157. Blanchot 1983, 9 and 23–25. Blanchot 1949, 291–331. Blanchot 1955, 48–52, 60, and 225–232. Blanchot 1959, passim. Blanchot 1969, 12–34, 46–69, and 323–342. Blanchot 1983, 93. Nancy 2001, 9 and 38–39. Nancy 2011 (and Blanchot 1984), 49. Sternhell 1983, 212 and 534. Amar 2014, 140–152. Manchev 2014, 196–215. Surya 2015, passim. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1980, passim. Nancy 2014, 73–78, 125, 131, and 134. Girard and Nancy 2015, 110. Surya 2015, 18. Bident 1998, 62 and 167–180. Blanchot 1983, 52–55.

fig. 21 Clandestine leaflet printed by the “Liberation” Resistance group in France’s southern zone, 1942. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

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refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its insufficiency are great and unendurable. … In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

“at night, the moment when life and death is decided, the moment when everything shows that our fates are being decided”—beginning, so abruptly, with a disobedience against God, and such a radical about-turn: “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.’ But Jonah rose up [but only] to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” Must we then know how to disobey in order to be a true prophet? How can we not, once again, call on the mythologies of Atlas or Prometheus? Or the story of Eve? Did she not disobey in full knowledge of the consequences? Not to follow the pernicious commandments of the serpent, but rather to undertake fervently her desire to know and to desire, even if it meant facing all of the consequences: the pains of childbirth, the efforts of work, and even mortality? To disobey would be refusal in action, and, altogether, the affirmation of a desire as something irreducible. With heroes and heroines who appear so close to us only because they are dogged by such a cruel zero tolerance: Antigone facing the law of the city, in the tragedy by Sophocles; or Lysistrata (whose name means “she who disbands the army”) in the comedy by Aristophanes. It will always be a nomos or a power (pouvoir) that will be disobeyed by a more fundamental dynamis or potency (puissance). There is, of course, a modern story of disobedience. Everyone knows, or ought to know, the extraordinary figure Henry D. Thoreau who founded the notion of “civil disobedience” in the context of modern democracies. After six years refusing to pay tax to the US State that was intended to finance the unjust war of conquest in Mexico, in July 1849, Thoreau was, very briefly (for a single night), thrown in prison. The text he wrote in 1849, reflecting on this experience of conflict with the state, Resistance to Civil Government, was published in a volume titled Civil Disobedience. The premise suggests Spinoza: is it not a philosophical contradiction for citizen to “resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?,” why is this so if it is true that the conscience alone is what, inside us, can judge everything in complete freedom? The conclusion comes quickly: logically, we must recognize every person’s “right to rebel” against the state:

There have been many extensions of this seminal text and of its experience of “doing otherwise” written about by Thoreau in Walden, numerous extensions which can give the impression that the word freedom could explode in every direction, in very different directions in particular, in very conflictual directions, as we sense in the adjectives “libertarian,”“liberal,” or even “neoliberal.” To give just a few examples here chosen from the left, we should remember that Thoreau appears as a tutelary figure for all movements of civil disobedience of which a few summaries—those of Hugo Adam Bedau in 1991, Chaim Gans in 1992, José Bové in 2004, or Simon Critchley in 2007—show the major tendencies: philosophical anarchism (according to the very general expression by Chaim Gans); nonviolent political action (Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence, Martin Luther King and his nonviolent revolution, and even Lanza del Vasto and his technique of nonviolence or Joseph Pyrronet and his nonviolent resistances; and, lastly, alterglobalization and political ecology (César Chávez, Chiapas, civil disobedience in front of GMOs, etc.). In the Anglo-Saxon context, Henry D. Thoreau founded a great philosophical and political movement, called radical democracy, beginning with his own contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson right up to our own contemporary Stanley Cavell. In any case, as Sandra Laugier has shown, it is a matter of claiming a right and granting a right to the claim itself. Against the liberal conformism of the American governmental system—which by an abuse of language uses the word “democracy” as an immutable given, acquired and preserved by real society—“radical democracy” attempts to reinvent, on the basis of an assumption of disobedience, the very conditions of which “democracy” should want to speak. Stanley Cavell’s major work, The Claim of Reason, attempted, on a fundamental level, to extend a philosophy of knowledge (from Wittgenstein) towards the ethical and political problems already contained in the word claim. Can we establish disobedience as a general principle? “The reasons to rebel are not lacking,” wrote Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier at the beginning of their book, Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie?

How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to

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Hence the conventionally “liberal” pattern: on the one hand, Weber’s vision of the state as the one that lays claim to the legitimate use of violence: on the other hand, the idea of the “use of violence [facing the state] inevitably leads to a distortion and a perversion of the struggle,” the political struggle. This is not enough. It is to push violence to the side, when in fact it constitutes the nexus of the problem of any politics, in the complete array, from tyranny to emancipation. Violence would be at the center of politics: it would be the whirlwind that distresses and threatens to bring down the history of human societies in confrontation. It is the hardest thing to think about (and I can sense, writing this phrase, that my own subjective position facing this question is not unfamiliar with such an admission of weakness: what stops me, petrifies me in a sense, faced with the question of violence). In 1921—when he was not even thirty years old—Walter Benjamin courageously attempted a “Critique of Violence,” which appeared in the third issue of Archiv für für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (a journal whose editors were Edgar Jaffé, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, who had just died). Beyond this article we find, notably, an unpublished fragment titled “The Right to Use Force” (1920), written as a critique of an article by Herbert Vorwerk, whose title he used (Das Recht zue Gewaltanwendung). Benjamin asked himself, to sketch the problem, what he wanted to call a combinatory of four “possible critiques”:

“In a democracy, the specter of the opposition to the power in place goes from the vote to the insurrection, including abstention, boycotts, petitions, demonstrations, strikes, moderate or symbolic use of violence, riots, and so on.” But “another form of political action is civil disobedience, that is the refusal to respect the law—or one of its provisions—regularly voted by a majority of representatives of the people.” This form of political action could, eventually, be relayed or organized by parties, unions, associations, civic forums, the blogosphere, etc. Certainly, the “voice” is inscribed in the principle of representative democracy. But “to claim is what makes a voice when it is founded solely on itself in order to establish assent [or common dissent]: to be founded on I in order to say what we say. … It is the possibility of this claim—by the voice—that makes it possible today to extend the model of disobedience.” Civil disobedience, then, can be seen for what it fundamentally is: “a form of political action that constitutes [rather than negates] democracy.” This means that we must re-establish the space of political representation, no less, as claimed by the same authors in a subsequent book, Le Principe démocratie, which is presented as an “investigation into new political forms” today. For political forms do not cease to change, even though they may be sustained by the still fresh memory of anterior forms: there was 1968, then 1989. In 2011, there were uprisings all over the world: in Tunis and Cairo, in Madrid and Athens, in New York and London, Quebec and Paris, Tel Aviv and Sana’a, Dakar and Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Kiev, Bangkok, Phnom Penh … Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier recognize the potency (puissance) of these uprisings; it is what they call “the force of the streets.” But, keeping with philosophical tradition, they stick to the path that confuses the ethical and individual position of Henry D. Thoreau with a political position strictly marked by nonviolence:

Critical possibilities A) To deny the right of the state and the individual to use force. B) To recognize unconditionally the right of the state and the individual to use force. C) To recognize the state’s right to use force. D) To recognize the individual’s sole right to use force. In one of the notes, Benjamin remarked that this table of “critical possibilities” was founded on an opposition between the individual and the state—and that, to make things clear, the “individual stands opposed not to the living community.” Thus there is something typically anarchistic in this opposition, even though “ethical anarchism” (ethische Anarchismus), as he calls it using quotation marks a few lines later, seems to him to be “contradictory as a political programme.” Benjamin then explains that “there can be no objection to the ‘gesture’ of nonviolence, even where it ends in martyrdom,” in order to give this ethico-religious example distinct from any anarchist position: “When communities of Galician Jews let themselves be cut down

In democracy, the demonstration is a right both recognized and guaranteed, even if the more and more drastic regulations tend to limit the freedom to meet and to frame the modalities of its expression. … The riot is simply unacceptable under any regime at all; and, in order to maintain law and order, to keep the civil peace or to safeguard private goods, it is systematically pacified by the police or the army, more often than not with the agreement or the relief of the population (so long as their intervention remains reasonable)—even if it is often a signal that a power rarely misses taking things into consideration to prevent the risk of a new explosion.

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of violence, or sabotage the tools of work. But it is quite a different case for the “revolutionary general strikes”: these are violently repressed, and that is why Benjamin was ready to follow Georges Sorel—and his Reflections on Violence—on the level of a refusal of any “legal foundation” of revolutionary action. Therefore it is necessary, according to Benjamin, to reject all founding violence of the law/right (Recht) as well as all violence that is constitutive of the law, which is its violence administered by the police, at the service of its leaders and their discretionary violence, the violence that will strike the oppressed and persist in protecting the oppressors. The question to be asked, then, is the following: is there a human violence that could be said to be “just” in the ethical sense, rather than “legitimate” merely in the legal sense? If the word Gewalt means both “violence” and “power,” is there a human violence that could be about potency and not power? On the one hand, Benjamin replies by stating that “the critique of violence is of the philosophy of its history,” which is one way to warn that violence as a gesture surpasses any prior models for a general or abstract philosophical doctrine. On the other hand, or even as a result, the text offers no conclusion: Benjamin ends by opening his text completely, opening it to Messianic evanescence, in order to leave it both philosophically and politically unfinished. Antonia Birnbaum, in her book on Benjamin’s “Greek detour,” commented on the fact that a knowledge of violence “is forever inaccessible” and that this very inaccessibility—via the mythical example of Niobe punished by Divine violence, an example that Benjamin often returned to himself—fundamentally touches the problem of the “pure violence of the tragic hero.” In parallel, in an illuminating chapter in his book Walter Benjamin, Die Kreatur, das Heilege, die Bilder, Sigrid Weigel reminds us that this inaccessibility touches what is “monstrous” (ungeheur) in humanity: Benjamin recalls, by this adjective, the translation of Sophocles’s Antigone by Friedrich Hölderlin—an inexact translation of the Greek deinos but one that is so illuminating. Thus, the tragedy reclaims its rights over violence: “its rights” which are not “the law,” exactly because it speaks to us, finally, about the disobedience to the laws of the state. We return, therefore, to our initial question. This is a question that Hannah Arendt sought to address in her collection, On Violence, in 1962: for this, she had to provide a conceptual order—or even an argumentative and dialectical orientation—for the three chapters, independently of the chronology of their writing. Thus, she dealt firstly with the theme of “Lying in Politic” (an article from 1971), “Civil Disobedience” (a text from 1970), and finally, the crucial

in their synagogues without any attempt to defend themselves, this has nothing to do with ‘ethical anarchism’ as a political program; instead the mere resolve ‘not to resist evil’ emerges into the sacred light of day as a form of moral action.” Dating from 1920–21, the famous “Theological-Political Fragment” projected the problem into the space of a “metaphysical anarchism”—as Gershom Sholem noted, while commenting on this text—anarchy according to which the messianic horizon of human history would be “total evanescence,” even if political action is used to “search for that evanescence.” Beyond the “Critique of Violence” we find the great text by Benjamin on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, a text in which, among many other motifs, it is poetry or literary work in general that was given the virtues of the “search for evanescence” that could be considered the search for liberty: “The literary work of art in the true sense arises only where the word liberates itself from the spell of even the greatest task.” Here we find the demand for the emancipation of the word (Wort) through poetry, as it would appear later through the space of images (Bildraum) invented by the artists of the avant-garde in the 1920s, from Brecht to John Heartfield, Chaplin to Paul Klee, Eisenstein to the Surrealists (in what Benjamin was to call the necessary “politics of drunkenness,” of artistic drunkenness). Why, then, is there a “Critique of Violence”? Because the first violence—that which Max Weber had called “legitimate”—is that of the state struck by the “individual” and the “living community.”“Ethical anarchism,”“Messianism,”“poetry,” or “politics of drunkenness,” are some of the experimental notions that Benjamin called upon to imagine the means by which to escape from this first violence, and to refuse it in the state, by disobeying. “The task of a critique of violence can be summarised as that of expounding its relation to law (Recht) and justice (Gerechtigkeit).” This relation is posited as something disjunctive, yet this is not because violence is opposed to law, quite the contrary, for it is violence itself that, historically, creates law. Instead, it is because “justice” defines an ethical space that is opposed, according to Benjamin, to the legal one of “right” or “law.” This is what firmly contrasted Benjamin’s perspective with that of Carl Schmitt, for whom the law makes the impassable horizon of any political decision, even in the famous notion of “a state of exception.” The fact that the right/ law (Recht) should monopolize violence is what divides us at present, depending on whether we find that “legitimate” or, on the contrary, dangerous for justice and even for equity (Gerechtigkeit). Why, for example, does the state accept to give workers a “right to strike”? More often than not, it is insofar as the right or law might limit its acts

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a thread. It barely moves forward, as though indefinitely slowed down by the balance between the political response to be given to state violence—could this response remain nonviolent until the end?—and the ethical warning regarding all violence in general. Arendt, in this sense, insists on the fact that the apologists of political violence, Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto, or Frantz Fanon, “were motivated by a much deeper hatred of bourgeois society and were led to a much more radical break with its moral standards than the conventional Left.” It goes without saying that a moral philosophy, in the classical sense, cannot justify violence as such. In the Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, edited by Monique Canto-Sperber, the entry on “Violence,” written by Giuliano Pontara, attempts to give the “condition of normative adequacy” of a definition of violence: “An adequate definition of the word violence must make plausible the judgment according to which a violent act is a morally negative act,” as though this judgment preceded the definition itself … and yet “the question of legitimacy of the use of violence in whatever conflictual situation remains to be asked.” This, it would seem, is a good way not to get anywhere, between the abyss of ethics and the abyss of politics. It is a way to cast violence outside of moral questions, like a gesture judged in advance (negatively, of course). According to this viewpoint, there would be, to finish, simply no possible ethics of violence as such, as though the disjunction between ethics and politics followed us everywhere with its negative double bind: “One must not use violence, even when one must.” I am not surprised that, in this normative article, the methodological lesson from Benjamin—with its questioning entirely on violence—should have gone unseen: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history”—and not the philosophy of its morals sub specie aeternitatis. It is significant, here, that the Dictionnaire d’éthique in question does not offer any entries on the notion of refusal, of disobedience, or of revolt, and offers even less, if that were possible, on uprisings. There is, however, an “ethical disobedience,” from that of Socrates or Thoreau all the way to Elisabeth Weissman, for example, if we study recent history (regarding the “resistance in public services” of the French state). There is, among thousands of examples, the emergence of “new politics of civil disobedience” that have been analyzed for a few years by the journal Multitudes. There is the rhizomatic atlas of contemporary forms of uprising, the Constellations or Trajectoires révolutionnaires du jeune 21e siècle published by the Collectif Mauvaise Trope in 2014: from Palestine to China, from Larzac to Genoa, from Italian Autonomy to the occupation of the banks, not to mention the

question, “On Violence” (1969). We understand from her text on the state’s lies that we should not fear to disobey. In the chapter on civil disobedience, she goes from Henry D. Thoreau all the way back to Socrates to give a philosophical substratum to disobedience, anchored in the most ancient tradition. She acknowledges, however, the considerable political importance of contemporary civic movements in the United States, notably facing the question of intolerable racial segregation. Hannah Arendt’s text “On Violence” seems to be marked, albeit silently, with her reading of Benjamin’s 1921 essay. We can see this from the initial thesis on the “instrumental nature of violence” and its link, as a “means,” with a history of technology (military technology in particular). We sense it also in the return to the same text by Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence: “The problems connected with violence have, until now, remained very obscure.” But the difference with Benjamin appears also in the divisions traced by Arendt: far from joining power (pouvoir) and violence, she dissociates the two and proposes a different typology, one more academic than genuinely dialectical. Far from the “ethical anarchism” and the Benjaminian dilemmas between power and potency, or between “conservative violence” and “pure violence,” she ends by suggesting that power (pouvoir), as such, does not exert violence but rather allows us to avoid it: “We know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence—if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it.” This relative confidence that is finally granted to power—inasmuch as it protects us from violence in the name of its own “legitimate violence”—is in huge contrast to the established historical facts of which Arendt was nevertheless well aware. She described correctly, for example, the state violence that was contemporary, insisting on the “weird suicidal development of modern weapons,” which went hand in hand with the “massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics.” She saw in the “politics of nonviolence,” as she called it, a coherent response to this globalized violence, and she concluded that between the Vietnam War and the anticolonial struggles a politics of violence prevails as though unavoidably and which is embodied, for example, in Frantz Fanon’s watchword in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), a watchword accentuated by Jean-Paul Sartre in the famous preface to the book: “only violence pays.” Thought, however, appears to sleepwalk in this domain, suspended by

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uprising or this bridge dangerously spanning between two banks of transindividual life. Her political act consists in following the sovereign impulse of an ethical potency (puissance) that is “justice” itself (in which we could easily recognize the Gerechtigkeit that Benjamin spoke of). But she contravenes: she disobeys, she opposes and, in a sense, does violence to the interdiction and to the violence of the “right/law” (Recht) in the city. When writing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel was aware just how much this point of overturning, or of uprising, spoke to us of the fundamental conflict between “human law” (civic right embodied by Creon) and “divine law” (the sacred right to bury the dead) or between “government [as] a negative potency and the ethical relation of man and woman embodied so well in the ‘relationship unmixed’ between brother and sister” in Sophocles’s tragedy. It fell to Hölderlin, in his eccentric translation of Antigone, to produce, at the very heart of the tradition, that “caesura of the speculative” that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe spoke of so well: a modern uprising of ancient tragedy, so to speak. Modern uprisings, moreover, ended up changing space, and therefore temporality. We are no longer in the little village of Thebes, but in the great metropolises of the industrial revolution; and very soon in the space of the bizarre, undifferentiated times of postmodernism and of neo-capitalism. Class struggles, then, or as is sometimes said, classless struggles. Contemporary Marxist thinkers wonder about this, thinkers like Immanuel Wallerstein and Étienne Balibar. How should we rethink the movements by which an ethical potency is capable of calling for a political act? It is no surprise that Balibar places the problem on the level of violence. How should we understand what ties “civility,” as he calls it, to omnipresent “civil war”? What link should be created between justice, right, exception, war, and revolution? So many questions asked by Balibar in the opening to his collection of texts titled Violence and Civility:

role of hackers and of “electronic civil disobedience” that the Critical Art Ensemble gave an example of in the years 1994–96. The list is, fortunately and unfortunately, endless. We do not refuse, we do not disobey, we do not rebel, and we do not rise up without violence, to whatever degree. The question is to know how, in each case, to critique—which does not mean to judge in advance—this in history, as Walter Benjamin showed as a philosophical task. There would, therefore, be a possible path between the ethics of the “right to rebel” (to rebel against the right/law itself) according to Henry D. Thoreau and the politics of “we have the right to rebel,” according to the famous phrase by Jean-Paul Sartre. We rebel only rarely without violence. To rise up, as we know, is often Violence to Violence, as the German anarchist Ernst Friedrich wrote, in the 1920s, in his work War against War; or as, before him, Auguste Blanqui had called for a “War against capital” in his ‘”Instructions for a taking up of arms” in 1868. It is nonetheless necessary to analyze how uses of violence brought certain revolutionary groups—the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, Action directe in France, or the Japanese Red Army, for example—towards a “sectarian functioning and a total [political and popular] de-contextualisation to compensate for the spectacularization of actions,” as Isabelle Sommier remarked in her study La Violence révolutionnaire on contemporary revolutionary violence. At the same time, how can we forget the leaflet from Libération ( fig. 21), when it called so clearly, as the “wisest of duties,” to “sabotage the enforcement of German law by every means”? To defend one’s rights or the rights of others is “the wisest” of ethical duties, even if it obliges us to violate an existing but iniquitous right/ law. But this is perhaps what can demand the exercising, de facto, of political violence, albeit in “legitimate defense.” We know that ethics and morals are today at the heart of the human sciences, whether it has to do with history or economics, ethnology or sociology, as seen in a recent anthology edited by two anthropologists, Didier Fassin and Samuel Lézé. To acknowledge the founding position of desire for any transindividuality—as maintained in a tradition first Spinozist and then Hegelian, right up to psychoanalysis and beyond—goes hand in hand with an acknowledgment of an ethical potency (puissance). To rise up, says Bernard Aspe, carries us towards an overturning of values that “obliges us to consider the ethical element in which everyone’s capacity to change is at play.” It is then that the potency (puissance) of desire finds its place of expression or expansion in the bridge that it builds between the dimension of thought, speech, and that of the political act as such. Antigone would be the tragic heroine of this overturning, of this

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About violence in its “individual” and “collective” forms (one of the insistent questions before us is precisely whether that distinction can be maintained), its “old” (perhaps even archaic) or “new” (not just modern but also “postmodern”) forms, we should surely be able to say something other than that it is unbearable and we are against it—or again, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous formula about the “state of nature”, taken up by Immanuel Kant, that “we must leave it.” But it must be frankly admitted that we do not know, or no longer believe we know, how to “leave it.” And we sometimes find ourselves suspecting that, by a new ruse of history less

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favorable than the old one, this inability of ours is becoming a condition and form of the reproduction and extension of violence. War or racism, aggression or repression, domination or insecurity, sudden explosion or latent threat, violence and all different kinds of violence may today be, at least in part, precisely the consequence of this nonknowledge. Western bourgeois societies seem to speak, in effect, with one voice to “condemn all violence”: we are scandalized when the white shirt of a company’s director of human resources is torn from him, a man who, moreover, at once throws a few hundred employees into unemployment for years to come. It falls to the oppressed class—in this case, the workers brutally thrown out into the street—to contest the institution when it monopolizes—not only the means of production but also—violence, albeit in contempt of any moral or social justice. How, then, can we not oppose this through the “extra-legal, and therefore revolutionary, figure” of a violence of uprising? Étienne Balibar agrees, saying that one should look also at the idea of insurrection, or at the idea of permanent insurrection, and in the widest possible sense. The idea supposes that we do not forget the intimate dimension of uprisings in our daily spaces and temporalities. According to Balibar, it is true that no one can be set free by anyone but him or herself, but also that no one can free themselves without the help of others; and here the philosopher proposes the notion of “anti-violence”—neither “nonviolence” nor “counter-violence”—in order to rethink, again through Karl Marx, the conflicting relations between instituted powers and revolutionary politics in contemporary societies, to the point of seeking to trace a path—an astonishing one—between Lenin and Gandhi.17

THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES It does not suffice to disobey. It is critical, also, that disobedience—the refusal, the call for insubordination—be transmitted to others in the public space. To rise up? First of all, to make our fear rise up, to throw it far away, or even to throw it directly in the face of those who gain their power (pouvoir) from manipulating our fears. To throw it faraway, but, also, to circulate this very gesture. To give it, in this way, a political meaning. This means to raise up our desire. It is to take it—and with it our expansive joy—in order to throw it into the air, so that it spreads over the space in which we breathe, the space of others, the entirety

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17. Provocation à la désobéissance 1962, passim. Turlais, ed. 2015, 204. Jonas 1955, 20 and 27. Thoreau 1849, 383, and 389. Thoreau 1854, passim. Bedau, ed. 1991, passim. Gans 1992, passim. Bové and Luneau 2004, passim. Critchley 2007, passim. Gandhi 1927–1948, passim. King 1958, passim. King 1963, passim. Lanza del Vasto 1971, passim. Pyronnet 2006, passim. Laugier 2004a, 222–225. Laugier 2004b, 99–124. Cavell 1979, passim. Ogien and Laugier 2010, 47 and 192–193. Ogien and Laugier 2014, 270–280, 207–208, 211, and 213. Benjamin 1920, 231–234. Benjamin 1920–1921, 305–306. Benjamin 1922–1925, 323. Benjamin 1929, 207–221. Benjamin 1921, 236–252. Sorel 1908, passim. Birnbaum 2008, 59–99. Weigel 2008, 88–109. Arendt 1970, 14, 65, and 87. Fanon 1961, 1–52. Pontara 1996, 2050. Canto-Sperber 1996, passim. Weissman 2010, passim. Multitudes 2010, passim. Multitudes 2001, passim Multitudes 2012, passim. Collectif Mauvaise Troupe 2014, passim. Critical Art Ensemble, 1994–1996, passim. Friedrich 1924, passim. Blanqui 1868, 257–271. Sommier 2008, 140. Fassin and Lézé, eds. 2013, passim. Aspe 2006, 37 and 111 (and in general, 67–117). Hegel 1807, 553. Hölderlin 1804, passim. Lacoue-Labarthe 1978, 39–69. Wallerstein 1979, 155–168. Balibar 1987, 207–246. Balibar 2010, 1. Balibar 1994, 17–18, 23–24, and 38. Balibar 2001, 251–304. Balibar 2004, 305–321. Balibar 2009, 435–461. Balibar 2015, 15–50.

fig. 22 Mikhail Kalatozov, Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), 1964. Still frame (a drive-in screen on fire).

fig. 23 Mikhail Kalatozov, Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), 1964. Still frame (flying leaflets).

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all, the act of touching in order to grasp, or (as in the French verb tracter, or the English word “tractor”) to pull or tow something or someone away from his or her initial place. Spinoza created “tracts” in the two senses of the word: the considerable Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as well as the modest placard Ultimi Barbarorum that he wrote and sought to stick on the walls of The Hague following the murder of the Republicans Johan and Cornelis de Witt in 1672 (but his friend Van der Spick wisely held him back, for Spinoza would probably have been killed in turn. The text of the first (the “treaty”) was devotedly printed, transmitted from generation to generation, while the second (the “tract”) has not been available for a very long time, to my knowledge. The tract form is perhaps tied to the paradox of being a written text … but one that does not “stay,” a written text that “flies” or that “flies away” like those words of urgency that we throw into the air without thinking of the consequences, without worrying about making them monuments engraved for the future. Spoken words fly away and written words stay it seems, but tracts are midway, merely writings destined to fly away. The German word for “tract,” Flugblatt, says this so well, meaning literally “flying page.” What do we write on a tract? How do we write so that the writing will fly so quickly towards those who were not expecting it? With slogans and watchwords, perhaps. But something else is needed for the words to genuinely fly away: we must make language rise up, create poetry, however critical or trivial it may be. When Charles Baudelaire took up his pen on February 27, 1848, for the first “flying page”’ of Salut Public, he began simply, in harmony with all his friends, with “Vive la République!” But very soon afterward, his sentences sought to dig deep into the heart of what he saw around him in the revolutionary effervescence, which he called “the beauty of the people”: “A free man, whoever he is, is more beautiful than marble …” In 1871, Arthur Rimbaud wrote, in the wake of the Paris Commune, sentences that were no doubt private—taken from his letters to Georges Izambard— that quickly became the perfect tracts concerning poetic insubordination for generations to come: “Poetry will no longer rhythm action; it will be ahead.” And what of Victor Hugo? Petitions, political writings, placards, position statements, trials, exiles, public speeches, etc. The tracts are everywhere and sumptuous. We could even go so far as to read the chapter titles of Les Misérables as tracts: “For the dark hunt a silent pack”; “Cemeteries take what they are given”; “Help from below may be help from above”; “What horizon we see from atop the barricade”;

of the public and political space. There are two images for this—two concomitant images—in an admirable film that was for so long censored, Soy Cuba by Mikhaïl Kalatozov. These images concern the popular uprising, the student uprising first of all, which was aborted in 1956, in the streets of Santiago de Cuba and Havana. The first image concerns a firebrand or a fire ship: we see young students throwing Molotov cocktails at the screen of a drive-in theater that is showing official images of the dictator Fulgencio Batista ( fig. 22). A fire ship is a vessel loaded with inflammable materials or explosives, used to ram or to set fire to an enemy building. The word firebrand is used today to describe political subversives or leaflets calling for revolt. The other image is that of the leaflets distributed by the same revolutionary students. In French, they are called papillons, “butterfly tracts,” due to their size and difference to posters or placards for example; these butterfly tracts rise up towards the clouds, without us knowing if their message will be lost in the emptiness of the sky or if their potency (puissance) of expansion is showing its irresistible character in this way ( fig. 23). The paper butterflies rise up: we do not know who will receive the message of uprising carried by the wind. It is like a moment of extreme lyricism included in the implacable logic of a scene of extreme violence (a scene of police repression on the grand stairs of the University of Havana evokes, irresistibly, the great massacre in Battleship Potemkin on the Richelieu Steps in Odessa). A lyrical moment and a fragile moment: what is the worth of those poor butterflies calling, as a last resort, the clouds to revolt, when down below, the young rebels themselves are being murdered by the police? Yet, it is a necessary moment, a moment in spite of all. The leaflets that we see here rising up to the sky—the contrary, then, of those propaganda tracts dropped over Cuba by the USAAF airplanes, for example—would be to the political space what fireflies are to a summer night or what butterflies are to a bright summer day. They are the sign of a desire that flies, that goes wherever it wants, that insists, that persists, that resists in spite of all. There is a double meaning in the word tract. On the one hand, it is a “short treatise,” a literary genre that gave rise to those numerous pamphlets and brochures that have addressed political, moral, or religious questions since the fifteenth century. On the other hand, and according to a more recent meaning, it is a simple little piece of paper handed out for political propaganda. In both cases, the etymology of the Latin substantive tractatus survives, a word that means the act of dealing with a subject, of deliberating, carrying on a discussion, or delivering a sermon; but also, and above

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“Supreme shadow, supreme dawn.” Much later, in March 1937, protesting with all his strength against the fascist attack by Franco on the Spanish Republic, René Char was to publish Placard pour un chemin des écoliers, a collection of poems whose dedication was printed on a sheet of paper that was sold at the Spanish Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition, for the benefit of the children of Spain:

philosophical wisdom that was taught them by their professor, Kurt Huber (who was also executed in the spring of 1943): Aristotle and his critique of all political tyranny, but above all the German romantics, beginning with Fichte (“And you must behave/ as though upon you and your act alone/ depended the fate of an entire people”), Schiller (“Everything can be sacrificed for the greater good of the state, everything, except what the state itself must serve, for it is never an end in itself”), Novalis (“celebrate peace”) … Beginning, of course, with Goethe himself:

Children of Spain—O, how RED, to cloud forever the burst of steel that tears you apart; - To you … Children of Spain, I shaped this placard while some of you with morning eyes had not yet learned of the purposes of death that flowed in them. Sorry for dedicating them to you. With my last reserves of hope.

The hour has come when I find My friends assembled in the night For the sleepless silence And the beautiful word of liberty We murmur it, we stammer it Till extraordinary novelty …

Better than anyone, the poet knows the meaning of a butterfly. It flies away, but often clumsily. It passes very close to you, beating its wings and surprising you with its beauty. And that can change your life. It can very easily fall into the nets of predators or police. It does not seem to know where to go, yet it manages to cross all the frontiers and to find recipients. But for what message? Georg Büchner was not yet twenty years old when he printed, secretly, his famous tract Der Hessische Landbote. The message was clear: “This sheet wishes to announce the truth in the land of Hesse, but the one who says the truth will be hanged; it is possible that the one who reads the truth will be punished by false judges.” The tract is certainly a little thing, a mere sheet of paper with words written on it. But this can also be as dangerous as a weapon. Hence the precautionary statements addressed by Büchner to his reader: hide the tract and, yet, do everything to communicate it to friends, etc. The call to rebel that was contained in that Flugblatt in 1834 was, to finish, punctuated by calls to “lift your eyes,”“lift your arms” and overturn the walls of prisons to “build a house of freedom” against what the poet already called the policing “violence of the law.” As a brief form, the tract brings to the surface, at the heart of its call to action, something like a condensed pathos: a lyricism of the gesture we might say, inherent to the political decision to rise up. This is what we already sense in the—obviously illegal—tracts written in 1916 by Rosa Luxemburg, in which the political and economic reflections written in a severe style leave room, as though rhythmically, for vibrant calls that are often quite different from mere watchwords. “This cannot be, this should not be!” In 1943, when young students Christoph Probst and Hans and Sophie Scholl threw their “White Rose” tracts around the corridors of the University of Munich, they were resorting to the

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This poem by Goethe, copied out on an anti-Nazi tract in 1943, evokes the whole situation concerning the writer of the tract itself: the “butterfly” is formed in the shadows and, in this sense, making a tract is like a clandestine literary and artisanal activity that has nothing directly “heroic” or “sublime” about it, as Inge Scholl insists in her account of The White Rose. But, once written, the tract calls out to all space, seeking to move in the air so that the ambient oppression will make room for something like the expression of a desire, an anticipation, a call to live in the free air. But for this, it must first be patiently copied. The White Rose’s tract, having copied out Goethe’s poem, ended then with a call to recopy again: “We ask you to copy out this tract, and to pass it on.” Thus, like fireflies and like butterflies, tracts only have meaning when they are used to throw out their multiple signals, when they make up a crowd, however dispersed they may be. Tracts need the fundamental condition of their technical reproduction. How can we not be struck by a certain resemblance that links Goethe’s poem, copied out by Hans Scholl in Munich in 1943, with Paul Éluard’s famous poem “Liberté,” written in Paris during the same period? But how can we not see, too, that the difference between these two poems—the “classical” and the “modern”—hangs on Éluard’s incessant repetition of the line “I write your name”: “On my school notebook/ On my desk and the tree/ On the sand on the snow/ … On every page read/ On every blank page/ Stone blood paper or ash”? Could we not understand, from this, the repetition of the line “I write

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your name” as a reference to the gesture by he or she who, in the clandestine night, copies out or reproduces, on every possible medium, tracts destined to be disseminated in broad daylight to a country in which repression still reigns? It is exactly this which initially impresses the reader who consults, in the collections of printed matter in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the thirty-two enormous binders in which more than twelve thousand clandestine tracts produced and distributed in France during the Nazi occupation are collected, put together by Paul and Renée Rou-Fouillet, studied by Anne Plassard, and, then made available by Pierrette Turlais in a magnificent anthology. Every technique of reproduction, from the most professional to the most primitive, was employed to create these tracts: lead-typography or photogravure when the tracts come from well-equipped clandestine press organizations, such as Libération (thus, the printed tract which cites the text of the headline in Libération dated March 1, 1943: “French youth answer: SHIT!” ( fig. 24). When the creation of these tracts comes from a marginal milieu, the means and the printing procedures are more ephemeral and artisanal: typewriters (with the successive carbons becoming more and more blurred), rubber stamps (with the successive stampings becoming paler), stencils, reproductions by mimeographs (Gestetner, Neostyle, Roneo), but also the improvised cut-out stencils, and even handwriting demanding a laborious copying. Someone, for example, writes with a pen, in miniscule letters, on the back of a postage stamp: “Dirty Kraut.” Another sends anonymous and furious postcards to Marshal Pétain himself. Another writes their message on little school notebook tags. On April 12, 1941, the police chief in Belfort sent a letter to his superior at the Préfecture: “Manuscript butterflies found on the public road.” On the letter he stuck nine minuscule tracts that were written in pencil, as though by a high school pupil: “Hitler to the stake” or “Victory” with a very big “V” ( fig. 25). The same year was to be that of the famous “battle of the V,” summarized by Jean-Pierre Guéno in the second volume of his illustrated work titled Paroles de l’ombre: blossoming everywhere we see “V” for victory, including in tracts in which the letter is cut in color paper, as children do for school celebrations ( fig. 26). Whatever the case, the instructions were always the same: “Copy out … Act quickly … Pass on.” But what was to be copied and circulated? What could have pushed someone to act? What words? What kinds of phrases (for illustrations were rare at this time)? The range of literary genres is considerable: there are watchwords, of course; appeals (beginning with that of June 18, reproduced so many times); stories

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fig. 24

fig. 25 Clandestine stickers included in a letter sent to the Prefecture from Police Headquarters in Belfort. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Clandestine leaflet printed by the “Liberation” Resistance group in France’s southern zone, 1943. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

fig. 26 “V,” clandestine Resistance leaflet, 1942. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

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“Open the prisons” “Long live the Red Army!” “They murdered Gabriel Péri” “Remember our dead” “And the vengeance is already burning” “There is no insignificant act” “Repeat this around you”

(of deportation, of repression, like when we are told of the executions of Georges Politzer and Jacques Solomon, of Gabriel Péri and Lucien Sampaix); information (on the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy, for example); encrypted messages with their special “alphabets”; testaments (like the last letter of Danielle Casanova) … but there are also poems (like the “Ballade des pendus” (Ballad of the hanged) composed in the style of François Villon and dedicated “to the patriots hanged in Nîmes on March 2, 1944” by the SS), songs that are alternatively militant (like “Hymne des francs-tireurs”) and ironic (like “Maréchal, nous voilà !”). The librarians even reserved a special section for facéties (tricks, schemes), ironic ballads pastiching classical authors, hijacked banknotes (Pétain strangled by a worker) or New Year cards predicting the allied invasion, and more. To which the German services responded by creating false communist tracts, terrifying ones) or simply, misinformation. With the very wide range of watchwords we find also the range of affects—the feeling of oppression, hatred, the injunction not to give in, the cry of hope which seems to contain an inherent despair felt when faced with the situation, that of the Jews at Drancy, for example, for whom a tract was circulated in Paris titled “Nazi Atrocities.” We could, quite easily, imagine a montage of these 12,000 tracts from which would surge something like the oceanic poem of uprisings, revolts experienced, demanded, and acted out against the oppressor, and about which a few sentences, gleaned by chance, already give an idea:

And it is in this way, with every butterfly tract, however modest it may be, that the “extraordinary novelty” of the word liberty is experienced as it was used in Goethe’s poem, copied onto tracts by the White Rose. This novelty or this singularity concerns gesture as much as action. It concerns gesture in the same way as the raised arm drawn by Courbet and then engraved on the frontispiece of Salut Public during the 1848 revolution: it is lyrical, it calls upon a poetry that would be in tune with the “beauty of the free man” that Baudelaire sang of on the same sheet. But it is also action: that is to say concrete, technical, precise (as we see, for example, through the actions of the man who escapes in the film by Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped). Here, the precision and the technique are a question of life and death, and that is why the “concrete,”“down to earth” tracts are among the most moving, as seen in the recipes for making explosives or “mimeograph paste ink,” lists of double agents, the indication of radio frequency waves. Or the tract titled Indications à donner aux hommes qui veulent prendre le maquis:

“Upright, stay free” “Parisians, stand up” “Stand up against Hitler” “Everyone, stand up, onward!” “We are being suffocated” “Demonstrate in front of the town halls” “Demonstrate en masse against deportation” “Disobedience is the wisest of duties” “Down with anti-Semitism! No racism in the Latin Quarter!” “Demand the immediate suppression of the yellow star” “Sabotage—Resistance—Strike” “Comrades, sabotage the German war machine” “Falsify lists, destroy files, lose orders” “Miners of France, go on strike for May 1st” “Young people, hide: resist!” “For armed struggle!” “We want potatoes” “Bread, bread! Let’s see the mayor!”

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Effects and objects to be taken with you: 2 shirts, 2 underpants, 2 pairs of woollen socks, 1 woollen jumper, 1 muffler, 1 pull-over, 1 woollen cover, 1 spare pair of shoes, laces, thread, needles, trouser buttons, safety pins, soap, a flask, a bowl, knife, spoon, fork, cup, torch, compass, weapon if possible, sleeping bag if possible. Wear warm clothes, a beret, a raincoat, a good pair of cleated shoes. … Come with even just a false civil status document, but which is perfectly in line with the work card to cross roadblocks, carry provision cards and ticket sheets. The latter are indispensable to facilitate provisioning. There are, therefore, many ways to conceive, to write, to create, and to receive tracts. There are at least as many kinds as there are of butterflies. Like butterflies, tracts are double, dual, and thereby efficient: they are fragile and resistant at the same time, poetic and strategic, made of shadows and of light, of gestures and actions,

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desperate and full of that power that is called uprising. Are they texts at all? Yes, since their task is to transmit very important messages. Are they images at all? Yes, since they resemble butterflies, to the point of being able to, like them, appear and disappear. They beat their wings and rise into the air. Their symmetry—like on the wings of the adult butterfly that we call imago—often hide an enigma at the same time as they deliver its beauty. We fold a tract in order to hide the message and so it will fly better in the wind. Or we fold it to reveal, as in the tract that I had in my hand before and that I could not find again in the volumes of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Written in capital letters, it praised Hitler and Pétain: let us love and admire chancellor hitler eternal england is unworthy of living let us curse and crush the people overseas only the nazi on land will survive be then a support to the german fuhrer navigator boys will finish the odyssey to them alone belongs a just punishment the victor’s palm awaits the swastika

fig. 27

But it was enough to fold the butterfly in the middle—like any proper butterfly—and use the poetic resources of Alexandrine verse to cut the hemistich to suddenly have two Resistance tracts: let us love and admire eternal england let us curse and crush only the nazi on land be then a support to navigator boys to them alone belongs the victor’s palm

fig. 28 Clandestine leaflet, Buckmaster Network, folded and unfolded, 1942. Private collection, Paris.

chancellor hitler is unworthy of living the people overseas will survive the german fuhrer will finish the odyssey a just punishment awaits the swastika

I have just found a visual equivalent to this folding strategy in the recent work by Zvonimir Novak titled Agit tracts, where a portrait of Hitler, dating from 1942 and created in the “hard,” contrasted style typical of fascist publications at the time of the Occupation ( fig. 27). But the image is, in reality, crossed down the middle by a fold. If we unfold it, the face is dislocated and lets us see a cartoon-like depiction of four pigs, with the indication—something characteristic of the Épinal prints, so popular since the nineteenth century—“Seek the 5th …” (fig. 28).

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It is indeed in every possible sense that these tracts appear, to finish, as double objects, divided, duplicable, or even dual. As gesture objects, they transmit affects (uprising as the pathos of revolt), as we saw, everywhere, in May 1968: “Imagination in power.” As action objects, they create the tactics and the techniques (uprising as praxis of confrontation) as we see, for example, in a tract written on May 17, 1968, and distributed by the Mouvement du 22 mars to explain how to protect themselves against the teargas the police used against the demonstrators:

and when there is a strike, show images of the strike.” The Godardian dazibao edited in Kinopraxis in 1970 by David C. Degener, would be considered the “apogee of the agit-prop” in the domain of cinema, at a time when the slogan “Liberate expression” was still in everyone’s mind. But was it not also a way of summoning recording and duplication techniques—16 mm cinema, and soon video—with a view to “sending butterflies,” in the same way that Courbet’s engraving and the typography composing the text by Baudelaire had done this on the small sheet of Salut public in 1848? Shouldn’t the lyricism of uprising be given the technical tools of a craft that is capable of diffusing the butterflies’ fragile message?18

Against gas. Preventative measures: If you have no gas mask: diving goggles, motorbike goggles, ski goggles, etc. (airtight). Hold half of a lemon in your mouth (to breathe). Cloth around the nose and mouth. Do not stay in a gas cloud, pour water onto the cloth placed around your mouth, open the hydrants (do not put water in your eyes or face for it can release toxic products). Do not breathe the gas from the grenades (they make a loud explosion). On the skin: a layer of foundation or thick cream. For the eyes: eye drops or hydro-cortisone. Before even turning towards semioticians who are ready to appropriate student tracts—for example those of the “Liaison des étudiants anarchistes,” by “taking measure of [their] vocabulary and [their] content,” which is what a team of scholars did in 1975, organized by Michel Demonet—it is worth recalling that the revolts of 1968 were prepared, in part, by an anonymous tract from 1966, from the Situationist International, De la misère en milieu étudiant, and in 1967 by a genuine tractatus, the Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations by Raoul Vaneigem. In the tract, he called for a “day without hindrance,” and the treaty affirmed that the “imagination is the exact science of possible solutions.” This is a remarkable phrase, opening the possibility for Chris Marker’s cine-tracts, and those of Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Gorin in the following years: these are brief militant films that take up the principles of efficiency explained in the 1920s by Dziga Vertov under the names “ciné-réclame” or Kino-pravda. “Militant images, struggling images and sounds,” wrote Godard in 1969, in his “Initiation révolutionnaire au cinema”: ‘That is to say, images and sounds that are neither in the press nor on television …

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18. Spinoza, 1670, 597–908. Baudelaire, 1848, 1028, and 1032. Rimbaud 1871, 92. Hugo 1845–1862, 353, 415, 470, 723, 942, and 1125. Char 1937, 266. Büchner 1834, 75, and 91–92. Rosa Luxemburg 1916–1918, 200. Scholl, 1953, 17–19, 59, 117, 123 and 125–126. Éluard 1939–1945, 57. Roux-Fouillet 1954, V–XXIII. Plassard 2002, 31–34. Turlais, ed. 2015, passim. Guéno 2011, 40–41. Novak 2015, 24–25. Lewino 1968, passim. Mouvement du 22 mars 1968, 15. Liaison des étudiants anarchistes 1966–1968, passim. Demonet et al. 1975, passim. De la misère 1966, 34. Vaneigem 1967, 348. Vertov 1923, 38–46. Vertov 1924, 62–70. Godard 1969, 119. Godard 1970, 342–350. Brenez and Schmitt 2006, 115–116.

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Nancy Jean-Luc. 1986. La Communauté désœuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990. (16) Nancy Jean-Luc. 2001. La Communauté affrontée. Paris: Éditions Galilée. (16) Nancy Jean-Luc. 2011. Maurice Blanchot : passion politique. Lettre-récit de 1984 suivie d’une lettre de Dionys Mascolo. Paris: Éditions Galilée. (16) Nancy Jean-Luc. 2014. La Communauté désavouée. Paris: Éditions Galilée. (16) Negri Antonio. 1981. Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. (9)

Ramond Charles. 1994. “Le nœud gordien. Pouvoir, puissance et possibilité dans les philosophies de l’âge classique.” In Spinoza et la pensée moderne. Constitutions de l’objectivité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998, 129–172. (9)

Plassard Anne. 2002. “De la haine à l’espoir : la collection de tracts de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, no. 10, 2002, 31–34. (18)

Raulet Gérard. 1992. Herbert Marcuse. Philosophie de l’émancipation: Paris: PUF, 1992. (15)

Poivert Michel. 2006. L’Image au service de la révolution : photographie, surréalisme, politique. Cherbourg: Le Point du jour. (10)

Revault d’Allonnes Myriam and Hadi Rizk, eds. 1994. Spinoza : puissance et ontologie. Paris: Éditions Kimé. (9)

Pontara Giuliano. 1996. “Violence.” In Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale. Edited by Monique Canto-Sperber. Paris: PUF, 2004 (revised and expanded), 2047–2052. (17)

Nicolas Jean. 2002. La Rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661-1789. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. (9, 16)

Proust Françoise. 1991. “Introduction.” In Immanuel Kant, Vers la paix perpétuelle [et autres textes]. Translated by Jean-François Poirier and Françoise Proust. Paris: Flammarion, 2006, 5–38. (13)

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Pyronnet Joseph. 2006. Résistances non violentes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. (17)

Pic Muriel. 2013. “Penser au moment du danger. Le Collège et l’Institut de recherche sociale de Francfort” suivi de : “Walter Benjamin et le Collège de Sociologie.” Critique 69, 2013, no. 788–789, 81–109. (10)

Negri Antonio. 1992. Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations. Edited by Timothy S. Murphy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. (9)

Novak Zvonimir. 2015. Agit tracts. Un siècle d’actions politiques et militaires. Paris: L’Échappée. (18)

Provocation à la désobéissance. 1962. Provocation à la désobéissance. Le procès du Déserteur. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2012. (16, 17)

Renaut Alain and Lukas Sosoe. 1991. Philosophie du droit. Paris: PUF. (13)

Rimbaud Arthur. 1871. “Lettres dites du voyant.” Poésies. Une Saison en enfer. Illuminations. Edited by Louis Forestier, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, 83–94. (18) Roth Michael S. 1988. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. (14) Rousseau Jean-Jacques. 1755. Discourse on Inequality. Translated by Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin, 1984. (13)

Roux-Fouillet Renée and Paul. 1954. Catalogue des périodiques clandestins diffusés en France de 1939 à 1945. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1954. (18) Rovere Maxime. 2010. Spinoza. Méthodes pour exister. Paris: CNRS Éditions. (9) Ruetz Michael and Rolf. 2009. Michael Ruetz: Spring of Discontent, 1964–1974. Göttingen: Steidl. (15) Saar Martin. 2013. Die Immanenz der Macht. Politische Theorie nach Spinoza. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. (12) Sartre Jean-Paul. 1952. “Réponse à Albert Camus.” In Situations, IV. Portraits. Paris: Gallimard, 1964, 90–125. (11) Schoell-Glass Charlotte. 1998. Aby Warburg und der Antisemitismus. Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. (7) Scholl Inge. 1953. La Rose blanche. Translated by Jacques Delpeyrou. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008.(18) Scribner R. W. 1981. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (6) Sighele Scipio. 1891. La Foule criminelle. Essai de psychologie collective. Translated by Paul Vigny. Paris: Alcan, 1901 (revised edition). (12)

Sighele Scipio. 1894. La teorica positiva della complicità. Turin: Bocca. (12)

Spinoza Benedict de. 1675. Éthique. Translated by Bernard Pautrat. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1999). (9)

Thoreau Henry David. 1854. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. (17)

Simmel Georg. 1911. “On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture.” In The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays. Translated by K. Peter Etzkorn. New York: Tearchers College Press, 1968, 27–46. (8)

Sportelli Silvana, 1995. Potenza e desiderio nella filosofia di Spinoza. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. (9)

Thoret John-Baptiste, ed. 2007. Politique des zombies. L’Amérique selon George A. Romero. Paris: Ellipses. (5)

Simonin Anne. 2008. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942-1955 : le devoir d’insoumission. Paris-Caen: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 2008. (16) Simonin Anne. 2012. Le Droit de désobéissance. Les Éditions de Minuit en guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2012. (16) Sommier Isabelle. 2008. La Violence révolutionnaire. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2008. (17) Sorel Georges, 1908. Reflections on Violence. Translated by Thomas Ernest Hulme. Edited and revised by Jeremy Jennings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. (17) Spinoza Benedict de. 1670. Traité des autorités théologique et politique, Translated by Madeleine Frances. In Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1954, 597–908. (9, 18)

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Sternhell Zeev, 1983. Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France. Paris: Gallimard, 2012 (revised edition). (16) Stoekl Alan. 1992. Agonies of the Intellectual. Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. (14) Surya Michel. 1992. Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre, Paris: Gallimard, 1992. (10) Surya Michel. 2004. La Révolution rêvée. Pour une histoire des intellectuels et des œuvres révolutionnaires, 1944-1956. Paris: Fayard, 2004. (16) Surya Michel. 2015. L’autre Blanchot. L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. (16) Tanis James and Daniel Horst. 1993. Images of Discord: A Graphic Interpretation of the Opening Decades of the Eighty Years’ War. Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College Library. (7) Thoreau Henry David. 1849. “Civil Disobedience.” In Walden and Civil Disobedience. London: Penguin Classics, 1986. (17)

Tillion Germaine. 1957. L’Algérie en 1957. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957. (16) Trotsky Leon. 1923–1936. De la Révolution. Cours nouveau. La révolution défigurée. La révolution permanente. La révolution trahie. Translated by anonymous. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1963. (16) Turlais Pierrette, ed. 2015. Papiers de l’urgence. Tracts et papillons clandestins de la Résistance. Paris: Éditions Artulis, 2015. (17, 18) Vaneigem Raoul. 1967. Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. (18) Vertov Dziga, 1923. “Ciné-réclame.” Translated by Sylviane Mossé and Andrée Robel. Articles, journaux, projets. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma-Union Générale d’Éditions, 1972, 38–46. (18) Vertov Dziga. 1924. “La Kinopravda.” Translated by Sylviane Mossé and Andrée. In Articles, journaux, projet. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma-Union Générale d’Éditions, 1972, 62–70. (18) Vidal-Naquet Pierre. 1958. L’Affaire Audin. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989. (16)

Vidal-Naquet Pierre. 1998. Mémoires, 2. Le trouble et la lumière, 1955-1998. Paris: Éditions du SeuilLa Découverte, 2007. (16) Vigo Jean. 1933. “Zéro de conduite : scénario, découpage littéraire.” In Œuvre de cinéma. Films, scénarios, projets de films, textes sur le cinéma. Edited by Pierre Lherminier. Paris: La Cinémathèque française, 1985, 113–192. (4) Wallerstein Immanuel, 1979. “Class Conflict in the Capitalist World-Economy.” In The Capitalist WorldEconomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 283–293. (17) Warburg Aby. 1893. “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring.” In The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999, 89–156. (7) Warburg Aby. 1900. “Ninfa Fiorentina.” In Werke in einem Band. Edited by Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010, 198–210. (7)

INDEX OF ARTISTS Warburg Aby. 1920. “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther.” In The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by David Britt. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999, 597–697. (6) Warburg Aby. 1925–1929. Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen. Gesammelte Schriften, II-2. Edited by Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. (7) Warburg Aby. 1927–1929. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Gesammelte Schriften, II-1. Edited by Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003 (revised edition). (6, 7) Warnke Martin, ed. 1973. Bildersturm. Die Zerstöung des Kunstwerks. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. (7) Warnke Martin. 1980. “Der Leidschatz der Menschheit wird humaner Besitz.” In Der Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1980, 113–186. (8) Warnke Martin. 1986. “Arte e rivoluzione.” In La storia. I grandi problemi dal Medioevo all’Età contemporanea, V. L’Età moderna, 3. Stati e società. Edited by Nicola Tranfaglia and Massimo Firpo. Turin: UTET, 1986, 796–804. (7)

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Warnke Martin. 2011. “Rebellion.” In Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie 2. Edited by Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke, and Hendrik Ziegler. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 280–287. (7) Weigel Sigrid. 2008. Walter Benjamin. Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. (17) Weissman Élisabeth. 2010. La Désobéissance éthique. Enquête sur la résistance dans les services publics. Paris: Stock, 2010. (17) Wiggershaus Rolf. 1986. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theory, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Roberson, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (15) Zarka Yves Charles, ed. 2015. “‘Percer le voile de la réification’ : de Lukács à Honneth, et retour.” In Critique de la reconnaissance. Autour de l’œuvre d’Axel Honneth. Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2015, 39–53. (15) Zibechi Raúl. 2005. Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. Translated by Ramor Ryan. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010. (12) Žižek Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso Books, 2015. (14)

Anonymous (Catalan) CNT-FAI, Barcelona, 1936 Book Private Collection p. 191, top Anonymous (French) Appel, 2003 Book 15 × 10.2 cm Private collection p. 196, left Anonymous (French) Barricade de la rue Saint-Florentin (vue prise de la place de la Concorde) (Barricade on Rue SaintFlorentin [taken from Place de la Concorde]), Paris sous la Commune, par un témoin fidèle: la photographie (Paris under the Commune, by a faithful witness: photographs), no. 24, Paris, Au bureau de vente, 17 rue du Croissant, [1872] Album 27 × 37.3 cm (closed) Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Anonymous (French) Cinétracts (Film tracts), 1968 Films: color/silent, each 2:00 to 3:00 min. Iskra collection, Paris p. 181

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Anonymous (French) Élections à la commune. Gustave Courbet candidat du VIe arrondissement, scrutin du 10 avril 1871 (Elections for the Commune. Gustave Courbet, candidate for the 6th arrondissement, election April 10, 1871) Poster Documentation, Musée d’Orsay, Paris p. 199 Anonymous (French) La Guerre sociale (The social war), Paris, 1906–15 Magazine 61 × 47 × 4.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Anonymous (French) “La jeunesse française répond : Merde !” (France’s youth says: Shit!), Call to action in Libération, no. 20, March 1, 1943 Leaflet 21 × 29 cm Private collection p. 176 Anonymous (French) La Pomme de pin[s] (The pine cone), 1921 Proof for an unpublished leaflet 22.5 × 14.3 cm Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris

Anonymous (French) Le Torrent révolutionnaire (The revolutionary deluge) Published in Le Charivari, no. 192, vol. 3, July 12, 1834 Engraving 15 × 20 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 105 Anonymous (French) Letter from a nineteenyear-old prisoner in the Fleury-Mérogis Prison, 1971 Roneoed leaflet 29.7 × 21cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’édition Contemporaine, – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe Fonds GIP/Groupe d’information sur les prisons Anonymous (French) Manières de dire (Ways of speaking), 1880 Lead pencil and black ink 20.1 × 31 cm Département Patrimonial du Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles (SMAC) de la Préfecture de Police de Paris p. 198

Anonymous (French) Postcard “Grèves de Limoges, 15 avril 1905, Barricade Ancienne” (Strikes in Limoges, April 15, 1905, old barricade) “Crosper Batier, pho-édit., Limoges – Repr. Int” Postcard 9 × 14 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 238, top Anonymous (French) Postcard “Les troubles de Méru – La tête de la colonne des Grévistes, conduite par des Femmes, édi E.L.D” (The disturbances in Méru – The head of the column of strikers, led by women, pub. E.L.D), 1908 Postcard 9 × 14 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris Anonymous (French) Postcard “Raon-l’Étape – L’Émeute du 28 juillet – Barricade de la rue Thiers, 1907” (Raon-l’Étape – The July 28 riot – Barricade on Rue Thiers, 1907) “L. Cuny, édit; Raon-l’Étape, 1907” Postcard 9 × 14 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 238, bottom

Anonymous (French) Postcard “Reste du Christ de l’avenue Baudin détruit à la suite des troubles de Limoges” (Remains of the crucifix on Avenue Baudin, destroyed during the disturbances in Limoges), May 8, 1905 Postcard 9 × 14 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 230, bottom Anonymous (French) Postcard “Tergnier – La Grève des Cheminots [III] – Les deux machines tamponnées sur la plaque tournante” (Tergnier – The Railway Workers’ Strike [III] – Collision on the turntable), 1910 “Tergnier – Impr. Ch. Poulain – Cliché Collet” Postcard 9 × 14 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 230, top Anonymous (French) Tiqqun, 2001 Magazine 30 × 20 cm Private collection p. 196, right Anonymous (French) Un coin de la salle des fusillés Paris sous la Commune, par un témoin fidèle: la photographie (A corner of the room for those who have been shot. Paris under the Commune, by a faithful witness: photographs), no. 5. Paris, Au bureau de vente, 17 rue du Croissant, (1872) Album 26.7 × 37.2 cm Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris 

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Anonymous (French) “Une barricade dans les prisons [Daniel Defert]” (A barricade in the prisons [Daniel Defert]). In “J’accuse,” supplement to La Cause du peuple, no. 15, December 18, 1971 Newspaper 58 × 42 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe Fonds GIP/Groupe d’information sur les prisons Anonymous (Greek member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando) Burning the bodies of gassed prisoners in the open-air cremation pits outside the Crematorium V gas chamber, Birkenau, 1944 Contact print with two images 12 × 6 cm Archival collection of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim p. 256 Anonymous (Greek member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando) Women being driven towards the Crematorium V gas chamber, Birkenau, 1944 Contact print with two images 12 × 6 cm Archival collection of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim p. 256

Anonymous (Italian) Potere operaio (Workers’ power), 1968 Magazine 41 × 27.7 cm Private collection Anonymous (Italian) Rosso (Red), 1968 Magazine 61 × 45 cm Private collection Anonymous (Mexican) Fortino Sámano fuma un cigarro antes de ser fusilado (Fortino Sámano smokes a cigar before being shot) Mexico City, 1917 Modern gelatin silver print 4 × 5 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 6013 p. 246 Anonymous (Mexican) Fusilados por tropas zapatistas en Ayotzingo (Men shot by Zapatist troops at Ayotzingo), c. 1913–17 Modern gelatin silver print 4 × 5 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 63752 p. 245, bottom Anonymous (Mexican) Jesús Carranza acompañado de varios hombres observan una vía destruida (Jesús Carranza and others inspecting destroyed rail track), “Revolución Zapatista,” Coahuila, Mexico, c. 1914 Modern gelatin silver print 2 × 3 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 32942 p. 239, left

Anonymous (Mexican) Ojo! Una revista que ve (Eye! A magazine that sees), Mexico, 1958 First issue of a magazine self-published by Héctor Garcia 38.5 × 28.5 cm Alexis Fabry collection, Paris p. 195 Anonymous (Mexican) Soldaderas en posición para disparar contra las gavillas de José Chávez García (Women combatants ready to fire at the forces of José Chavez García), c. 1914 Modern gelatin silver print 4 × 5 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 63945 p. 267, bottom Anonymous (Mexican) Soldaderas preparan comida en el techo de vagón de tren (Women combatants cooking on the roof of a train), c. 1914 Modern gelatin silver print 5 × 7 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 6388 Anonymous (Mexican) Soldados y campesinos caminan por calle, México (Soldiers and peasants walking in the street, Mexico), c. 1914 Modern gelatin silver print 5 × 7 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 5317

Anonymous (Russian) Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Council (nos. 7, 8, 9, 10), March 9, 10, 11, and 12, 1921 Newspaper 48 × 31.5 cm Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine – BDIC, Nanterre Anonymous (South African) African National Council demonstration, Fordsburg, 1952 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm p. 252, top Anonymous (South African) Dead and wounded outside the police station in Sharpeville, March 21, 1960 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm Getty Images p. 252, bottom Paulo Abreu Conde Fereira, 2003 Video: black and white, 4/3, sound, 1:22 min. Paulo Abreu/Light Cone p. 144 Dennis Adams He’s no terrorist, “Airborne” series, 2002 C-print mounted on aluminum 102.7 × 136.5 × 2.3 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 03-243

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Dennis Adams Patriot, “Airborne” series, 2002 C-print mounted on aluminum 103 × 137 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 03-241 p. 99 Dennis Adams Payback, “Airborne” series, 2002 C-print mounted on aluminum 102.5 × 137 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris inv. FNAC 03-242 Henri Alleg La Question, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958 Book Private collection p. 347, left Jean Alloucherie Noches de Sevilla. Un mes entre los rebeldes (Nights in Seville. A month with the rebels), Barcelona-Madrid, 1937 Book Private collection p. 191, bottom Manuel Álvarez Bravo Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Murdered striker), 1934 Gelatin silver print 18.8 × 24.5 cm Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris p. 247

Francis Alÿs, with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 Cinematographic documentation of an event, Lima, Peru Francis Alÿs/Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich p. 107 Art & Language Shouting Men, 1975 Screenprint and felt pen on paper 9 sections, 75 × 60.5 cm (each) MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona p. 155 Antonin Artaud Notebook no. 321, 1947 Manuscripts and drawings 22.5 × 17.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 168, bottom Antonin Artaud Notebook no. 326, 1947 Manuscripts and drawings 22.5 × 17.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 168, top Antonin Artaud Hammer used by Antonin Artaud at Ivry for “trying out” his texts and stressing his diction, 1947 50 × 15 × 4 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 130

Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 8.3 × 11.4 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection p. 202, top Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Gelatin silver print 8.5 × 11.6 cm Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris p. 202, middle Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Gelatin silver print 8.5 × 11.6 cm Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris p. 202, bottom Ever Astudillo Delgado Cali, 1975–78 Gelatin silver print 8.5 × 11.6 cm Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris Hugo Aveta Ritmos primarios, la subversiòn del alma (Basic rhythms: subversion of the soul), 2013 Video loop: 16/9, color, sound, 8:11 min Hugo Aveta/NextLevel Galerie, Paris p. 281 Ismaïl Bahri Film à blanc (Blank film), 2012 Series made during a residency at Fabrique Phantom Videos: 16/9, silent, duration variable Ismaïl Bahri collection p. 227

Artur Barrio Livro de Carne (Meat book), 1978 Photographs Each 35 × 45 cm Artur Barrio collection p. 197 Georges Bataille and André Breton Contre-ttaque : union de lutte des intellectuels révolutionnaires (Counterattack: United front of revolutionary intellectuals), 1936 Leaflet 27 × 21 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 165 Taysir Batniji Gaza Journal intime (Gaza diary), 2001 Video: 4/3, color, sound, 4:52 min Taysir Batniji/Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris pp. 276–277 Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Champfleury, and Charles Toubin Le Salut public, no. 1, 1848 Newspaper 27.2 × 22 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Champfleury, and Charles Toubin Le Salut public, no. 2, 1848 Newspaper 30.5 × 22.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 160

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Francisca Benitez Garde l’Est, 2005 Still frame Francisca Benitez collection p. 286 Francisca Benitez Garde l’Est, 2005 Still frame Francisca Benitez collection Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Gelatin silver print 15 × 10 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_016 p. 270, top Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Gelatin silver print 15 × 10 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_028 p. 270, bottom Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Gelatin silver print 15 × 10 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_018 Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Gelatin silver print 15 × 10 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_024

Ruth Berlau Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone, 1948 Gelatin silver print 15 × 10 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_025 Ruth Berlau American Strikers, 1941–44 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B018_004 p. 208, top

Joseph Beuys So kann die Parteiendiktatur überwunden werden (Thus can the dictatorship of parties be overcome), 1971 Printed plastic bag, felt 96/500, published by art intermedia, Cologne 68 × 48 × 1.2 cm Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich pp. 178–179

Ruth Berlau American Strikers, 1941–44 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B126_004 p. 208, bottom

Joseph Beuys Unbetitlet (Untitled), 1971 15.8 × 16.3 cm Pencil on card Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München. Leihgabe Sammlung Klüser, Munich p. 131

Ruth Berlau American strikers, 1941–44 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B018_003

Alfredo M. Bonanno La Gioia armata [Armed Joy], Edizioni di Anarchismo, 1977 Book Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 194, bottom

Ruth Berlau American Strikers, 1941–44 Gelatin silver print 10 × 15 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA_B126_010

Enrique Bostelmann América – un viaje a través de la injusticia (America – a journey through injustice), Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1970 Book 27 × 20 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris

Joseph Beuys Diagramma Terremoto (Diagram of an earthquake), 1981 Pencil on ECG paper 10 × 340 cm Isabel and Agustín Coppel collection, Mexico p. 180

Bruno Boudjelal Sur les traces de Frantz Fanon (In the footsteps of Franz Fanon), 2012 6 photographs, modern prints, 2016 40 × 40 cm Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’ pp. 274–275

Désiré-Magloire Bourneville Hystéro-épilepsie, hallucinations: angoisse (Hysterical epilepsy: hallucinations, anxiety), 1875 Vintage albumen print 9 × 5.5 cm Private collection Désiré-Magloire Bourneville Hystéro-épilepsie: contorsions (Hysterical epilepsy: contortions), 1875 Vintage albumen print 9 × 5.5 cm Private collection Désiré-Magloire Bourneville Untitled, undated Vintage albumen print 9 × 5.5 cm Private collection Désiré-Magloire Bourneville Untitled, undated Vintage albumen print 9 × 5.5 cm Private collection Bertolt Brecht Modellbuch (Model) for Mother Courage and Her Children, January 11, 1949– April 4, 1961 Photomontage Page from a booklet 30.1 × 25 × 0.5 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, inv. BBA MB_031_248 p. 266 André Breton et al. La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, 1924 Magazine 29.2 × 20.5 × 0.8 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 164

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Marcel Broodthaers Carte d’une utopie politique et Deux petits tableaux 1 ou 0 (Map of a political utopia and Two little pictures 1 or 0), 1973 Card mounted on canvas, ink, felt pen, printing, collage, drawing, and handwriting 119 × 185.5 cm; 27 × 35 cm (each) Private collection p. 171 Marcel Broodthaers Soleil politique et Fig., Fig., Fig. (Political sun and Fig., fig., fig.) (diptych), 1972 Printing and collage on paper 27 × 36 × 44 cm and 36 × 44 cm Estate Marcel Broodthaers p. 170 Malcolm Browne Self-Immolation by Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc, Saigon, 1963 Modern gelatin silver print 24 × 30 cm AP/SIPA Agency p. 253 Gilles Caron Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic demonstrations in Londonderry), 1969 Modern gelatin silver print, 2006 30 × 40 cm Fondation Gilles Caron p. 139, top, cover

Gilles Caron Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry (AntiCatholic demonstrations in Londonderry), 1969 Contact sheet, modern print, 2016 30 × 40 cm Fondation Gilles Caron p. 139, bottom Gilles Caron Manifestations étudiantes à Paris (Student demonstrations in Paris), 1968 Modern gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Fondation Gilles Caron Gilles Caron Manifestations étudiantes à Paris (Student demonstrations in Paris), 1968 Modern gelatin silver print 30 × 40 cm Fondation Gilles Caron Gilles Caron Manifestation paysanne à Redon (Farmers demonstrating in Redon), 1967 Modern gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Fondation Gilles Caron p. 138, left Gilles Caron Manifestation paysanne à Redon (Farmers demonstrating in Redon), 1967 Modern gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Fondation Gilles Caron p. 138, right Henri Cartier-Bresson Comité Information Défense, Palais de la Mutualité, Paris, France, 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print 20.2 × 25.6 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, May 1968 Gelatin silver print, 1984 41 × 28.6 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris p. 209 Henri Cartier-Bresson Funérailles des victimes de Charonne, Paris, France (Funeral of the victims of the “Charonne massacre,” Paris, France), February 13, 1962 Gelatin silver print, 1980s 20.4 × 25.3 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris p. 222, top Henri Cartier-Bresson Manifestation AIDA pour la libération de 100 artistes argentins disparus, Paris (AIDA demonstration for the freeing of 100 abducted Argentinian artists, Paris), 1981 Gelatin silver print, 1990s 20.4 × 25.3 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson Manifestation AIDA pour la libération de 100 artistes argentins disparus, Paris (AIDA demonstration for the freeing of 100 abducted Argentinian artists, Paris), 1981 Gelatin silver print, 1990s 20.7 × 25.7 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson Manifestation AIDA pour la libération de 100 artistes argentins disparus, Amsterdam, Pays-Bas (AIDA demonstration for the freeing of 100 abducted Argentinian artists, Amsterdam, Netherlands), September 12, 1981 Gelatin silver print, 1980s 20.3 × 25.3 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson Manifestation pro-Castro, New York (Pro-Castro demonstration, New York), September 1960 Gelatin silver print, 1970s 20.5 × 25.3 cm Fondation Henri CartierBresson, Paris p. 222, bottom Cornélius Castoriadis et al. Socialisme ou barbarie, no. 23 (1959–60) Magazine 22.7 × 14.4 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe Pere Català Pic Aixafem el feixisme (Crush fascism), 1936 Photomechanical print 29.6 × 19.5 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 111 Claude Cattelain Video Hebdo 41 (Weekly video 41), 2009–10 Pal video: 4/3, color, sound, 3:12 min. Claude Cattelain collection, Valenciennes p. 128

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Claude Cattelain Video Hebdo 46 (Weekly video 46), 2009–10 Pal video: 4/3, color, sound, 6:30 min. Claude Cattelain collection, Valenciennes p. 129 Agustí Centelles Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca p. 242, top Agustí Centelles Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca p. 242, bottom Agustí Centelles Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Agustí Centelles Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Agustí Centelles CNT trade union trucks, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca

Agustí Centelles Children playing, Montjuic, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca p. 271 Agustí Centelles Children playing, Montjuic, Barcelona, 1936 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 12 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Agustí Centelles Amnestied prisoners leaving the model prison, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 15 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Agustí Centelles Amnestied prisoners leaving the model prison, Barcelona, 1936 Modern gelatin silver print 15 × 17.3 cm Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Agustí Centelles Rioting after the victory of the Popular Front at the elections of February 16, 1936. Plaça de la República (Plaça Sant Jaume), Barcelona, February 17, 1936 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper 16.8 × 23,1 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 216, top

Agustí Centelles Belchite, Teruel, Aragon Frontline, September 1939 Gelatin silver print 24.7 × 36 cm Private collection Chieh-Jen Chen The Route, 2006 35 mm film transferred onto DVD: color and black and white, silent, 16:45 min. Chieh-Jen Chen/Lily Robert gallery p. 225 Léon Cogniet Les Drapeaux (The flags), 1830 Oil on canvas 19 × 24 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans Pascal Convert Soulèvement (Uprising) Left to right: Paul VaillantCouturier, Charles Michels, Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 2015 Palladium contact print on pure linen paper 47 × 30.7 cm, 47 × 74.3 cm, 47 × 30.7 cm Crystal on mirror, glass, and charcoal H 10 x L 56 x W 11 cm Edition 1/2 Pascal Convert/Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris p. 141 Gustave Courbet Révolutionnaire sur une barricade, projet de frontispice pour “Le Salut public” (Revolutionary on a barricade: draft frontispiece for “Le Salut public”), 1848 Charcoal on paper 9.5 × 12.5 cm Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris p. 134

Honoré Daumier Les Femmes socialistes (Women socialists), in Le Charivari,  April–June 1849 Lithograph 36.5 × 25 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 264, left Honoré Daumier Les Femmes socialistes (Women socialists), in Le Charivari,  April–June 1849 Lithograph 36.5 × 25 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 264, right Honoré Daumier Les Divorceuses (Divorced women), in Le Charivari, August–October 1848 Lithograph 36.5 × 25 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 265 Honoré Daumier Les Divorceuses (Divorced women), in Le Charivari, August-October 1848 Lithograph 36.5 × 25 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Armand Dayot Journées révolutionnaires 1830-1848 (Revolutionary days), Paris: Flammarion, 1897 Book 15 × 22 cm Private collection pp. 236–237

401

Armand Dayot L’Invasion, le Siège, la Commune (The invasion, the siege, the Commune), 1870–71 Original edition 35.5 × 28 × 3.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Guy Debord et al. Internationale situationniste… nouveau théâtre d’opération dans la culture (Situationist International: New theater of cultural operations), 1958 Leaflet 40 × 21 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris André-Adolphe Eugène Disdéri (attributed to) Insurgés tués pendant la Semaine sanglante de la Commune (Insurgents killed during the Commune’s “Bloody Week”), 1871 Albumen print 21 × 27 cm Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris p. 245, top Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray “Élevage de poussière” (Breeding dust) Littérature, no. 5, 1923, p. 10 Magazine 23.5 × 17.5 × 2 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Edmond, successor to Charles Marville (presumed photographer) Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Cour des bureaux (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. The office courtyard), c. 1871 Albumen print 27 × 36.8 cm Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris p. 229 Carl Einstein “Unes declarations sensacionals de Carl Einstein” (A sensational statement by Carl Einstein), 1938 Article by Sebottomtià Gasch in Meridià. Setmanari de literatura, art i política: tribuna del Front Intellectual Antifeixista (Meridià. A weekly of literature, art and politics: the voice of the Anti-Fascist Intellectual Front) Magazine page 30 × 20 cm Private collection p. 188 Élie Faure “Portrait de passionaria” (Portrait of La Pasionaria) in Regards, no. 134, August 6, 1936, p. 9 Magazine 36 × 27.5 cm Private collection p. 143 Robert Filliou Optimistic Box no. 1, 1968 Wood, sandstone, and paper 11 × 11 × 11 cm Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris p. 226

Michel Foucault “The situation in the prison is intolerable …,” 1971 Manuscript of the leaflet accompanying the investigation by the Prisons Information Group (GIP) in France 21 × 15 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe GIP Collection Leonard Freed Residents of Guernica in front of a mural replica of Pablo Picasso’s painting, 1977 Gelatin silver print  40 × 30 cm Magnum Photos, Paris p. 137 Gisèle Freund International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, 1935 Contact sheet 20 × 23 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe p. 174 Gisèle Freund International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, 1935 Gelatin silver print 24 × 30 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe p. 175, top

Gisèle Freund International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, 1935 Gelatin silver print 24 × 30 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-BlancheHerbe p. 175, bottom Gérard Fromanger Film-tract no. 1968, 1968 16 mm film: color, silent, 2:45 min. Gift of the artist, 2006, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris p. 184 Federico García Lorca Mierda (Shit), 1934 Calligram Indian ink 25 × 25 cm Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid p. 163 Marcel Gautherot Pèlerinage à l’occasion du jubilé du sanctuaire diocésain du Bon Jésus de Matosinhos (Pilgrimage for the jubilee of the shrine of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos), c. 1950 Modern gelatin silver print 45 × 45 cm Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo p. 136, bottom Marcel Gautherot Sanctuaire diocésain du Bon Jésus de Matosinhos (The shrine of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos), c. 1947 Modern gelatin silver print 45 × 45 cm Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo p. 136, top

402

Agnès Geoffray Catalepsie (Catalepsy), “Incidental Gestures” series, 2011–15 Modern gelatin silver print 35 × 50 cm FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand p. 145, bottom

Eduardo Gil Paraguas. Segunda Marcha de la Resistancia (Umbrellas. Second Resistance March), Buenos Aires, December 9–10, 1982 Modern gelatin silver print 50 × 60 cm Eduardo Gil collection p. 269, bottom

Agnès Geoffray Laura Nelson, “Incidental Gestures” series, 2011–15 Modern gelatin silver print 22 × 16 cm FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand p. 146

Eduardo Gil Siluetas y canas. El Siluetazo (Silhouettes and cops. The silhouette action), Buenos Aires, September 21–22, 1983 Modern gelatin silver print 50 × 60 cm Eduardo Gil collection p. 273

Agnès Geoffray Métamorphose II (Metamorphosis II), “Métamorphoses” series, 2012–15 Photograph 55 × 75 cm Collection of the artist p. 145, top Jochen Gerz Calling to the Point of Exhaustion, 1972 Betacam, black and white, sound, 19:30 min. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris p. 148 Eduardo Gil Niños desaparecidos. Segcunda Marcha de la Resistancia (Murdered children. Second Resistance March), Buenos Aires, December 9–10, 1982 Modern gelatin silver print 50 × 60 cm Eduardo Gil collection p. 269, top

Jules Girardet La Colonne Vendôme après sa chute (The Vendôme Column after being torn down), 1871 Oil on wooden panel 21 × 27 cm Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris p. 228 Jack Goldstein A Glass of Milk, 1972 Film: color, sound, 3:42 min. The Estate of Jack Goldstein/Galerie Buchholz, Cologne p. 132 Julio González Mà dreta aixecada (Right hand raised), c. 1942 Bronze 44 × 15.2 × 12.6 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 140, left

Julio González Mà esquerra aixecada (Left hand raised), c. 1942 Bronze 37.2 × 19 × 15.2 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 140, right Julio González Cap cridant (Shouting head), c. 1936–39 Oil on canvas 46 × 33 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 151, top Julio González Cap de Montserrat cridant (Head of Montserrat shouting), c. 1942 Bronze 31,5 × 19,8 × 29,3 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 150 Julio González Montserrat cridant, núm. 1 (Montserrat shouting, no. 1), c. 1936–39 Oil on canvas 46 × 33 cm Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona p. 151, bottom Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard, “Que faire dans le cinéma ? Participer aux luttes et nouvelles méthodes de travail” (What is to be done in the cinema? Take part in struggles and new working methods), in Politique Hebdo, no. 23, March 11, 1971 Magazine Open: 42 × 55 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris

Francisco de Goya The Disasters of War: “Que valor!,” 1810–20 First edition, 1863, plate no. 7: etching, aquatint, burnisher, and drypoint 15.5 × 21 cm Sylvie and Georges Helft collection p. 109, bottom Francisco de Goya Los Caprichos, 1799 Second edition, 1855, etching, aquatint, and burin 21.4 × 15 cm Sylvie and Georges Helft collection p. 108 Francisco de Goya Los Disparates (The follies), 1815–24 Third edition, 1891, plate no. 1, etching, aquatint, burnisher, and drypoint 24.3 × 35.3 cm Sylvie and Georges Helft collection p. 109, top George Grosz Blutiger Karneval (Bloody carnival), 1915–16 Lithograph 25.6 × 20.5 cm Private collection p. 213 Raymond Hains OAS. Fusillez les plastiqueurs (OAS. Shoot the bombers), 1961 Torn poster on canvas backing 50 × 73 cm Private collection p. 200 Raymond Hains Sans titre (Untitled), 1952 Slashed poster on canvas backing 50 × 50 cm FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais , Dunkirk p. 201

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Raymond Hains Sans titre (Untitled), c. 1957 Slashed posters on canvas backing 81 × 102 cm Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin/Paris Private collection, France Ken Hamblin Beaubien Street, 1971 Modern gelatin silver print 15 × 20 cm Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan p. 268 Raoul Hausmann Portrait of Herwarth Walden at Bonset, 1921 Postcard sent by Raoul Hausmann to Theo van Doesburg 14 × 9 cm Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Archive, RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, La Haye p. 162 Arpad Hazafi Budapest, 1956 Modern gelatin silver print 24 × 30 cm AP/SIPA Agency p. 217 John Heartfield “Benütze Foto als Waffe!” (Use photography as a weapon!), AIZ magazine, no. 37, Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Berlin, Jg. VIII, no. 37, p. 17, 1929 Magazine 37.8 × 27.5 cm Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin, inv. JH 2265 p. 192

John Heartfield Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Germany, Germany above all else), 1929 Book 23.2 × 49.6 cm Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin, inv. JH 1646 p. 241, bottom

Bernard Heidsieck Machines à mots, no. 28 (Word machines, no. 28), October 1971 Handwriting and collaged press photograph Ink, photograph, and collage on Arches paper 64 × 50 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 94-258

John Heartfield Art for the dustjacket of John Reed’s 10 Tage, die die Welt erschütterten [Ten Days That Shook the World], Verlag für Literatur und Politik, Vienna-Berlin, 1927 20.3 × 42.5 cm Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin, inv. JH 722 p. 192, top

Bernard Heidsieck Machines à mots, no. 35 (Word machines, no. 35), October 1971 Handwriting and collaged press photograph Ink, photograph, and collage on paper 62 × 50 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 94-259

John Heartfield Artwork for the magazine Jahrbuch für Politik, Wirtschaft, Arbeiterbewegung, Verlag Carl Hoym Nachf., Hamburg-Berlin, 1926 24.7 × 22 cm Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin, inv. JH 1423 p. 192, bottom Bernard Heidsieck Machines à mots, no. 10 (Word machines, no. 10), October 1971 Handwriting and collaged press photograph Ink, photograph, and collage 64 × 50 cm Lent by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 94-257 p. 173

Jerónimo Hernández Soldaderas en el estribo de un tren en la estación de Buenavista (Women combatants on the steps of a train in Buenavista station), “Tropas federales” (Federal troops) series, Mexico, 1912 Modern gelatin silver print 5 × 7 cm Secretaria de Cultura, INAH, Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 5670 p. 267, top William Hogarth The Battle of the Pictures, 1744–45 Etching 17.8 × 19.8 cm Private collection p. 104

Alvaro Hoppe Concentración de la oposición (Santiago de Chile) (Opposition rally [Santiago du Chili]), 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 21.2 × 31.8 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection Victor Hugo “Anniversaire de la révolution de 1848” (Anniversary of the revolution of 1848), 1855 In Actes et paroles. Pendant l’exil Manuscript 44.5 × 38 × 9 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris pp. 158–159 Victor Hugo “Pétition pour l’abolition de la peine de mort” (Petition for the abolition of the death penalty), 1855 In Actes et paroles. Pendant l’exil Manuscript 45.5 × 37 × 10 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Victor Hugo Toujours en ramenant la plume (Always coming back with the quill), 1856 Brown ink and wash drawing 10.5 × 28 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 96, top Mat Jacob Chiapas 1 (marche 1997) (Chiapas 1 [March 1997]) Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue p. 278

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Mat Jacob Chiapas 2, 1996–2001, Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue p. 279, top Mat Jacob Chiapas 3 (Marcos 1996), (Chiapas 3 [Frames 1996]) Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Mat Jacob Chiapas 4 (Dignité rebelle 1996) (Chiapas 4 [Rebellious dignity] 1996) Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Mat Jacob Chiapas 7 (marche 2001) (Chiapas 7 [March 2001]), Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper, 2016 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue p. 279, bottom Mat Jacob Chiapas 8 (marche 2001]) Mexico (Chiapas 8 [March 2001], Mexico) Photograph and inkjet print on textured paper 15 × 20 cm Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Asger Jorn Fin de Copenhague (End of Copenhagen), 1957, Paris: Allia, 2001 Book 25 × 17 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 183

Asger Jorn Brisez le cadre q[u]i [é] touf[ fe] l[’]image (Smash the frame that stifles the image), 1968 Five-color offset lithograph 50.1 × 32.7 cm Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen p. 232

Herbert Kirchhoff Revolución en La Paz (Bolivia) (Revolution in La Paz, Bolivia), 1946 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 16 × 23 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection p. 216, bottom

Asger Jorn Pas de puis[s]ance d[’] imagination sans images puis[s]ante[s] (No power of imagination without powerful images), 1968 Five-color offset lithograph 50 × 33.2 cm Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen p. 233

Käthe Kollwitz Aufruhr (Riot), 1899

Tsubasa Kato Break it Before it’s Broken, 2015 Video: color, sound, 4:49 min. Cameraman: Taro Aoishi Tusbas Kato collection p. 115 Dmitri Kessel Greek National Liberation Front rally, Athens, December 3, 1944 p. 250, left Dmitri Kessel Greek National Liberation Front rally, Athens, December 3, 1944 p. 250, right Dmitri Kessel Greek National Liberation Front demonstrators gathered around the bodies of three fellow protestors shot by police during a rally, Athens, December 3, 1944 p. 251

Engraving (etching, drypoint, aquatint, emery paper, and roller) 55 × 70 × 2.5 cm Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne p. 123 Käthe Kollwitz Die Freiwilligen (The volunteers), 1920 Charcoal and red chalk 45 × 60 cm Fritsch collection Käthe Kollwitz Losbruch (Assault), 1902–03 Sheet 5 of the Peasants’ War cycle Engraving (etching, drypoint, aquatint, resist, and soft ground) 68 × 86 × 2.5 cm Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne p. 122 Alberto Korda El Quijote de la Farola, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana, Cuba (Don Quixote of the streetlamp, Plaza de la Revolución, Havana, Cuba), 1959 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 29.9 × 38.1 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection p. 127

Eustachy Kossakowski “Panoramic Sea Happening – Sea Concerto, Osieki” by Tadeusz Kantor, 1967 Gelatin silver print 45 × 56 cm Anka Ptaszkowska collection p. 114 Maria Kourkouta Remontages, 2016 16 mm film transferred onto video (loop): black and white, silent, 5:00 min. Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 133, endpapers Maria Kourkouta Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. Frontière grécomacédonienne (Idomeni, March 14, 2016. Greek– Macedonian border), 2016 HD video loop: color, sound, 36:00 min. Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 287 Germaine Krull Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly (The Dancer Jo Mihaly), 1925 Modern gelatin silver print 22 × 15.9 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen p. 118 Germaine Krull Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly in “Revolution”, Paris (Dancer Jo Mihaly in “Revolution”, Paris), 1925 Modern gelatin silver print 21.3 × 12.3 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen p. 119

405

Hiroji Kubota Manifestation des Black Panthers (Black Panthers rally), Chicago, 1969 Modern gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Magnum Photos, Paris p. 149 Marie Lechner Forms of Digital Resistance, 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 280, text p. 406 Jérôme Lindon (editor) Provocation à la désobéissance. Le procès du Déserteur (Call for disobedience: The deserter on trial), Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1962 Book 18 × 11.5 cm Private collection p. 347 Héctor López Poblado la Victoria, Santiago, Chile (Village of La Victoria, Santiago, Chile), c. 1986 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper 20 × 30.3 cm Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection p. 220, top Héctor López Poblado la Victoria, Santiago, Chile (Village of La Victoria, Santiago, Chile), c. 1986 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper 20 × 30.3 cm Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection p. 220, bottom

Rosa Luxemburg Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie [The Crisis of Social Democracy], Zürich: Verlagsdruckerei, 1916 Book 15.7 × 14.1 cm Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Nachlassbibliothek Bertolt Brecht, Nb bb D 01/037 p. 190 Édouard Manet Guerre civile (Civil war), 1871 Two-tone lithograph on thick paper 47 × 52.5 cm Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris p. 244 Man Ray Élevage de poussière (Le Grand Verre de Marcel Duchamp), New York (Breeding dust [Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass], New York), 1920 Vintage gelatin silver print, with cropping of the glass negative, c. 1960 11.5 × 17.2 cm Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris p. 97 Man Ray Élevage de poussière (Le Grand Verre de Marcel Duchamp), New York (Breeding dust [Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass], New York), 1920 Vintage gelatin silver print, contact from glass negative, 1990 10 × 12.5 cm Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris

Man Ray Fireworks, 1934 Solarized gelatin silver print 29.2 × 22.5 cm Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris Man Ray Sculpture mouvante or La France (Moving sculpture or La France), 1920 Gelatin silver glass plate negative. The image was obtained by reversing the values obtained from the negative. 9 × 12 cm Donation in lieu of taxes, 1994, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, p. 100 Man Ray Cover, Mother Earth, IX, no. 6, New York, edited by Emma Goldman, 1914 Magazine 30 × 20 cm David and Marcel Fleiss collection, Galerie 19002000, Paris p. 187, left Man Ray Cover, Mother Earth, IX, no. 7, New York, edited by Emma Goldman, 1914 Magazine 30 × 20 cm David and Marcel Fleiss collection, Galerie 19002000, Paris p. 187, right Germán Marin Chile o Muerte (Chile or death), Mexico City: Editorial Diógenes, 1974 Book 22 × 19 cm Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine – BDIC, Nanterre

Charles Marville Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris), c. 1871 Albumen print 36.3 × 27.8 cm Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris p. 225 Charles Marville Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris), c. 1871 Albumen print 27.8 × 36.8 cm Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Charles Marville Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Salle de réception (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Reception hall), c. 1871 Albumen print 25.3 × 36.8 cm Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Cildo Meireles Inserçoes em circuitos ideológicos 2: Projeto Cédula (Insertions into ideological circuits 2: Banknote project), 1970 27 offset prints on paper with ink-stamped texts and slogans 5 × 15 cm (each) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid p. 185 Annette Messager 50 Piques (50 Pikes), 1992–93 Soft toys, colored pencils on paper, various materials, and 50 metal pikes 279.4 × 127 × 71 cm Annette Messager and Marin Karmitz collection/ Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris p. 147

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Jasmina Metwaly Tahrir Square: Cut Skin, 2011 Video-painting, part of a series of 12 (edition of 7), 5:05 min. Open Gallery, London p. 103, top Jasmina Metwaly Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, 2011 Video-painting, part of a series of 12 (edition of 7), 4:38 min. Open Gallery, London p. 103, bottom Henri Michaux Émergences-résurgences [Emergences/resurgences] Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972 Book 21.5 × 33 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 166 Henri Michaux Face aux verrous (Facing the locks) Paris: Gallimard, 1992 Book Private collection Henri Michaux Sans titre (Untitled), 1975 Acrylic on paper 32.5 × 50 cm Private collection p. 96, bottom Henri Michaux Sans titre (Untitled), 1971 Indian ink and acrylic on paper 50 × 65 cm Private collection p. 167 Henri Michaux Sans titre (Untitled), 1957 Indian ink on paper 56.5 × 76.5 cm Private collection

Joan Miró Preliminary drawings for L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), 1974 Pen on paper 15.5 × 21.4 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona p. 257, bottom Joan Miró Preliminary drawings for L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), 1974 Pen on paper 17 × 18 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona Joan Miró Homme torturé s’évadant (Tortured man escaping), 1973 Colored pencils and pen on paper 19.8 × 15.5 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona p. 258 Joan Miró L’Espoir du condamné à mort, I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), February 9, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 267 × 351 cm Fundacio Joan Miró, Barcelona pp. 260–261

Joan Miró L’Espoir du prisonnier (The prisoner’s hope) Preliminary drawings for L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III (The hope of a condemned man, I, II, and III), 1974 Colored pencils and pen on paper (notepad) 7.7 × 12.5 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona p. 257, top Joan Miró Prisonnier crucifié (Crucified prisoner), 1974 Colored pencils and pen on paper 21 × 14 cm Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona p. 259 Lisette Model Metropole Café, New York, c. 1946 Gelatin silver print 50.8 × 40.6 cm Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid p. 120 Lisette Model Valeska Gert, “Olé,” 1940 Vintage gelatin silver print Gift of the Estate of Lisette Model, 1990, by direction of Joseph G. Blum, New York, through the American Friends of Canada, inv. 35154, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa p. 121 Tina Modotti Bandolier, Corn, Guitar (Composition for a Mexican song), 1927 Modern gelatin silver print 29.5 × 22.3 cm Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

Tina Modotti Bandolier, Cob, Sickle, 1927 Modern gelatin silver print 18 × 23 cm Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine p. 110

Robert Morris Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969 Multiples, New York , 1970 10.8 × 30.6 cm Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris p. 113

Tina Modotti Woman with Flag, Mexico City, 1928 Modern gelatin silver print 23.3 × 28.7 cm Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine p. 125

Pedro Motta Natureza das coisas #024 (The nature of things #024), from the “Natureza das coisas” series, 2013 Mineral print on cotton paper, edition of 3 + 2 artist’s proofs 61 × 55 cm Private collection p. 106

Tina Modotti Worker, Mexico, 1928 Modern gelatin silver print 17.5 × 23.7 cm Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine p. 124 Tina Modotti Peasants reading “El Machete”, 1927 Modern gelatin silver print 16.5 × 22 cm Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine p. 189 Ernesto Molina Sín título (Untitled), 1977 Newspaper cuttings and paper 27.9 × 21.5 cm Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection p. 218 Ernesto Molina Sín título (Untitled), 1977 Newspaper cuttings and paper 27.9 × 21.5 cm Anna Gamazo de Abelló collection p. 219

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Jean-Luc Moulène Series: 39 objets de grève (39 strike objects), 1999–2000 Casse-tête Dirty Protest Holgeir Meins La Bobine novacore La Pantinoise Le Costume novacore Les Souliers de la lutte Manivelle de pédalier de cycle dit “Le casse-tête” Cibachrome prints under diasec 47 × 36 cm (each) Jean-Luc Moulène/Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris pp. 210–211 Saburo Murakami Passing Through, 1956 Performance at the Second Gutai Exhibition, 1956 Photography: Kiyoji Otsuji Modern gelatin silver print 19.8 × 30 cm Seiko Otsuji, Makiko Murakami, and Musashino Art University Museum & Library/Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Estate of Saburo Murakami and ARTCOURT Gallery p. 112

Friedrich Nietzsche Götzen-Dämmerung [The Twilight of the Gods], 1921 Leipzig: Alfred Köner Book Private collection Hélio Oiticica Seja Marginal Seja Herói (Be an outlaw be a hero), 1968 Private collection p. 182 Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz Parangolé – Encuentrosde Pamplona (Encounters in Pampeluna), 1972 C-print on paper and card 23.5 × 49 cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid p. 101 Voula Papaioannou Barricades During the Civil War of December ’44 (Dekemvriana), Athens, 1944 Modern gelatin silver print 24 × 30 cm Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens p. 239, right Voula Papaioannou Prisoners’ notes written on the wall of the German prison on Merlin Street, Athens, 1944 Modern gelatin silver print 30 × 30 cm Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens pp. 262–263

Pier Paolo Pasolini Iconografia ingiallita (per un “Poema fotografico”) (Yellowed iconography [for a “Photographic poem”]) Turin: Einaudi, 1975 Book 19 × 13.3 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 169 Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza Et ils vont dans l’espace qu’embrasse ton regard (And they go into the space taken in by your gaze) (study, screenshot), 2016 HD video Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 282 Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza Et ils vont dans l’espace qu’embrasse ton regard (And they go into the space taken in by your gaze) (study), 2016 HD video Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris  p. 283 Pablo Picasso Marianne, no. 194, July 8, 1939 Newsprint witha drawing of a dove and handwritten annotations by Picasso on the first page, “Dora mia,” in red, blue, and yellow pencil 58 × 38 cm Musée National Picasso, Paris, acquisition, 5151AP/H/49/1 Jerzy Piórkowski Miasto Nieujarzmione (City unbroken), Warsaw: Iskry, 1957 Book 33 × 24 × 2 cm Private collection p. 243

Sigmar Polke À Versailles, à Versailles! (To Versailles, to Versailles!), 1988 Mixed media on fabric 229 × 300 × 15 cm Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart p. 224 Sigmar Polke Gegen die zwei Supermächte – für eine rote Schweiz (Against the two superpowers – for a red Switzerland) (1st version), 1976 Spray paint and stencil on paper 254 × 339 cm Ludwig Collection, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aix-la-Chapelle pp. 204–205 Enrique Ramirez Cruzar un muro (Passing through a wall), 2013 HD video: color, sound, 5:15 min. Enrique Ramirez/Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels pp. 284–285 Jacques Rancière et al. Les Révoltes logiques, no. 1, no. 13, no. 14/15, 1975–81 Magazine 15 × 11 cm Private collection Réseau Buckmaster (Buckmaster network) Clandestine leaflet, 1942 Paper 17 × 25 cm Private collection p. 381

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Hans Richter Orator-Rebellion-Revolution, 1916 Ink on paper 28 × 21.5 cm Private collection p. 215 Hans Richter Revolution, 1918 Pencil, wash, and chalk on paper 42 × 34.5 cm Private collection p. 214 Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre. Entrée des troupes de première ligne revenant de la guerre sur la Pariser Platz (The November Revolution: Front-line troops returning from the war enter the Pariser Platz), 1918 Modern gelatin silver print 13 × 18 cm Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin p. 126 Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre: occupation du quartier de la presse. Barricades faites de papier journal. Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The November Revolution: Occupation of the press district. Barricades made of newspaper, Berlin), 1919 Modern gelatin silver print 13 × 18 cm Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin p. 240

Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre: occupation du quartier de la presse. Barricades faites de rouleaux de papier journal. Devant la maison d’édition Rudolf Mosse, Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The November Revolution: Occupation of the press district. Barricades made of newspaper. Outside the Rudolf Mosse publishing house building, Schützenstrasse, Berlin), 1919 Modern gelatin silver print 13 × 18 cm Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin p. 241, top Willy Römer La Révolution de novembre: occupation du quartier de la presse. Barricades faites de rouleaux de papier journal. Devant la maison d’édition Rudolf Mosse, Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The November Revolution: Occupation of the press district. Barricades made of newspaper. Outside the Rudolf Mosse publishing house building, Schützenstrasse, Berlin), 1919 Modern gelatin silver print 13 × 18 cm Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X. Tesauro : Vandalismo (Thesaurus: Vandalism), 2005–16 Paper edition Private collection p. 231

Willy Ronis Rose Zehner, grève aux usines Javel-Citroën (Rose Zehner addressing strikers at the Javel-Citroën plant), 1938 Gelatin silver print 40 × 30 cm Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris p. 135 Jesús Ruiz Durand Lima, Pérou (Untitled, Peru), 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 17.9 × 22.5 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection p. 221 Graciela Sacco Bocanada (A breath of fresh air), 1993–94 9 photographs 50 × 70 cm (each) Graciela Sacco collection Photograph shown p. 152: from the “Bocanada” (A breath of fresh air), series. Posters in the streets of Rosario, Argentina Armando Salgado Halcones (Falcons), 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper 12.3 × 17.5 cm Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski collection Armando Salgado Halcones nunca más. Memoria contra la impunidad (No more falcons. Memory against impunity), Mexico City: Editorial Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2011 Book 17.5 × 20 × 0.5 cm Alexis Fabry collection, Paris

Álvaro Sarmiento and Fina Torres, Neruda. Entierro y testamento (Neruda: Burial and tribute), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Inventarios Provisionales, 1974 Book 15 × 22 cm Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 194, top left and top right Allan Sekula Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black), 1999–2000 Photography installation: 81 slides Institut d’Art Contemporain, Rhône-Alpes, France. Acquired from Michel Rein gallery in 2001 p. 223 David “Chim” Seymour Dolores Ibárruri, s’adressant au 8e régiment (Dolores Ibárruri addressing the 8th regiment), 1936 Contact sheet 20 × 30 cm Magnum Photos, Paris David “Chim” Seymour Federico Garcia Lorca, Dolores Ibárruri, 1936 Contact sheet 20 × 30 cm Magnum Photos, Paris p. 142 Roman Signer Heufieber (Hayfever), 2006 Video: color, sound, 2:27 min. Camera: Aleksandra Signer Roman Signer/Art : Concept, Paris Roman Signer Rotes Band (Red tape), 2005 Video: color, sound, 2:07 min. Camera: Aleksandra Signer Roman Signer/Art : Concept, Paris p. 102

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Roman Signer Schwebender Tisch (Floating table), 2005 Video: color, sound, 2:27 min. Camera: Aleksandra Signer Roman Signer/Art : Concept, Paris Lorna Simpson Easy to Remember, 2001 Film: color, sound, 2:56 min. Lorna Simpson collection p. 154 Solidarte México Desaparecidos políticos de Nuestra América (Solidarte Mexico, the political disappeared of our America), 1984 Two posters (Paulo Bruscky, Manuel Marin) p. 272 Philippe Soupault Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts everything), 1921 Collage 14.3 × 10.6 cm Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris p. 161 Philippe Soupault Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts everything), Paris, January 12, 1921 Leaflet on cream paper, black ink, printed front and back, 1 sheet 27.5 × 21 cm Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Thibault La Barricade de la rue SaintMaur-Popincourt avant l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière, le dimanche 25 juin 1848 (The barricade on Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt before the attack by General Lamoricière’s troops, Sunday June 25, 1848) Daguerreotype 11.7 × 15 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, acquired with the assistance of Patrimoine Photographique, 2002 p. 234 Thibault La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt après l’attaque par les troupes du général Lamoricière, le lundi 26 juin 1848 (The barricade on Rue Saint-MaurPopincourt after the attack by General Lamoricière’s troops, Monday June 26, 1848) Daguerreotype 11.7 × 15 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris p. 235 Félix Vallotton L’Âge de papier (The age of paper), cover illustration for Le Cri de Paris, no. 52, January 1898 Photomechanical print and etching 28.5 × 19 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 186

Félix Vallotton La Charge (The charge), 1893 Proof Woodcut on paper 19 × 26 cm Gift of Adèle and Georges Besson, 1963, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. On loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon p. 212 Jean Veber Le Dompteur a été mangé (The animal tamer has been eaten), 1904 Engraving 43.3 × 57.2 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 98 Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 4) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 4]: “Scientific progress”, published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Photographic reproduction of a print 32 × 24.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 248, bottom Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 5) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 5]: “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Photographic reproduction of a print 32 × 24.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 248, top

Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 12) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 12]: “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Photographic reproduction of a print 32 × 24.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 249, right

Gil Joseph Wolman Sans titre (la tragédie) (Untitled [tragedy]), 1966 Tape art on canvas 24 × 41 cm Natalie Seroussi gallery, Paris p. 203

OVERVIEW OF DIGITAL RESISTANCE BY MARIE LECHNER Forms of Digital Resistance, 2016 Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 280

Gil Joseph Wolman Prague occupée par les Russes ou Art scotch (Prague occupied by the Russians or Tape art), c. 1968 162 × 114 cm Tape art on canvas, ink Les Abattoirs, Toulouse p. 172

The early days of the Internet seemed to signal the coming of an autonomous, global, and connected electronic agora, and with it a promise of more democracy, participation, and power for civil society. Dating from the last century, this utopia has failed to survive the commodification of the network and its transformation into an infrastructure of control by governments and the giants of the web. Back when the Internet was still in diapers, the American collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE, founded 1987), which operates at the junction of art, technology, and political activism, was the first to conceptualize the idea of “electronic civil disobedience,” because of its realization that capitalism in a post-industrial world was first and foremost a matter of flows. “Nomadic power must be resisted in cyberspace rather than in physical space,” CAE points out in its founding manifesto, The Electronic Disturbance (1994). “Just as authority located in the street was once met by demonstrations and barricades, the authority that locates itself in the electronic field must be met with electronic resistance.” In the course of events numerous artists and hacktivists began exploring this new contestation space and coming up with new ways of resisting, ranging from the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s virtual sit-ins to the DDoS (Disributed Denial of Service) attacks by hydra-headed Anonymous: actions that became more sophisticated as their network infrastructures were reinforced. At the same time electronic civil disobedience is only a tool: the goal is to succeed in “aligning” data bodies with real bodies in the streets, as happened with the protests against the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999, when the alter-globalization movement was born. As the Internet itself spread through urban space, energizing streets and squares with its mobile, wireless technologies, citizens mobilized online via social networks felt the need to assemble somewhere physically, and thus reactivate what Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has called the “erotic body of society.” Despite the massive mobilizations that accompanied the “occupy movement,” which began on Tarhir Square in Egypt in 2011 and found different forms in Spain, the United States, Turkey, and France, demonstrators did not succeed in changing the balance of power between the state, capital, and society.

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Jean Veber Les camps de reconcentration au Transvaal (no 19) : “Les progrès de la science” (The concentration camps in the Transvaal [no. 19] : “Scientific progress”), published in L’Assiette au beurre, September 28, 1901 Color photographic reproduction of a print 32 × 24.5 cm Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris p. 249, left Wolf Vostell Dutschke, 1968 Polymer paint on canvas 104.7 × 103.5 × 3.5 cm Haus der Geschichte der Bundensrepublik Deutschland, Bonn p. 153

The only people to have really managed to bring crisis to the political scene would seem to be among hackers and whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden: individuals forming a kind of virtual collective, standing out against state secrecy and radicalizing democratic demands, while at the same time eluding such standard political catchalls as public space, collective commitment, and national loyalty.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EXHIBITION

An exhibition like Uprisings requires the work and the help of too many people for me to be able thank each one individually. Concerning those with whom I worked directly, I can say that they listened to me while I in turn was enriched by them well beyond what is normal, I believe, in this kind of project. First of all, Marta Gili offered me her incomparable trust, generosity, and rigour; and all quite naturally, with a joy in her work, a profusion of ideas, and a capacity for making decisions, all of which made everything both simple and exciting. These past months spent with the team at the Musée du Jeu de Paume have also been a pleasure: my thanks first of all to Véronique Dabin, Franziska Scheuer, and Chloé Richez with whom everything began for me; and to Judith Czernichow and Marie Bertran who, with patience, passion, skill, and friendship, fulfilled my wishes for particular works as far as possible for this exhibition, looked for missing items and found solutions when the obstacles appeared to be insurmountable. My great thanks to Muriel Rausch—but also to the entire team at Gallimard—for having so remarkably guided the creation of this catalogue. Thanks to Nino Comba for his beautiful scenography. Thanks to Marta Ponsa, Anne Racine, and Pascal Priest, who, with their teams, broadened the very message of the exhibition. I was very touched by the trust given to me by those who lent the works, by my friends and co-authors of the catalogue, and by the artists themselves, particularly those—Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza and Maria Kourkouta— who created specific pieces for this project, as well as Marie Lechner for her important contribution to the question of social networks. The Uprising exhibition will travel and while travelling will be transformed and enriched with new contributions. The work already sketched out with Pepe Serra and Juan José Lahuerta in Barcelona, Anibal Jozami and Diana Weschler in Buenos Aires, Cuauhtémoc Medina in Mexico as well as Louise Déry and Guillaume Lafleur in Montréal, already heralds new joys of work and discovery. Georges Didi-Huberman

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Uprisings (Soulèvements) presented at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, from October 18, 2016 to January 15, 2017, at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, from March to June 2017, at the Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, from August to October 2017, at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, from December 2017 to May 2018 and at the Galerie de l’UQAM, Université du Québec, Montreal, from September to November 2018.

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Isabel Marant chose to support the exhibition Uprisings in Paris. ISABEL MARANT

The Uprisings exhibition and accompanying catalogue were supported by the Amis du Jeu de Paume. The Jeu de Paume is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

This exhibition is produced by the Jeu de Paume, Paris. Curator of the exhibition Georges Didi-Huberman Jeu de Paume Marta Gili, Director Maryline Dunaud, Jade Bouchemit, General Managers Claude Bocage, Administration and Finances Véronique Dabin, Exhibitions Pierre-Yves Horel, Technical Services Marta Ponsa, Public Programs Pascal Priest, Bookshop Anne Racine, Communications and Fundraising Sabine Thiriot, Educational Programs Exhibition Judith Czernichow, Marie Bertran, assisted by Chloé Richez and Franziska Scheuer, Exhibition Coordination Maddy Cougouluègnes, Registrar Matthieu Blanchard, Pascale Guinet, Alain Tanguy, Technical Coordination Catalogue Muriel Rausch, Publications Scenography Nino Comba [N-workshop] assisted by Kathy Khine

It is supported by Neuflize OBC and the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre, its principal partners.

The Jeu de Paume and the curator of the exhibition would like to extend their sincerest thanks to all the private and public lenders: Agence AP/SIPA Agence VU’ Akademie der Künste, Archiv, Berlin Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Nachlassbibliothek Bertolt Brecht Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv Archival collection of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti – Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine Art : Concept gallery, Paris Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München. Leihgabe Sammlung Klüser, Munich Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine – BDIC, Nanterre Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Buchholz Gallery, Cologne CNAP – Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris Estate Marcel Broodthaers Estate Jack Goldstein Estate Eustachy Kossakowski Estate Saburo Murakami / Artcourt Gallery Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid Fondation Gilles Caron Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona Galerie 1900-2000 Galerie Bendana-Pinel, Paris Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin/Paris Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris Getty Images Haus Der Geschichte der Bundensrepublik Deutschland, Bonn IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe Institut d’Art Contemporain, Rhône-Alpes Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo Iskra

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Karmitz collection Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin Les Abattoirs, Toulouse Light Cone, Paris Lily Robert gallery, Paris Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona Magnum Photos, Paris Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris Musashino Art University Museum & Library  Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain, Rochechouart Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée National Picasso, Paris Musée d’Orsay, Paris Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Museum Folkwang, Essen NextLevel Galerie, Paris Open Gallery, London Préfecture de Police, Paris – Département Patrimonial du Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles (SMAC) Michel Rein gallery, Paris RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, Archives Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Secretaría de Cultura – INAH, Mexico Taka Ishii Gallery Photography University of Michigan, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library

And also to the artists and collectors who made this exhibition possible: Paulo Abreu Dennis Adams Hugo Aveta Ismaïl Bahri Artur Barrio Taysir Batniji Francisca Benitez Bruno Boudjelal Claude Cattelain Chieh-Jen Chen Pascal Convert Isabel and Agustin Coppel Alexis Fabry David and Marcel Fleiss Gérard Fromanger Anna Gamazo de Abelló

Agnès Geoffray Jochen Gerz Eduardo Gil Sylvie and Georges Helft Mat Jacob Tsubasa Kato Maria Kourkouta Annette Messager Ernesto Molina Pedro Motta Jean-Luc Moulène Anka Ptaszkowska Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski Enrique Ramírez Pedro G. Romero Jesús Ruiz Durand Graciela Sacco Lorna Simpson And to those who wish to remain anonymous. The Jeu de Paume would also like to thank all the people who provided assistance during the preparation of the exhibition and this accompanying publication: Catherine Amé, Louis Bachelot, Ana Belèn Lezana, Sylvain Besson, Dominique Blain,  Anne Blondel, Bruno Bonnenfant, Daniel Boos, Paula Bossa, Emeline Bourdin, Chloé Braunstein-Kriegel, Marianne Caron-Montely, Doriana Capenti, Nathalie Chemouny, Alain Chevalier, Nathalie Cissé, Christelle Courregelongue, Ghislaine Courtet, Philippe Crousaz, Laetitia Dalet, Violaine Daniels, Bénédicte De Donker, Laure Defiolles, Rebecca Donelson, Christiane Dole, Raphaëlle Drouhin, Marie-France Dumoulin, Sophie Duruflé, Lydie Échasseriaud, Sébastien Faucon, Victoria Fernández-Layos Moro, Valérie Fours, Jean-Marie Gallais, Hélène Gasnault, Claire Giraudeau, Friederike Gratz, Valérie Guillaume, Geneviève Guilleminot, Laure Haberschill, Heinz Hanisch, Nadine Henn, Carole Hubert, Jennifer Hsu, Ralph Jentsch, Alice Joubert, Michiko Kiyosawa, Simone Kober, Chantal Lachkar, Virginie Lanoue, Emmanuel Lefrant, Joëlle Lemoine, Antonio Manuel, Olga Makhroff, Michel Marcuzzi, Claire Martin, Gabrielle Maubrie, Nathalie Mayevski, Isabelle Mesnil, Stefanie Mnich, Brigitte Moral-Planté, Patricia Morvan, Julia Mossé, Rabih Mroué, Annja MüllerAlsbach, Sophie Nawrocki, Marie Okamura, Chiara Pagliettini, Agnès Petithuguenin, Mathilde Polidori, Aude Raimbault, Jeanne Rivoire, Annemarie Reichen, Perrine Renaud, Mélina Reynaud, Nicolas Romand, Alix Rozès, María Sanz, Anett Schubotz, Frieda Schumann, Christina Sodermanns, Patricia Sorroche, Miriam Stauder, Sally Stein, Anne Steiner, Ina Steiner, Annabelle Tenèze, Corinna Thierolf, Yoann Thommerel, Aliki Tsirgialou, Anne VerdureMary, Johanna Wistrom

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Reproductions Coll. Les Abattoirs-Frac Midi-Pyrénées © ADAGP ; photo: Grand Rond Production: 172 — © Paulo Abreu/Light Cone, Paris: 144 — Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv: 190, 208 (top and bottom), 266, 270 (top and bottom) — Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung,: 192 (top, inv.-Nr.: JH 722), 192 (bottom, inv.-Nr.: JH 1423), 193 (inv.-Nr.: JH 2265) — akg-images/Album/oronoz: 19 (right) — © Manuel Álvarez Bravo – Cliché: Musée d’Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet: 247 — Courtesy Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich: 107 — The Archival Collection of the State AuschwitzBirkenau Museum in Oświęcim: 256 — Archives de la Préfecture de Police/All rights reserved: 198 — Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti – Comitato Tina Modotti – Udine – Italy: 110, 124–125, 189 — Pepe Avallone: 180 — Courtesy Hugo Aveta: 281 — Courtesy Ismaïl Bahri: 227 — Courtesy Arturo Barrio: 197 — Courtesy Taysir Batniji and galeries Eric Dupont and Sfeir Semler: 276–277 — © 2016 by Benaki Museum Athènes: 239 (right), 262–263 — Courtesy Francisca Benitez: 286 — Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris: 229 (top and bottom) — Bibliothèque nationale de France: 96 (top), 98, 105, 130, 158–160, 164, 165 (left and right), 168 (top and bottom), 186, 248–249, 264–265, 359, 377 (top right and left bottom) — Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’: 274–275 — © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BPK: 126, 240, 241 (top) — © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Haydar Koyupinar: 178–179 — Jean de Calan: 108–109, 169 — © Gilles Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron/Gamma Rapho: cover, 138–139 — © Henri CartierBresson/Magnum Photos, Paris: 209 (PAR104625), 222 (top and bottom, PAR106371 and PAR35007) — Courtesy Claude Cattelain: 128–129 — © Centre Pompidou – MNAM CCI – Bibliothèque Kandinsky: 113 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Image obtenue par inversion des valeurs du scan du négatif: 100 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Georges Meguerditchian: 226 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Service audiovisuel du Centre Pompidou: 148, 184 — © Centre Pompidou/Musée national d’art moderne/Cliché Pierre Guenat, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie: 212 — Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris: 161 — Courtesy Chieh-Jen Chen and galerie Lily Robert gallery: 225 — © CNAP/Dennis Adam/Courtesy Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie: 99 — © CNAP/ ADAGP, Paris/photo: Yves Chenot (inv. FNAC 94257): 173 — Collectif de l’Hôpital social de Thessalonique, all rights reserved: 21 — Collection Eric Coulaud/Published in Anne Steiner, Le temps des révoltes, L’échappée, 2015: 230 (bottom) — © Ivora Cusack/360° et même plus: 73 (bottom) — © André A. E. Disdéri/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet: 245 (top) — © Les Éditions de Minuit: 347 (left and right) — With the kind authority of the publishers L’échappée: 381 (left and right) — España. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Centro Documental de la Memori: 170–171 — Courtesy Estate Germaine Kull, Museum Folkwang, Essen: 118–119 — Courtesy Estate Hans Richter: 214–215 — Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris: 202 (midle and bottom) — Collection FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais: 201 — © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos, Paris (PAR111535): 137 — Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC: 174 — Fundació Miró: 257–261 — Colecciones FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE: 120 — Galerie 1900-2000, Paris: 187 (left and right) — Courtesy Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York/Jack Goldstein: The Estate of Jack Goldstein: 132 — Courtesy Chantal Crousel, Paris and Jean-Luc Moulène: 210– 211 — Courtesy Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris: 141 — Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery: 147 — Galerie Françoise Paviot/Centre Georges Pompidou: 97 — Courtesy Galerie Natalie Seroussi, photo Thierry Ollivier: 203 — © Gaumont, département Arkeion: 133, 293 (top and bottom), 303 (top and bottom), endpapers — © 1933 Gaumont: 298 (top and bottom) — Marcel Gautherot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection: 136 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Agnès Geoffray: 145 (top and bottom) and 146 — Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images: 252 (bottom) — Courtesy Eduardo Gil: 269, 273 — Haus der Geschichte, Bonn: 153 — IAC, Villeurbanne: 223 (top and bottom) — © IMEC, Fonds MCC, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Gisèle Freund: 175 (top and bottom) — © Iskra, Paris: 181 (top, center, bottom), 291 (top and bottom), 352 — © Mat Jacob/Tendance floue: 278–279 — © Mikhaïl Kalatozov/Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC)/MOSFILM: 371 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Tsubasa Kato: 115 — Photo Dmitri Kessel/Time and Life Pictures/all rights reserved : 250 (left and right) — Photo Dmitri Kessel/Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images: 251 — Courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum,

CREDITS

Artists Paulo Abreu: © Paulo Abreu/Light Cone — Dennis Adams: © Dennis Adam/Courtesy Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie — Francis Alÿs: © Francis Alÿs/Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann — Art & Language: © Art & Language — Antonin Artaud, Taysir Batniji, Joseph Beuys, André Breton, Marcel Broodthaers, Pascal Convert, Jochen Gerz, Raymond Hains, Raoul Hausmann, Bernard Heidsieck, Alberto Korda, Annette Messager, Henri Michaux, Jean-Luc Moulène, Robert Morris, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wolf Vostell, Gil Joseph Wolman: © ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Manuel Álvarez Bravo: © Manuel Álvarez Bravo — Ever Astudillo: © Estate Ever Astudillo — Hugo Aveta: © Hugo Aveta — Ismaïl Bahri: © Ismaïl Bahri — Arturo Barrio: © Arturo Barrio — Francisca Benitez: © Francisca Benitez — Bruno Boudjelal: © Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’ — Ruth Berlau: Copy by R. Berlau/Hoffmann — Gilles Caron: © Gilles Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Freed, Hiroji Kubota, David Seymour: © Magnum Photos, Paris — Pere Català Pic: Estate of Pere Català Pic — Claude Cattelain: © Claude Cattelain — Chieh-Jen Chen: © Chieh-Jen Chen courtesy galerie Lily Robert — Marcel Duchamp: © succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Robert Filliou: Courtesy Estate Robert Filliou and Peter Freeman, Inc. /© Estate Robert Filliou — Gérard Fromanger: © Gérard Fromanger — Marcel Gautherot: © Marcel Gautherot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection — Agnès Geoffray: © Agnès Geoffray — Eduardo Gil: © Eduardo Gil — Jack Goldstein: © The Estate of Jack Goldstein — George Grosz: © The Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/ ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Ken Hamblin: © Ken Hamblin — John Heartfield: © The Heartfield Community of Heirs/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Mat Jacob: © Mat Jacob/Tendance floue — Asger Jorn: © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Tsubasa Kato: © Tsubasa Kato — Leandro Katz: © Leandro Katz — Käthe Kollwitz: Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne — Eustachy Kossakowski: © by Anka Ptaszkowska — Maria Kourkouta: © Maria Kourkouta — Germaine Krull: © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen — Man Ray: © MAN RAY TRUST/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Cildo Meireles: © Cildo Meireles/ Courtesy Galerie Lelong New York — Jasmina Metwaly: © Jasmina Metwaly/Courtesy Open Gallery — Joan Miró: © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Lisette Model: © The Lisette Model Foundation, Inc. (1983). Used by permission — Ernesto Molina: © Ernesto Molina — Pedro Motta: © Pedro Motta/Courtesy galerie Bendana-Pinel — Saburo Murakami: Estate of Saburo Murakami — Helio Oiticica: © Projeto HO — Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: © Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza — Sigmar Polke: © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Enrique Ramírez: © Enrique Ramírez/ Courtesy Galerie Michel Rein — Pedro Romero: © Pedro Romero — Hans Richter: Estate of Hans Richter — Willy Ronis: Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris/Donation Willy Ronis – Ministère de la culture et de la communication (France) — Jesús Ruiz Durand: © Jesús Ruiz Durand — Graciela Sacco: © Graciela Sacco — Allan Sekula: © Allan Sekula Studio LLC — Roman Signer: © Roman Signer/Courtesy Art: Concept — Lorna Simpson: © Lorna Simpson — Philippe Soupault: Estate Philippe Soupault

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Cologne: 122–123 — Courtesy Maria Kourkouta: 133, 287, endpapers — © Hiroji Kubota/ Magnum Photos Paris (PAR56868): 149 — Jean-Louis Losi: 96 (bottom), 143, 166–167, 183, 194 (top right and left), 230 (top), 236–237, 238 (top and bottom), 241 (bottom), 243 — Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen: 204–205 — MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Long-term loan by Philippe Méaille/Photo: Àngela Gallego: 155 — Michel Marcuzzi: 200 — Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris/ Donation Willy Ronis – Ministère de la culture et de la communication (France): 135 — Courtesy Jasmina Metwaly and Open Gallery, London: 103 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Pedro Motta and galerie Bendana-Pinel: 106 — © Musée Carnavalet/RogerViollet: 134, 228, 244 — Collection Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart/photography: Freddy Le Saux: 224 — © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Angèle Dequier: 294 (bottom) — Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona: 111, 140 (left and right), 150–151, 216 (top) — National Gallery of Canada – Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, Ottawa: 121 — Collection National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen © SMK Photo: 232–233 — © Seiko Otsuji, Makiko Murakami and Musashino Art University Museum & Library/Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film, Estate of Saburo Murakami and ARTCOURT Gallery: 112 — Courtesy Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: 282–283 — Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia: 101, 185 — Courtesy Projeto HO: 182 — Courtesy Enrique Ramirez/ Galerie Michel Rein: 284–285 — Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History: 162 — © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michèle Bellot: 19 (left) — © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski: 234–235 — © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Daniel Arnaudet: 294 (top) — Courtesy Pedro Romero: 231 — © Michael Ruetz/Agentur Focus: 343 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Graciela Sacco: 152 — Sammlung Klüser, Munich, photo: Mario Gastinger: 131 — Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst: 114 — © Secretaria de cultura. INAH. SINAFO. FN. MX: 239 (left, inv. 32942), 245 (bottom, inv. 63752), 246 (inv. 6013), 267 (top, inv. 5670), 267 (bottom, inv. 63945) — © David Seymour/Magnum Photos Paris: 142 — © Aaron Nikolaus Siever/Shooting by the interns of the Institut national d’éducation populaire: 73 (top) — Courtesy Roman Signer and Art: Concept, Paris, photogrammes: Alexandra Signer: 102 — Courtesy Lorna Simpson: 154 — © Sipa presse: 217, 253 — Toluca Fine Art: 127, 195, 202 (top), 216 (bottom), 221 — Torreal: 218–219, 220 (top and bottom) — University of Michigan, Special Collection Library: 268 — VEGAP, Madrid: 163 — © The Warburg Institute: 306 — Wikimedia Commons: 104 — © Silvio Zuccheri, all rights reserved: 312 (bottom) All rights reserved

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Éditions Gallimard Nathalie Bailleux, editorial director of illustrated books Jean-François Colau, editor Anne Lagarrigue, artistic director Pascal Guédin, graphic designer Cathy Piens/Pays, layout artist Marie-Agnès Naturel, production manager Bronwyn Mahoney, copy editor and proofreader Béatrice Foti, assisted by Françoise Issaurat, public relations Hélène Clastres, editorial coordinator for co-editions Translation from the French by Shane B. Lillis (texts by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière) and John Tittensor (texts by Nicole Brenez, Marie-José Mondzain, and index of artists) Translation from the Italian by Arianna Bove (text by Antonio Negri) Translation from the Spanish by Karel Clapshaw (text by Marta Gili)

© Éditions Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2016 © Georges Didi-Huberman for his texts Book set in Replica, a Lineto typeface, and in Mencken Text, a Typofonderie typeface Papers (inside): Munken Print White 115g/m2 and CreatorSilk 170g/m2 Photoengraving: Reproscan ISBN (Gallimard): 9782072697296 Printed in September 2016 by Geers in Ghent Printed in Belgium Legal deposit: October 2016 Publication number: 308 544

gallimard.fr jeudepaume.org jeudepaume.soulevements.org librairiejeudepaume.org

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