1.(π)
Encounters are events that always come from an outside. They are transgressions of what was there up to that moment. That’s how we met: a new friend, and an old friend, and that’s how we started discussing and walking around, looking for the others. No rush. Like we had all the time in the world. That ethics of encounter defined those days and nights of June.
There is currently no place that is conducive to encounters. Berlin is certainly no exception. The mythology that these streets have accumulated is suffocating. The phantasmagoria of freedom and union has become dirt on the pavement. The slow rotting of these promises has produced a series of effects that we are not yet able to adequately map. We know for sure that, as elsewhere, the sense that this world is intolerable is growing.
What we can do is to start from this very point, looking for something that we are not sure where it will happen. We keep focusing on how it will. We start with what we have at hand. We look for ways to breathe together. This is our organization. We look in texts and faces, in intentions and wounds. In our stories. We look for „our places,“ in places we could never have imagined we would find them. We organize a joint attack on everything that hinders this movement.
Here, the streets are quite long and the sidewalks are too wide. We enter this opening and use it. We’re playing a game of stride from one edge to the other. Our game is only made possible through a political gesture predominantly anti-gaming. We desert the rooks we are urgently called upon to defend, we abandon the soldiers who line up beside us calling us to the „right side“ of history, we give away the queen and the king to those who seek yet another consolation in their loneliness. We leave behind what was never ours anyway. We move on to different shapes, find a backyard, a high-ceilinged hall or a bar behind an iron door. What brought us all here? That question remains relatively secondary, now that we’ve met.
We don’t know what will happen next. What is certain is that this game has no end.
2.(τ)
Nothing is left to apologize for. There are certainly attitudes that can endure, texts that need to be rewritten, and, fortunately, among our company there are some still young enough to escape the danger of apology. Only those realities that would like to make their power last more keep to apologize over and over again: civilization, the left, democracy, rationality, and we have ceased to recognize ourselves in these abstractions that mangle us. If anything connects us to a past that would like to be recognized as a „movement“, „resistance“, „critique“ it is the desire to separate ourselves as clearly as possible from it. Within this blurred past, one can recognize moments of passion and sincerity that, after having been sacrificed to immobility, ended up being deadened in the life of the militant, who tends asymptotically towards the very enemy he wanted to fight [being a Bolshevik during ‘17 retains a significance, mainly historical, that is cancelled out as such when today at your 17 you declare yourself a Leninist, a leftist, someone who is organized and… and… and…]. To keep the passion not the method is what is incumbent on us if we want to invent a strategy to win.
So if a heterogenous crew came to Berlin at the end of June to engage with Non-Kongress, it was to confirm this strategy of separation and to reinforce an internal demand to be as imperative as possible. What we are attempting is a civil war.
It is no longer possible to be left-wing and rational, which has led to a life that is not attractive. We must desert to a becoming-world or cease to exist. At the Non-Conference we found what we were looking for: friends, forms of life and conspirators. There is no account to be taken- it would be a mistake. There is no political program -it would be a disaster. What happened there cannot be confused with anything else, such as the expression of a complaint, for example, much less with what is rightly called politics. There was no shortage of those who did not understand, who would like to be recognized within a movement in order to be loved for their inadequacy, but they certainly did not set the tone. If one has to stick to one conclusion it is that it was a process, a becoming. Let us say that in order to understand the kind of texts we are translating and to imagine what follows them, one must keep in mind that the indeterminacy of the non – is the unconditional term of a conspiracy aimed at the destruction of a world that has never been able to be loved and is now openly hated.
A large part of the conference texts and presentations will be translated. We are still working on the conclusions of our engagement. It is not always necessary to put everything in written form. What we can state with certainty is that a revolutionary process is active and looking for complicits.
3.(θ)
Jet lag from Berlin.
Communism cannot be organized. Period. This formulation contains no pessimism and no nebulous vanity about a romantic spontaneity – or in the language of political milieus, radical informalism – that shatter in the light of day at the moment of its articulation. Communism is nothing but an ethical stake. It is that which is at stake (en-jeu). What is played out in every situation. It is a relation to a part of ourselves that is put into use, that is transformed and refashioned in the bosom of a larger context; a territory, a language, a friendship, in the gestures between lovers, in the breakup that occurs when two or more bodies have nothing in common. That is why it has no need of any descriptive adjective, of any name, major or minor, of daddy and mummy; it knows only of singularities that open up in their multiplicity and of multiplicities that undergo processes of singularization. Communism is always-and-already, here, waiting to be built. In other words, there are ways of taking up communism, and therefore ways of organizing ourselves to assume it. Which means: so that we abandon ourselves to the becoming of the diverse worlds we inhabit, which, in turn, are inclined, intersect and collide. In sum, whether we know it or not, we do nothing but seek means to indulge in the experimental process of communism, which is nothing but a pure means.
Communism is simultaneously, what transcends us and what can be traced back in every single point and bond that constitutes it.
Therefore, communism is what-is-coming and therefore does not fit into any definition.
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It is certainly surprising to observe a number of people from different countries seriously discussing the impasse that is the Left – and when we say Left, we mean the whole of the established movement practices, not only of the extra-parliamentary but also of the anti- authoritarian milieu – and declaring their determination and resolve to end it. To note that the revolutionary tradition demands our study and attention, but at the same time to admit that its syntax and grammar are not sufficient to keep up with the stakes of our times. Finally, to place ethics at the heart of the debate, as well as the formation of a language and practice that is expressed and conducted in these terms.
Perhaps it is strange to discuss all this in Greece. In this country, where we have all at one point or another heard the pompous phrase „I in my assembly…“ or the admission „as a political subject I consider…“ or, finally, the impassioned complaint „you should have said that at the assembly.“ How can we understand that we do not have to belong to the same political group or collective to organise ourselves? I wonder what it means here to talk about the we of a position and not of a group, of a political subject. That we are nothing but a constellation, a con-stellation whose common ground branches out and manifests itself differentially?
Many of us have found ourselves in the deafening silences of (general) assemblies and political events where the sound of a lighter or a beer-sucking larynx cracks the endless silence. In the rituals of radical posturing that kills desire at the same time as it believes it intensifies its circulation. We have even seen the critical side of the movement organizing the distribution of lack and frantically attempting to fix (or be fixed?) it even as it evangelizes that revolutionary theory is the enemy of any revolutionary ideology, and it knows it.
Therefore, it is not a question of denouncing the evils of a movement. Or to simply shout out, exit, desertion. The point is to understand the functioning of the apparatuses that keep it together and lead it to repeated deadlocks, so that we can deactivate them. In this context, we are talking about all levels, all the layers that structure it: material, organisational, affective, social, cultural. This is how we understand the practice of escape.
If there is a destituent tendency, it does not want to appropriate, to conquer, to take, but to put into use, to use. To transform and be transformed. That is why it does not wish to constitute something new, but to move strategically within a situation and nibble away its surfaces.
So it was about a con-juration, an oath taken in common at the Non-Conference.
That’s how we’re back to the point where we started.
‘What’s the world for?
[…]
Find me involved in the world
All these fast talkers are trying to take hold of the world
Thoughtless remarks and bold suppositions
I’m sick of their mission
Stop solving the world and start listening.’
(These texts have been written as opening texts to the translations of NON Kongress bulletins in Greek. The translations can be found here: https://hangovertheory.substack.com ).