This category is a collections of ruptures of temporality and discontinuation, and displays more theoretical texts on the interruption of linear progressive time.
This book by Nietzsche consists of a preface and three treatises that trace the evolution of morality, specifically with a view towards Christianity and Judiasm.
To require of strength that it not express itself as strength…is just as absurd to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.
Nietzsche
Now classic text by French collective – The Invisible Committee describing the present impasse through seven circles of hell and the way out through the insurrectionary commune
The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible.
It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated
both authority and the need for authority, property
and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the
desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary
process carries within itself the form of its victory, or
that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough
to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s
done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly
provoke the return of what has been crushed.
The first written essay by Subcomandante Marcos serving as “tour guide” to the state of Chiapas, desecrated by years of extractive neoliberalism. Written a year and a half before the Zapatista uprising, it outlines all the reasons that prompted the revolt.
“Everyone is dreaming in this country. Now it is time to wake up…
The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has
arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming…
The prophecy is here. When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country
in peace, the world will no longer be the world but something better.”
– The Lacandon Jungle, August 1992
Thesis examining U.S. radical feminism as the arrest of patriarchal order, gaze, and time
Radical feminists were adamant about their overarching anti-establishment ethos and they believed that the liberal quest for concessions from the United States’ hierarchically, bureaucratically organized political system merely confirmed the legitimacy and dominance of a political order comprised by men and sustained by male values.
Mehmet Dosemeci questions why we have come to understand the history of social struggle through the category of movement and discusses the complicity of movements with the social order they are struggling against. Offers an alternate history of social struggle as the arrest or interruption of the existing order.
Why do we think of social struggles as movements? What is in motion and where is it going? Has struggle been thought and practiced otherwise? Not as movement but as disruption, arrest, stasis? If so, what are struggles trying to stop? Asking these questions pushes us to think about struggle kinetically: to analyze social struggle through the register of motion and its interruption.
This treatise written by Jean Baudrillard introduces the idea that reality and a constructed form of reality are unable to be distinguished from each other. He introduces the idea of the “hyperreal” which is a creation of a new real that is not based on reality. He explains the ways images, culture and media work to define simulacra.
Carla Lonzi, leading member of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, 1970 pamphlet against patriarchal thought, history, and time. In this text Lonzi attacks Hegel (and Marx’s) notions of antagonism, progress, and historical development and calls for a subaltern history of women through the recovery of her perishable traces.
We consider incomplete any history which is based on nonperishable traces.
The future of the world does not lie in moving continually forwards along a path mapped out by man’s desire for overcoming difficulties.
Not being trapped within the master-slave dialectic, we become conscious of ourselves; we are the Unexpected Subject.
Classic text by Walter Benjamin, Marxist Jewish-German philosopher loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Written in 1940 shortly before Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fleeing Nazi invasion.
In the text, Benjamin critiques the idea social progress and lays forth a revolutionary temporality that connects past and present struggles allowing for their mutual recognition and redemption.
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.
[He] grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one…blasting open the continuum of history…Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
This report, submitted in 1793, describes the arguments for replacing the Gregorian Calendar with the Republican Calendar. The change of the conceptualization of time was a disruption of society and everyday life.
In October 1793, the French National Convention ordered the use of the Republican Calendar to replace the Gregorian Calendar. The Republican Calendar was made to depict agrarian imagery and dismantle the lies of the throne and church.