Three German autonomes refuse to respond to Judge Fragnoli

Two autonomes from Berlin and another from Hamburg received summons to
appear as material witnesses on 16 and 17 July, respectively, in the
so-called Tarnac Affair. They were summoned to give testimony against
nine comrades (the “Tarnac 9″) in the framework of a major series of
investigations in Paris. In November 2008, nine people were arrested
in France on the basis of anti-terrorist laws following the sabotage
of the railroad network when nuclear waste was going to be transported
during a strike by French railroad workers.

Demonstrations were organized in Berlin and Hamburg on the occasion of
the summons.

In Berlin, the 50 people who met before the French Embassy were
surprised to see a yellow, high-spirited ape the height of a human
being — an orangutan — with a placard against the transport of
nuclear wastes attached to it ass. The orangutan joined in the
demonstration and, in a clearly female voice, spoke up. A quarter of
an hour later, while preparing to leave the demonstration, the ape was
arrested. Perhaps the sensible reader won’t be surprised: under the
disguise was one of the witnesses. She was taken to the headquarters
of the federal police for the Tempelhof region, where she was detained
for several hours. The participants in the demonstration took the same
route to support the people who had been questioned.

Under Section 55 of the Penal Code, the second witness refused to
respond to the questions of the judge and was freed after 16 hours,
without any charges being made against him. The person arrested during
the demonstration then had to be heard.

The two German judges and the four French judges were surprised to see
her in her ape costume. Under this accoutrement she wore only her
underwear and the functionaries preferred their witness to be wearing
yellow and somewhat ruffled fur, rather than being half-nude. And so it was
in that state that she faced the astounded judges for two hours and
refused to make any declaration whatsoever.

Such is the narrative of a successful action that can serve as an
example of how to refuse to give in to a judicial proceeding. It is
always fitting to give an appropriate response to governmental
theater.

[The following text was read aloud at the demonstration at the French Embassy]

The Franco-German atomic mafia: cut the connection!

The repeated breakdowns at the nuclear power facility in Kruemmel,
reported in today’s newspapers, emphasizes what has been obvious for
decades to the German and French anti-nuclear movement: atomic energy
is not controllable! The fight against the use of atomic energy,
against the construction of nuclear power plants and the mining of
uranium (in Canada, for example) — a fight conducted at many levels
and by different means — is a fight against a technology that is
dangerous to life itself.

Nuclear energy policy at the international level

Franco-German cooperation in matters of nuclear energy is
distinguished by a very long tradition. Ever since the 1970s, German
atomic wastes have been treated at the processing plant in The Hague
before being transported via CASTOR[1] to Gorleben. It was also 30
years ago that Siemens began collaborating closely with French
industrial groups to develop and build nuclear power plants. The
enterprise of the French State, EDF, is the principal actor in EnBW,
an enterprise based in southern Germany that manages many nuclear
plants.

Despite many breakdowns and accidents at French power plants, such at
those at Tricastan last year or the recent ones at Kruemmel, which is
near Hamburg, the industrial groups and the [two] governments have
pursued costly endeavors and have even extended the utilization of
atomic energy, despite its dangers. Thus, the French nuclear group
Areva has constructed new reactors in France and China; the German
group EON has constructed one in Finland; and RWE is responsible for
the construction of a Russian model in Bulgaria. In this framework,
the security of the population is secondary. The priority of the
capitalists is to secure their profits. In Bulgaria, the reactor is
situated in a region that presents important seismic risks. For
decades, all sorts of radioactive and toxic materials have been
deposited at the “burial” site in Asse, though it is publicly well
known that the infiltration of water into this site has rendered it
inappropriate for such usage.

In Bulgaria as in Asse, it is as clear as source water that the
politicians and the scientists of the nuclear industry have been
bought. And this business is well worth the cost for the Franco-German
nuclear mafia: the operation of 17 German power plants earns a
[yearly] profit of more than 200 million euros for the four German
groups in the energy sector. To get that money, the nuclear industry
– not just in Europe, but everywhere in the world — thinks little of
human life. Nevertheless, it isn’t the criminal energy [technology] of
the industrial groups that is prosecuted by the Franco-German justice
system. No, one instead criminalizes people because a few hooks were
thrown over the high-tension lines of the rail network as a way of
finally stopping the madness of the nuclear mafia.

International resistance pushes the authorities out of the woods

In November 2008, while German nuclear wastes were being sent via
CASTOR to Gorleben in Lower Saxony, protest and resistance actions
took place in France and Germany. Many demonstrations, blockades of
railroads and sabotage of the lines in Germany and France caused
damage exceeding several million euros. More than a thousand trains
were delayed. It was only thanks to a police operation of exorbitant
cost, and after more than 20 hours of delays, that the convoy reached
the intermediary storage site at Gorleben, which is nothing other than
a well-ventilated potato barn.

In Germany, signal-switches were put out of service. In France,
sabotage of the high-speed lines spread chaos throughout the
week-end[2] traffic of the SNCF. Many trains were halted; more than a
thousand were delayed. The cause: two metal hooks suspended from the
high-tension line that separates the car from the electrical line. In
a communique drafted in German and sent to the newspaper Taz, the
actions in the two countries were explained in the following manner:
“Because we have had enough, we have directed our anger against the
network that transports nuclear wastes.” Shortly afterwards, a great
wave of searches and arrests swept through the small [French] village
of Tarnac and other places. Nine people were arrested; some of them
were kept in provisional detention for months.

The French authorities and a portion of the media spoke unrestrainedly
of “terrorism” and established a link with the on-going investigations
against a so-called “anarcho-autonome sphere of influence,” which was
the label under which the French State had made many arrests in France
since January 2008. These investigations originally centered on
actions against detention centers, participation in the opposition to
the “reform” of education (which is very strong in France), and
demonstrations against the presidential election [of Nicholas
Sarkozy]. In this context, a small book — of which one of the
indicted people is suspected of being a co-author — was also causing
a commotion. Entitled The Coming Insurrection, this book spoke of
rebellion against a present that is as unreal as it is disappointing,
and launched an appeal to get prepared concretely for an imminent
revolt. The authorities reacted to this book with much nervousness.
They signaled the alarm because men and women were creating
international networks to oppose atomic, climatic and capitalist
madness, along with all that it imposes. What we consider to be pure
necessity, the adversary calls “terrorism,” an “International of
revolt,” and the actions of brutal rioters.

In Italy, shortly before the summit of the G8 (the powers resolved to
decide global policy amongst themselves), two comrades were imprisoned
for attempts to sabotage railroad lines with hooks. They, too, were
suspected of belonging to an “International of revolt” that includes
35 other people. We salute them, as well as all those who do not want
to allow any respite!

The investigation in France continues. All the people concerned have
been released from jail, but remain subject to very strict
obligations, such as having no contact with each other, assigned
residences, etc, or they will be subject to re-arrest. The date of a
trial still has not yet been set.

Franco-German friendship against Franco-German Investigations

The French authorities leading the investigation into the “Tarnac
Affair” and the sabotage of rail lines during CASTOR transport
obviously intended to pursue their investigations into Germany. Two
autonomes from Berlin received summons from a judge to be heard as
material witnesses in the framework of a series of French
investigations. At the beginning of the year, a report by the French
anti-terrorist police on the “Tarnac Affair” already mentioned these
two people. The passage in question evoked the practice, largely used
in Germany, of using hooks to sabotage nuclear-waste transportation.
The German authorities informed their French colleagues of an on-going
investigation called “The Golden Hooks,” which had, among others,
incriminated the two people summoned to be heard today. Another must
soon appear in Hamburg. The two anti-nuclear activists from Berlin
will make no declarations. They do not desire to furnish the
authorities any information whatsoever that might help the
investigation into anti-nuclear resistance and those whom one dresses
up as members of a criminal gang because they fight against a criminal
policy. We invite you to accompany the two people to the court in
Tempelhof Damm. We will seize the occasion (which is not freely
offered to us) to make our solidarity with the comrades from Tarnac a
part of this day of judicial testimony in a Berlin that is still too
calm.

Show your claws to the system, here, there and elsewhere: they will
not pass! Our solidarity against their repression! Our struggles
against their politics! Solidarity!

[What the Ape said before her arrest]

“I am what I am”: such is the last offer of the publicity for this
world. It took decades of development to arrive where we are today. A
pure tautology. “I am what I am.” My body belongs to me. I am me, and
you are you, and something isn’t right.

From whatever perspective one looks at it, the present offers no exit.
We are all in agreement about the fact that things can only get worse.
“The future has no future”: such was the wisdom of an era that, in its
perfect normality, reached the level of awareness of the first punks.
Finally!

We are here, at the sides of our friends, whose hides the French
State, under the label of an “anarcho-autonome sphere of influence,”
wants to have. And two of us must help them?! As material witnesses?!
But they will not go along! Never! We are here in front of the
[French] embassy because we have a message to transmit, but not to the
State, nor to the justice system. Our message is to our friends and
all those who feel connected to them. What binds us together is not
addressing ourselves to the dominant politics, not criticizing it, not
wanting to help it make itself better in any way. We want to abolish
it and, along with it, the entire destructive administration of the
world, because this is our life, and we will reconquer it.

Like our friends, we know what everyone knows and yet no one wants to
speak truthfully about: this will not continue as before. This global
order, based for 500 years on the murder and pillaging of humanity and
nature, is rushing straight for the wall: economically, ecologically,
socially and mentally, that is to say, at all levels.

One need no longer agitate oneself or produce proof. The proof itself
has long ago become a commodity, an end-in-itself that preserves the
system, a strategy that avoids all the logical and ethical
consequences. With the media ceaselessly revealing the same terrible
destinies, and the public ceaselessly showing itself to be capable of
acting as if it has just discovered (as if for the first time) the
horror of drowning refugees, bombarded towns, climatic catastrophe –
to briefly become terrified, to assure itself of the fatality of the
situation and its own powerlessness, before returning to its affairs
in complete calm — no one can seriously doubt that all this will
remain possible for much longer. It will explode!

It will explode!

And suddenly there are “dangerous books” once again. One of them, The
Coming Insurrection, is at this moment the object of attentive reading
by a part of the French security forces. In the reactionary quagmire
of the United States, this book has aroused indignation of the highest
order.[3] Such books speak of breaks with the everyday, apocalyptic
ambiance of finished-off modernity and the combat for our life. To
have done with the wheezy activism of the traditional Left and,
furthermore, to begin to revolt today.

The Coming Insurrection begins with the castrations that keep us in
the choir of those who sing themselves hoarse on the high notes of the
psalm “There is no alternative.”[4] But the book does not persist in
its representation of misery. If it describes misery, it is, on the
contrary, to permit ourselves to recognize ourselves in it, to
recognize in it our own experiences and our wildness. Where The Coming
Insurrection is concerned, it is not a question of explication, but
resonance. To find and develop a shared language that is no longer
compatible with the commando. Whoever finds him or herself in the
emptiness that is described, and wants to put an end to it, is invited
to continue to reflect upon the manner of ending misery.

The Coming Insurrection constitutes a practical and strategic
position. It takes as its target the internal fragility of the regime,
which is hidden by all of power’s forces. Despite an apparent
stability, the regime continues to depend — today, as yesterday — on
the motivation of the workers and on the failure of any wrenches to
fall into the gears. The regime’s vulnerability at this level has
grown over the course of the last few years. It resides in the
elevated cadences of just-in-time[5] production, energy and
transportation networks, and flows of information.

It is a question of recognizing one’s own strengths in the weaknesses
of the adversary, of reflecting on the possibilities of escaping from
this runaway train [cet appareil en roue libre] so as to engage
ourselves, together, in something better. To create links between
combative groups and keep ourselves from reproducing the errors of the
past. They know the necessity of constructing proper structures for
the preparation of acts of sabotage. Because the supermarkets can only
be pillaged as long as there is something inside them; the carrot is
as necessary as the fist; the combat against what exists must be
accompanied by practical research into a radically different
existence. Combative groups recognize in liberty the spinal column
that reciprocally joins them together.

Groups link up, groups that want everything now and that clearly
refuse all procrastination. We recognize, as a condition, the fact
that we live at the heart of a global social war in which we must take
a position, one way or another. Then why not dare to make a new
departure? Why not try to organize our lives together on this planet
in a way that each person can have something? More seriously: Is there
still any argument in favor of the conservation of the failed
experiment that is capitalism?

Compared to the determination with which the indigenous communities
blockade the thieves of natural resources in Peru; compared to the
cold threat of French workers to blow up their bankrupt company if
they do not obtain retirement funds; compared to the realism of riots
without demands (and not only riots by poor youths in the metropolis);
compared to all the managers of the crises of the Empire, with their
dry words of encouragement, which are already as obsolete as the
bearers of the powdered wigs of the Ancien Regime — one can only
deplore the fact that they are so well armed.

Nevertheless, the coming insurrection will perhaps be the least bloody
of all the foreseeable possibilities.

[1] CASTOR stands for “Casks for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive
Materials.”

[2] English in original.

[3] Glenn Beck’s coverage of the book on FOX News.

[4] English in original.

[5] English in original.

(Unsigned, published on-line in French on 29 July 2009. Translated by
NOT BORED! 2 August 2009. Footnotes by the translator.)

translated from Echos de la Taïga (french support committee bulletin) #5 June 30, 2009.

It is sometimes by an apparent chance that makes one believe that there really does exist a “spirit of the age”. Thus, the appearance of a book on the “Internal Enemy” by Mathieu Rigouste at the same moment when “the Tarnac affair” was in the news, leaves the thought that a real popular uprising, for those who want to contain it as for those who place in it their hopes, is in the air. Invited to Tarnac to present to us his research, the author brought us some thoughts on the theory of revolutionary war that involves a good part of the “cadres of the Nation”. If we have contributed to diffusing this work, it is as much to show that the preventive war of counter-insurrection is truly a practical and theoretical reality, as it is to give certain clues to all those who envisage derailing this war machine.

The colonial roots of counter-insurrection: Indochina, 1946-1954. The French military who tried to safeguard the colonial empire of France were bypassed by events. The techniques of crowd control that they could have utilized up until WW2, in the face of a clearly identified enemy, were checked by an untraceable form of anti-colonial revolt, where the actors were disseminated amidst the mass of the colonized population. Undiscoverable, the presumed terrorists could hit everywhere, only to dissolve back once more into the largely supportive population. It was thus necessary to react, invent, and experiment with techniques other than that of frontal combat, with a sentiment of urgency all the more powerful as the Cold War hit its peak, and as the military theorists were convinced that the hand of Moscow was hidden behind all forms of insubordination. Relying on historical antecedents, but also on a creativity not devoid of zeal, they began to utilize certain techniques: it was a question of finding one part of the enemy that was the politico-administrative organization, supposedly the spinal column of subversion, the structure of which was to be destroyed; on the other hand, systematic propaganda and psychological action upon the population, as well as the use of industrialized torture on the prisoners, to make each and every one lose their interest for insubordination. Sure of total support from a colonial state attached to “defending the free world” against “communist subversion”, the generals who guided these operations had free reign for testing techniques the better to defend the French empire- whatever the price.

Thus, even though paid for by defeat, the war in Indochina had permitted the refinement of a doctrine of revolutionary war which shortly thereafter found its place in the heart of institutes for military studies (such as the Institute for Higher Studies in National Defense [IHEDN]). Taught to military figures, but equally to owners of the media, the military industrial complex, and high ranking judges who were invited to participate in seminars, and in this way to ministers who regularly received reports- in brief, all the “cadres of the nation”- the new doctrine permitted the circulation of what they called “defense theory”. The nation is considered as an organism that must be immunized against the menaces of dissolution that eat away at it. The army is here the source of an “immunization theory” which it has precisely to function to defend the national “body” politic. The diffusion of “defense theory” into the population, relayed by all the cadres formed to this end, is thus a manner of bringing the population to immunise itself against the intervention of a protective army. An army that on its side, develops to the end of combating subversion (“cancer“) a coherent ensemble of techniques to conjure a revolutionary menace.

The resume made by Mr. Rigouste is eloquent: 1)The colonized populations are the centers of proliferation of revolutionary subversion 2)Information gathered must reveal the appearance of parallel hierarchies, which can be supported, destroyed, or replaced 3)Terror permits the adversary to hold the population, it is necessary to re-appropriate these principles 4)Designating interior subversion permits the population to be lead into supporting and participating in repression. 5)Psychological action permits the control of representations of the population and psychological war fools the adversary. The army must be the surgeon of a gangrenous society. 6)The military-police cordoning of the urban terrain constitutes a radical surgical act to purge the subversives and immunize the colonized population. 7)Reasons of state justify the state of exception and militarized surveillance.

Theorized and taught, the doctrine of counter insurrection continued at the same time to nourish itself on French colonial wars, particularly in Algeria. A new stage was thus reached during the 1957 “Battle of Algiers”. Confronted by a city-labyrinth in which subversive elements could move about and hide themselves with an uncontrollable ease, the military created what they called the “technique of urban protection”, namely that -a number was attributed to each house – the population was carded in its entirety, each one being the object of a summary of information on their job, their habits, their activities- the city was cordoned off with barbed wire and barricades, constituting so many checkpoints that permitted the control of the smallest movements-and last, diverse operations of “disappearances” and of torture were effected against anyone who was suspected of harboring bad intentions. In a parallel fashion in the 50’s, the doctrine was exported to diverse international colloquiums, for example into Nato. In the U.S., this doctrine would be immediately applied, notably against the Black Panthers.

Importing revolutionary war into the metropolitan space: After the colonial terrain, relayed by military theorists who had applied it there, the doctrine imported itself into the metropolis. In France, it was forbidden following many attempted coup d’etats (in 1961 and 1962) by its principal theoreticians (the future cadres of the Secret organization of the Army [OAS in french], but it remained studied in military institutes, and its heritage remains visible in the techniques of maintaining order. It’s in this manner that the leftists of the 60’s were designated as “chienlit”, and thus an action was taken to teach the populace to immunize itself against the leftists. At the same time, the security techniques multiplied, the media stations were held under control and the subversives expelled. But it was above all a few years later that the practices of counter-insurrection reappeared with force.

An old student of IHEDN, Giscard D’Estaing, put in place the plan Vigipirate applying the counter-insurrectional model: classed in part secret defense, this plan aimed as much to cordon the urban terrain as to immunize the population and diffuse among them the spirit of security. Later, another old student of IHEDN, Mitterand, chose to rehabilitate the generals who had attempted the coup d’etats under De Gaulle, and by this to give a new legitimacy to the doctrine. The affair of the “Irish of Vincennes” in 1982 inaugurated in France the practice of “media-police montages”: a concerted action between the media and the police permitted the preparation of a designated enemy for the populace, the diffusion of descriptive details about this foe, and, after a few months of recitation, to proceed with collective arrests.

The doctrine of revolutionary war seems to henceforth appear as a pure technology of the state, apolitical, leading simply to the maintenance of order in a population all at once menacing and menaced. The doctrine was, however, shaken by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Deprived of their principle justification in the designation of an internal enemy, the theoreticians of counter-insurrection recovered very quickly, using the “theory of new menaces”. The new doctrine always advocates the non-distinction between the subversive and the enemy, the interior and the exterior, but it adds to this the existence of gray areas, spaces of an incomplete control which serve as the terrain for the premise of subversion. And above all, the enemy from now on has multiple faces: suburban youth, leftist subversives, radical ecologists, diverse independence fighters, and above all, foreign populations. These last, constituted as “French suspected of questionable allegiance” have thus been made the object of many mediatic campaigns since their invention as a problem, and of many police interventions, and justifying at the same time by the fear that they are supposed to inspire, an ever-growing mobilization of the population.

Human Rights Watch numbers 17 media-police montages in the 90’s in France, of which the two most memorable concern such “enemies” as Khaled Kelkal, the name of the Algerian accused of the metro bombings in Paris in 1995, and who was killed by gendarmes in front of TV cameras- the affair in which the #1 and #2 in the DST have since admitted were commanded by the Algerian secret service…in the shape of an operation of psychological war; and the affair of the “Chalabi network”, which lead in 1995 to the arrest of more than 300 people of which many passed years in provisional detention to end finally at the quasi-total acquittal of the detained.

New menaces, the reinforcement of Vigipirate, psychological action…in step with the time, “defense theory”  became “security theory”: the theory no long posits the population faced with an exterior enemy, but facing a new enemy from within which everyone must mistrust, and against which a permanent military-police presence is indispensable. Since 9/11, the techniques have hardly evolved, but the urgency imposed by the “Global War on Terror” has, in passing, permitted the acceleration and intensification of actions of preventive war, all the while multiplying security laws.

The internal enemy, today: One can largely resume things thusly: elaborated in the course of colonial wars, the doctrine called revolutionary war (or counter-insurrection) has since been imported into the metropolis while adapting to the context of the age. The “thought of security” has a clear lineage, and the theories that have issued from it have very concrete practical applications on the techniques of maintaining order, at the national level first, but equally and more and more, at the international level.  The dominant representation is henceforth at a quasi-global level that of a singular society placed under the threat of internal subversion disseminated amongst the population, and which must at all costs be contained and prevented by the States.

In France, the two most ancient interior enemies, who have been the object of very elaborate actions of counter-insurrections, are the “savages of the suburbs” and the “illegal immigrant”. These two types constructed by “security theory” are supposed to be an antisocial force, sometimes aided by foreign powers, who menace the integrity of the nation which must protect itself. It is, in the terms of the state, a “low-intensity war” that has been led against them already for twenty years. ”Low intensity war”, that is to say one employs the methods of war in a time of peace. Thus, faced with the amplitude of the riots in 2005, it was the theory and the military figures who were solicited to the end of reestablishing order. A “technique of urban protection” of which we spoke of previously, was employed on this occasion for the first time in a metropolis: checkpoints, cordoning, and carding of the population. The military mobilized were the same who, a few months earlier, had assured the defense of French interest in the Ivory Coast (see the affair of the Ivory Hotel, an affair that was paid for by 64 deaths among the rebels). The possibility of having to use guns to keep down the rebels was envisaged with the greatest seriousness, and the military was finally mobilized to that end. And if finally its above all the CRS who were put in the foreground of the scene, the employment of technique or military material in their action was frequent (drones, flashballs, protection equipment).

In such a context, one understand better the ideological reasoning of the “Tarnac affair”. One can in effect observe, across this prism, the putting into place of a counter-insurrection operation with the intention to designate a new type of interior enemy: the anarcho-autonomous. To that end, in 2007, the first descriptions of this “new menace” began to circulate in the media. In 2008, the mediatic interventions multiplied, and the first arrests where held in a new context, attacking a supposed “French anarcho-autonomous movement”. At the same time, a certain Alain Bauer, security counselor of Michele Alliot-Marie and besides a boss of an important international security company, passed around examples of The Coming Insurrection, alerting the responsible figures of national security of the danger represented by these authors. In June 2008 all French judges received a service note inviting them to inform the Anti-Terrorist Bureau (SDAT) of all affairs that could be linked with the anarcho-autonomous movement. Then in November, after a year of mediatic preparation diffused against the new enemy, came the time for the “police-media montage” of Tanac, which permitted the public designation of the supposed representatives of this menace, and to give some principle characteristics: young, white, cultivated, mistrusting cellphones and suspecting police shadowing, living occasionally in groups…After many months of preparation, the population is in this way made to see their new enemy, against which the State is posed as the savior who intervenes preventively against a group launched on a dangerous path. That this action was balanced by a burning failure matters very little. The fact that it was irony which stood out against this paranoia of the state does not change the fact that the structures which give shape to its phantasms are really present. The plan Vigipirate has passed to red for many years (cordoning of territory and security theory), the gendarmerie is in the process of passing under the responsibility of the Minister of the Interior (army/police fusion), the general carding of the population advances slowly (Edvige and its cousins, student id cards, internet surveillance, biometrics), arrests follow, psychological action is constant, whether it be in the media or in all the places where one calls for the vigilance of the citizens against a supposed menace, the fight against the interior enemy is internationalizing, and its techniques are changing. . .

The state appears for better or worse, at all levels, to be leading a preventive offensive against all that could oppose the dominant order, combining the permanent drilling and mobilization of populations, and war operations of low intensity to assure itself of protection against the “subversive cancer” that corrodes it. Associated with the arsenal of anti-terrorist laws, which offer a legal frame for the state of exception necessary to apply this military theory, this ensemble of measures offers a structure more and more operational for putting down all eventuality of revolt. If we add to this certain recent information on the actuality of this paranoia, there is much to be unquiet about: on one hand, the same Bauer who cultivates “defense theory” at the summit of the State is about to put into place a “National Security Council” that would reunite all the bosses of the military-industrial companies, ministers, or owners of the media; on the other hand, one knows that a note has been sent to retirees and reservists of the national gendarmerie, demanding them to hold themselves ready to mobilize as of next June 30. . .

Thus, unease. But as M. Benasayag said in an interview diffused by numerous committees, “Unease, it’s what makes you move, what makes you act”. It’s not by fear or anguish which paralyzes and incites to replace something as stronger or more protective- above all in the context of the state, which poses as savior, since it is the same one that diffuses this anguish.

We thus face a disturbing machine of preventive war. But for one part, all machines have failures, bugs, and dysfunctions. And for another part, they also all have weak points. The question is now to succeed at discovering these, and to derail this machine. Some ideas? If the machine rests upon psychological action to diffuse anguish, we can stop trusting it; if it rests upon our collaboration, we can refuse it our complicity; and if it counts on the discretion of its real intentions, we can also put these in the light. . .

Recently three people in Germany received an order to appear in the court of Berlin, resp. Hamburg next week to speak out against comrades in France. None of them will speak to the judge, in both places collective public appearances will take place. You find the call out for the thing in Berlin below, the Hamburg text is not translated so far, but the idea is pretty much the same.

As well you will find here a text written after the Berlin police was sent to the house of one of these comrades to steal her handwriting for a comparison with a letter found with one of the people in the Tarnac proceedings. The attempt was not successful so far.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

The connection you desired is permanently disrupted

In the middle of June two autonomous received mail from the court in Berlin. In juridical support of the Grande Instance de Paris they are ordered to speak out as witnesses against nine comrades in some french proceedings. What is it all about?

November 11th 2008 a large scale razzia took place in the french village of Tarnac. Ten people were arrested under terrorist suspicion, meanwhile all of them are out, but face strict bail conditions. They are said to have formed »Invisible cells« and put socalled hook claws – Hakenkrallen – into the overhead power lines of several TGV trainlines. In the following a lot of trains were not running and damage done ran into the millions. Nearly simultaneously there noumerous arsons on train signals of the Bahn AG occured in Germany.

A communiqué written in German, send amongst other places to the german Newspaper taz, relates the actions in both countries to the nuclear Castor transport, that was on its way to Gorleben at the time: »Because we are fed up with it, we directed our anger against the transportation network of nuclear waste this morning.« Meanwhile, in french publications neither police nor media or the accused themselves connect the sabotage to the resistance against nuclear waste transports. Instead, the actions were clearly seen in the light of growing social tensions. Again and again a book is mentioned that one of the accused is said to be one of the athors.

»The coming insurrection« speaks about rebelling against a triste and unreal present and calls to concretely prepare for the revolt that will inevitably take off. The nervous reactions to the acts of sabotage, the inflationary talk about terror and the massive media hype all nurish the impression, that the organs of state security and the political class agree to this thesis – and start to fear for their quietness a little bit accordingly…

Now, where do we come into play here? Why this leaflet? The two comrades from Berlin that were ordered to speak out as witnesses now were mentioned in a police report of the french investigators in the Tarnac proceedings by the beginning of the year already. The respective paragraph describes the occasionaly widespread practice in Germany to sabotage nuclear transports with hook claws. It also mentions investigations the german police lead 10 years ago (the files are closed today, the proceedings never made it to the courts) that got a bit famous under the working title »Goldene Hakenkralle«- investigations that were amongst others directed against the two ordered as witnesses.

We will use this not completely free chosen opportunity to send messages of solidarity from the much too quiet Berlin to the comrades in Tarnac at the day of the order. Join us!

Thursday. July 16th 11 o´clock at the french embassy, Pariser Platz

After this groundbreaking spectacle we invite you to drive to the court with us and do what people in this society so often do: say nothing together.

But we do send greetings of solidarity to the two comrades that were arrested in Italy some days ago for sabotage using hook claws. Together with other 35 persons they are said to belong to an »Insurrectional Internationale«.

Here and there and everywhere: They will not get through!

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

[Berlin] Serialized Novel „hook claw“

Today: Provincial criminal police searches the house of a witness and yet doesn’ t search it

What happened so far: November 2008 | Castor season | abrupt standstills of trains in France and Germany | spectacular arrests under terroris laws in France | exorbitant media hullabaloo | politicians try to present the threat evolving social war puts to their position as the world being threatened by the anarcho-autonomous movement – insurrectional intentions, dangerous books | few are scared – instead union demonstrations end in streetfights, bossed are taken hostage | in June the last of those incarcerated gets out of prison under strict bail conditions | is Sarkozy losing his teeth?

The next stage in this play of bureaucratic tristesse is set in Germany. In Berlin and Hamburg people were called to witness summons.

http://de.indymedia.org/2009/07/255507.shtml
http://de.indymedia.org/2009/07/255811.shtml

On July 16th 2009 the french investigators wish to talk to Berlin autonomous, a day later to a comrade in Hamburg. A dearest wish obviously that cannot wait. Alraedy in the evening of the 7th eight offizers of the Berlin police stand in front of the house of our friend intending to search it. They want to capture handwriting specimen of hers to compare it with a letter found with one of the comrades accused in France, and – as they assume and want to prove – signed with her name.

At this point we have to disappoint you: This letter does neither contain the long desired magic words that will enable us to free us from those in power without any bloodshed, nor is it a fiery call to get rid of them right away tomorrow morning in a bloodbath. It is a letter that speaks of the joy to come across companions in other parts of the world, of exchanging ideas and inspiring each other, a longing soaked in reality that is expressed in the greeting „love & peace & petrolbombs“. A letter between comrades, so to speak.

Back to Instanzia: The handwriting specimen were not taken that day, as the room of our friend was not found, as she was not at home, and as her housemates did not show the slightest will to help the authorities. Perfect. Immidiately after this happened an evening discussion about solidarity with the militant group ‘mg’ offered the possibility to inform interested circles.

Retrospectively we came to the conclusion that this house search was an extraordinary soft one. We think that it proved to be advantageous at least in this case that we do not adhere to the standard in polit-circles to have little plates with names at the doors of our rooms: Why to contribute to a smooth process for the cops? Also, having NO nameplate can mean different ways to deal with the situation, actually it is the missing plate that allows for self-determined action in the very course of the situation. It still is possible to decide within a collective house that it is perfectly ok, if people who do not want to be affected by the search for different reasons immidiately point the respective room to the police. A nameplate is in no way more binding than what the people in the house say. The important thing is to talk about what people want to see happening in case of the police searching a collective place, how they think and feel about it. Without nameplates the decision remains with us, what we want to tell the cops in which way at what time.

To sum it up: Wrong rooms, nothing confiscated, everything is fine.

That’ s all for now. Find out how the story will further unfold live and in color on Thursday, July 16th 2009 at 11 o’clock in front of the french embassy in Berlin.

The best book review yet! Video here: The Coming Insurrection on FOX NEWS

While the government warns that right-wing extremists could be domestic terrorists, and The New York Times, says I could incite those crazy conservatives to violence, the extreme left is actively calling for violence!

As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.

The dangerous leftist book that could spark this is “The Coming Insurrection.” This is a call to arms for violent revolution, authored anonymously by a French group called the Invisible Committee who want to bring down capitalism.

This started in France and spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience.

Now it’s coming here. The book comes out in English in the U.S. in August. I have one of the first English copies.

The book was written after riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005 tore the country apart, and that was before the economy really got bad. This is the anti-”Common Sense,” where I call for peaceful protest.

This is a book of revolution. Remember this is not from the right, you know the radicals that everyone is so worried about in government. This is from the far left. Let me share a bit:

“Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary.”

The French government was so freaked out they arrested nine people believed to have written “The Coming Insurrection” on charges of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity” for allegedly sabotaging train lines in France.

When I first heard of this book it was in The New York Times book section. A group had organized an unauthorized reading of “The Coming Insurrection” at a New York City bookstore. When they were shooed out of the store they went to Starbucks and so on. Not exactly terrorist activity; more of a curiosity.

But it gets a little more creepy when you look at this: One of those leaders arrested in France Julien Coupat was held for six months and just released this May. According to a story in The Globe and Mail back in January of 2008 while visiting Canada, Coupat and his girlfriend sneaked over the border to visit New York City. According to relatives, they didn’t want their photos and fingerprints in the hands of U.S. authorities. Why is that? (By the way are our borders protected yet?)

Remember the media will tell you the right is the one to be feared. They do everything they can to tie any random nutjob shooting to conservatives. “The shooter was a fan of ‘24′ — ‘24′ starred Jon Voight — Jon Voight is a conservative!”

But this is a call for violence. Here is more:

“It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight.”

The synopsis of the book describes it as “an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe… a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to spread anarchy and live communism.”

A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it’s coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fear for their future — taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The communist party of Japan says they are getting 1,000 new members a month.

This book has not even been released in this country yet. It has been passed hand to hand and via the Internet, much like the pamphleteers in pre-revolution America. Thomas Paine was one of them. He issued a call to arms. I am not doing that. You are an idiot if you start shooting people — all that does is delegitimize the cause. Be like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King.

But people on the extreme left are calling people to arms. I am not calling to ban this book, but you should read it to know what is coming and be ready when it does.

— Watch “Glenn Beck” weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel

Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes

By COLIN MOYNIHAN.

They arrived at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in small groups on Sunday afternoon, proceeding two and three at a time to the fourth floor, where they browsed among shelves holding books by authors like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger.

By 5 o’clock a crowd of more than 100 had gathered. Their purpose: to celebrate the publication of an English translation of a book called “The Coming Insurrection,” which was written two years ago by an anonymous group of French authors who call themselves the Invisible Committee. More recently, the volume has been at the center of an unusual criminal investigation in France that has become something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians.

The book, which predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture, was inspired by disruptive demonstrations that took place over the last few years in France and Greece. It was influenced stylistically by Guy Debord, a French writer and filmmaker who was a leader of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who encouraged the Paris protests of 1968.

In keeping with the anarchistic spirit of the text, the bookstore event was organized without the knowledge or permission of Barnes & Noble. The gathering was intended partly as a show of solidarity with nine young people — including one suspected of writing “The Coming Insurrection” —whom in November the French police accused of forming a dangerous “ultraleftist” group and sabotaging train lines.

As a bookstore employee announced to the milling crowd that there was no reading scheduled for that night, a man jumped onto a stage and began loudly reciting the opening words of the book’s recent introduction: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”

A security guard tried to halt the unsanctioned reading, but the man continued for about five minutes, until the police arrived. The crowd, mostly people in their 20s and 30s, including some graduate students, then adjourned, clapping and yelling, to East 17th Street. There they formed a rebellious spectacle, crowding into shops and loudly shouting bits of political theory, to the amusement of some onlookers and store employees and the irritation of others.

When the French publisher La Fabrique first issued “The Coming Insurrection” in 2007, it received comparatively little attention. But among those who did take notice were the French police, who began monitoring a group of people, mostly graduate students, living in the tiny mountain village of Tarnac in central France.

Last November nine of those men and women, ages 22 to 34, were arrested and accused of “associating with a terrorist enterprise” and disabling power lines that left 40,000 passengers stranded for several hours on high-speed trains. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutors’ office said that one of the nine, Julien Coupat, was believed to have written “The Coming Insurrection.” He has denied being the author but told interviewers in France that he admired the book.

The government eventually released the group — who have come to be known as the Tarnac Nine — pending further investigation, with some opponents of the official action accusing the police of carrying out arrests without sufficient evidence.

Meanwhile, the book Mr. Coupat was accused of writing has developed a small but devoted following. Dozens of anonymous translators have posted the text on Web sites. And Semiotext(e), a Los Angeles publisher that specializes in works by French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, published an English-language edition of the book at the end of last month with a print run of 3,000.

Hedi El Kholti, an editor at Semiotext(e), said that the book’s winding up as a key part of a controversial case added to the historical value of its message.

“Everyone is dancing around this notion that publishing a book can take you to jail,” he said recently by telephone. “That a book is an element that can involve you in a trial.”

The slender text is part antimaterialist manifesto and part manual for revolution. The writers expound at length on what they see as a diseased and dehumanizing civilization that cannot be reformed but must, they contend, be torn apart and replaced. To that end the authors direct their readers to sabotage authority, form self-sufficient communes and learn how to “support a conspiracy against commodity society.”

Like the authors of “The Coming Insurrection,” most of those observing its publication on Sunday night refused to identify themselves by name.

“The book is important because it speaks to the total bankruptcy of pretty much everything,” one man said after the group left the bookstore. “We’re living in a high-end aesthetic with zero content.”

Inside the Sephora cosmetics shop on East 17th Street, the crowd chanted, “All power to the communes,” as security guards wearing black T-shirts ordered them back outside. A few minutes later the cry was taken up again as the group marched into Starbucks on Union Square West.

Emile Olea, 28, a customer at the coffee shop who was visiting from San Diego, closed his laptop computer and gazed at the crowd.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “But I like the excitement.”

French News Reports: Liberation | Le Monde |  Le Jura Libertaire | Le Figaro | Metro | Sud Ouest

French authorities on Thursday authorised the release of Julien Coupat, who has been detained for more than six months on suspicion of sabotaging high-speed train lines, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Julien Coupat, 34, was arrested by anti-terrorist police in November 2008 and his lengthy detention without charges being filed had become highly controversial.

His arrest was part of a wider swoop on members of what Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie described as an “anarcho-autonomous” movement that had been under surveillance by domestic intelligence services for months beforehand.

Coupat, the last of the 10 suspects arrested in November to remain in custody, has always said he was innocent but he is still under investigation for organised, terrorism-related destruction of property.

Under the terms of his release, he will have to stay in the Paris region and surrender his passport and identity papers.

The failure to secure any convictions after a highly publicised raid by hundreds of police has proved embarrassing to the government, which has been accused of whipping up terrorism fears to justify tough new security measures.

In a written interview with the Le Monde newspaper this week Coupat described his detention as a “petty revenge which is quite understandable given the means that were deployed and the extent of the failure.”

LeMonde | 5.25.09 – Here are the responses to the questions that we [Isabelle Mandraud and Caroline Monnot] posed in writing to Julien Coupat. Placed under investigation on 15 November 2008 for “terrorism,” along with eight other people interrogated in Tarnac (Correze) and Paris, he is suspected of having sabotaged the suspended electrical cables of the SNCF. He is the last one still incarcerated. (He has asked that certain words be in italics.)

Q. How are you spending your time?

A. Very well, thank you. Chin-ups, jogging and reading.

Q. Can you recall the circumstances of your arrest for us?

A. A gang of youths, hooded and armed to the teeth, broke into our house. They threatened us, handcuffed us, and took us away, after having broken everything to pieces. They first took us into very fast cars capable of moving at more than 170 kilometers an hour on the highways. In their conversations, the name of a certain Mr Marion (former leader of the anti-terrorist police) came up often. His virile exploits amused them very much, such as the time he slapped one of his colleagues in the face, in good spirits and at a going-away party. They sequestered us for four days in one of their “people’s prisons,” where they stunned us with questions in which absurdity competed with obscenity.

The one who seemed to be the brains of the operation vaguely excused himself from this circus by explaining that it was the fault of the “services,” the higher-ups, all kinds of people who want [to talk to] us very much. Today, my kidnappers are still free. Certain recent and diverse facts attest to the fact that they continue to rage with total impunity.

Q. The sabotage of the SNCF cables in France was claimed [by someone] in Germany. What do you say about that?

A. At the moment of our arrest, the French police were already in possession of the communique that claimed, in addition to the acts of sabotage that they want to attribute to us, other simultaneous attacks in Germany. This communique is inconvenient to the police for a number of reasons: it was mailed from Hanover, drafted in German and sent to newspapers in the Outer Rhine area exclusively; but it is especially inconvenient because it does not fit the framework of the mediatic[1] fable about us: a small nucleus of fanatics bringing the battle to the heart of the State by hanging three iron bars on the cables. From then on, they took care to not mention this communique too much, either in court or in the public lie.

It is true that the sabotage of the train lines lost much of its mysterious aura as a result: now it would be a matter of simple protest against the transportation of ultra-radioactive nuclear wastes to Germany over railroads and denunciations (made in passing) of the great rip-off known as “the crisis.” The communique concludes with a very SNCF-like “We thank the travelers on the trains concerned for their understanding.” What tact there is among these “terrorists”!

Q. Do you recognize yourself in the phrases “anarcho-autonomous circle of influence” and “ultra-left”?

A. Let me resume what I was saying. In France, we are currently living through the end of a period of historical freezing, the founding act of which was the accord reached in 1945 by the Gaullists and the Stalinists to disarm the people under the pretext of “avoiding a civil war.” The terms of this pact can be formulated thus: while the Right will renounce its overtly fascist accents, the Left will abandon all serious revolutionary perspectives. For four years, the advantage of Sarkozy’s clique has been the fact that it unilaterally took the initiative by breaking this pact and renewing “without apologies” the classics of pure reaction concerning the insane, religion, the West, Africa, work, the history of France and national identity.

Faced with a power at war that dares to think strategically and divide the world into “friends,” “enemies” and “negligible quantities,” the Left remains frozen, as if sick with tetanus. It is too cowardly, too compromised and, more than anything else, too discredited to offer the least resistance to a power that it doesn’t dare treat as an enemy and that, one by one, snatches away the sly devils [les malins] among its ranks. As for the extreme Left (Besancenot, for example): whatever its electoral results, and even if it has emerged from the groupuscular state in which it long vegetated, it hasn’t a more desirable perspective to offer than Soviet gray that has been slightly retouched in Photoshop. Its destiny is to deceive and disappoint.

Thus, in the sphere of political representation, the established power has nothing to fear from anyone. And certainly not the union bureaucracies, which are more corrupt than ever and now importune power [for help]. They do this, they who have danced an obscene ballet with the government for the last two years! In such conditions, the only force that can put a check on the Sarkozy gang, its only real enemy in this country, is the street, the street and its old revolutionary penchants. During the riots that followed the second part of the ritualized plebiscite of May 2007, only the street knew how to rise to the occasion. In the Antilles, during the recent occupations of companies and factories, it alone knew how to make another voice heard.

This summary analysis of the theater of operations was soon to be confirmed in June 2007, when the intelligence agencies published — under the bylines of journalists working under orders (notably for Le Monde) — the first articles bringing to light the terrible peril that is placed upon all social life by the “anarcho-autonomes.” To start, one attributed to them the organization of spontaneous riots, which, in so many towns, saluted the “electoral triumph” of the new president.

With this fable of “anarcho-autonomes,” one has sketched out the profile of the menace to which the Minister of the Interior is docilely committed to give a little flesh and a few faces by organizing targeted arrests in mediatic police raids. When one can no longer contain what overflows, one can still assign it a case number and incarcerate it. Thus, the case of the “rioter,” in which the workers of Clairoix, urban youths, student blockaders and anti-summit demonstrators are dumped pell-mell — this is certainly an effective move in the current management of social pacification — permits the State to criminalize actions, not existences.[2] And it is indeed the intention of the new power to attack the enemy, as such, without waiting for him to declare himself. Such is the vocation of the new categories of repression.

Finally, it hardly matters than no one in France recognizes him or herself as “anarcho-autonomous” or that the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than inoffensive volumes of Marxology. Moreover, the recent fortunes of the term “ultra-left,” which have permitted some journalists to catalogue the Greek rioters of last December without striking a blow, speak to the fact that no one knows what the ultra-left was nor even that it ever existed.

At this point — and in the anticipation of outbursts that can only be systematized in the face of the provocations of a hard-pressed global and French oligarchy — the utility of these categories to the police must no longer be debated. Nevertheless, one cannot predict whether “anarcho-autonomous” or “ultra-left” will finally carry off the favors of the Spectacle and relegate a totally justified revolt to the inexplicable.

Q. The police consider you the leader of a group on the point of tipping over into terrorism. What do you think about that?

A. Such a pathetic allegation can only be the work of a regime that is on the point of tipping over into nothingness.

Q. What does the word terrorism mean to you?

A. Nothing allows one to explain why the Algerian Department of Intelligence and Security, suspected of having orchestrated — with the knowledge of the DST[3] — the wave of attacks in 1995, is not classed among the international terrorist organizations. Nothing allows one to explain the sudden transformation of “terrorists” into heroes in the manner of the Liberation, into partners suitable for the Evian Accords, into Iraqi police officers and “moderate members of the Taliban,” according to the most recent sudden reversal of the American strategic doctrine.

[It means] nothing, if not sovereignty. It is the sovereign in this world who designates the terrorist. He who refuses to take part in this sovereignty will take care not to respond to your question. He who covets a few crumbs will comply [with the question] promptly. He who doesn’t suffocate from bad faith will find instructive the case of the two ex-”terrorists” who became the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the Palestinian Authority, respectively, and who — to top it all off — were both given Noble Peace Prizes.

The fuzziness that surrounds the designation “terrorist,” the manifest impossibility of defining “terrorism,” does not affect several provisional lacunae in French law: terrorists are at the source of this thing that one can define very easily: anti-terrorism, for which “terrorism” forms the pre-condition. Anti-terrorism is a technique of government that thrusts its roots down into the old art of counter-insurrection, so-called “psychological warfare,” to be polite.

Anti-terrorism, contrary to what the term itself insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, but is the method by which one positively produces the political enemy as terrorist. By means of a wealth of provocations, infiltrations, surveillance, intimidation and propaganda; by means of the science of mediatic manipulation, “psychological action,” the fabrication of both evidence and crimes; by means of the fusion of the police and the judicial; and by means of the annihilation of the “subversive menace” by associating the internal enemy, the political enemy — which is at the heart of the population — with the affect of terror.

In modern warfare, the essential aspect is the “battle for hearts and minds” in which blows are permitted. The elementary procedure here is invariable: individualize the enemy so as to cut him off from the people and from communal reason; display him in the costume of a monster; defame him, publicly humiliate him, incite the vilest people to heap their spit upon him; encourage hatred of him. “The law must be utilized simply as another weapon in the arsenal of the government and, in this case, represents nothing other than a propaganda cover to get rid of undesirable members of the public. For maximum efficiency, it would be suitable that the activities of the judicial services are tied to the war effort in the most discrete fashion possible,” advised Brigadier Frank Kitson (former general in the British Army, theoretician of counter-insurrectionary war), who knew something of the subject.

Once is not a pattern: in our case, anti-terrorism has been a flop. In France, one isn’t ready to let oneself be terrorized by us. The prolongation of my detention for a “reasonable” period of time is petty revenge, quite comprehensible due to the means mobilized and the depth of the failure; as comprehensible as the petty fury of the [intelligence] “services,” which since 11 November [2008] have through the press attributed to us the most fantastic misdeeds and stalked our comrades. How this logic of reprisals has seized control of the minds of the police and the small hearts of the judges, this is what the cadenced arrests of those “close to Julien Coupat” will have had the merit of revealing.

It is necessary to say that certain people are using this affair to extend their lamentable careers, like Alain Bauer (a criminologist), for example; others are using it to launch their latest ventures, like poor M. Squarcini (the Central Director of Domestic Intelligence); while still others are trying to rehabilitate the credibility that they’ve never had and never will have, like Michele Alliot-Marie.[4]

Q. You come from a very well-to-do background, which oriented you in another direction. . .

A. “There are plebes in all classes.” (Hegel).

Q. Why Tarnac?

A. Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you, I fear.

Q. Do you define yourself as an intellectual? A philosopher?

A. Philosophy was born like chatty grief from original wisdom. Plato already heard the words of Heraclitus as if they had escaped from a bygone world. In the era of diffused intellectuality, one can’t see what “the intellectual” might make specific, unless it is the expanse of the gap that separates the faculty of thinking from the aptitude for living. Intellectual and philosopher are, in truth, sad titles. But for whom exactly is it necessary to define oneself?

Q. Are you the author of The Coming Insurrection?

A. This is the most formidable aspect of these proceedings: a book integrally versed in the case histories of instructional manuals, in the interrogations in which one tries to make you say that you live just as described in The Coming Insurrection; that you protest[5] as The Coming Insurrection advocates; and that you sabotaged train lines to commemorate the Bolshevik coup d’Etat of October 1917. Because this idea is mentioned in The Coming Insurrection, its publisher was questioned by the anti-terrorist services.

In French memory, one hasn’t seen power become fearful of a book for a very long time. Instead, one had the custom of believing that as long as leftists were preoccupied with writing, at least they weren’t making revolution. Assuredly, times change. Serious history returns.

What founds the accusation of terrorism where we are concerned are suspicions about the coincidence of thought and life; what founds the accusation concerning the association of evil-doers is the suspicion that this coincidence couldn’t have been the result of individual heroism, but communal attention. Negatively, this means that one does not suspect any of those who sign their names to so many fierce critiques of the system of putting the least of their firm resolutions into practice; the insult is strong enough. Unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and this whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially repressive [policiere] character of the author’s function.

On the other hand, I am a reader. Re-reading it, just last week, I better understood the hysterical bad temper that, from high up, motivates the State to hound its presumed authors. The scandal of the book is that all that figures in it is rigorously, catastrophically true and it does not cease to prove itself true, little by little, each day. Because what proves itself, under the outward appearance of this “economic crisis,” this “collapse of confidence,” and this “massive rejection of the ruling classes,” is indeed the end of a civilization, the implosion of a paradigm, namely, that of the government, which rules everything in the West — the relations of beings to themselves no less than to the political order, religion or the organization of business. At all levels of the present, there is a gigantic loss of mastery that no word-games [maraboutage] by the police will be able to remedy.

It is not by skewering us with prison terms, microscopic surveillance, judicial supervision and prohibitions upon communication because we might be the authors of these lucid findings that one will make what has been found disappear. The characteristic of truth is that it escapes, barely enunciated, from those who formulate it. Governments: it doesn’t accomplish anything if you send us to jail; quite the contrary.

Q. You’ve read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. Does this analysis still seem pertinent to you

A. The prison is indeed the dirty little secret of French society, the key to and not the margins of the most respectable social relations. What is concentrated in the prison is not a pile of wild barbarians, as it pleases some people to think, but in fact the ensemble of the disciplines that weave together so-called “normal” existence outside. Supervisors, the canteen, soccer games in the courtyard, one’s use of time, divisions, camaraderie, fights and ugly architecture: one has to have been in prison to take the full measure of the carceral in the school, the “innocent” schools of the Republic.

Envisioned from this impregnable angle, prison isn’t a pit [repaire] for society’s failures; instead, current society is a failed prison. The same organization of separations, the same administration of misery through shit,[6] TV, sports and porno reigns everywhere else, but much less methodically than in prison. To conclude: these high walls only hide from view this truth of explosive banality: there are lives and souls, entirely equal, who drag themselves along on both sides of the barbed wire, and because of it.

If one avidly tracks down the testimonies “from the inside” that finally expose the secrets that the prison conceals, it is done to better to hide the secret that the prison is: the secret of your servitude, you who are reputedly free, while its menace weighs invisibly on each of your gestures.

All of the virtuous indignation that surrounds the black hole [la noirceur] of French prisons and their suicide rates; all the crude counter-propaganda of the penal administrators who bring on camera the disciplinarians [des matons] devoted to the well-being of the detainees and the metal-plated directors who are concerned with the “meaning of the penalty”; in sum, all of the debate on the horror of incarceration and the necessity of humanizing detention is as old as the prison system itself. It is part of its efficacy, which permits the State to combine the terror that the prison must inspire with the hypocritical legal status of “civilized” punishment. The little system of prison-based spying, humiliation and violence [de ravage] that the French State uses more fanatically than any other State in Europe isn’t even scandalous. The State pays for it a hundred times over in the banlieus, and this, from all the evidence, is only a beginning: vengeance is the hygiene of the plebes.

But the most remarkable imposture of the judicial-penal system certainly consists in pretending that it exists to punish criminals when, in fact, it only manages illegality. Any boss — not just the boss of Everything — any president of a general council — not just the President of Hauts-de-Sein — any cop knows that illegality is necessary for the correct performance of his or her trade. In our time, the chaos of the laws is such that one would do well to not seek to make the laws respected too much and the drug enforcements agents [les stups] should stick to regulating trafficking and not repressing it, which would be social and political suicide.

The discussion is not — as the judicial fiction would have it — between the legal and the illegal, between the innocents and the criminals, but between the criminal whom one judges suitable for prosecution and the criminal whom one leaves in peace, as the general powers of society require. The race of the innocents was wiped out long ago, and the penalty is not what condemns you to justice: the penalty is justice itself; thus, it isn’t a matter of my comrades and I “claiming our innocence,” despite what is ritualistically repeated in the press, but trying to derail the hazardous political offensive that these vile proceedings constitute. These were some of the conclusions to which the mind is brought by re-reading Surveiller et Punir in prison. Of course, one isn’t suggesting, given what the Foucaultians have done with the works of Foucault for the last twenty years, that they should spend some time in jail.

Q. How do you analyze what has happened to you?

A. Enlighten yourself: what has happened to us, to my comrades and I, will also happen to you. This is the first mystification by power: nine people are prosecuted in the framework of a judicial proceeding against an “association of evil-doers in connection with a terrorist enterprise,” and they must be particularly concerned by these grave accusations. But there is no “Tarnac Affair,” no “Coupat Affair,” no “Hazan Affair” (Hazan published “The Coming Insurrection”). What there is, is an oligarchy that is very wobbly and becomes ferocious like any power when it feels itself to be really threatened. When his views no longer elicit anything among the people other than hatred and scorn, the prince has no other support than the fear that he inspires.

What there is before us is a bifurcation that is both historical and metaphysical: either we pass from a paradigm of government to a paradigm of living, at the price of a cruel but deeply moving revolt, or we allow the instauration at the planetary level of an air-conditioned disaster in which — under the yoke of a “simplified” management — an imperial elite of citizens and marginalized plebeian classes coexist. Thus there surely is a war, a war between the beneficiaries of the catastrophe and those who are accustomed to a less skeletal idea of life. One has never seen a dominant class commit suicide willingly.

The revolt has conditions, but not causes. How many Ministries of National Identity, lay-offs, raids of those without proper papers or those who are political opponents, young people beaten up by the police in the banlieus, and ministers threatening to deprive diplomas from those who dare to occupy their schools are necessary before one decides that such a regime — even if installed in power by an apparently democratic plebiscite — has no reason to exist and only merits being brought down? It is a matter of sensitivity.

Servitude is the intolerable thing that can be tolerated indefinitely. Because this is a matter of sensitivity and this sensitivity is immediately political — not that it wonders “Who should I vote for?” but “Is this incompatible with my existence?” — it is, for power, a question of anesthetizing the response [to the second question] through the administration of ever more massively distracting doses of fear and stupidity. And there where the anesthesia no longer works, this order, which has united against it all the reasons for revolt, tries to dissuade us by stuffing us into a small, tight-fitting [ajustee] terror.

My comrades and I are only a variable in this adjustment. One suspects us like so many others, so many “youths,” so many “gangs,” of having no solidarity with a world that is collapsing. On this one point, one doesn’t lie. Fortunately, this heap of swindlers, impostors, industrialists, financiers and prostitutes; this entire Mazarin’s court full of neuroleptics, Disney versions of Louis Napoleon, and Sunday shows that grip the country for an hour lack an elementary sense of dialectics. Each step that they take towards total control brings them closer to their fear. Each new “victory” with which they flatter themselves spreads a little further the desire to see them defeated in their turn. Each maneuver that they figure comforts their power ends up rendering it detestable. In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.

(Published in Le Monde on 25 May 2009 and translated by NOT BORED! 27 May 2009.)

[1] There is no adequate English equivalent for mediatique, which not only refers to the media, but to the spectacular, as well.

[2] There could be typos in or words left out of the original French. The context suggests that the case of the “casseur” allows the State to criminalize existences and actions.

[3] The French FBI.

[4] Minister of the Interior.

[5] vous manifeste can also mean “demonstrate” and “reveal yourself.”

[6] English in original.

Statement of the Limoges Support Committee Concerning 11 May 2009

“We are all iron bars,” announces the banner in front. Because this is what is at issue.[1] And this insupportable slogan: the everyday routine [le train train] must not be derailed. Move along, there’s nothing to see here! As if! There are things to see. First of all, there are the nine people who, since this past 11 November [2008], have been subjected to a State that is surpassed, powerless and incapable. Repression in perspective, its indictments resemble a farce, a bad farce, a tragic farce.

So what? At the moment that soldiers fill the train stations and cops intervene at schools, can we regard with indifference the militarization of public space? Can we let this government use anti-terrorist provisions to muzzle activists with impunity? Can we let ourselves be ridiculed by their loud and populist speeches? Can we hear the disappointment of the foreigners whom they ceaselessly arrest, lock up and deport from its borders?

In this world turned upside-down, in which the rich are given what is taken from the poor, will we suspend the order of things if, somewhere, we help someone who is without proper identification papers? [Yes,] by becoming the iron bars that sabotage the vile ambiance that reigns, the grain of sand that jams the machine, the bug[2] that renders so many things possible. And also by noisily manifesting our disgust with this squalid power. This is what is at issue. When we want to create more acceptable ways of living, they become afraid and overwhelm us. And, indeed, it is youth — not as [biological] generation, but as spirit [elan], as dynamic — that they lock up. Move along, there’s nothing to see here!

Thus, it is a question of sabotaging the everyday routine. And so Monday’s march took on the aspects of an enthusiastic and joyful carnival that has not forgotten its tradition of contestation. A carnival held to vomit [out] those who govern us, scorn us, kill us. A masked carnival. Because nothing justifies the idea that the cowl is only reserved for the agents of the SDAT[3] and the disciplinarians of the ERIS[4] whose task is to beat up prisoners. A noisy carnival, because the anger displayed, the rage that inhabits us, is hardly satisfied with muffled indignation at the growing number of injustices. And so enthusiastic and joyful that we exhausted ourselves singing out our solidarity! And one must see the smiling faces that know that here is a weapon much more powerful and livable than the “Every man for himself” of this degenerated world. This past Monday evening, under the storm of a world that stinks of the billy club and poverty, it was a parade that faced the prison. The final gesture of defiance by a libidinal power — faced with several messengers from the CRS[5] and in the great revolutionary tradition — was to set off fireworks in front of the prison. This was a working-class [populaire] pyrotechnical display to recall our support for Julien [Coupat] and all prisoners. Because this festival was also theirs, and also because — wall by wall, stone by stone — it will be necessary to destroy all the prisons.

No truce, no rest! By refusing to interrupt the instruction in progress, by maintaining Julien’s detention, the judges persist in obeying only the phantasms born from sick and putrid minds. This anti-terrorist and pro-security delirium must end. Immediately.

(Written by the Support Committee of Limoges, “in response to several odious commentaries in the local media” concerning the demonstrations of Monday, 11 May 2009. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 20 May 2009.)

[1] The iron bars that were allegedly used to sabotage the high-speed trains in France.
[2] English in original.
[3] The Anti-Terrorist Under-Directorate.
[4] The Regional Intervention and Security Teams set up by the Minister of the Interior, Dominique Perben, in February 2003.
[5] The French riot police.

Collective Statement of the Delegates from Nearly 30 “Tarnac 9″ Support Committees Who Met in Limoges, Belgium, in March 2009

It is a failure. We haven’t feared “anarcho-autonomous” terrorists weaving international networks. This invasion — so brutal and crude — by the political police has pushed us to put our bitterness into words, to leave our isolation.

The day after the arrests, support committees sprung up like crocuses after the thaw. Without consultations or slogans, the contagion spread: concerts, debates, meetings, evening performances. . . . Everywhere the support has brought together dozens, even hundreds of people.

It is a failure. Perhaps it was too crude. No one has wanted to believe that those who one accuses of having disconnected the TGV were bloody brutes who fomented terrible attacks. The Tarnac affair has been a trigger. Because we had forgotten that this is how one treats political enemies, forgotten that some radical intentions can officially lead to your jails. We did not know that those who in your eyes represent such a great danger could be isolated in a fantastic “circle of influence.” Instead, we have felt — from many places, epidermically — that something was not right. And if these arrests revealed a will to terrorize, it does not come from those who were indicted. There was a strange resonance everywhere that one evoked the affair that concerns us here.

And we feel that this support exists — not only in the number of signatories to a petition — but also in the amused eyes of the passersby who [think they] see an altercation between the police and a group of young people (thereby secretly desiring that the latter have the upper hand); in the mischevious eyes of the one who, at the office, consults an anti-social pamphlet that is hidden in a manager’s manual; in the discreet gesture of the administrator who conceals the texts that would justify his or her expulsion from the country; in the determination of those who sequester their bosses, who practice the requisitioning of goods; and in the tension that systematically shows itself at every public demonstration. The “Tarnac Affair” is a prism in which one can read the era and the struggles that traverse it. One considers the more discreet arrests that have followed with less indifference. One sees more clearly what ends the anti-terrorist laws serve. And what ends databases [le fichage] serve, and what it costs to want to be removed from them and what it costs to accept being subjected to them. What was diffused in the air was crystallized there in such a way that it has become very difficult to not takes sides.

One better grasps a government’s need to invent the figure of an interior enemy during such an explosive era. And one divines by filigree the unavowed nightmare of a system that has lost its footing: one in which the citizens of yesterday stop playing the game, defy the established order and organize themselves accordingly. There are, finally, legends in which we have ceased to believe along the way. From now on, how can one not feel oneself close to the rebels who have taken seriously the necessity of organizing themselves collectively? In this era in which what is best distributed is bitterness and the feeling of missing out on life, how can one not feel a complicity with those who have sought to extricate themselves from the ambient sadness and to struggle against its causes?

How not to perceive in their defiance the echo of that which we all feel? Without the arrests of 11 November [2008], The Coming Insurrection perhaps would never have been read — in any case, not collectively and no doubt not in a perspective that is so obviously practical — as if all the discussions, actions and meetings had perhaps never taken place.

We feel the force and the joy that there is in sharing our doubts and anger, and we see forming the “gangs” that your recent laws have not managed to dissolve. We see how the arrests — made for more or less useless reasons — reveal the panicked reflex of a perturbed power. They no longer dissuade anyone. Other people are still in prison for reasons similar to those of the Tarnac defendants. Some have been returned to prison for not scrupulously respecting the prohibition to not see each other. The legal surveillance, the forced dispersion of all the friends who have organized themselves, increases. Your prisons and all those that you can construct will never suffice to lock up all those who leave your norms behind. And wherever we are, solidarity is woven. In this period of crisis and trouble, we are only one voice in the chorus of those who no longer accommodate themselves to piecemeal reforms [rabibochages]. In all sections of the territory, in all segments of the people, adhesion to the system is in tatters. Disaffiliation becomes a practical route everywhere. And so much the better.

In what you wanted to inflict on the “Tarnac 9,” nothing consoles us as much as ascertaining that, for you, more threats arise (and from all sides) than those threats that you have believed you have conjured away. It is no longer due to incomprehension that we feel that we must retrace the thread of this affair. But understanding the logic at work doesn’t appease us. It only makes us angrier. The indictments must be lifted, just as the anti-terrorist, anti-gang, anti-mask and anti-assembly arsenal that aims at breaking all effective solidarity must be defeated. During the entire month of May, in each town in which they exist, the support committees will multiply their initiatives. On 8 May, public meetings will be held so that the question of knowing how to react to the situation that is made for us can be posed everywhere. There aren’t nine people to save, but an order to bring down.

(Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 13 May 2009.)

A communique from the support committee

At 2 pm on Tuesday [28 April 2009], a very active member of a support committee was arrested on the streets of Paris. The police fixed her to the steering wheel of her car and expelled the person who accompanied her, before taking flight with our comrade. She was brought to the offices of the SDAT[1] under an anti-terrorist regime (in custody for 96 hours and [access to] a lawyer after 72 hours).

This crude attempt at intimidating those who organize against anti-terrorist measures and for the support of people imprisoned in Paris and elsewhere. The police justified this arrest on the grounds that Tessa was “close to the hard core” of the group from Tarnac and “gravitated” around the farm at Goutaillioux. Not only has the justice system not abandoned its stupid set-up and the police categories that go along with it (“cell,” “circle of influence,” “hard core,” “circle” and “member”), but even claims to henceforth apply them to those who remain close to their friends who have been placed under examination. Legal surveillance prevents these friends from seeing each other, indeed, from returning to them. The SDAT’s new operations also tells them: “Your shared friends will henceforth be considered as facilitating communications between you and, thus, [other] members of the same association of evil-doers; if you see them, we can arrest them.”

This indictment, which allows the police to pursue someone without attributing participation in criminal acts to them, is decidedly very useful.

We see the evolution of this business. One day it is Eric Hazan, the publisher of The Coming Insurrection, interrogated for 4 hours. Another day it is a member of one of the support committees who is carried off from the street. The operation is clear: on the one hand, it banalizes the summoning to court and the taking into custody for long periods of time and without any meaning; on the other, it generates some mediatic[2] agitation to make people believe that this affair will advance when everyone has understood that, not only does it trample upon people, but it also will never go anywhere.

With each public statement by the people who were indicted, by their lawyers and by their supporters, the accuser — the Minister of the Interior, a judge, a cop or an expert — claims to pull from his or her hat “exclusive” elements or other pseudo-proofs that in reality have no legal value and that, decontextualized, are used exactly as propaganda. Besides this, what principally is the purpose of the judge’s interrogations and investigations? Today, at this stage of the inquest, it is The Coming Insurrection: who wrote it, when and for what purpose. More than what it says, it is this text’s resonance with the current explosive situation that becomes troublesome for power.

Party to a spontaneous reaction that led to the creation of a certain number of support committees everywhere in France, solidarity is expressed ever more publicly, even in the pages of the newspapers. Judge [Thierry] Fragnoli doesn’t give a fuck; and, one year after the beginning of the inquest and six months after the incarceration of Julien [Coupat], he still has no fear of making himself look ridiculous by arresting anyone, anytime, though these people will inevitably be released. We will provide a practical response to these petty maneuvers in a few weeks.

You fuck with us? You will not fuck for long.[3]

Thank you.

(Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2009.)

[1] The federal anti-terrorism task force in France.

[2] There is no equivalent in English for mediatique, which not only denotes the media, but the spectacular, as well.

[3] This slogan can be found at the end of Raoul Vaneigem’s Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations, first published in French in 1967 and translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Disclaimer: this article was written by an academic for a popular french magazine. The ending is crap, and its tone is shit as well. Enjoy.

April 2009 – Around the time of the arrest of Julien Coupat and the [other] people accused of sabotaging the lines of the SNCF[1] in the autumn of 2008, among all the names, more or less fanciful, used by the Minister of the Interior and the police to describe the nebulous political ideology to which these “terrorists” adhered, there was one — a single one — that had some legitimacy: “ultra-left.” Contrary to what one might believe, this term wasn’t created for the occasion, like the rather comic expression “anarcho-autonomous.” And even if its usage gas sometimes been contested by those to whom it was supposed to designate, it undoubtedly possesses a descriptive value. Indeed, although it remained attached to the communist project, the movements that one groups together under the name “ultra-left” are still distinguished from the extreme left by their opposition to Lenin, Trotsky and their inheritors.

What also particularizes the ultra-left is the critique, even the pure and simple rejection, of the modes of action proper to the extreme left: organization into parties or unions; parliamentarianism; and the support of anti-fascist or national-liberation struggles. The ultra-left has always privileged anti-hierarchical forms of organization, based upon direct democracy and the concentration of all of its forces upon a single goal: revolution.[2]

This is why it can be said, without exaggeration and perhaps even with praise, that Julien Coupat — as well as those who published in the journal Tiqqun or in the works with which this name is associated[3] — are parts of the ultra-left. Indeed, by consigning the traditional formulations of the extreme left to the Gemonies,[4] the movement inspired by Tiqqun and its successive avatars only recognized itself in an “imaginary party”: the party of those “who choose to live in the interstices of the market world and participate in whatever is connected to it.”[5] Which does not prevent this movement from once again taking up the question of communism in a new light, not as a political or economic system — “Communism can do very well without Marx. Communism doesn’t give a fuck about the USSR.” — but as the instauration of a form of authentic community: “A thing is mine to the extent that it enters into the domain of my usage, and not by virtue of some legal title. Legal property has no other reality, in the final analysis, than the forces that protect it. The question of communism is thus, on the one hand, the suppression of the police and, on the other, the elaboration of modes of sharing, of usage, among those who live together” (The Call).

More exactly — and the police have themselves recognized it[6] — Tiqqun, Coupat et al inscribe themselves in the filiation of the Situationist International (SI), which was a singular movement from all points of view. Guy Debord, who was one of its principle leaders, defined it thus in 1963: “at once an artistic avant-garde, experimental research into the free construction of everyday life, and finally a contribution to the theoretical and practical edification of a new revolutionary contestation.”[7] Born in the 1950s from the encounter between several artists who came from Surrealism and Lettrism, this group progressively came to adopt the political positions of the ultra-left of its time, which was a singular trajectory that can be explained by the group’s encounters with certain “heretical” Marxist intellectuals (Henri Lefebvre, Cornelius Castoriadis, etc) as well as by its ardent research into means capable of rendering life completely poetic, beyond the limits that are imposed on it by a certain ordering of the social world.

When the first two issues of Tiqqun appeared, almost ten years ago, the journal was instantly identified by all its prospective buyers as a new component in the small milieu that keeps the spirit of the SI alive, even today. They could recognize among the people associated with Tiqqun the names of Joel Gayraud, a habitue of post-situationist circles,[7] and even Coupat himself, the author a short time previously of a university thesis on the SI, was thanked by the sociologist Luc Boltanski, who utilized Tiqqun’s conclusions in a work written at the same time.[9] But even more than names, it was the style [facture] of the journal that signaled its adherence to post-situationist movements: a burning style, one that “burns like ice,” in the words of Baudelaire; the recurring usage of the concept of the spectacle as it was elaborated by Guy Debord; and a beautiful and sober presentation, which contrasted with the radicality of the texts. There were even several small polemics within the milieu, against this or that remarkable figure — for example, Jean-Pierre Voyer and Jaime Semprun[10] — in perfect conformity with “the old leftist tradition that consists in hitting as hard as possible the currents that one believes to be the closest [to oneself] and that one wants to distinguish oneself from at all costs.”[11] Thus, Tiqqun resembled all of those publications that were distributed in the hundreds through the classic bookstores of the post-situationist milieu in Paris: Actualites, on the rue Dauphine (since closed); Un regard moderne, on the rue Git-le-Coeur; and the basement of the Compagnie bookstore.

“Theory of Bloom,” “Theory of the Young Woman,” “Theses on the Terrible Community” . . . . Someone who turns the pages of Tiqqun today will think they are reading the words of theorists, not terrorists. In the pages of the journal, there developed a manner of thinking that was greatly nourished by philosophy and inspired by a simultaneously demanding and inventive reading of the works of Hegel, Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, but also Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and many others. Especially Agamben, who became a friend of Debord at the beginning of the 1990s, [12] held the work of Tiqqun in high regard, [13] and ended up close to several of its editors, including of course Julien Coupat, whose public defense he has taken up;[14] Joel Gayraud, who became Agamben’s translator in France; and even Fulvia Carnevale, with whom Agamben had the occasion to lead seminar in Venice.[15] A discreet homage in return and a pledge of loyalty, The Coming Insurrection — the last treatise published in the Tiqqun line,[16] which the police considered to be a manual for terrorists — alluded in its title to The Coming Community, an enigmatic and seminal book published by Agamben in 1990.

The passion for theory was always constitutive of the situationist movement, which — so as to launch its accusations against the ensemble of social life — was strongly inspired by the masters of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. To such an extent that this philosophical passion sometimes turned to drunkenness among some of its continuers. The curious reader can even convince herself of this by consulting, for example, the texts published in a neo-Hegelian style and interrupted by choleric flashes that was published during the last 20 years by the team at the center of the Bibliotheque des Emeutes, then the Observatoire de Teleologie,[17] which was a small group whose doctrine is not without analogy to that of Tiqqun in its fascination for diverse figures of the contemporary lumpenproletariat (gangs, the youth of the banlieus, marginals and others who have been demoted).[18] In a general fashion, the theory of the situationists and their followers is still managing to be maintained at a sufficiently estimable level to keep the attention of a good number of intellectuals. The influence of the situationists thus has been decisive for thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Paul Virilio;[19] and even today the publications of the Encyclopedia of Nuisances, for example, are read with interest in the leftist circles of the university-based intelligentsia. [20]

It is not necessary to believe, as the result of all this, that the situationist and post-situationist movements have remained as pure theory. What made their reputation was their capacity to give to this theory a striking force, to engage it in practice, to make the arms of critique transform themselves into a critique of arms (to take up an expression from Marx for which the SI had particular affection). Contrary to a certain vulgate who wants the situationists to have been a bunch of schoolkids, that is, the arty version of the great student parade [monome of '68, it is necessary to recall that the situationists brought fire to the powders at the faculte de Nanterre, fought at the barricades in the Latin Quarter before they took part in the first Occupation Committee at the Sorbonne and organized the provision of supplies for the factory workers who were on strike.[22] The authorities did not deceive themselves about the subversive character of the SI: its publications were seized several times; and its members were pursued by the courts, surveilled by the police and sometimes put in prison or physically threatened.

The care of putting their ideas and actions into accord has pushed many movements issued from the situationist nebula to continue this tradition, either by involving themselves directly in social conflicts or by intervening punctually in a more isolated fashion. For example, let us cite several instances of brilliance, such as the 1990 public divulging by the Cangaceiros[23] of the secret plans for several French prisons so as to prevent their construction; or even the two sabotage campaigns that revealed to the public at large the noxiousness of GMO [genetically modified organisms] — the first begun in January 1998 on the initiative of Rene Riesel, an ex-situationist connected to the Encyclopedia of Nuisances[24] and the second launched in the summer of 1999 by a multitude of small groups whose tracts clearly showed situationist inspiration. No doubt it was this tradition of sabotage and active participation in contestatory movements — that is to say, its capacity for perturbation — that drew the attention of the police to Coupat and his companions. Tiqqun’s declarations of intention in favor of illegalist strategies and a generalization of social chaos no doubt were accompanied by a humor typical of the situationist milieus: one remembers the very scholarly “Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science,” founded by Tiqqun in the pages of issue #2, and which proposed the use of recipe cards that would allow someone to realize a fictive use of a Molotov cocktail. But does not humor constitute an aggravating circumstance when it passes from black to red and threatens to explode all social contradictions?

In the midst of many perspicacious ideas and very exact formulations about our era, it is perhaps the insurrectionism of Tiqqun that poses the most problems. In their desperate quest for an intensity of words and acts, Coupat and his fellows have systematized and carried to its summit a certain discourse of struggle that is proper to radical movements. They have thus forged a veritable ideology, which desires that the exercise of domination is understood as a permanent war and that a revolutionary attitude consists in taking note of this situation, that is, in carrying the conflict that is in this situation to the end. “We protest nothing, we demand nothing. We constitute ourselves in force, in material force, in autonomous material force at the heart of the global civil war,” The Call announces. And [they constitute themselves] by dreaming that this force will emerge in the manner of a guerrilla who has “his farms, schools, weapons, medicines, collective houses, editing tables, print shops, covered trucks and beachheads in the metropolises.” And that, one fine day, a series of subversive actions will converge upon a general tipping-point . . . in what? That’s the question. Simone Weil, who lived in the middle of the Spanish [Civil] War that Tiqqun has presented as a model, nevertheless foresaw that, in this armed upheaval, “the necessities, the atmosphere of civil war, have the upper hand over the aspirations that one seeks to defend by the means of civil war.”[25] Which he had already formulated several years before in the following manner: “It seems that a revolution engaged in a war has only the choice between succumbing under the murderous blows of the counter-revolution and transforming itself into counter-revolution by the very mechanism of military struggle.”[26]

(Written by Patrick Marcolini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nice, and published in Le Tigre, volume 30, March/April 2009. Translated by the French by NOT BORED! May 2009. Footnotes by the author, except where noted.)

[1] Translator: the Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer francais is the National Railway of France. It provides high-speed train travel to the rest of Europe.

[2] In France there is only one synthetic work on the ultra-left, the one by Christophe Bourseiller, which is unfortunately blemished by a certain number of errors and misinterpretations: Histoire generale de l’ultra-gauche, Denoel, 2003.

[3] The journal Tiqqun came out with two issues: February 1999 and October 2001. Several texts were extracted from them and published by diverse publishers. A Call was then distributed anonymously in 2004. The Coming Insurrection was published in 2007 by Editions La Fabrique under the signature of “The Invisible Committee.” A preface to a collection of writings by Blanqui was also published by La Fabrique in 2006 (signed “Several Agents of the Imaginary Party”), and finally a long tract from the Invisible Committee entitled “Mise au point” and distributed since the end of January 2009. All these documents are available at bloom0101.org

[4] Translator’s note: Staircase in Rome where the bodies of murdered prisoners were displayed.

[5] Several formulae from “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” in Tiqqun #1.

[6] In its report to the procurer of Paris, the anti-terrorist task force of the judicial police wrote that the thought of Julien Coupat was formed “in the school of situationism, an international anarchist movement that extols struggle against the current structures of society.” This report is available on-line.

[7] Guy Debord, “The situationists and the new forms of action in politics and art,” reprinted in his Oeuvres, Quarto Gallimard, 2006, p. 647.

[8] Joel Gayraud is also known for having attached his name to French translations of the writings of the Italian section of the SI (published by Editions Contre-Moule in 1988), as well as more classical translations of the works of Giacomo Leopardi. He is also a member of the Surrealist Group of Paris. Note that La peau de l’ombre, a poetic-political essay that was published by Editions Jose Corti in 2004, also reveals a certain “Tiqqunian” spirit.

[9] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Gallimard, 1999. The work of Julien Coupat — a term paper for the course “History and Civilization,” under the direction of Nicolas Tertulian, EHESS, Paris, 1996-1997 — was entitled Perspective et critique de la pensee situationniste.

[10] Translator’s note: Jean-Pierre Voyer once worked with Guy Debord on his film La Societe du Spectacle (1973). After being dismissed by Debord and having some of his books refused by Editions Champ Libre, Voyer became a dedicated anti-Debordist. A couple of Jaime Semprun’s books were published by Champ Libre in the 1970s. In 1984, Semprun — attempting to defend Champ Libre in the aftermath of the murder of its founder, Gerard Lebovici — founded the Encyclopedia of Nuisances.

[11] Le Cauchemar de Don Quichotte: Sur l’impuissance de la jeunesse d’aujord’hui, Climats, 2004.

[12] Translator’s note: While it is true that Agamben and Debord exchanged letters in 1989 and 1990, and that Agamben helped publish Italian translations of Debord’s two books on the spectacle, the two were not “friends.” According to Debord, Agamben wasn’t discriminating enough in his praise for other writers. In his letter to Agamben dated  6 August 1990, Debord states: “You have spoken so well, in all of your texts, of so many authors, chosen with the greatest taste (about which I am reassured, with the exception of several exotics of whom I am very regrettably ignorant and four or five contemporary Frenchmen whom I do not want to read at all), whom one finds inevitably honored with figuring in such a Pantheon.”

[13] See, among others, “Une biopolitique mineur,” interview with Giorgio Agamben, conducted by Stany Grelet and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville for the journal Vacarme #10, Winter 2000.

[14] Translator’s note: see Terrorism or Tragicomedy, dated November 2008.

[15] Seminar held 11-15 October 2005 at the University Institute of Architecture in venice. In 2004, Fulvia Carnevale, along with the artist James Thornhill, founded the Claire Fontaine collective, which mostly adopted the theses of Tiqqun on an artistic plane by utilizing the codes of conceptual art in an ironic manner.

[16] Beyond the identity of style and thought between Tiqqun and The Coming Insurrection, the name “The Invisible Committee” appeared in Tiqqun #2, p. 84, at the end of a short narrative that appears to have been a sketch of the passage that closes The Coming Insurrection and that describes the harbingers of the revolution announced by its authors.

[17] Editions Belles Emotions being the point of contact between the two. Today, the members of the three groups pursue their activities under the name Teleologie Ouverte

[18] One will note furthermore that the writer and philosopher Medhi Belhaj Kacem, who participated in the Tiqqun adventure for a while, had fashioned his first arms in the Bibliotheque des Emeutes. See EvidenZ / Medhi Belhaj Kacem, Theory of the Trickster, Paris, Sens & Tonka, 2002 and Medhi Belhaj Kacem, Pop philosophie, interview with P. Nassif, Paris, Denoel, 2005.

[19] Translator’s note: A Maoist in the 1960s, Jean Baudrillard tried to convince his readers in the 1970s that Debord’s theory of the spectacle was no longer relevant to contemporary society. Debord detested him.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was the co-author of a book on psychoanalysis that was translated into English by the ex-situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith. Paul Virilio is in fact an anti-situationist.

[20] Before becoming a publishing house in 1993, the Encyclopedie des Nuisances was at first a journal of post-situationist and anti-industrial social critique, founded by Jaime Semprun and Christian Sebastiani (a former member of the SI). Guy Debord briefly participated in it in 1985-1986. [Translator: this version of the events in question completes side-steps the roles of Jean-Francois Martos and Jean-Pierre Baudet, co-authors of The Encyclopedia of Powers: Public circular relative to several theoretical nuisances verified by the strikes during the winter of 1986-1987.]

[21] Translator’s note: English in original.

[22] Years previously, in fact in March 1965. The SI was at the origin of the demonstrations against NATO troop maneuvers in Denmark. These demonstrations turned into riots and durably marked [people's] minds.

[23] Translator’s note: For Os Cangaceiros, follow this link.

[24] Translator’s note: For Rene Riesel, see  this interview, which took place in 2001.

[25] Simone Weil, “Reflexions pour deplaire” (1936), reprinted in his Oeuvres, Gallimard, 1999, p. 401.

[26] Simone Weil, “Reflexions sur la guerre” (1933), ibid. p. 459.

Le Monde has reported that the 4th appeal for the release on remand of Julian Coupat failed on April 29. Earlier the 8 other defendants announced that they would no longer respond to any of the judge’s questions in order to “collectively protest a process of individualization that has been continually increasing in this case”. Meanwhile a member of the Parisian support committee was recently detained by anti-terrorist police.

From Occupied London #4

(on the occasion of the recent arrests in France)

by Johann Kaspar

Silently, and without much notice until recently, a series of collective, anonymous French texts appeared between 1999 and 2007 that effectively slashed open a gap into the seamless fabric of banal political critique. Packed within the two issues of the journal Tiqqun—subtitled, at one point, Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party—is a minefield of ideas barely tapped and hardly translated, including: Theory of Bloom, Theses on the Imaginary Party, Man-Machine: Directions for Use, First Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, Introduction to Civil War, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Theses on the Terrible Community, This is Not a Program, and How is it to be Done? Subsequently, an anonymous Call surfaced which responded to Tiqqun’s provocations, laying out more clearly just how it is to be done. Finally, in 2007 the Insurrection to Come emerged, that searing text by the “Invisible Committee” which the French government has recently described as a “manual for insurrection.” Using it as their only evidence, the Minister of Interior has accused the alleged writers of “conspiracy to terrorism” in relation to the recent rail sabotages.

Perhaps, at the risk of becoming accomplices in a thoughtcrime, it is time to seriously look at this family of texts. For as we will see, although the government is wrong to accuse them of terrorism, they are right to be afraid of the ideas housed within. For if they are to be thought through, then what they are describing is nothing less than the dissolution of the modern world as such. But this goal is nothing to fear for all those who desire worlds other than this one, worlds in which our ability to collectively exist outstrips any governmental, capitalist, or societal attempt to capture our desires. What follows is a skeleton that emerges from a reading of four of those texts—Introduction to Civil War, How is it to be done?, Call, and Insurrection to Come—which can hopefully guide one through the shifting fields of meaning that are produced therein.

In a series of theses and notes, the Introduction to Civil War lays out the biopolitical horizon in which our modern lives are situated. This horizon is conceived of as a global “civil war” amongst forms-of-life. How is it to be done? poetically marks the ethical necessity of becoming-anonymous, of dis-identifiying with all received and all possible forms of political classification. To realize this en masse, we must pass through the unchartered waters of the Human Strike, that form of action in which inoperativity becomes synonymous with possibility. In seven propositions and scholia, the Call critiques existing forms of activism as not only irrelevant, but reactionary as well. Once this is accomplished, the desertion of activism can begin, in which living communism and spreading anarchy constitute the dual sides of the same structure of revolt. The Insurrection to Come, after outlining the seven circles of hell in which contemporary French politics resides, opens up onto a strategy of resistance centered on the irreversible multiplication of articulated communes. The commune names both the work of self-sufficiency shared amongst comrades as well as the incessant blockages, liberations, and points of confrontation that populate and crack the metropolis itself. What is the reason for all of this? Survival and its correlate, joy.

There are two moments which these texts all are crafted around, two simultaneous and overlapping possibilities of action which are articulated within a widening zone of indistinction called the commune. These two moments, although empirically indistinguishable, are logically discrete; they signify the two sides of communisation. That is, on the one hand, a subjective decomposition occurs through becoming­ a whatever singularity in the human strike; and on the other hand, a collective reconstitution occurs through forming and experiencing a consistency of intense strategies of sharing, blockading, and liberating territory. Like a möbius strip, the inside flips outside in the “center” of this politics-without-name. For instance, describing the politics of the whatever singularity, it is written,

Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being.

Liberating spaces sets us free a hundred times more than any

“liberated space”.

More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of

my potentialities. The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the

offensive.[1]

Within the contemporary order of empire, where life itself is the object and ground of political power, the ability to evade capture is the same ability to confront power, for power itself is grafted onto an architecture of control which only needs to recognize something in order to neutralize it. “From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated.”[2] Becoming anonymous while remaining singular is the modern task of resistance today, a task as offensive as it is defensive. This is, therefore, what grounds the imperative of the human strike:

Empire means that in all things the political moment dominates

the economic one.

A general strike is helpless against this.

What must be opposed to Empire is a human strike.

Which never attacks relations of production without attacking at the

same time

the affective knots which sustain them.

Which undermines the shameful libidinal economy of Empire,

Which restores the ethical element – the how – repressed in every

contact between neutralised bodies.[3]

What the human strikes creates is the possibility for shared worlds to communicate free of coercion on the basis of their needs. These shared worlds constitute the commune. “The commune is the basic unit in a life of resistance. The insurrectionary surge is probably nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their articulation and inter-connection.”[4]

On one side of the commune then is the vector of self-dissolution, a process by which worn identities such as ‘activist’, ‘squatter’, ‘environmentalist’ etc., become utterly void of meaning. Against the triumph of “existential liberalism” and its emphasis on individual choice, distinct properties, social contracts, and the management of things,[5] we must instead form worlds created out of our own shared needs and desires. If we live in a world where politics is nothing but the consumption of an identity-of-resistance, then in order to outmanoeuvre politics, we must vomit up our identities wholesale. Becoming opaque to the managers of empire, we subtract ourselves from their forms of accounting as well. Hence,

the experience

of my own desubjectivisation. I become

a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole

apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.[6]

Evading the “imperial police of qualities,” this dis-identification opens up a space in which a real singular existence can emerge.

Everything that isolates me as a subject, as a body provided with a

public configuration of attributes, I feel melting.

The bodies fray at their limit. At their limit, become indistinct.[7]

This existence, while formally anonymous, is materially present. This is named the form-of-life. “The elementary human unity is not the body—the individual—but the form-of-life.”[8] Expressing not the what of life but the how, this affective form traverses individual bodies, either joining with those which are compatible (friendship) or repelling from those which are irreconcilable (enmity). The free play between forms-of-life is named civil war. “‘Civil war’ then, because forms-of-life are indifferent to the separations of men from women, political existence from bare life, civilian from military; because to be neutral is to take sides in the free play of forms-of-life; because this play between forms-of-life has no beginning or end that can be declared, its sole end being the physical end of the world that no one would be able to declare.”[9] World civil war is nothing but this situation generalized across the planet. In this situation, the enemy is not something which we stand opposed to, but rather a milieu which we stand hostile within.[10]

If our forms-of-life are the parties to a world civil war, then how do they communicate without becoming identities, without mimicking the state-form? It is here that the force of the imaginary party and the invisible committee comes through. For in the collective drowning of one’s own assignable qualities, zones of opacity emerge which, being empty of all predicates, effectively constitute the common. Rendering oneself inoperative alongside others—that is, engaging in the human strike—reveals the possibility of communication across bodies with no names.

I need to become anonymous. In order to be present.

The more anonymous I am, the more present I am.

I need zones of indistinction

to reach the Common.

To no longer recognize myself in my name. To no longer hear in my

name anything but the voice that calls it.

To give substance to the how of beings, not what they are but how they

are what they are. Their life-form.

I need zones of opacity where the attributes,

even criminal, even brilliant,

no longer separate bodies.[11]

In other words, “the collective creation of a strategy is the only alternative to falling back on an identity.”[12] In this zone of indistinction born of the human strike, comes the possibility that such a strategy may take hold. By unraveling the process of biopolitical desubjectivization on one side of the commune, we find ourselves exposed to the possibility for an insurgent resubjectivization on the other. Hence, we move around, in a torsion of being, from the logic of the human strike to the strategy of communisation.

“Our strategy is therefore the following,” says the Call, “to immediately establish a series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilisation that is headed for the abyss.”[13] These foci of desertion are not given but neither are they created; they are rather established within and through what is already present. They are topological mutations of the forms we are presented with, such that experience knows no name for our modes of relation with them, except through the link between sharing and needs. “Communism starts from the experience of sharing. And first, from the sharing of our needs.” Here “needs” refers to “the relationship through which a certain sensible being gives meaning to such or such element of his world”[14] In this view, communism is another word for the “sharing of the sensible,” the practice of coordinating worlds of meaning across the abyss of bare life.

Reconstituting worlds of shared experience “can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them.”[15] Sharing here is not simply a gratuitous act between individuals, but a mode of survival across bodies and spaces in a consistent series of linked events. Communising a space, knowledge or object is not changing its relations of production, but rather abolishing those relations, rendering them structurally meaningless, indeterminable. “Communising a place means: setting its use free, and on the basis of this liberation experimenting with refined, intensified, and complicated relations.”[16]

But communising without anarchizing is hopeless, for one must constitute a threat in order for communism to be more than an isolated affair. Following the logic of anarchy implies here the task of causing inscrutable confusion and damage to the enemy while simultaneously expanding one’s power of self-organization with one’s friends. Three notes on how to do this culled from the Insurrection to Come: one, fan the flames of every crisis. Why? Because “the interruption of the flow of commodities, the suspension of normality and of police control releases a potential for self-organization unthinkable under normal circumstances.” Two, liberate territory from police occupation; avoid direct confrontation as much as possible. Expose the police for what they are: shameless parasites of the fear of people. Don’t fetishize police confrontation, rather confront the fetishization of the police. Finally, blockade everything. In a world where “power is the very organization itself of the metropolis,” where life is suspended such that capital may be free, any and every interruption has the possibility of reopening the possibility of life again. “But a blockage can only go as far as the capacity of the insurgents to feed themselves and to communicate, as far as the effective self-organization of the different communes.”[17] In other words, blockades must contribute to both the extensive mutilation of the metropolitan form as well as the intensive circulation of self-perpetuating knowledge and affects. Perhaps, if one maintains an attention of discipline, if one wagers on a thin ridge their entire existence, then what becomes possible is that as yet unachieved goal for every insurrection: to become irreversible.[18]

This is where we are left today. With comrades in jail, how are we to take this in, make it ours, consume it without deforming it? If the invisible has become identified, if the opaque has been made transparent, then there is no other solution but to disguise ourselves once more, opening

human strike

after human strike, to reach

the insurrection,

where there is nothing but,

where we are all,

whatever

singularities.[19]

Bibliography

Tiqqun 1 (French): http://www.archive.org/details/Tiqqun1

Tiqqun 2 (French): http://www.archive.org/details/Tiqqun2

Introduction to Civil War

English (partial): http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/introduction-to-civil-war/

How is it to be done?

French: http://infokiosques.net/spip.php?article127

English: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/how-is-it-to-be-done/

Call

English: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2007/05/371405.html

French: http://meeting.senonevero.net/spip.php?article37

Insurrection to Come:

English: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

French: http://www.lafabrique.fr/IMG/pdf_Insurrection.pdf

LE MONDE | 16.03.09 bwo Multitudes-infos list/ Frederic Neyrat

For four month now, the legal & media spectacle titled “The Tarnac affair” won’t come to an end. Was Julien Coupat to come out of prison for Christmas? For New Year’s Eve then? Or would Friday the 13th be his lucky day? No. In the end ‘we’ will keep him a bit longer in jail, locked into his new role as ‘leader of an invisible cell’.

Since a few people in power appear to have an interest in letting this charade go on, even beyond the limits of the grotesque, for the sake of collective clarification, we will have to take once more the garb that has been knit for us (“the 9 from Tarnac”).

Well then.

Firstly. As journos were burrowing into our garbage cans, the cops were fingering our assholes. Not the funniest of experience. For months you have been opening our mail, eavesdropping our phones, harassing our friends and video-tapping our homes. And you delectate in these actions.

We, the ‘nine’, we endure them, like so many others. We have been atomised by judicial procedures, nine times one single individual, whereas you are one administration, one police force, and the one and whole logic of one system. As we stand now, we have been double-dealt, and the stake is already erected. So please don’t expect us to play cricket.

Secondly. Of course you do desperately need ‘individual suspects’ making up ‘cells’ belonging to a ‘movement’ relating to a certain ‘fraction’ on the political chessboard. You need all this, because it constitutes your last and only handle on an increasing part of reality, which cannot be longer reduced to ‘the society’ you pretend to protect. You are right, there is something happening in France, but it is definitely not the rebirth of the ‘ultra left’ [*N1]. We are merely symbol people, a, rather rustic, crystallisation of the conflict that criss-crosses our times. The media-police edge of a ruthless conflict opposing an order that is collapsing against everything and anyone who dares pretend to survive it.

It is rather obvious that when looking at what is going in Guadeloupe, Martinique [*N2], in the banlieues (big cities suburbs) and in the universities, among the wine-growers, the fishermen, the railway workers and the sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants), you will soon need more judges than teachers to control the mess. You don’t get it – and don’t bank on the sleuths of DCRI (French home security intelligence service) to enlighten you – they’re just as clueless.

Thirdly. We can but notice that there is much more joy in our friendships and our ‘company of miscreants’ than in your offices and court houses.

Fourthly. Whereas it would appear entirely appropriate to you, given the seriousness of your employ, to question us regarding our political thoughts and our friendships, for us, we do not feel like a duty to talk to you about these matters. No life will ever be entirely transparent to the State and its judicial apparatus. You wanted to shed some light on certain things? You have rather managed to spread obscurity. And as rumour has reached us, in order to escape your glance, the numbers are growing of those who go to demos without mobile phones, who encrypt their messages, and who take the long winding way home to reach their homes. As the saying goes: makes sense.

Fifthly. From the start of this “affair”, you appear to have deliberately given great credence to the statements of a mythomaniac witness, heard under the cover of anonymity. And you persist, a brave stand we admit, to somehow believe this heap of lies, reviving a practice, delation, that ‘honoured’ France a few scores of years ago [*N3]. It would be almost moving, if this did not mainly frame the prosecution of Julien Coupat, and hence his ongoing detention. And as if this kind of ‘witness statement’ was necessary to make arbitrary arrests, like in Villiers-le Bel (Paris suburb) after the riots there.

And finally. Given the fact that the margin of liberty left to us is henceforth rather limited, and that the only moments we can escape your clutches are actually the ones in which you subject us to questioning, what you do regularly; And that Julien Coupat has now for the fourth time seen his request for release denied; And that he is our friend; And that he is no more than we are: We are to state that from this day onwards, following the heroic tradition of Bartleby, “we would rather not”. Meaning roughly: That we will speak no more till you liberate him, that you abandon the qualification of ‘leader’ for him, and of ‘terrorists’ for us all. In one word, that you drop the whole case.

For all those, wherever they are, fight and do not resign. For all those who are not suffocated by resentment, and make joy their line of offensive. For our friends, our children, our brothers and sisters, and the support committee. Have no fear, harbour no commiseration. We are not heroes, we are not martyrs. It is precisely because this ‘affair’ had no legal standing from its very inception that we need to bring the conflict in the realm of politics. What the ever increasing number of attacks launched against us by an ever more absurd political power calls for is a generalisation of collective practices of self-defense everywhere where it becomes a necessity.

There are no nine people to be saved. There is a regime to be felled.

Aria, Benjamin, Bertrand, Elsa, Gabrielle, Manon, Matthieu, Yldune are, together with Julien Coupat, indicted in what has become known as “The Tarnac Affair”.

‘Q ‘n’ D’ translation by Patrice Riemens
Bangalore, St Patrick’s Day, 2009

——————

Translator’s notes

[*N1] “Ultra-gauche” in French. A neologism of sorts coined by interior minister Michelle Alliot-Marie in a bid to distinguish it from traditional extreme left (‘extreme gauche) of old. The ‘ultra gauche’ was deemed to be ‘anarchist’, ‘autonomous’ and, of course ‘violent’. The ‘9 of Tarnac’ were arrested and lengthily detained after a number of sabotages of hi-speed (‘TGV’) train lines last autumn, which have not at all been elucidated yet, let alone materially linked to ‘the 9′.

[*N2] Add Reunion to the list. The French ‘overseas departments’ in the Carraibic and the Indian Ocean are boiling at the moment, as the chickens come home to roost after years of a colonialism without name, an artificial ‘motherland’-oriented economy, ill-mitigated by a pretense of welfare and a reality of increasingly unmanageable clientelist hand-outs culture.

[*N3] Authors refer to the collaborationist (with the Nazis) government of Vichy France (1940-45) where the ‘citoyens’ engaged in settling their private scores with their neighbours by denouncing them to the regime’s police or the Gestapo with gay abandon. Official France long time choose to and still would rather like forget this unsavoury page of history.