UPRISINGS

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

Endpapers:
Maria Kourkouta
Remontages, 2016
Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris
 Georges Didi-Huberman

UPRISINGS
With essays by

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

Gallimard | Jeu de Paume

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

V. WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE), 254

The hope of those condemned to death, 256
Mothers rise up, 264
They are your own children, 270
Foreword by Marta Gili, 7 They who go through walls, 274
Introduction by Georges Didi-Huberman, 13

By The Desires (Fragments on What Makes Us Rise Up)

Uprising by Judith Butler, 23 by Georges Didi-Huberman, 289
Uprising as Event by Antonio Negri, 37 Loss and uprisings, 289
To “Those who sail the sea …” by Marie-José Mondzain, 46 The depths of the air are red, 290
One Uprising Can Hide Another by Jacques Rancière, 62 Freiheitsdrang, the “upsurge of liberty”, 295
Counterattacks by Nicole Brenez, 71 Zeros for conduct, 296
From the depths, 299
A gesture rises, 301
PORTFOLIO From contrition to uprising, 305
I. WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED), 94 In order to throw your suffering overboard, 307
The elements become unleashed, time is out of joint, 96 Potency against power, or the act of desire, 310
And if the imagination made mountains rise up?, 104 Duende of transgression, 315
The time of the revolt, 319
II. WITH GESTURES (INTENSE), 116 Masses and potency, 322
From burden to uprising, 118 Even the newborn rises up, 328
With hammer blows, 130 Desire, struggle, domination, recognition, 332
Arms rise up, 133 Political eros, 336
The pasión, 142 Refusal, or the potential to do otherwise, 344
When bodies say no, 144 Desiring, disobeying, doing violence, 358
Mouths for exclaiming, 148 The message of the butterflies, 370

III. WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED), 156

Poetic insurrections, 158 Bibliographic index (texts cited), 384
The message of the butterflies, 176 Index of artists, 395
Newspapers, 186
Making a book of resistance, 190
The walls speak up, 198

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 Marta Gili

FOREWORD

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

6 7
For these reasons, and from this position, in the superb proposal Uprisings and submissions: for Alberti, two sides of the same coin.
by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman The wind defying gravity, its strength raising up bodies, salt, and sand,
to form an exhibition from his research on the theme of “uprisings,” all toward the same destination; “the poor children of the sea,” the
we found the ideal intellectual, artistic, and museological challenge. sailors of Cádiz, stripped of those siren songs, of the promises of a life
While the notion of revolution, rebellion, and revolt isn’t alien lived with dignity, between sky and sea.
in contemporary society’s vocabulary, the object of its action is These are the people, the earth’s dispossessed, Georges Didi-
replete with collective amnesia and inertia. That is why analyzing Huberman refers to in this catalogue’s moving introductory essay.
the representations of “uprisings”—from the etchings Goya, The thousands of human beings that pass through the walls
to contemporary installations, paintings, photographs, documents, of a society that has lost all transparency, all ability to let light pass
videos, and films—demonstrates an unequivocal relevance to the through so that other bodies, other souls, may find their way; these
social context in which we are living in 2016. visible beings, in flesh and images, wandering our streets, parading
Constructing a chronological narrative or an exhaustive review of on our televisions, who are denied the status of lawful citizens.
“uprisings” is not the aim. Thousands of representations of the gesture Uprisings confronts us with these and many other contradictions
to say “NO,” to shout “STOP,” or to raise the banner “THEY SHALL NOT for which there are no words of consolation or gestures of indignation
PASS” exist. They are known by women, men, and children, by workers, that could take the place of shared and solidary action, an action
artists, and poets, by those who cry out and those who are silent, of “enough.”
by those who weep, who mourn and those who make them. If only the elation of the poet’s song could awaken our senses!
“Uprisings” is a montage of these words, gestures, and actions,
which defy submission to absolute power. Cantad alto. Oiréis que oyen otros oídos.
The lament of the famous Cádiz poet Rafael Alberti seems Mirad alto. Veréis que miran otros ojos.
fitting here: Latid alto. Sabréis que palpita otra sangre.

… Sing loud. You shall hear other ears hearing.

Creímos en las sirenas Look high. You shall see other eyes looking.
que cantan entre las olas. Beat loud. You shall know that other blood is pulsing.2
Sus cantos nada nos dieron
ni ayer ni ahora. The Jeu de Paume team wishes to thank Georges Didi-Huberman
… for his passion, enthusiasm, and involvement in carrying out of
Somos los mismos que el viento this colossal project. His intellectual generosity is without limit: he has
nos tiró en las mismas olas. not only engaged us all fully in the project, but has enriched
Los hijos pobres del mar, and broadened our collective ability to think and to be energized.
de ayer y ahora. We wish to express our appreciation and admiration to this
… catalogue’s authors: Nicole Brenez, Judith Butler, Marie-José Mondzain,
We believed in mermaids Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, and Georges Didi-Huberman himself.
singing in the waves. The sensitivity of their reflections and depth of their thinking
Their songs gave us nothing constitute a unique contribution to a publication of unprecedented
not yesterday nor right now. quality.
… Without partners who firmly believe in the social and artistic
We are the same as the wind relevance of such a project, it is not possible to create an exhibition
We are pulled into the same waves. of this caliber. Thus we are sincerely grateful to the four institutions,
The poor children of the sea, and their representatives, which will host Uprisings: Pepe Serra,
Yesterday and right now.1 director, and Juan José Lahuerta, curator, Museu Nacional d’Art de

1. 2.
Rafael Alberti, “Canción Rafael Alberti, “Balada para
de los pescadores pobres,” los poetas andaluces de hoy,”
in Ora Maritima, seguido in Ora Maritima, seguido de
de Baladas y Canciones Baladas y Canciones del Paraná
del Paraná (Buenos Aires: (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada,
Editorial Losada, 1953), 49. 1953), 159.

8 9
Catalunya (MNAC), Barcelona; Aníbal Jozami, director, and Diana
Wechsler, curator, Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres
de Febrero (MUNTREF), Buenos Aires; Graciela de la Torre, director,
and Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator, Museo Universitario
de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; and Louise Déry,
director, Galerie de l’Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)
and Guillaume Lafleur, curator of the Cinémathèque de l’Université
du Québec à Montréal.
Jeu de Paume does not have its own collection. The works displayed
in our exhibitions are shown thanks to the collaboration of collectors,
and public and private institutions. To them we also wish to extend
our profound thanks: it is their good will that has made this exhibition
a reality. We would also like to express our gratitude to Maria Kourkouta
and Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza for the commitment they brought to
producing the original works commissioned by the Jeu de Paume
for the exhibition; and to Marie Lechner for her exploration of the
Uprisings theme on the Internet and social networks.
Last but by no means least, we thank the Parisian designer
Isabel Marant for her generous support of this project, and, as always,
the Amis du Jeu de Paume.

10 11
 Georges Didi-Huberman

INTRODUCTION

HEAVINESS OF THE TIMES

As I write these lines—March 2016—some thirteen thousand

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

1.
Aeschylus, The Suppliants,
trans. Alan Sommerstein,
Penguin Classics, London, 2009.
Aeschylus, Les Exilées, trans.
Irène Bonnaud (Besançon:
Les Solitaires intempestifs, 2013).

12 13
It’s raining in Idomeni. People want to flee, to find refuge, and
they cannot. The sky is heavy over their heads, their feet become stuck
in the mud, and the barbed wire would tear the skin from their
hands if they dared to approach the border. The sky is heavy over their
heads, but I know that there is only one sky on earth, and so we are
in direct contact with their fate. Indeed, I have not been to Idomeni:
I am writing these words from hearsay and visual testimonies.
Furthermore, I am writing this for the introductory section of an art
catalogue. Yet I am not off topic, if you accept the idea that art has not
only a history but also appears as the “eye itself” of history. Sadly,
it is not the presence of Ai Weiwei in Idomeni—with his white piano
and his specialized team of photographers—that will help anyone
or anything with regard to this gaping question; the refugees showed
themselves to be completely indifferent to this “performance,” with
their thoughts elsewhere, waiting for something else. I can see that
white piano, surreal in the middle of the wasteland of the camp,
a derisory symbol of our good artistic consciences: white, like the walls
of an art gallery, it merely evokes, in the end, the contrast by which
we see, with heavy hearts, in Idomeni as elsewhere, the weight of
the dark times on our contemporary lives.
“Dark times”: that is how Bertolt Brecht spoke for his
contemporaries, and from his own condition as a man surrounded by
evil and danger, as a man in exile, as a fugitive, as a perpetual “migrant”
who waited for months to receive a visa, and to cross a border.
In contrast, Hannah Arendt used the same expression, a few years later,
to draw from it a certain notion of “humanity” as such: the ethics
of a Lessing or a Heine, that of free poetry and thinking, beyond any
dominant political barbarities.2
Dark times. But what do we do when darkness reigns? You can wait,
quite simply: you retreat, endure. You say that it will end at some point.
You try to manage. At best, in the dark, you repaint your piano white.
And as you get used to it—and this will happen soon, for humans
are animals that adapt quickly—you start to expect nothing at all. The
horizon of expectation, the temporal horizon, ends up disappearing
in the gloom, just as any visual horizon does. Where there is limitless
darkness, there is nothing more to expect. This is called submission
to obscurity (or, if you prefer, obedience to obscurantism). This is called
the death impulse, the death of desire. In a 1933 text titled “Experience
and Poverty,” Walter Benjamin wrote that “here and there, the best
minds have long since started to think in these terms [regarding these
burning questions of the contemporary political context]. A total
absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited
2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle
Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity
in Dark Times: Thoughts about
Lessing” (1959), trans. Clara and
Richard Winston, Men in Dark
Times (Orlando, FL: Harcourt
Brace & Company, 1983), 3–32.
3.
Walter Benjamin, “Experience
and Poverty” (1933), trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 733.
4.
of Hope, Volume 3. Wishful Images
of the Fulfilled Moment (1938–59),
trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen
Plaice, and Paul Knight
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996).
commitment to it—this is its hallmark.”3 This diagnostic has lost none
of its relevance today. Everyone, or almost everyone, knows that you
have no illusions in obscurity, unless you are bombarded with billions
of puppets, as on the walls of a Platonic cave filled with plasma screens.
It is one thing not to have any illusions in the obscurity, or in front
of the puppets in the imposed show, but it is another thing to fall back
into the deadly inertia of submission, be it melancholic, cynical, or
nihilistic submission.
TO LIFT UP OUR BURDENS
Before he ever had to recognize the efficiency of the death impulse
(it took him the First World War to do so), Sigmund Freud had asserted,
at the end of his great book on dreams, that desire was indestructible—a
magnificent hypothesis! How that ought to be true! The indestructibility
of desire would make us seek, in obscurity, a light in spite of all, however
hazy it may be. If you are lost in a forest in the night, the light of
a faraway star, or of a candle behind a window, or of a firefly nearby
will be astonishingly beneficial. This is when the times rise up.
Enclosed in their dark cells from the beginning of the twentieth
century, the Andalusian anarchist or the Gypsy thief of three olives had
invented a particular style of “prisoners’ songs” called carceleras, in
which it was often said that their horizon of aspiration could depend
entirely on the glow of a burning cigarette in the blackness:
A mí me metieron en un calabozo
donde yo no veía ni la luz del día
gritando yo me alumbraba
con el lucerito que yo incendía. 
They threw me in a prison cell
Where I could not see the light of day
Crying out I made my light
Under the little star that I lit for myself.
And so the voice, in this context, was the best way to desire, to speak
to each other, to pierce the darkness, or to cross the perimeter. The little
light, for its part, could guide the prisoner towards what Ernst Bloch,
in The Principle of Hope, called “wishful-images,” that is to say, images
that can become prototypes or “guiding figures of venturing beyond
the limits.”4 

14 15
The “dark times” are so dark only because they knock against our
foreheads, press down on our eyelids and offend our gaze. Like limits
placed on both our bodies and our thoughts. In reality (if we look
at them from a distance) they are gray. Gloomy gray of rainy skies and,
above all, anthracite gray of the barbed wire, of the weapons, or the
lead used by the cruellest prisons. The dark times are leaden times.
Not only do they prevent our ability to see beyond and, therefore,
to desire, but they weigh heavily upon our necks, upon our skulls,
and as such they suffocate our ability to want and to think. With this
paradigm of weight or of lead, the word submission has a more obvious
and more physical meaning. But we should understand, then, that
the desire against this—the survival of desire in the space that was
conceived for neutralizing it—finds its full meaning in the word
uprising, and in the gesture that this word suggests.
Should we not, at every instant, raise up our many lead screeds?
And for this should we not rise up ourselves and, necessarily—for
the screed is so vast and the lead so heavy—rise up in numbers?
There is no single scale for uprisings: they go from the tiniest gesture
of retreat to the most gigantic movement of protest. What are we
underneath the lead of the world? We are at the same time vanquished
Titans and dancing children, perhaps future victors. Vanquished Titans,
like Atlas and his brother Prometheus, who had once risen up against
the unilateral authority of the gods of Olympus, then defeated by Zeus
and punished, the one to carry the weight of the sky on his shoulders
(a sidereal punishment), the other to have his liver devoured by
a vulture (visceral punishment).
This is how Titans became the “guilty,” punished by Olympian law.
According to a fate shared by many uprisings, they failed therefore to
take power on Olympus. This is not the story’s only lesson. They had
actually liberated humanity by transmitting to humans—in order to
share or to pool—a crucial part of the power of the masters: a certain
knowledge (for Atlas, the science of the earth and the stars) and
a certain know-how (for Prometheus, the mastery of fire). Where the
Titans had failed in the confrontation for power, they succeeded in
the transmission of a certain potency—the potency of a knowledge
and of a know-how that could be extended indefinitely. And God knows
if the gods do not like it when their open secrets are shared with
everyone. It is enough, for example, to rub two stones together in
darkness to obtain the miracle of fire and light.
We can imagine that this successful transmission provided the
foundations for new confrontations, future confrontations between
Titans—allied or mixed with the human race—and the gods of
16
5. for this exhibition—to Barcelona, Montréal, Mexico, and Buenos
Georges Didi-Huberman,
Peuples en larmes, peuples
en armes. L’œil de l’histoire, 6
(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
2016).
6.
Georges Didi-Huberman,
Atlas: How to Carry the World
on One’s Back?, trans. Shane Lillis
(Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010).
17
Olympus. We can imagine that, one day, the Titan Atlas, having
sung his last carcelera, would throw his burden, in a grand gesture
of liberating uprising, over his long-bruised shoulders. He could, then,
exclaim his desire once and for all: expose his drive for life and for
freedom in front and for everyone, in the public domain and in the
time of history. Two decades after the French Revolution had ignited
minds in Europe, Francisco de Goya was able to give shape to this
luminous exclamation in the fabric of the lumpenproletariat,
somewhere between the carrier fatefully crushed under his burden
( fig. 1) and the worker claiming—albeit first of all “for nothing,” that is
to say to obtain nothing decisive in this history that is only open to
him—his revolt ( fig. 2). This is the gesture—a gesture of uprising—that
will be the object of my examination and research here.
EVIDENCE OF UPRISINGS
I was already following this line of questioning—all that was needed
was the montage between the gestures represented as though
successively in the two drawings by Goya, and successive reflections on
the representations of revolt in Eisenstein5—when, a few months ago,
Marta Gili asked me to imagine an exhibition for the Jeu de Paume in
Paris. The evidence of Uprisings: it sufficed that Atlas, the hero of an
earlier exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid,6 should find
the energy, the free potency to throw his burden—and with it his
failure, his sadness—over his shoulders and in the face of his bosses
on Olympus. As I write these lines, I do not know, finally, what will
come of the montages of works that we are attempting to bring
together, in the disjunction that occurs sometimes between what we
might have wished and what is actually impossible to obtain for this
type of undertaking (with its specific material constraints): it is no
easier to move large paintings by Joan Miró or Sigmar Polke than
it is Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People or Daumier’s The Uprising.
But these possibilities remain immense, given how true it is that
the uprising is a gesture without end, continually starting again,
sovereign just as we can call sovereign the desire itself or that instinct,
the “push towards freedom” (Freiheitsdrang) that Sigmund Freud
spoke of. So, the domain of uprisings is potentially infinite. In this
sense, the roaming, the traveling that has already been planned
Aires—will be the opportunity for a constant reformulation or heuristic
transformation through which, I hope, new aspects of the uprising—
political, historical , and aesthetic aspects—will be deployed. To this
pleasure in research—which is infinite, since learning, discovering,
inventing new montages that can give life to new emotions and
offer new paradigms for thought are never finished—must be added,
nonetheless, the fact that anxiety will also play a part, and even
that it will be infinite: “the anxious gay science,” according to what
we learned from both Friedrich Nietzsche and Aby Warburg.7 This
is because such an endeavor is not without fundamental pitfalls, nor
without contradictions: why should a list of works for exhibition be
limited when their study is not? The essay offered in this catalogue,
though long and armed with an extensive bibliography, is actually only
a start to the examination needed of philosophical, historical, political,
and aesthetic questions regarding uprisings. It is for this reason
that Marta Gili and I believed it was necessary to call upon thinkers or
researchers from different horizons—Nicole Brenez, Judith Butler,
Marie-José Mondzain, Antonio Negri, and Jacques Rancière, who will
be joined by other figures during a planned study day—who have their
own experiences and histories with regard to this question of uprisings.
One final contradiction, though not the least, could be formulated
as follows: do we not betray these very particular “objects”—uprisings
that are not only “objects” but gestures or acts—when we make fig. 1 fig. 2
them “objects” of an exhibition? What do uprisings become and what Francisco de Goya, The Porter, c. 1812–23. Francisco de Goya, No haras nada con clamar
Scraper, brush, and sepia ink wash on white laid (Crying out will get you nowhere), c. 1814–17.
comes of their energy on the white walls of the white cube or in the paper, 20.3 × 14.3 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Ink drawing on paper, 26.5 × 18.1 cm. Private collection.
vitrines of a cultural institution? Does the objection to the white piano
not risk turning back on itself in the distance that separates every
exhibition from what it speaks of? Some will think perhaps that such
a project of aesthetics—since it has to do above all with showing
images, many of which are works of art—merely aestheticizes and, as
a result, anaesthetizes the practical and political dimension inherent in
any uprising. By proposing to bring such images together, in the
public space of an exhibition, I am not attempting to create a standard
iconography of rebellions (which would undermine them), nor am
I attempting to draw a historical tableau, or even a trans-historical
“style,” of uprisings either past or present (which, in any case, would
be an impossible task).
Instead, it is a question of testing that hypothesis, or more simply,
this question: How do images draw so often from our memories
in order to give shape to our desires for emancipation? And how does
a “poetic” dimension manage to be created in the very heart of our
gestures of uprising and as a gesture of uprising? It suffices to recall
Baudelaire’s words from 1848 in Le Salut public or those of Rimbaud
from 1871 in his Lettres du voyant, or the drawings of Courbet or

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

18 19
of Daumier, or the films of Eisenstein or of Pasolini. It suffices to
remember the avant-garde phrase from the end of the First World
War: “Dada makes everything rise up!” Is the same thing not happening
today when, in its modest calendar of 2016—which does not claim to
be a work of art—the Social Solidarity Infirmary of Thessaloniki, where
the worst off are cared for, those that the state health services no
longer want, juxtaposes Joan Miró’s The Hope of a Condemned Man and
the No of the Greeks to the current austerity plans, the barricades
constructed by the women in Barcelona in 1936 and the great gestures
addressed by the rescuers to the Syrian refugees on the Mytilene coast?
A poem by Jorge Luis Borges accompanies this particularly current
image captured by a volunteer caregiver ( fig. 3):

The Just

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

fig. 3
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
Pages from the 2016 calendar (July 4–10) by the collective of the Social Solidarity
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Infirmary, Thessaloniki.
Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a colour and a form.
The typographer who set this page well, though it may not please
him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.8

We not rise up without a certain force. What is it? Where does it

come from? Is it not obvious—for it to be exposed and transmitted to
others—that we must be capable of giving it a form? A political
anthropology of images should start from the fact that our desires
need the energy of our memories, provided we create a form therein,
a form that does not forget its origin and that, therefore, becomes
capable of reinventing possibilities.

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

20 21
 Judith Butler

UPRISING

Who rises up when there is an uprising? And what is it that rises up

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

22 23
beyond a shared sense of its limit. Individuals and groups both undergo
subjugation and so in rising up, it is this body with other bodies, and
from a shared refusal to live beyond the limit of what can be, or should
be, endured. An uprising can be local and directed; it can be against
a particular set of laws or polices, such as unfair taxation, segregation,
discrimination, lack of shelter, or health care. An uprising can also be
directed against an entire legal regime, whether it is one that supports
slavery or colonial power, including occupation, siege, and apartheid,
authoritarian rule, fascism, capitalism, state corruption, or austerity.
What rises up in an uprising follows from a growing resolve that
subjugation should not be endured any longer; a shared sense that
things must stop and how they must change, drawn from converging
individual and group histories. And yet, we would be wrong to assume
that if there is an uprising, it is always justified, or that everyone will
agree with its political aims. After all, there are sometimes uprisings
against democratic regimes. Here we will focus mainly on those
uprisings that seek to realize democratic aims. In general, uprisings
tend to emerge from indignation—an angry refusal of the condition
under which dignity, held in place by the moral limits of what should
be endured, is denied or destroyed. And that indignation spreads
among people, gathering those who have been lying low, who have
kept close to the ground, or who have been “grounded” in some way,
those for whom standing up and looking forward embodies the
physical risk of asserting dignity. They are no longer making themselves
low, keeping themselves down, trying to avoid the eyes of the law.
They rise, but they do not simply stand up—they rise up. If they were
only to stand, they would make themselves known, exposing
themselves to the law—the police, the military, the tribunal. But if they
rise up, they are not planning to sit or lay down anytime soon. Their
action is reflexive: they rise up, and in this way they take the body
in hand and assume an erect posture. Their action has an object: they
rise up against something—they know what they wish to overthrow,
what condition they seek to bring to an end. Their action has an aim:
they are seeking freedom and self-determination, dignity, mobility,
justice, or equality. In standing, they are getting ready to act and to free
themselves from shackles that have been shouldered for too long.
If they stand in public where they are not allowed to stand, especially
when freedom of assembly has been suspended or denied, and they
allow themselves to be arrested, they are practicing principled acts
of civil disobedience, risking punishment and prison. They can do this
singly or plurally. But if they rise up, standing forth against power,
they signify their intention to challenge a persistent form of injustice
24
or to overthrow the regime predicated upon that injustice. To rise up
is to stand forth with others against a form of power, to be seen and
heard precisely under conditions in which standing forth, being seen
and heard are not allowed, and not only for the symbolic value of
appearing in public when it is proscribed. One rises up with a certain
energy or force, a corporeal and visceral intention that is not just one’s
own, but shared—a transitive resolve to overcome a common condition
endured for too long. To endure a condition that is unendurable can
break a person, fracture a community, decimate a social world, but it
can also produce the paradoxical circumstance in which those who
have been living with something they should never have had to endure
now mobilize to reject that very condition, making a bid for a livable
life. They have been crossed, denied, degraded, but now, in the moment
of uprising, they gather a certain strength or force from one another,
from alliance itself, one formed by a shared rejection of the unlivable,
emerging now as bodies whose political strength lies in its growing
numbers.
Perhaps a series of indignations individually suffered is recognized
as a shared condition, a subjugating power is identified for opposition
or overthrow; that shared recognition is a first moment of gathering.
A gathering is, however, not yet an uprising. Perhaps that gathering
takes the form of a community meeting or a set of conversations on
the street, or the transmission of a newspaper analysis or a spreading
understanding that follows upon seeing a picture widely enough
distributed to form a consensus about the unacceptable character
of an incident or condition of suffering. Each sees it from his or her
own location, or with a proximate set of others, and a group of people
gathers there at the site of the image, or the image gathers people
across disparate locations, perhaps the loss of innocent life, or the
evidence of torture, but also the forcible dispersion of a people from
their lands and homes, or evidence that a certain group of lives are
treated as dispensable, or that racial inequality has become accepted
as the legal and social norm, or that an entire legal or economic
system depends upon the disenfranchisement of workers or minorities
to work as it does. There does not have to be an elaborate analysis for
an uprising. It is not required that everyone reads Karl Marx or follows
post-Marxist debates, and yet uprising does involve thinking. All that
is required is a sense of living within a particular regime, whether that
be political or economic, requires suffering in unbearable ways, and
an understanding that this should not be bearable, and that this claim
is true not only for oneself but for others who are positioned in
a similar situation within the field of power.
25
A shift in perspective takes place in the midst of uprising. It is not
only that I suffer, but that you do as well, and that some “we” forms
in the course of recognizing the widespread and systematic character
of that form of subjugation that has been suffered too long and that
calls now to come to an end. So a “we” forms in the midst of that
uprising, one that congeals the sense of a shared indignation. But there
is also a “now” or a “no more” or a “no longer,” marking that it is past
time to throw off this subjugation. In a way, every uprising is both
urgent and belated. Many have already submitted to what breaks them
or has broken them, often suffering immeasurable losses, and yet still,
the uprising signifies that even in the midst of being broken, the people
are not fully or finally broken such that rising up proves impossible.
A group of already abrogated people rises up, those who lived with
those shackles but who now arrive together not only to stand or
to gather, but to rise up and shed the shackles they have borne. They
throw them off or shake them off.
Uprisings tend to rely on an organizing metaphor, a figure
of someone who stands up, one for whom standing signifies a form
of liberation, one with the physical power to free him or herself from
chains, shackles, the signs of slavery, or indentured servitude. Indeed,
we may not find anyone who approximates this figure in an actual
uprising, and yet the figure is there, casting the shadow of its physicality
on the gathering. In German, the uprising is called Aufstand, which
can mean outrage, uprising, revolt, or revolution, depending on context,
but relying on a sense of standing up and standing forth. In Hebrew,
it is hitqomemut ’amamit (popular uprising), usually against an
established authority. And in Arabic, it is intifāda, understood not only as
a tremor, a shuddering, or a convulsion, but figuring the act of emerging
from prone position on the ground, shaking off dust and leaves.
In French, soulèvement also implies the idea of lifting, as if suddenly
there is strength enough to lift and cast off an enormous weight
by which one has been burdened. In any given uprising, there may be
no literal shackles, and no individual body suddenly rising up from
a protracted prone position can describe the acts of gathering, moving,
standing, and resisting that comprise an uprising. And yet, such figures
convey a sense of the unprecedented capacity of a group that appears
and moves in numbers, gathering popular power as they do. With that
corporeal spread and speed a form of resistance is produced, but so, too,
a demographic problem of containment for police and the military as
human barriers emerge, or traffic rules are set aside, a problem that, if it
becomes too large, proves to be uncontainable. The larger they become,
the more those shackles seem, for the time being, to be cast away.
26
Of course, not everyone can be on the street or literally rise up.
Contemporary uprisings are hardly thinkable without Internet
activism. Some people lag behind, or some stay in sheltered spaces
where they work the Internet or arrange for lawyers or health care
in the course of an uprising, or write an editorial, or engage in
reproductive labor. For some, standing may be literally difficult or
impossible, so they undertake different tasks. And yet, bodies still have
a way of making their presence known through physical or virtual
space, even though that form of “appearing” should not be confused
with hyper-visibility. An uprising is not the same as a discrete
and finite demonstration, but when demonstrations last longer than
expected, they can, at some moment, become an uprising. Despite
some efforts to designate uprisings as spontaneous and irrational
outbursts, they are often the result of long simmering processes of
dawning and expanding recognition. They have been forming, taking
form, before they take place as uprisings. Those who dismiss or
fear uprisings as “outbreaks of the irrational” presume that processes
of recognition and judgment are separable from visceral processes
of resistance. Some even insist that uprisings are bestial and barbarous
outpourings that have to be contained so that more “civilized” modes
of deliberation can proceed within established political structures.
But what if uprisings are expressions of a popular will, ways of making
demands, or exposing the unjust limits imposed by existing political
structures? What if those existing structures were responsible for
the conditions that could not be endured, and that no one should
have to endure? If a set of established political structures do not reflect
or represent the popular will, are those structures still legitimate?
How much of the popular will must political structures reflect in
order to lay claim to legitimacy? Which populations count as part
of the relevant popular will? And if those political structures actively
seek to break the popular will, then is there not only a crisis of
democracy, but the fertile conditions for uprising?
Prior to uprising, there are ways of enduring and resisting
unendurable situations under conditions of subjugation that remain
local and furtive. For there to be an uprising, some set of connections
have to be made among those who endure and resist in ordinary
life, even if they lack the ultimate power to bring down the political,
legal, or economic regime by which they are subjugated. And so,
for there to be an uprising, there must first be a set of links, networks,
virtual and corporeal gatherings that are not only organized by
dialogic or deliberative principles, but in which a group of people are
moved and moving. They are moved from a complacent to an active
27
position, and this gathering of bodies for the purposes of acting
together involves a visceral judgment, that is, a way of feeling and
thinking that is more or less shared. They are on the move, and
as they move from one site to another, they also begin to move from
a prostrate to an upright position—upright and mobile, against
the odds. As they move and gather, they also rise, and their action,
however physical, is not fully summarized in this figure of physicality.
Rising up and shedding shackles is a physical figure for a concerted
collective movement that seeks frontally to contest a form of power
identified as the source of subjugation. It is a way of thinking and
acting together against a commonly identified source of subjugation.
Whether we approve or disapprove of an uprising, we probably
misunderstand the phenomenon if we do not understand it as
a collective and embodied political judgment—a visceral judgment
incarnated in stance and action. The trace of such a body persists
even on the web or with the cell phone: someone typing, someone
holding the camera.
What is the power of those who rise up? Is this popular power?
Who is rising up? What if it is not all of the people? On the one hand,
whoever they are, these people are establishing a certain public
presence, corporeal and virtual. On the other hand, they are exposing
themselves deliberately to a power that can cut them back and beat
them down, returning them to a subjugated position or destroying
them. Sometimes those who rise up are those for whom basic rights
such as gathering and demonstrating under protected constitutional
conditions are not available. Other times, those who rise up do so
because gathering and demonstration, though permitted, are not
enough to achieve their goals. In the case that basic rights of assembly
and mobility are restricted or prohibited by a legal regime, then
exercising basic democratic rights—assembling, marching,
demonstrating, distributing pamphlets—are treated as criminal acts.
Those who defend democracy may go silent or pursue furtive or
underground forms of resistance. They may go on strike, or seek to
bring to a halt the everyday operation of transportation systems, but
neither of those tactics are uprisings. They may become insubordinate
in what they say and write, but that still is not quite an uprising.
An uprising takes place when people start to gather and move and
appear and act in ways that seek to dismantle the regime or the power
responsible for their subjugation. Their gathering, moving, appearing,
and acting is informed by a rejective indignation, a judgment not only
that subjugation has gone too far, but that it is unjust. Uprising is an
embodied and collective form of that judgment under conditions in
28
which there is no single collective subject. It is a judgment shared,
passed between people, heterogeneous yet concerted, embodied
differently and yet in common.
When people do appear in this way, their action may well be
misnamed by those who oppose their aims or their tactics. Sometimes
misnaming is understandable: after all, uprisings, rebellions, and
revolts may all seem like one another in certain ways and they can,
under certain conditions turn into one another. Other times, however,
a misnaming indicates that there is a more fundamental
misrecognition in play. Governments and the media may call what they
are seeing a demonstration, thinking it is temporary, or a riot, figuring it
as a chaotic outbreak with no legible demand, or a breach of national
security so that police and military interventions are justified, including
violence, detention, arrest, and forcible dispersion. At such a point, the
people who engage in uprisings are not understood to be expressing
any part of a popular will, but treated instead as a “population” to be
managed, contained, and controlled. The police and the prison system
is always implicitly there in any uprising; police power awaits the
people at the spatial boundary or temporal limit of the uprising,
making sure that the uprising resolves as a spatio-temporally discrete
event, seeking to block its transitive and contagious effects. At the
moment when the police join the crowd or lay down their arms,
the uprising starts to become a revolution. More often than not, that
is not the case.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings of 1943 were part of a larger Jewish
resistance movement in Poland during World War II, directed against
Nazi and collaborationist forces on two discrete occasions. In the
summer of 1942, the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto rose up against
German soldiers who sought to enter the ghetto and deport the Jewish
to Treblinka where they were to be exterminated. After 300,000 Jews
were deported from the Ghetto to Treblinka, the Jewish resistance
organization, Z.O.B., rose up early in 1943 with only 750 resistance
fighters to block the entries and resist the Nazis. Their resistance lasted
a full month before they were vanquished and tens of thousands
more were deported to death camps. Although the uprising was
brutally crushed, and so “failed,” the history of the uprising testifies
to a willingness to fight for freedom even in the face of near-certain
defeat. The story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become iconic
for thinking about uprisings after World War II. It tells us a story of
resistance, freedom, and the desire for emancipation, and so these
principles are clearly articulated by the historical narration. Uprisings
give rise to narrative reconstructions after the fact. In the moment,
29
uprisings are not always practical and calculated. Yet they sometimes
embody ideals that live on in the accounts that postdate their
failures. Even when they are crushed, uprisings still have the power to
articulate ideals. The aftermath of defeat is also the time in which
the story of the uprising becomes narratable. Only from the vantage
of hindsight does an uprising become a discrete story with beginning,
middle, and end, sometimes the story of a valiant struggle that
exemplifies principles of freedom and justice.
Uprisings are generally understood as discrete or periodic
forms of resistance, as bids or demands for emancipation under
conditions in which political freedoms and rights have been denied
and insupportable conditions endured. For those who rise up,
emancipation is transiently embodied by the uprising itself. Uprisings
last longer than a minute or an hour. They begin, they have duration,
and they end—an indefinite uprising is not quite thinkable, even
though an uprising can happen again and again—slave rebellions had
to occur many times before slavery came to an end; the intifāda in
Palestine takes place in waves and in stages, alternating between
periods of time more active and more subdued. The end of an uprising
usually comes about not because people are exhausted or they meet
an internal limit, nor because political aims have been achieved
or opposing forces have prevailed. If an event comes to be called an
uprising rather than a revolution, that is because, however valiant it
was, the bid for emancipation failed in the end. If an uprising is
organized against state power, that possibility of failure is always there:
will the numbers and the tactics outwit and overwhelm state power
itself? Or will the state’s military power impose its own end on
the story of the uprising, vanquishing those have sought to contest
its authority or jurisdiction?
From the start an uprising is a risk: will those who rise up against
a power be vanquished by that very power or will the uprising
become protracted, converting into a revolutionary situation that
leads to emancipation? Uprisings are always trying to lose their name,
become more lasting insurrections or revolutions that inaugurate
an emancipatory future. Those who rise up may know full well that
the uprising will not “work” and that “failure” may well become
the end of the story—or, at least, one way of ending the story. And yet,
the story of the failed uprising can become an important historical
marker and precedent for those who rise up again. A valiant uprising
that fails nevertheless produces heroes, martyrs, stories of national
self-sacrifice, images of hope; it is through failure that an uprising
stands a chance to become iconic and so to mobilize future uprisings.
30
The iconicity of an uprising can be translated into another place
or time, or it can happen in the same place as part of an ongoing
movement. The figure of Cuban poet and freedom fighter,
José Martí, incited the Cuban struggle to free itself from Spanish
colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. His image and verse
continues to be invoked in almost all subsequent struggles to preserve
Cuban independence and the opposition to subjugation and
exploitation. Of course, it can be that uprisings take place and are
rapidly or eventually effaced from history. When that happens, the
chain of citations comes to an end and the task of politics becomes to
fight against oblivion.
An uprising is usually a discrete event. It comes to an end. Failure
is there as the very condition of its definition. So even when an
uprising fails to achieve its goal, it nevertheless “goes down in history,”
and that is still a deed, a discursive accomplishment with affective
reverberations. A failed uprising can become a historically transmitted
memory, an unfulfilled promise taken up by future generations
who vow to realize those aims. One uprising cites another, becomes
reanimated by its imagery and story. As uprisings start to happen here
and there, and again and again, a historical legacy is produced. One
uprising fails and another commences, suggesting that at some point
a cumulative history of uprisings implies an ongoing movement,
a struggle that is larger than any of the uprisings by which it is
composed, a struggle that does not end. An uprising can fail, but a
movement can continue on indefinitely or become a revolutionary
movement and either come to an end (once the revolution has
taken place) or continue as a state form that paradoxically understands
itself as a “permanent revolution.”
The contagious and citational character of uprisings was apparent
in the Arab Spring of 2011. The uprisings began with the suicide of
a fruit vendor in Tunisia in 2010, who had been defeated in his
individual struggle with the state after losing his license to sell his
goods on the street. The iconic imagery of that self-immolation incited
huge numbers of people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya where
rulers were ultimately forced from power. Popular uprisings convulsed
Bahrain and Syria. In both Tunisia and Egypt, rulers lost their power
once the military started to defect to the popular movement. At this
writing, most people believe that the Arab Spring is over, defeated for
all time as so many of the affected countries have returned to
authoritarian rule, but perhaps the story is not yet over. Perhaps the
people rise again, in a different form, for another purpose, continuing
the larger citational chain of democratic uprisings.
31
In the Arab Spring, one uprising was quickly followed by another,
but the interval between uprisings can take much more time. We are
more conscious of the contagious and quick model of transitivity.
Actions prompt new actions very quickly when an uprising takes
on a life on the Internet and works its effects in a complex network
of physical and virtual space. The uprising is reported, and the report
gives the event its virtual life, becoming a virtual part of the event.
That very event, reported on the web, becomes communicable once it
starts to spread in this way. The event takes leave of its own space and
time, determined as a communicable event, inciting those who receive
and relay the news and so become part of the action. And yet the
Internet alone cannot spread the uprising. An uprising has to happen
again and again, relying on the concerted physical actions of those who
rise up. The representation of the event incites desire, and sometimes,
as Ernesto Laclau has shown, a key term, such as “democracy” or
“freedom” or “independence” comes to name and incite a fundamental
longing transmitted from one group of people to another, linking them
to one another as it spreads.
Of course, iconic uprisings commend a story of admirable courage
and they function as paradigms that distinguish between the kinds
of uprisings that are considered valuable and those that are demeaned
or dismissed. There is something odd about distinguishing just from
unjust uprisings, but, of course, there can be an uprising of racists who
are “indignant” that foreigners are entering the country. In 1676, there
was “Bacon’s Rebellion” in America: a group of settlers rose up against
their governor for failing to slaughter the native people who had
attacked their post in an effort to defend their land. It is surely not
possible to condone the aims of every uprising. And yet, once an event
is called an “uprising,” it appears as if “the people” are rising up, and
that the uprising is an expression of the popular will, one that should
be honored. But if a group rises up, claiming racism to be their right
and that group even feels “indignation” about having to live in a
racially diverse society, we have every reason to condemn that uprising.
We may even find ourselves siding with a state or international
authority that seeks to embody and secure principles of racial
equality over and against a populist rejection of those principles.
Confusion gathers for those who believe that, in principle, uprisings
are a pure expression of the popular will and the most purely
democratic form of expression. After all, if an uprising implies that
subjugation is in the process of being thrown off, then those who
oppose an uprising appear to be in favor of subjugation, and that
cannot be good. And yet, if a group understands itself as “subjugated”
32
by democracy, or equality, women’s rights, gay marriage, or the concept
of “gender,” what are we to make of their rising up? Who are they?
Are they “the people”?
It is always difficult to say whether an uprising represents all
the people, the essence of the people, or a pure democratic demand.
So that is one reason why it is not possible to simply affirm all
uprisings as democratic. And sometimes uprisings take violent forms
that are important to condemn. Our judgments about violent uprisings
might become more precise if we distinguish between aims and tactics.
An uprising may begin with lofty ideals and end up destroying
property or murdering people, at which point we would be right
to condemn those destructive consequences. This does not mean,
however, that all uprisings have destruction as their aim. Indeed, many
uprisings, most of the slave rebellions in the Americas that took place
from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, were
poorly armed uprisings—slaves in the early seventeenth century rarely
had recourse to arms. Anti-colonial struggles have famously differed
on the use of weapons to achieve goals of independence. We see this in
the very different approaches to anti-colonial struggle in Frantz Fanon,
who affirmed the necessity of some kinds of violence to overcome
colonialism, and Mahatma Gandhi, who sought to establish practices
of nonviolent disobedience to bring down colonial rule. So uprisings
raise the question of whether violence is a legitimate means for
achieving the goals of freedom and emancipation. And if violence
were to be deemed legitimate in some cases, is it possible to “contain”
violence as a means to an end, an instrument that is set aside when
the aim is realized? Can the violence deployed by an uprising to free
itself from violent oppression successfully distinguish its own violence
from the violence it opposes? Of course, uprisings seek to dismantle
oppressive forms of power, and that “dismantling” may well seem
destructive in one sense, but surely it remains possible to distinguish
between violent and nonviolent modes of dismantling power. Jack
Goldstone tells us that most uprisings are undertaken by unarmed or
poorly armed groups of people. And yet, those engaged in uprisings
have been constantly confronted with the dilemma of violent
resistance: they have had to come to terms with the question of
whether violent resistance is any less wrong than violent subjugation,
and if so, why. Slave and prisoner uprisings take place within a context
in which citizenship has been denied or suspended, and political
participation in a polity has been foreclosed through the exercise of
institutional and legal violence. Violent resistance is often the result.
Nevertheless, it would be an error to conflate all uprising with violent
33
resistance. Most of the uprisings that belonged to the “Arab Spring”
were nonviolent: those assembled in public squares exposed their
unarmed bodies to a surrounding military threat, with many injured
or killed in the process.
One problem with the debate on the justifiability of violent
tactics is that it is not always easy to identify “violence.” Calling an
uprising “violent” can be a discursive instrument of its suppression.
For instance, a state may well call any uprising “violent” if it challenges
that state’s own monopoly on violence, evidenced by its police and
military powers. The state may call an event an “outbreak of violence”
only because power is seized and police force is mitigated or
neutralized for the duration of the uprising—not because of any
physically violent acts. The upsurge of the people is not the same as
an “outbreak of violence” even though an uprising can lead to violent
resistance. That situation is surely different from the state calling
an uprising “violent” as it invokes ”security” to unleash police or
military forces against the very people who are rising up against a
government or a state or a colonial condition or a mode of
imprisonment. When an uprising is named by the state as violent
rather than, say, a democratic resistance movement, then the state can
suppress any uprising on such grounds, justifying an attack on its own
people or on those people it disavows as its own. Whether or not an
uprising should turn to violence is an abiding ethical question for
resistance movements. But that important debate can hardly take place
if uprisings are presumed always to be violent.
The scene of rising up is one in which non-authorized freedom
is seized to contest an authority that seeks to deprive a group of
the freedom they exercise. If we take the object of an uprising to be an
essential aspect of what it is, then an uprising is a rising up against
authority or power or systems of violence or disenfranchisement. Seen
in this way, uprisings are concerned with popular self-determination
in the course of resisting some existing form of power. We would be
partially right to claim that uprisings belong to popular power
and that they manifest the popular will. But quite apart from the
question of “who” counts as the people in any given popular uprising,
we mistake the oppositional aim of the uprising if we see it only
as popular self-expression. Uprisings are formed in opposition to an
unendurable condition.
Although uprisings claim to represent the will of the people,
there is usually another set of people who decline to be represented by
the uprising. Laying claim to the popular will is an ongoing struggle,
a struggle for hegemony. So though an uprising seems to be an
34
expression of the popular will, we always have to ask: which version of
the popular will, and who is not included in that version, and for what
reason? Is it some people or “the people” who rise up in an uprising?
Is it the popular will in a pure form that rises up? What rises up in
people when people rise up? And what histories rise up again when
there is an uprising? What historical forces act on the people when
they rise up, and does history itself rise up when they do? In the 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx famously claimed that the “the
tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living.” It is especially at moments in which people come
together to create something new, to make revolution that the past
surges up in unexpected ways. For Marx, this unconscious way that the
past surges up proved to be a nightmare or, rather, was itself a
nightmare lived out in the light of day. He writes, “precisely in such
epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of
the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans
and costumes in order to present the new scene of world-history in this
time-honored disguise and this borrowed language” (MER1 595). Marx
terms this a “world-historical conjuring up of the dead.” What Marx
called a decidedly bourgeois revolution in France (1848–51) drew its
imagery and self-understanding from the Roman Republic and the
Roman Empire, from “a need of heroism, of sacrifice, or terror, of civil
war and of national battles” (MER 596). Marx explains this strange
resurrection of the dead as serving the purpose of “glorifying the new
struggles … of magnifying the given tasks in imagination …” For Marx,
the nightmarish return of Roman grandeur in the figure of Napoleon
is, indeed, a nightmare, for Napoleon rallied “the conservative
peasantry” by giving them the opportunity to be property owners,
breaking any potential ties with revolutionary workers. For the
conservative peasant, “war was their poetry.” The revolutions that Marx
approved had no need to reanimate the imperial past to lend grandeur
to their proper aims. They were “critical” and “revolutionary” and so he
claimed: “the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw
its poetry from the past, but only from the future” (MER 597).
And yet, is Marx right to assume that the revolutionary movements
draw their inspiration only from the future, and not from the past? If
we consider uprisings as discrete outbreaks of the popular will or, at
least, one version of the popular will, it follows that they take place
time and again, often drawing on the unfulfilled promise of the former
episodes. However transient they may be, uprisings that are sequential,
episodic, and cumulative invariably draw upon past uprisings, or find
themselves animated by images and stories of valiant struggle as they
1.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Marx-Engels Reader, ed.
Robert C. Tucker (New York:
Norton, 1978).
35
seek to continue a movement, or complete a project of emancipation.
Those uprisings that eventually lose their name and turn into a
revolution succeed in time. Uprisings are a set of failures, then, that
succeed through finishing off the series, transforming into revolutions.
In 1831, slaves in Jamaica went on strike, demanding to be paid for
their labor. When their owners refused, they burned down homes and
warehouses filled with sugar cane, damaging the economic holdings of
their owners. Under the leadership of Samuel Sharp, 20,000 slaves
seized ownership of more than 200 plantations, and though they were
finally subdued, imprisoned, and many were executed, that uprising
has been credited with helping to bring an end to British slavery in
1834. All the uprisings failed, but taken together, they succeeded.
Marx made historical note of “premature revolutions,” suggesting
that revolutionary promise emerges in partial and episodic forms,
and that the past can resurge with a promise of the future. Perhaps the
past does not only weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the
living. If every discrete uprising is a repetition, a citation, then what
happens has been happening for some time, is happening now again,
a memory embodied anew, in events episodic, cumulative, and partially
unforeseeable. Those exhilarated by uprisings often find themselves
left with a terrible disappointment and sense of loss. In hindsight,
we can ask whether that failure has a history—and a future.
36
Antonio Negri
UPRISING AS EVENT
Do you know the sport where athletes lift increasingly heavy weights?
There is a pause, an exceedingly long instant, between their lifting
the weight from the ground, the clean, and pushing it high, the jerk.
This pause or interval is what we need to think about when speaking
of uprising. Only when the weightlifter, the haltérophile, has completed
the lift is it possible to say lifted. The up-rising is accomplished,
a noun replaces a verb, a term substitutes an action.
The pause we must pay attention to is not a pause but a short
movement, almost a stop, a temporal contraction. The athlete’s veins
bulge on neck and muscles: this effort is immeasurable. The athlete
can no longer choose, only decide; he or she gesture knows of no
alternative; it’s an expiration, a “blow.” Like the creation of the world.
A God?
When the Olympic Games were first held this is what was believed.
But no: it can fail to succeed. We need to find out where the movement
stops and the effort fails; the difference between a pause and an
interruption. Once the difference is discerned, we must try to experience
it from within, comprehend it, act within it.
Images chase one another. And here comes Atlas. He carries
the sky on his shoulders, he lifted it but would like to lift it even
higher. He can’t. There, in the heavenly garden of Hesperides, the pause
has turned into an interruption. Ananke imposed herself over Titan’s
effort: just as Zeus wished. Another side, this, between lifting and
uprising, a necessity that blocks. Ananke, the force that translates
weight into a limit and then turns limit into an insuperable mark
of human misery, death always lurking around the corner. In the Iliad,
Zeus conceives the Keres, who carry Achilles’s and Hector’s souls,
and on the scales Achilles’s goes up while Hector’s descends into Hell.
Is there, then, a gravity that only a gigantic force can overcome?
Let us try to turn that interruption back into a pause, rather than
a break, a brief suspension. Only a concentrated effort can affect
37
the gesture. There was an event, and a surplus of being arises out
of the extraordinary power of that gesture. It is a powerful gesture,
but we can see, it comes out as a breath, a blow, a waft, a whiff,
a puff.Let us see the plot from a collective standpoint. Can we grasp
this being, this surplus, this “breath” as a collective experience?
Of course we can. In fact, it only becomes powerful when produced
collectively. Uprising is plural; the event is collective. Sure, each
collective is constituted by individuals and the uprising is made up
of a multitude of singularities, but the “true” collective is the shift that
turns the heaviness and unbearableness of life into the choice of
rising up, into the effort and joy of doing it. Political science attests to
this fact and demands that the sovereign avails him or herself of
the tools necessary for the repression of the revolt around the corner.
The science of capital knows that the eventuality of a riot is present in
every place of production, and that there is only valorization when
that power is wrenched away from the uprising, and discerned
and ordered. When there is an uprising, before exploding, the collective
tension gathers up in a moment of pause, an interval that betrays
an undecided effort that precedes the decision to open up to action.
Altogether. When this happens, time becomes joyful.
Even poets and philosophers displace the analysis of this interval
onto a social plane. Here the event of the lifting is mistaken with
that of the uprising and becomes a powerful collective “breath.”
“Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or
guilty of vile atrocities … I have never liked the crowd except on days
of riot, if even then! … On those days there is a great breath in the
air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature,
but more ardent.”1
“What makes a riot? Nothing and everything. Electricity released
a little at a time, a flame suddenly shooting out, a roving force, a
momentary breath of wind. This breath of wind meets beings that
think, brains that dream, souls that suffer, passions that burn, howling
torments, and carries them away. … Anyone who nurses in their soul
a secret grudge against some act of the government, or of life or fate,
lives on the brink of riot and as soon as it shows, begins to quiver
and feel themselves lifted up by the vortex.”2
“People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity
(not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history,
breathing life into it.” 3
I pointed out the difference between a pause/interval in the gesture
and an interruption/rupture of the gesture. Now, the interruption can
38
1. comes after the catastrophe. The “breath” of the uprising becomes the
Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet,
March 31, 1853.
2.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables,
Part IV, Book 10, June 5, 1832,
trans. Julie Rose (London:
Vintage, 2008), 861.
3.
Michel Foucault, “Inutile
de se soulever?,” Le Monde,
May 11–12, 1979. “Useless to
Revolt,” in Power: Essential Works
of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume 3,
ed. James D. Faubion,
trans. Robert Hurley et al.
(London: Penguin, 1994), 452.
become the place of utopia. A negative place, portrayed precisely by
the rupture: when the weight of lifting becomes unbearable and one
escapes from the materiality of that operation. What is left is a sad
and fearful desire that has been won over and frustrated: a reparatory
idealness has come undone from it. The episode of the rupture is tied
to the dramatic importance of the insolubility of the link between
the awaiting and the uplifting, and the self-delusion that the stoppage
might be minimized in the consolatory perspective of apocalypse
and exodus. In other words, if this world irresistibly runs towards the
catastrophe of meaning, the destruction of nature, and the end
of history, if it is corrupted to such an extent, it cannot but end in
apocalypse. The denunciation that comes with this desperation takes
on mystical or cynical semblances, and that expectance of the tragedy
of the world sees itself as exodus. A mystical exodus, new—or, less
often, a political exodus: “You want to make us govern, we will never
give into this provocation.”4 But where, how and when to exodus?
The answer is missing. Those subjects who have not planned to rise up
in revolt fool themselves that a magical hand will lift them up from
the pending catastrophe. They move towards exodus as a salvation,
actually building an anxious flight and forcing themselves into a sort of
containment of the will.
This is the place of negative ontology. The time of the pause and the
space of expectation are occupied by a malevolent angel who destroys
their substance. Utopia is the apology of a flight into the idea, an
impatient flight that does not measure the heaviness and the danger
of doing and making. What remains of the thought of uprising?
Memory, suffering, regret, repentance ... and where has subjectivity
gone? Nostalgia takes away the desire to start again and deposits tired
residue of that ancient experience into the soul. The perception of the
crushing of desire replaces the uprising. The soul transpires cowardice
before difficulties, the refusal of the concrete.
Parallel to it, mythologies develop—utopias of insurrection
and revolution ... “They are coming!” But where do they come from,
and how? These insurrections avoid subjectivation. The vain “I’d like”
of childish games and the atrophy of adults’ desire. The revolution
flame of a dragon that sets everything on fire, and there is no Saint
George to come to liberate us. More than lugubrious, it is funny
to gather, enveloped in the same destiny, “desk Marxists” and Dadaist
libertarians. For the former, uprising presupposes a fall (of capitalism)
that ends reasonably well; for the latter, it is a concession to a
catastrophic precipice from which they will resurface with a pure soul!
4.
“Nos quieren obligar
a gobernar y no vamos a caer
en esa provocación.”
39
The apocalypse is central and necessary, on this they all agree. There is
no more subjectivation and the ability to fight to change the world,
to rise up not for the pleasure of the gesture, but for the urgency
of a transformative action, has come away.
Thus it appears that only when subjectivity is introduced in the
pause, in the interval, as a motor of lifting, is it possible for the tension
of the shift from clean to jerk, from lifting from below to rising up to
the sky, to produce action.A negative ontology of uprising: we have
already touched on its definition. But we will understand it better once
we answer this question: What is a positive ontology of uprising? Or
rather, what does a definition of uprising demand so that a positive
ontology can develop from it?
First, it requires to be planted in the ground, enervated by passions
and interests, radical will and desires for the future. Second, it needs
to make itself a machine producing subjectivity that pulls together, in
an active “we,” a whole of singularities. There is always a shift between
the first and the second moment: an ontological shift of spirit and
passions, materiality and needs between a moment of rupture and an
act of building. Negative ontology, conversely, separates these two
moments and vainly takes on the semblance of either one or the other.
Positive ontology is that which conjoins the two moments and roots
to the ground what rose to the sky.
Let us ask ourselves: Is it possible to think following the rhythm,
and placing ourselves within, these uprisings? The 1977 New York
Blackout, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the youth revolt of the French
banlieues in 2005, and the English riots of 2011, for instance?
All these episodes are the same: those who rise up are young people
confined in apartheid areas condemned to poverty, working in brutal
conditions, stigmatized for facies or religion, discriminated by the
law and persecuted by the police. But these episodes are all different
because they are linked to the specificity of the forms of state
repression and the anger and violence of the subjects revolting.
In each of these episodes, moral and political indignation are liberated:
the field is freed from the forces of repression, and then there is an
appropriation of consumer and leisure goods. Looting and arson.
A scandal? Not really. They are no angels, they are proletarians;
their wings are heavy but they can still fly. Or they are migrants who
break the law, migrants out of need or political dissent, or refugees
fleeing war. Again, a scandal. Why? They exercise their right to flee,
a sacred demand, linked to the law of survival that cannot be denied to
anyone. They flee misery, they live as clandestine sans papiers,
having furtively or forcedly crossed borders. And yet it is a scandal:
40
“They steal our jobs, they tarnish the nation’s homogeneity,” the
wealthy protest! Well, that flight is an uprising.
The multitudes rebel against austerity and the debt neoliberalism
imposes on subjects. Here too, the uprising is rooted in the harsh
materiality of need, and this is what the multitude wishes to satisfy.
To rise up to change the earth in which we are rooted, to occupy squares
to free them from the control and fear that domination produces,
to attack Wall Street to divest debt of its legitimacy, to denounce the
media and its invasiveness in order to build, against it, truth,
to demystify political representation to rise up to self-government.
The uprising does not easily turn into insurrection, and the revolution
remains beyond the horizon. The difficulties pertaining to migration
are ever more insurmountable. The command of money and financial
capital has risen to such a level that it seems impossible for the march
of contestation to reach it. Spontaneity without blockages, then?
No, because cupiditas, the desire for freedom and happiness, are not
exhausted in arson and looting, in border crossings and clandestine
existences and occupations. On the contrary, they are excited, they
suffer their not-making it as a harsh limit that must be overcome at all
costs, not as a form of impotence. We will win next time. Venceremos!
The intensity of desire is so strong in the ontology of uprising
that it produces extreme subjectivities. It does not train consciousness,
it changes it. If consciousness simply matured, there would be
evolution, but there is no evolution. There would be someone in charge
of an ultimate truth who guides it, but there cannot be anyone,
because that ultimate end is not something to discover and reveal,
but something to build in struggle; it is not truth, it is veridiction.
Uprising transforms consciousness; in this movement consciousness
is reconstituted by it. It gathers needs together and turns them into
demands, it turns affects into desires and wills, it positions them
in a tension towards liberty. A red thread links the attempt to break the
existing order and the project of a future world: this thread is not
a process but a leap, it has no end; it produces it, just as it produces
ever new subjectivities that are adequate to it. From rupture to
construction, the uprising moves beyond the space that separates
them. It withstands the pause of a gesture that is not automated:
the lifting is not blind. Ask anyone -who has experienced this and
participated in the passions of revolts. They will tell you: every time it
happens, the revolt is unpredictable, but we always organized it.
This is what is positively revealed about the ontology of uprising:
the fact that the “breath,” however sudden, was built towards in
the collective practice of suffering and desire.
41
As we have seen, there is a limit: defeat. The experiences of defeat are
burning. However, it is not from the limit that one can grasp the
distance covered. There is the defeat of the uprising, but there is also
the point of arrival, the field that has been conquered, the interruption
that is challenged. There is always a limit to the uprising: the athlete
lets the weights fall. But that limit is also the sign of something
that has been built, an ontological stratum. It is an engine that must be
restored and reignited. concentration, the muscular tension that prevents the pause from
We have almost two centuries of workers’ uprisings behind us.
They go from 1848,, those damned days for the bourgeoisie, as Karl
Marx called them, to the Commune of 1871. From 1905 to 1917, to the
cycles of struggle that still mark our existence: from the latest
alter-globalization movements to the “Springs” of the indignados
movements. Those struggles represent the paradigm of a movement
that grows, continues, and intensifies even through defeats. How much
negative dialectics has been thrown upon this path of struggles:
a past of catastrophes? No, our reasoning cannot stop here. The Angelus
Novus is not a theology of the past, but an ontology of the present, of
the not-yet. There is a sort of secular training that leads the multitudes
to shake the limits of power with growing force. The defeats are
a stratum, a deposit, and a living one. They are not inert, they are
passions that keep producing subjectivity, productions that cannot be
stopped. Defeat is also an indication of a subterranean power always
capable of rising up to the surface.
Indignation is spoken of as the spark of uprisings. This is true only
when the sad passion of the indignant comes across the ontological
power deposited by lives of struggle. Only then is the uprising
realized, and it is enthusing for the militant to see how in that concrete
historicity and in the productive imagination, the relay is handed over
from the peasants’ jacqueries to the workers’ insurrections, from
the uprisings of second-generation migrants to the occupations
of the indignant precarious class. In the continuity of uprisings lies
a common content, an urge for liberty: the “breath” of a body that
no longer accepts its suffering.
The workers’ paradigm of uprising demands for its accomplishment
a constituent action. This shift from uprising to constituent desire is
rooted in ontology, and thus it is a joyous passion. In Baruch Spinoza’s
Ethics, unhappy passions cannot be the engine of a production of
a new being, whereas joyful passions determine the shift from
the hatred caused by indignation, from the pain of the defeat, to the
constructive explosion of cupiditas and its constituent affirmation.
42
Indignation can be the basis, but never the end point; it can be an
occasion but not an engine. Indignation still participates in a negative
ontology. Instead, what speaks of a positive and constituent ontology
is the paradigm that blows from the Commune to the Soviet, from the
metropolitan insurgencies to the “Springs” of the new proletariat.
This paradigm produces institutions. But what is an institution in the
movement of an athlete who is lifting weights? It is the intellectual
becoming an interruption of the gesture. It is the inner development
of power. Not even the haltérophile had expected to reach such a high
score … but they had organized it. Organizing means discovering the
surplus of ontological stratum and putting it at the service of the
uprising, of the constituent expression.
Uprising then unleashes survival needs, ethical resistance,
and political indignation against power; it inaugurates processes of
subjectivity that produce intense ruptures; it aims to fix the outcome
of struggles by inscribing them into a constitution. This is the only way
for it to overwhelm and defeat the enemy; when it cannot do this, it
disseminates indestructible desires of liberation all over the territories,
and builds ontological strata for a new uprising.
“Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike,” said an anonymous
rebel in Machiavelli’s account of the Revolt of the Ciompi against the
popolo grasso (the wealthy townsmen). “Dress us then in their clothes
and them in ours,” the anonymous agitator continues, facing the rich
owners of wool manufacturing, “without doubt we shall seem noble
and they ignoble. There is no reason for the poor to feel remorse
for the violence of their rebellion, “for when, like us, men have to fear
hunger, and imprisonment, or death, the fear of hell neither can nor
ought to have any influence upon them. … Faithful servants are always
servants, and honest men are always poor. … Now then is the time,
not only to liberate yourself from them, but to become so much
superior, that they will have more causes of grief and fear from you,
than you from them.”5
“My theoretical ethic is … ‘antistrategic’: to be respectful when a
singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal.
A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look
closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep
watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it.
After all, that is my work; I am not the first or the only one to do it.
5. But that is what I chose.”6 This is how Foucault replied to accusations
Niccolò Machiavelli, Historiae
fiorentine, History of Florence
of being an apologist for the perverse revolution in Iran. That revolt
and of the Affairs of Italy. From
The Earliest Times To The Death
Of Lorenzo The Magnificent
(Washington, DC: M. Walter
Dunne Publisher, 1901).
6.
Foucault, “Useless
to Revolt?,” 453.
43
might end badly we know. History does not leave any room for
the smallest error; it is made of imperceptible and contiguous
differences. It is the “breath” that makes up singularities, gives meaning
to their project and turns the uprising into a creative power. But if
the “breath” fails, the smallest errors become destructive agents.
And yet, we keep searching for its constituent spirit in the experience
of the uprising, and various elements come together here.
First of all, a practice. A practical kairos blooms, an arrow is
launched, an avalanche composes no one knows what exactly. As in
the parrhesia of the Cynics, where making the truth means producing
it, building through the engagement of subjectivity a “we” that is active
in history. A complex “we” because it is an ensemble of singularities,
a multitude of differences: in this lies its power. This activity is not
generic: telling is generative of the “we,” the generative making
of subjectivity.
Secondly, taking the floor. When uprising, one always needs the
word. The uprising is linguistic, performative, and a shift from saying
to doing, but without the saying, it would not exist. A manifesto,
a text, a message, a symbol, a flag, or a simple shaking of the hands
to ask or approve, or a clenched fist: these are words.
Third, the exercise of force. The practice of the gesture and the
taking of the floor attack and transform, overcoming the limits of our
existence. This production of subjectivity generates violence. A violence
addressed to the destruction of the legitimacy of every institution that
insists on exercising inhuman command on our humanity. This is a
different kind of violence; Walter Benjamin claims it is detached from
the wrath of the state and the master, it is an immediate violence,
destructive of power, yet pure and purifying. “By the absence of all
lawmaking … it is justifiable to call this violence, too, annihilating;
but it is so only relatively, with regard to goods, right, life, and suchlike,
never absolutely, with regard to the soul of the living.”7
The taking of the floor that built a “we” in the uprising and showed
its transformative violence wishes to turn, again, from doing to saying,
to establish a constitution. But what constitution can be spoken of,
if by constituted power we mean a blockage and fixation of the
constituent activity? If the relation between uprising of liberty and
efficiency of an ever renewed taking of the floor is closed up in
the tight webs of a presumably indestructible organization of power?
As a power to resist and change the context of life, an uprising
cuts short all links to fixed power. The discipline of the organization
of labour will be destroyed, violently even, by the self-valorization
of singularities established within social cooperation. “The right to
7.
Walter Benjamin “Critique of
Violence,” in Reflections, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986), 297–298.
44
self-determination”, “the right to have rights”: this is the giant leap
forward that nourishes the uprising. And the impenetrable border,
the forbidden frontier will rightly be crossed by migrants, who thus
constitute a “right to flee.” And the “right to the common” against
private property: this is another great objective for uprisings. In the
uprising, private property is always pointed to as what it really is:
egoism, indiscriminate violence, use and abuse of things and people,
possession and subjugation of all goods. The destruction and
looting of private property that manifest themselves in the excesses
of the uprising thus reveal an inviolable demand of the common,
for a “right to the common” that legitimizes every just social need.
The uprising is a “divine power,” as Benjamin says, an irrepressible
power of freedom. Why can we not imagine constitutions that affirm
as their premise the priority of singular self-valorization in collective
work, and the construction of the common and destruction of
private property?
We got lost in the stars. Let us descend to where the uprising is
the salt of the earth. Uprising = resistance, as we have seen. But let us
also reconquer the nuances of these gestures. The uprising produces
performances that go, going down and rising up again, from the
expression of a constituent counter power to the most minute “no”
uttered against command. We integrate the simple “difference” to
our framework: difference = resistance = uprising. Can it be a smile?
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Memoirs tell of a day in June 1848. We are
in a beautiful apartment on the Parisian left bank, the seventh
arrondissement, at lunchtime. Tocqueville’s family is gathered there
and yet, in the calm of the evening, the cannons drawn by the
bourgeoisie against the workers in revolt suddenly resonate, distant
noises from the right bank. The diners pale, their faces darken.
A young waitress serving their table, fresh from the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, instinctively smiles. She is immediately fired. Wasn’t
there, in that smile, the real mark of the uprising? Wasn’t that what
really terrified the Czar, the pope ... and the lord of Tocqueville?
Wasn’t there a “breath” of the joy that is also a spark of liberation?
45
Marie-José Mondzain Beckett’s characters inhabit a vibratory space that wrenches them
free of the ground but forbids them to fly. To stand up or not stand up,
TO “THOSE WHO SAIL unaided, is that the question?
Uprising, soulèvement, Aufstand, sollevazione, levantamiento—all
THE SEA …” these words vibrate with the same summons to get up, straighten up,
stand up. “Rise up and walk” is the injunction of miracle workers
bent on conquering death, exhorting us not to take things lying down,
submissively and passively. It is surely not a matter of resuscitating,
though, but rather of triumphing over the weight and gravitational
pull of everything that hampers the power and lightness of the dance
of bodies that are free, living, thinking, and desiring. An emancipatory
UPRIGHT uprising, inevitably situated between the excesses of disorder and the
painful order of the fall. Midway between chaos and fall, the insurgent
Are we living through a general ebbing of mental and physical vitality? arises between what he or she is to be severed from and what he or
It’s possible. Given the current political slumbrousness that numbs all she seeks to bond with. But uprising stands unaided in this interspace
capacity for dreaming, is not a sense of a crushing global powerlessness of supposedly unlimited possibility—of freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche
imbuing certain words with a kind of ethereal, magical energy? issued the warning in his rhyming prelude to the soarings, careerings,
I pronounce the word uprising and I seem to hear a murmur swelling and volcanic dances of The Gay Science:
in the distance, so far off that I cannot tell if it is the exhilarating
return of some old memory or the ultimate muttering of a fading, Do not stay in the field!
receding voice doomed never to return. True, I did say energy; but this Nor climb out of sight.
energy has to escape the skepticism that drags us back to a sense of The best view of the world
futility. “Uprising” has to lose its intimations of some bereaved passion. Is from a medium height.1
It makes audible the susurrus of storm and wind and wave rolling in
from the horizon, then conjures up the ageless memory of all He concludes his book with a song to dance to, dedicated to the
insurrections, of nature’s wild, spectacular unleashing of the sublime, Mistral, the power of waves and the unfettered gallopings that
and of peoples who put their urge for revolution into practice. enchant and liberate both the body and the mind. This is an ode
But while the up-rising of the sublime offers an intimate savoring of to all uprisings:
intoxicating limitlessness, of a terrifying frisson of excess, popular
insurrection seeks to put an end to the excesses of oppression and so Mistral wind, you rain cloud leaper,
install freedom’s new order. Yet insurrection retains of the sublime Sadness killer, heaven sweeper,
the inherent residue of the contradictory tensions underlying any How I love you when you roar!
uprising. This is because, paradoxically, uprising takes place within …
boundaries: it seems to seek self-containment within a territory where Through the heavens’ threshing basin
its movements defy all restriction. Consider Samuel Beckett’s superb I could see your horses hasten,
irony in Endgame: …
Dance on myriad backs a season,
CLOV: I can’t sit. Billows’ backs and billows’ treason—
HAMM: True. And I can’t stand. We need dances that are new!
CLOV: So it is. Let us dance in myriad manners,
HAMM: Every man his specialty. Freedom write on our art’s banners,
our science shall be gay.

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

46 47
 … journey beneath the earth.”4 Every uprising is a battle in which the fall
Let us whirl the dusty hazes
right into the sick men’s noses,
flush the sick brood everywhere!2
This is all about what uprising owes to wind and waves, to inspiration
and respiration. Those who do not dance cannot stand, and joy is part
of the uprising.
INSPIRE, DESIRE? PNEUMA, LUNG
When silence stifles the eloquence of desire, the outbursts of reason
and the exultations of unreason, the real or imaginary spectacle of any
unleashing alerts us to the rising of our own lungs. It makes our
respiration the body’s most intimate response to the world’s upheavals.
No insurrection without the swelling of lungs that set words and songs
ringing out, triggering images that unfailingly signal all-shattering
seismic events and movements. The body’s rhythmic inner din couples
with public clamor and the vox populi. Chests swell with what is first
called the birth cry and later song. Then rises inspiration. What fills us
is weightless, just as in the holy delirium of enthousiasmos, which swells
the poet’s heart and body, and which Socrates discusses with Ion, the
performer of poetry: the force that draws iron filings to the magnet is
the same as the one that affects the lover of beauty uplifted by the
sacred fire of poetic creation: “The gift which you possess of speaking
excellently about Homer is not an art … there is a divinity moving you,
like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This
stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar
power of attracting other rings … In like manner the Muse inspires the
poet, who communicates inspiration to others … For the poet is a light
and winged and holy thing.”3 What lightens and gives wings begins by
filling us with an impalpable ether in which the words, images and
sounds called up by breath intermingle. Body, mind, and soul are
uplifted by the divine energy of desire. Pneuma, spiritus—philosophers
have not shrunk from ethereal metaphors and evocations of flight in
their descriptions of the forces that intensify thought and direct it
towards skies as astral as they are noetic. In these skies horses have
wings. For those who have ears to hear, the silence of an angel’s passing
rings with the clatter of hooves. The noble chariot and horses of the
soul that Plato speaks of in Phaedrus are pulled in two directions: on
a “heavenward pilgrimage” and towards the “darkness and the
2.
Ibid., 306
3. 6.
Plato, Ion, trans. Benjamin
Jowett, http://classics.mit.edu/
Plato/ion.html (translation
modified).
48
4. up a body asking only to be raised, to lift its face and look upwards at
Plato, “Phaedrus,” in Six Great
Dialogues, trans. Benjamin
Jowett (New York: Dover, 2007),
118.
5.
Hesiod, Theogony, Works and
Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn
W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Loeb
Classical Library, 2006), 45.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture
and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock
Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1993).
49
is conquered. But not all gallopings are desirable, even when they
are the burning daughters of desire. The elevation of souls calls for the
uplifting of bodies when the aerobatics of the body owe everything
to the acrobatics of the soul. Creative thinking is an athletic act, but
one that involves no lifting of weights.
GRAVITY, WEIGHT, COUNTERWEIGHT …
An impetuous passion wrenches us free of the earth, but with a
thrilling, perilous price to pay: the price of the uncontrollable. At the
core of the word uprising there stands firm the weight—the value,
the price—of lightness itself: Old English rīsan, at once “to make an
attack” and “to wake, get out of bed.”
Experienced in all its lightness, the power of being can be the
“unbearable” movement of something that refuses all assigning to
a fixed, identifiable place. Milan Kundera has worked through
its desireful and political manifestations. The uprising is a form of
enantiosemy in that it gives voice simultaneously to weight and
lightness. Everything brings us back to earth, everything subjects us
to gravity, everything reminds us of dust. When the burden of living
becomes too heavy, fable and myth are there to recount the vigorous
effort demanded by the lifting of the load in a movement that defies
gravity. Such is the task of the Titan: Atlas, Hesiod tells us, was
condemned to hold up the sky for eternity as a punishment for
having rebelled against Zeus. He who rises up against Zeus incurs the
heaviest penalty.5 Thus did “atlas” become the name of the first cervical
vertebra, whose function is to uphold the weight of the head, while
its companion, “axis,” allows the head to move and pivot. Atlas is at
the head of column, but the burden is so heavy that from Dürer’s
Melencolia to Rodin’s Thinker, Atlas’s neck asks for aid and support from
the hand. The image of the thinker cannot separate the hand from
the skull, from that weighty site of speech that the helping, acting hand
upholds. Raising the head requires the assistance of the hands.
Thus does André Leroi-Gourhan describe the birth of speaking, acting
humanity:6 the foot freed the hand and together they straightened
the infinity of the heavens and the flight of birds. Then humans
became able to speak and produce a world of signs and techniques.
Birth is an uprising: it is a straightening up, a lifting up of oneself
and a maintaining of the upright stance of something that threatens to
buckle, fall and sink under its own weight. Later “atlas” came to mean
a book containing a summary of the images of the earth and the
heavens. The lightness of signs and images delivers us from the
crushing weight of the universe. And then there was Sisyphus, also
punished by Zeus, endlessly condemned to raising, after each fall,
a rock unremittingly obedient to the laws of gravity: “Then I saw
Sisyphus, suffering bitter torments, trying to roll a gigantic rock with
his hands. Bracing himself, constantly straining with all his might,
he would push the huge rock straight up toward the top of a hill; but
just as he came close, its weight would roll it back, and the pitiless rock
went bounding down from the top of the hill to the valley below.
And once more he would descend and begin to strain back up the hill,
with the sweat pouring over his body.”7 Neither the Titan nor Sisyphus
had access to Archimedes’s marvelous engineering, whose levers
could move crushing weights with the aid of a single finger: “Give me
a fulcrum and a lever,” he declared, “and I shall move the world.”
Archimedes reversed the energy of lifting by using downward forces
to achieve elevation. Lifting became an art of balance, a science of
equilibrium based on opposing forces. The art of the lever, able to lift
the heaviest weights, is that of weight and counterweight, without
which there is neither equality nor justice. It is the strength of the
weakest that lifts up the masses. The truth of fable and myth, though,
has nothing to do with the ingeniousness of intellectuals or the
engineers of social and political balance. The uprising driven by the
energies of disequilibrium has no fear of conflict. Moreover, no lever
has ever succeeded in freeing anybody from the weight of reality, from
the encumbrance of the shamings and adversities handed out by gods
or demons. The uprising shares the history of all our burdens and
throws the scales out of kilter. It wants to have done with the weight
of destiny. Even if the heaviest of all our burdens is quite simply death,
our perception is of a burden as weightless, insubstantial, invisible,
and impalpable as time itself. No image of it exists. Only fable and the
metaphors of shadow seek to lift us far above the ground, far from all
place and outside time. The poetics of flight. Resurrection, ascension,
levitation: nothing but exercises in the eternal. The uprising is a
constitutive fiction out to escape all constituted gravity. The experience
of eternity was a Spinozist formulation. In his commentary on Baruch
Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze illustrates the three kinds of knowledge
with the metaphor of the wave: the wave slaps and submerges the
person who cannot swim—this is the precipitate of the shipwreck;
if you meet the wave it lifts you up and if you can swim it joins forces
with you—this is the mastery provided by reason and knowledge;
7
Homer, The Odyssey, trans.
Stephen Mitchell (New York:
Atria, 2013), 330.
50
but when the wave meets you and lifts you up you become one with it,
“feeling and experiencing eternity.” Beatitude in the immanence
of uplift.
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY
Uprising rhymes with realizing, but it seems to hesitate, not to say
negotiate, between the ongoing movement that smoothly and
unbrokenly “shifts the lines” upwards and the eruptive force of the leap
that takes its chances with vertigo and the risk of falling. The uprising
can blend with a slow, patient, gradual lift-off from some point
of constraint—with a solemn composure aiming at sovereignty over
the heights so effortfully conquered. But like every conquest, this
one weakens the driving force of the uprising by endowing some
overarching fiction with the privilege of well-earned rest. Once the
goal has been attained, the status quo loses the energy demanded by
a permanent uprising. Dialectically speaking, there is a real temptation
to reduce the uprising to a mere step, a stage in the liberatory shift
towards the pleasure of the concept and regal glory. Dialectical
thinking tends to skip the leap—the break—in favor of considerations
of process. The uprising’s temporality is discontinuous within the zone
of radical indeterminacy without which there can never be revolution.
The uprising is an adventure that defies the loci of power, be it the
power of reason or of truth. It flees exposure.
On the uprising’s shifting ground, the fluidity of waves is equally
receptive to storms, cataclysms, and seismic fractures. The uprising
has given birth to mountains, to ignited volcanoes. Our political
history shares a radical intimacy with subterranean geology:
both have darkness at their center. The deities of forge and fire, of the
netherworld and of vengeance, reside below ground, ever
ready to rise to the surface.
LEVITATION
Far from the dialectic in quest of power, what of the surprising power
held by those uninterested by power in any form? If we return to those
celestial elevations that bear souls and bodies off into the territories of
the birds, we must take account of the spiritual exercises that bear and
bear off the soul and the body of the one who feels called, irresistibly
drawn, towards supraterrestrial, saving places. Levitation is the singular
51
experience of a body flying towards the ether, attested to by the entire
mystical tradition from East to West. In her autobiography, Saint Teresa
of Avila makes a distinction between union and rapture: “I wish that
I could explain, with God’s help, the difference between union and
rapture (arrobamiento), or elevation (elevamiento), or flight of the spirit
(vuelo que llaman de espíritu) or transport (arrebatamiento)—for they
are all one … these are all different names for the same thing, which is
also called ecstasy (éxstasis).”8 Thus does Teresa, uplifted, distinguish
different experiences of the phenomenon according to the degree of
violence and joy she feels. Far from always surrendering to the ecstasy
of these upliftings, whose rapture Bernini’s statue of her seizes but does
not immobilize, she remains plaintive even in the midst of the most
exquisite emotional volatility. Her description of this ethereal spiriting-
away by the deity illuminates the paradoxical tension of a state whose
grace is as eroticizing as it is embarrassing. The spectacular visibility
of the invisible forces that bring her to climax is barely tolerable, barely
acknowledgeable.
“But rapture is, as a rule, irresistible. Before you can be warned by
a thought or help yourself in any way, it comes as a quick and violent
shock; you see and feel this cloud, or this powerful eagle rising and
bearing you up on its wings … very often I should like to resist, and
I exert all my strength to do so, especially at such times as I am in a
public place … At other times resistance has been impossible; my
soul has been carried away, and usually my head as well … It seemed
to me when I tried to resist that a great force, for which I can find no
comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet. It came with
greater violence than any other spiritual experience, and left me
quite shattered.”9 What Teresa experiences is an uprooting, a leap
that separates her not only from the ground, but from the community
as well. The supernatural order of the miracle is a rupture with the
natural and the social orders. Repudiating the upward leap, but
following the mystical path of uplift, Simone Weil speaks of the
elevation through grace as an experience of gravity, as acceptance
of the “law of descending movement.” Refusing the prideful pleasure
of ascending ecstasies, she defends a “second degree of grace” that
rejects all upward movement towards a higher state. “To lower oneself
is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral gravity makes us fall
towards the heights.”10
Spiritual uplift is not without its contradictions, and a recurring
feature of the texts is the fundamental principle of a counterbalance.
“Equilibrium alone destroys and annuls force,” Weil writes.11 “If we
know in what direction the scales of society are tilted, we must do
52
8.
Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint
Teresa of Avila by Herself,
trans. J. M. Cohen
(Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1988), 136.
9. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in
Ibid., 38.
10. (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace,
trans. Emma Crawford and
Mario von den Ruhr (London:
Routledge, 2002), 4.
11. Ron Padgett (New York: NYRB
Ibid., 171.
what we can to add weight to the lighter side. Although the weight
may be something evil, if we handle it with this motive we shall
perhaps not be tainted by it.”12 No uplift to be achieved, then—
including by grace—if one steers clear of the worst. If Teresa fears in
her elevation the ruses of the devil, Weil, on the contrary, sees hers
in the form of a descent towards the real world of work and war. In
London, during the winter of 1943, she wrote The Need for Roots after
publishing La condition ouvrière (The condition of the working class)
in 1937. For her, what uplifted was the commitment of spirit and body
to uprisings: in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, she joined the
Durruti Column. Andrei Tarkovsky was another who was committed
to resisting the two worlds he rejected: Stalinism and capitalism.
Tarkovsky used the cinema to meet the near-mystical but nonreligious
responsibility of putting images of uprising into action. In three films
he achieved the union of the mystical fable and political thinking.
In Andrei Rublev, the peasant, Yefim, has made a kind of hot-air
balloon out of animal skins, intended to fly him over fields and forests.
As Tarkovsky tells it, “The script includes an episode in which a
peasant, who has made himself a pair of wings, climbs up on to the
cathedral, jumps, and crashes to the ground … Evidently it was a case
of a man who all his life had been thinking of himself flying …
Then he jumped … In order to dispel the Icarus overtones we decided
on an air balloon … we felt it rid the episode of spurious rhetoric
and turned it into a unique happening.”13 This kind of pivotal event
recurs in Solaris, as the levitation of the cosmonaut’s dead wife in the
orbiting space station. In the depths of interstellar space, Tarkovsky
confronts a dual torment: the raising of the dead and the stirrings of
the primordial magma. Ultimately, in Stalker, he endows a child’s gaze
with the power to lift objects and thwart the law of gravity.
And now is the moment to let Guillaume Apollinaire restore its
enigmatic lightness to divine grace:
It’s Christ who goes up in the sky better than any pilot could
He holds the world record for altitude.14
RAISING?
It may be that paths like these distance us from the initial energy
12. that in every uprising acknowledges the effects of an exercising of the
Ibid., xvii. body and of reason. This is because there exist other elemental forms
13.
of thought and imagery that demand we pay homage to the gravity
Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair
Press, 1989), 79–80.
14.
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,”
Zone: Selected Poems, trans.
Poets, 2015).
53
of lightness. Gravis, heavy. The law of gravity seeks to deter all birds,
all who laugh and dance, all poets, and all who believe in the
insurrectional forces of revolution. Gravity is what makes every upward
movement weighty. Is not the first phase of this uplifting the raising of
a child as a subject full of gravity who, through the power of play,
invents dramatic scenarios of his or her own existence as a desiring
subject, in defiance of the world’s let-downs and failings? To teach the
pupil to transform the absence of things into a ferment of signs is to
offer the resources inherent in all uprisings, and to use this ferment
to trigger an endless, limitless interplay of volatile images and words.
Raising does not consist in teaching the pupil to walk and talk and
do everything others have already done before in our relationship with
the ground beneath our feet, language, and time. Raising immediately
betokens the power of flight. In enabling pupils to do what none have
done before, the master gives them wings.
FLYING
This winged child is also Cupid. The archer of desire also takes flight.
Lacking gravity, Eros shares the space of the angels and that of
butterflies. “Light as a feather,” flighty woman defies volatile man and
the lightness of libertinage. Desire lifts veils but often prefers to intuit
what lies hidden. There is room here for everything ascendant, for
the “subterranean” rush of air that blows Marilyn Monroe’s skirt sky
high, and for French chansonnier Georges Brassens’s celebration of the
“haphazard, roguish wind” that sets youthful petticoats aflutter. But
desire’s flurryings can also betray their chance origins and veer into
the systematic. When photographer-jumpologist, Philippe Halsman
got Marilyn and lots of others to perform leaps and bounds, it was
probably with the secret hope of capturing a truth revealed when
bodies are wrenched free of the ground. Here we have an odd trade-off
with dance and its endless challenging, defiance, and denial of gravity.
But when photography yields to the capture fantasy, the very act
that catches the up-rising annihilates it by freezing it. The dancer
and the acrobat are in constant opposition to the image: fixity
is impossible. This up-rising is necessarily a fleeting conversation
with the “moment of our death.” The performer is on the brink,
like every tightrope walker.
15. in amnesty without amnesia: “The establishment of the Erinyes
Nicole Loraux, The Divided City:
On Memory and Forgetting in
Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne
Pache with Jeff Fort (Brooklyn:
Zone Books, 2001).
16.
Ibid., 105.
17.
Ibid., 106.
18.
Ibid., 41.
STASIS: INSURRECTION
It is to the Greeks that we must turn now, with uprising becoming an
immanent menace to democratic peace. Stasis is the word they used
for the paradoxical insurrection/equilibrium dyad of the “Divided City,”
to quote the title of a remarkable book by Nicole Loraux.15 At issue
here is that state of insurrection inherent in the social bond and peace.
The section of the book dealing with the fundamental ambivalence
of stasis is titled “A Gegensinn,” a German term referring to the use
of the same word for something and its opposite. Stasis embraces
both the fixed, stable state of what stands firm, and the insurrectional
movement about to trigger civil war. “We could, of course,” Loraux
writes, “disregard the opposite meanings of words. We could pretend
that nothing of the sort is happening and shelter behind an
etymological dictionary that glosses stasis as ‘stability, place, action
of standing, hence insurrection’… But I suggest that we complicate
the double meaning even further by adding to the opposition (between
movement and rest) the tension between what is upright and of a
piece—stasis, then—and the representation most commonly associated
with stasis in daily life, namely, division.”16 
Whence the author’s hypothesis, which does indeed complicate
the question of insurrection by illuminating its non-dialectical force:
“Civil war is stasis inasmuch as the clash between two equal halves
of the city erects ( just like a stēlē) conflict in the meson.”17 The Athenian
city is not the fantasy model of a peaceful democracy that has only
external enemies against whom it makes war and with whom it makes
peace. On the contrary, there is no internal peace, no inner equilibrium
without stasis, an energy at once insurrectional and stabilizing. Stasis
is affiliation and disaffiliation. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides it is clear that
the Erinyes have their abode beneath the law court, and that hatred
and discord are the subterranean coals underlying the exercise of
justice. At any moment the Kindly Ones can revert to being
bloodthirsty hounds surging out of their lair to claim their due. What
Loraux so vividly points up is the place of memory in the distribution
of the forces that make and unmake bonds. Should the uprising of
memory reactivate the desire for revenge and once again cause
hideous crimes, political life will cease to be possible. And so, in order
that this threat should no longer weigh crushingly on the city, the
wording of contracts and oaths must be given a performativity rooted
at the foot of the Areopagus indeed symbolises the domesticated yet
always threatening presence of terror and wrath in the city.”18

54 55
The uprising is, as language was for Aesop, “the best and worst of
things.” Without the founding threat of insurrection and civil war, there
can be no contract and no peace. This is why Loraux calls on Hesiod
for the epigraph to her chapter on stasis:
It was never true that there was only one kind
of strife. There have always
been two on earth. There is one
you could like when you understand her.
The other is hateful.19
The insurrectional uprising is a revolutionary energy without which
there could be no order other than bureaucratic dictatorship. If this
threat of violence were defused and ceased to fuel the conflict between
dominators and dominated, the community would be deprived of
the radical possibility of the event. Liberty can be continuously
exercised only at the cost of the possibility of violence—and much
worse. Only the forces of knowledge and creativity can address this
intractability and by their actions bring about popular, democratic
emancipation. This is what led Gramsci to say that there would never
be a political revolution without the shaping and development of
intelligences through the practice of ideas and creativity. Emancipation
of the citizenry is both the raison d’être and the prerequisite for the
permanence inherent in any true political uprising and thus for any
transformation of the relationships involved in production and power
sharing.
The workshop for insurrection is the zone of perilous, exhilarating
creativity, for which celebrations and the carnival are the seminal
models.
THE LEAP
Turnarounds, overturnings, mask dances, and the practice of
confusion: these nourish the uprising’s political energies. Thus hatred
of ideas and art is what drives the wars all dictatorships declare on
those who stand up and those who wrench themselves free of the
ground solely through their power to leap. This is doubtless what made
Kafka write in his diary: “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous,
perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of
murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place. This occurs
by a higher type of observation, a higher, not a keener type, and the
19. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire -
Hesiod, Works and Days, 11–13.
Quoted in Loraux, Divided
City, 89.
56
20. root in the encounter with whatever Other: here violence is spotlighted
Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923,
trans. Martin Greenberg
with Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken, 1988), entry for
January 27, 1922, 406–407.
21.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions
to Philosophy (of the Event), trans.
Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela
Vallega-Neu (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press,
2012), 232, 241.
22.
Supra, note 18.
23.
Heidegger : L’être 3 - Figure du
retrait (1986-1987) (Paris: Fayard,
2015).
57
higher it is and the less in reach of the ‘row,’ the more independent it
becomes, the more obedient to its own laws of motion, the more
ascendant its course.”20
The leap differs from flying in that it needs no oneiric or
thaumaturgical conduit. It is impossible without solid ground, a
base—a launchpad if you like—but the question of the leap remains
inseparable from the movement in which it is completed by fulfilling
(or not) some real or imaginary end or purpose. For Kafka writing is
“a leap out of murderers’ row,” the invention of the solid ground on
which life is spared. While not endowing the leap with saving or
redemptive overtones, he effects it as a gesture towards life and liberty.
This necessarily makes the point of departure tenebrous and criminal.
It is not simply a matter of escaping the violence of the murderers,
but also of escaping one’s own criminal future. This is why Heidegger’s
use of the leap in his Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) is
problematical in that for him, one leaps in order to “be projected”:
“Da-sein as a projection of the truth of beyng [sic] … The task is an
original projection and a leap that can draw its necessity only out
of the deepest history of mankind … The transcendental way (through
a different transcendence) is merely provisional, in order to prepare
the turnaround and the leap.”21 Dating from 1937–38, this text raises the
issue of the leap in terms of immemorial truth and thus powerfully
foregrounds the event as a bringer of the truth of being—the truth of
humankind itself. The wrenching-free is return, refounding, a rooting
in the historical explosion of that which is going to throw the subject
out of indifference. Even so, writing has not removed the writer
from murderers’ row. So what leap are we talking about? And how, then,
are we not to return to stasis and Loraux’s quotation from Hesiod?22
The uprising embodied in the leap must resign itself to the loss of
truth and face the risk of the form that will be given to the movement
not of return but of venturesome encounter and sharing. It is the
encounter with the Other that gives the curve of the leap its firmness.
No point in torturing language to avoid the part of truth that takes
by the fact of the absence, the elision, of what founds the event,
in this case the coming, the arrival of the first-comer, of whatever other
wrenches us out of indifference. As Alain Badiou has so neatly
put it, “There is this German inclination ultimately to prefer birds to
people.”23 Badiou continues his analysis by seeking the exit from
indifference not, like Heidegger, in differential evaluation, but in the
“composing of an indiscernible.” Seen in this light the uprising has less
to do with metaphors of breaking free and taking flight, than with
the movement that raises the eyelid of the sleeper, opens the ear of the
deaf person and gives speech to the mute person when our gaze,
listening ability, and voice refuse to submit passively to the tyranny
of fear. The “composing of the indiscernible” it quite simply our putting
into action of the imaging power at work in every encounter. To see
for the first time, to hear for the first time, to speak for the first time …
this is the creative leap, the perilous upsurge of the unprecedented.
In Timaeus, Plato suggests the disturbing but necessary hypothesis
of a third kind (triton genos) of existence lurking unseen in the matrix
where every image can be born once it takes on the appearance of
the underlying idea. In this indiscernible locus are played out the
testing of our discernment and the upsurge in our acts of the
unprecedented, the unheard of. The unheard of making itself heard
used to be called an annunciation. To those who have ears to hear,
an angel says “Hail”; that is how the image has its arrival announced
even before eyes can see it. But to hail is not to save. The fable is
beautiful and mystery free: it announces the arrival of the first comer,
of one who arrives for the first time and who, thus, will never cease
arriving. Moreover, in this birth there must be the declaration of
a birth, that is to say of the inventive program of every revolutionary
event; nor must the fable become a tale for good children and for
adults dozing during this seismic annunciation.
WAKE-UP CALL
To preempt visual, aural, and oral shutdown on the part of mystery
gulpers, image gobblers, and other indiscriminate gorgers, we have to
leave room for those who change the subject on the grounds that the
only thing to bring up is the problem. Sooner or later the uprising
problem produces the rising-up of its own enigma. It certainly seems,
going down this road, that Marcel Duchamp most deserves our
homage. The question has already been raised here of upbringing and
well or badly brought-up pupils. When pupils rise up to make it clear
that they cannot be brought up if they are enslaved, what happens is
what Jean Vigo filmed: the gleeful explosion of pillows and eiderdowns
that turns the dormitory into a flurry of feathers, and the pupil telling
his principal, “And I say to you: Shit!” It’s party time—and soon the
down of birds carpets the floor with white and the children march
over it in resolute revolt. This is exactly how Duchamp, the talented
scion of painting and art history, chose to rise up and march against
everything upraised under the banner of the picture, against the
58
contemplation of venerated artifacts, against docile grammar,
against established differences and distinctions. Not that he was in the
grip of some hyperbolic, truth-seeking doubt; there was a quite
different hyperbole at work, scandalizing and subverting respectfulness
in the name of the tiny energies that set space imperceptibly seething
with Brownian motion. But enduring patience is required, and time
too, if, colorlessly and noiselessly, the dusty trace of countless, incessant
turbulences is to settle. In 1920, Man Ray photographed the Large Glass
that Duchamp had left to gather dust, and called the result View from
an Aeroplane. Duchamp, the genius of the uprising, called it Dust
Breeding:
 transformer designed to utilize the slight, wasted energies
A
such as:
the excess of pressure on an electric switch.
the exhalation of tobacco smoke
… sighs, etc.24
This slow accretion of gray matter forms the fuzzy, indecipherable
shadow of time itself. Dust Breeding raises the impalpable substance
of any event by letting it settle. Duchamp’s meditation on weight
and gravity underpins his conception of the infra-thin—the gravity
of whatever is without weight or thickness. Art of traversal, virginal
uprising of membranes, accretion of the fall. Here the art of the fall
is a redundancy. Thus arises “Song of the revolution of the bottle
of Bened”:
—After having pulled the chariot by its fall, the bottle of
Benedictine lets itself be lifted off by the hook C; it falls asleep as it
goes up, and is woken with a start at dead center, head downwards.
It pirouettes and falls vertically according to the laws of gravity.25
Even more than the leap, the start sets the revolutionary refrain
going. No uprising without falling, and vice versa. Duchamp’s
statements function as annunciations: he states the diaphanous divide
separating the visible from the invisible; through the osmotic grace
of a membranous locus, incarnation becomes the work of a bachelor
machine and a virgin bride. Diaphanous hymen, intact screen on
which all images can appear. The visible veils the invisible and
manifests it without unveiling it. On this osmotic veil the invisible
offers itself to the eye. The Christian fable of the Marian birth
of the image draws on Platonist thinking in this osmotic treatment
24.
Marcel Duchamp, The Writings
of Marcel Duchamp (Boston,
MA: Da Capo, 1989), 191–192.
25.
Ibid., 61–62 (translation
modified).
59
 Though the shadow and the mystery
of the khôra, described by Plato as the receptacle and invisible mother
Had not broken the threads that bound me to the ground
of the visible.26 The virginal receptacle brings the image into the world
In my head, laid bare to the winds of terror,
by consenting to be only the pure screen for the projection of the
I felt a strange and terrible oblivion well up,
invisible into the visible. The hymen is infra-thin and becomes the
In the dark shape that I sense myself to be,
locus of all apparitions of the possible.
That mist drifting around in the problem …30

 e possible is/ an infra-thin … The possible implying/ the

Th
Darkness, strange welling-up, drifting, solitude, and doubt: these are
becoming—the passage from/ one to other takes place/ in the infra-
the words that speak to us of what uplifts the speech of poets and,
thin.27
at best, a few philosophers. Things waver when waves are involved,
which is why it is only right to leave the last word to Anarchasis,
No question, Duchamp is the iconic insurrectional artist, signaling in
who supposedly said, “There are three kinds of men: the living, the
an utterly radical way that an artistic act has no point other than to
dead, and those who sail the sea.”
disturb the viewer with a problem at once exhilarating and anguishing.
Uplifted by powerful gusts, the gray, dusty matter conjures up
simultaneously the infinite, turbulent life of the invisible particles that
make up the world and the deathly pallor of the ashes reminding us of
our dust. A recent exhibition in Paris featured a tribute to Dust Breeding
and took as its epigraph a quotation from T. S. Eliot:

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.28

Might rising/uprising generate fear? Is it not, rather, a matter of giving

tangible form to what raises the problem and its power in every
speaking, desiring subject. Raising the Problem demands the spectator
advance to meet the enigma of his or her own visibility, experience
the foundering of unifying certainties and plunge into the multiplicity
of temporalities, the reversibility of all positionings. To raise the
problem is to welcome the ever-perilous fecundity of a loss of bearings.
Infra-thin is one name for the place where this loss of bearings
happens. Amazingly, in a remarkable tribute to Victor Hugo by André
du Bouchet,29 whose title—L’œil égaré dans les plis de l’obéissance aux 26.
vents (The eye lost in the folds of obedience to the winds)—is a Plato, “Timaeus,” in Timaeus and
dazzling phrase from the master’s Postscript to My Life, we learn that Critias, ed. and trans. Thomas
Kjeller Johansen (London:
well before Duchamp, Hugo was haunted by the question of Penguin, 1977), 70.
discontinuity and uprising: 27.
Marcel Duchamp, Notes,
ed. and trans. Paul Matisse
In the silent, unheard, impalpable darkness, (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1983), 1.
I was alone, but no longer myself; 28.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922),
quoted in the exhibition
catalogue A Handful of Dust
(Paris: Le Bal, 2015).
29. 30.
André du Bouchet, L’œil égaré Victor Hugo, Post scriptum
dans les plis de l’obéissance aux de ma vie (Paris: L’Herne, 2015).
vents followed by L’infini et This excerpt translated by
l’inachevé (Paris: Seghers, 2001). Jeremy Harrison.

60 61
Jacques Rancière
ONE UPRISING CAN HIDE
ANOTHER
There are words that seem to have already accomplished what they
refer to, and, better still, that seem to indicate the path from words
to things because they already went from things to words, because
the breath that emits them belongs to the movement of universal life.
“Uprising” is one of these words. What in the world does not rise up?
This is how life is recognized: the beating under the skin, the breathing
that makes a sheet rise up imperceptibly, the wind that moves the dust
that is the symbol of nothingness, and of the wave that is the symbol
for everything, showing just as much the calm of its regular movement
as the unleashing of storms. How, then, could we not include, in the
great breathing of life that rises up, the moment when waves of people,
whose breath and whose blood beat silently behind the walls of
houses, loudly flood the streets behind raised fists or flags flapping in
the wind? How could we not link the movements of the lines on the
canvas and the breathing of sentences in books with the great
continuity of life that rises up? No doubt the novelist who strove to
be an aristocrat would claim that men are no more brothers than the
leaves in the woods are alike. “They torment themselves together,
that is all.”1 But the words “that is all,” which suffice to arouse in him
a love for a little dust that rose up under a door, indicates the path that
goes from the swirling of the leaves to the torment of the souls, and
from the storms in our skulls to the insurrection in the streets. For the
visitor to the Phillips Collection, the raised fists in Daumier’s The
Uprising naturally occupy their space between those little children
of Soutine that run on the path after the storm, the waves that have
risen up in The Mediterranean by Courbet or The Wake of the Ferry II
by John Sloan, the elation of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party,
or the abstract volutes in the Equivalents by Stieglitz.
This path seems to come, quite naturally, to the reader’s mind when
he or she follows the way in which Georges Didi-Huberman returns
to the sequences in Battleship Potemkin, to which Eisenstein himself
1.
Gustave Flaubert, letter
to Louise Colet, May 26, 1853,
in Correspondance 2
(Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 335.
62
returned so often that we no longer really know if it is the images
on the screen that we see or those that are born from his words.2
The erudite and scrupulous analysis by Didi-Huberman focuses the
reader’s attention on every articulation of the montage and editing,
and on the jump that occurs at every moment. Yet, the reader feels
carried off on the compelling movement of a continuous flow. On the
Odessa bridge, there is the morning mist that already contains the
bright daylight in its sails; there are reflections dancing on the waters
that prefigure the storms of emotion: the tears of a lamentation called
upon to become a plaint against the murderers; the emotion of the
crying that becomes a movement of fists, clenched tightly against the
waist before rising up and calling for the uprising of the bodies; the
pain of the individuals that is transformed into the action of the crowd.
Thus, the stases of emotion are transformed into the ecstasy of revolt,
thereby refuting the doxa that always pits the passivity of the first
against the active energy of the second. In the same way, the montage
that links everyone’s emotions in a sequence, and that turns this
sequencing into the potency of a collective, rejects the facile
oppositions between identifying passivity and reflective distance,
or the platitude of the obvious sense and the poignant singularity
of the obtuse sense. From the movements of clouds or waves flowing
with the mobilized crowd, through the tears that fall from the faces, it
is the same uprising that seems to transform the pathos into praxis and
to bring revolutionary dialectical action into the continuity of ancient
forms of pathos. And this uprising seems to continue in the phrases
of the commentator where, in order to speak of the uprising of images,
the words constantly lean, as though pushed by the movement they
intend to extend and transmit.
Yet, the old problem of the active and the passive is not so easily
solved. One must first of all know just who must be made to rise up
and for what action. This is the question asked by Eisenstein, who was
not concerned with becoming the passer of emotions from the depths
of the ages, but was concerned instead with representing himself as the
inventor of attractions destined to produce the emotions of a specific
crowd, a cinema audience. He was able to imagine—above all
during the years in which the writing was a compensation for the
impossibility to film—a thousand models for his work, from the
calculation of the Golden Section to primitive rites of passage, the
architectures of Piranesi to Japanese theater or to the Chinese musical
landscape. But during the period when he filmed Battleship Potemkin,
he emphasized that the important emotions for him were not those
that belonged to the screen but those to be felt by the spectator who
2.
Georges Didi-Huberman,
Peuples en larmes, peuples en
armes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,
2016).
63
must be “created in the desired direction through a series of calculated
pressures on [their] psyche.”3 The tears as well as the raised fists,
rifles that descend in a line, a mother coming back up carrying her
dead child, hanging eyeglass frames, or a pram hurtling down the stairs
are all stimuli intended to work on the brain of the spectators, who are
all too ready to believe the war ended with the defeat of the White
armies. Battleship Potemkin is a film from that time of the NEP when
the watchword was to fight the bourgeois with their own weapons.
Eisenstein calls, therefore, upon the activity of the communist
producers by using “all the procedures of passive art: doubt, crying,
sentimentality, psychology, maternal sentiment, etc.”4 You never know,
of course, to what extent the filmmaker’s provocative declarations are
to be taken seriously. But one pattern remains constant throughout:
it has to do with producing an effect (activity) by means of its opposite
(passivity), and this assumes that the opposites, even if they must
overturn each other, are indeed opposites. This is why the intended
effect of the montage of images can be said just as easily in terms
of a consciously manipulated contagion of “bourgeois” emotions or
of formal use of the Marxist logic of opposites. In both cases, the
straight line from the tears to the weapons is broken. The structure
of the “third act” illustrates this perfectly, but so does the overturning
that it undergoes in the following act. The movement of the crowd
that culminates in the red flag being raised to the top of the ship at the
end of this act must be the opposite of the morning lamentation of
the old women and not merely its transformation. But in the following
act the contradiction works in the opposite way. The mobilized people
is not a people up in arms. It has become, on the contrary, a crowd
of spectators in their Sunday best, greeting the battleship from the
staircase steps. And the dialectical inversion of rest into action is the
work of the guards, who make them rush down the steps, to throw
them into the arms of the Cossacks.
An action, then, is always needed; a master of operations to
transform the pathos into action. But the problem is not only that
this master describes not the effect of this manoeuver, but merely the
image made of it. It happens that there are several different ways to
make the passive and the active indistinct. The uprising is, perhaps,
less a becoming-active of pathos than a way to unite movement and
rest. The diversity of commentaries that Eisenstein gives of the passage
from the mists to the revolt, and from the “melancholic surface” of the
sea to the “uprising embracing the whole city,”5 evokes a more ancient
history of the relation between the movement of the waves, the energy
of the bodies and the freedom of the people. Winckelmann had already
64
3. and therefore at the heart of the uprisings of the people, or rather of
S. M. Eisenstein, Au-del. des
étoiles, trans. Jacques Aumont
(Paris: UGE-10/18, 1974), 127.
4.
Ibid., 35.
5.
S. M. Eisenstein, La Non-
indifférente Nature, vol. 2, trans.
Luda and Jean Schnitzer (Paris:
UGE-10/18, 1975), 69.
65
formulated the paradox of inactive activity or of active inactivity
when he described the muscles of Hercules of Belvedere, headless and
without arms or legs, melting with each other like waves rising up
and falling. The perfection of this immobile movement is, he said, the
fruit of another perfection; it expressed the freedom of a people. The
freedom of a people is its capacity to depend upon itself alone, which
does not mean merely to be independent of any exterior domination
but rather to be the always renewed source of its own movement.
It is in this way that the wave can be a symbol of freedom: not by
its ecstatic impetuosity, but by falling and rising endlessly, by the
repetition that removes its movement from the opposition between
the active and the passive, because it takes it away from what normally
commands the activity of the active and bases its privilege on the
passive, in other words the pursuit of an end. It is not unimportant
that this freedom of the wave, which would seem more suitable to
Apollonian nobility, should appear on the back of the hero of the
Twelve Tasks. The Hercules that symbolizes Greek freedom is not only
a fighter at rest, a worker who completed the cycle of his tasks. He is
also a hero who stopped wanting. He went over to the side of the gods;
more precisely to those antique gods that the modern age invented:
gods that want nothing and that, for this reason, are ready to embody
the freedom of a people that wants nothing—for every want reveals
a lack—but merely deploys the potency which makes it be: a playful
people, as Friedrich Schiller would say, redirecting the ancient
opposition between paidia and spoudè to make the game the sensible
state in which the opposition between the form that commands and
the matter that undergoes is voided. The characteristic of the game,
like that of the wave in movement, like that of freedom, is that it has
no end beyond itself. That freedom, which neither imposes nor submits
itself, has disappeared from peoples’ lives. But its idea is preserved
in the indifference of these stone faces that emotion can stir up and
which force no one to look upon them with any determined emotion.
And this freedom of the gaze that neither exerts nor suffers any
mastering is perhaps, says Schiller, the principle of a new art of living
and of a new sensible community.
In this way the uprising is divided into two: the wave of freedom
that rises up is opposed to the ends of the enterprising will. This
paradox is not only the preoccupation of an artist or a philosopher
who dreams of new communities by contemplating ancient marble
statues. We find it everywhere the acting of freedom is at stake,
the uprisings that make a people be. It is not enough to be numerous
and active. Some inactivity, some finality without end must also come
into play. The stones of the Parisian barricades would seem to have
nothing to do with the torso in the Roman museum. And yet, they too
assume a certain standstill. At the end of June 1848, the Illustrated
London News offered its readers an image of the insurrection that had
just pitted the workers against the Republican power. The engraving
shows the great barricade obstructing the entrance to the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine. But it looks more like a scene from an opera. At the
summit of the barricade, the workers seem to pose in front of an artist,
just as many of the combatants were to later pose for the
photographers of the Commune. On each side of the barricade, two
groups of three combatants are arranged symmetrically. Behind one of
these groups, a kind of organized cave between the stones reveals
another trio that look like conspirators in an operetta. And, at the top
of the barricade, at the feet of the man with his arms outstretched and
holding a red flag, we read on a placard the word Complet—“full.”
Did the artist really see this placard? In any case, the message that it
transmits to readers is clear: these terrible insurgents, whose imaginary
atrocities are recounted by the newspaper, are false men of action,
actors in the theater. This is both correct and incorrect at the same
time. The link between the workers’ uprising and the theater is not a
matter of spectacle, but rather it touches upon the division of times
and spaces. The fact is that these men have nothing to do at this time
in this place. Plato said it clearly: their place is in the workshop where
the work does not wait; and even if work in those troubled times was
instead waited for, this was undoubtedly not the place to find it.
In 1848, like in Plato’s city, the Republican order wanted everyone to be
in the place that their work demanded and to which their capacities
sent them: the workers in the workshop, the legislators at the Assembly,
and the guards where the defense of the community called them.
Unfortunately, there is a place—a place that is material and symbolic—
where roles and identities are mixed, for the work consists in making
oneself into something other. This place is called theater. It is its
example that pushes workers to build this scene in which they play the
role of the people in arms fighting for their freedom. Before becoming
a military tactic, the barricade was a disorder of places and of their use.
More visionary than the artist in the English newspaper, Victor Hugo
later described the barricade as a monstrous hurly-burly upon which
were piled “roofing-ridges, fragments from garrets with their coloured
wall-paper, window frames with panes intact set upright … amid the
rubble, uprooted fireplaces, wardrobes, tables, benches piled in
clamouring disorder, a thousand beggarly objects disdained even
66
by beggars, the expression of fury and nothingness.”6 More than just
Hugo’s ritual fraternity between Olympus and the cloaca, the disorder
of the barricades is made of an upheaval in the distribution of places
and occupations. It is built with stones that normally pave the streets
and that turn them into a space of circulation, with carts used to
transport goods, with furniture and mattresses used for family life.
The workers’ uprising is neither the wave of emotion that swells up,
nor the earth that moves and projects into the daylight the chaos of its
underworld. If it refutes the share of the active and the passive, as did
the workers’ recently invented action, the strike, it is because it undoes
the normal order that assigns activities to specific places and times.
It is because with this very disorder it constructs the time and the
places for the appearance of a people that is different from that which
was incorporated in the existing order of occupations.
However resolved this might be, the people’s rising up in arms is
also, in its way, a suspense. The revolutionary strategist does not make
a mistake here. The action of the people of the barricades is, for him,
an inactive activity, disconnected from the calculation of ends.
What then, he asks, is a movement that begins by barring the ways for
movement of traffic? Is it not a wave rising up simply to fall until the
troops—who do not at hesitate to move—end it? Seventeen years later,
while assessing the June insurrection, Blanqui denounced the anarchy
of these uprisings in which a few dozen men, united by chance
on a street corner, overturned wagons and piled up the pavestones
whichever way they wanted in order to build these barricades that
“waste time, obstruct the roads and impede the traffic necessary for
all parties.” He commanded that the lesson of the defeat be learned.
It was no longer time for the pandemonium of chance combatants
or of motley constructions. In order to defeat the enemy, it was enough
to no longer “shut oneself away in one’s own part of town,” but to create
an organized, trained and disciplined army like any army and to “act
with the whole apparatus of a governmental force.”7 This reasoning has
no reply: only an organized army can beat an organized army.
Regrettably, the people that have risen up are not an organized army.
And it is not merely question of means. It is the vey relation between
means and ends that is in question. If the popular uprising prevents
traffic on the streets, it is not merely the result of a lack of knowledge
of military art; rather, it is because it is that stopping of the traffic,
that re-appropriation of places that constitutes an act of uprising
and creates a people. The most difficult thing is not to go from tears
to arms, but rather to go from arms to an army. There is no straight
6.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, part
line from the people risen up in arms to the victorious army.
five, book one, trans. Norman
Denny (London: Penguin
Classics, 1976), 989.
7.
Louis Auguste Blanqui,
“Instruction pour une prise
d’armes” (Paris: Sens & Tonka,
[1868–69] 2000), passim.
67
Five years later, the Communards were to verify this while Blanqui
meditated in prison on the eternal return: the recovery of the
cannons from the Montmartre hill is not the “taking up of arms” by
a revolutionary strategist. If in 1925, it was necessary to make a film
about the victory/defeat of 1905, it was also because the taking of
the Winter Palace by a detachment of revolutionary soldiers was not
yet the victory of the people, and that the latter was yet to come,
even if it was for artists to inscribe it into the order of the sensible.
Behind the idea of the line, albeit a broken line, drawn from
pathos to praxis, there is the gap between two forms of revolution
of the sensible world: that which suspends the order of places and
of identities, and that which makes forces converge towards a central
point or a paroxysmal moment. Reconciling Schiller (the aesthetic
revolution that delivers human action from the subordination of
means to ends) and Blanqui (the strategy that meticulously prepares
the means of the end and chooses the right moment to put them to
fig. 1
work) remains the impossible program of the Marxist revolution.
The great barricade at the entrance of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Illustrated London
It is true that what is impossible in politics is frequently what is News, July 1, 1848.
possible in art. And conciliations exist apparently for those who added
to the study of German philosophy the study of the philosophy of the
streets of Paris, and who discovered that the theoretician for taking up
arms was also the dreamer of eternal return. “Dialectics at a standstill”
and “dialectical image” are the notions through which Walter Benjamin
attempted to think about the explosive potency of the standstill,
a potency that Georges Didi-Huberman attempts, in turn, to combine
with the survival of Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln. But the artist who
organizes the images of popular uprising in order to make public
emotions rise up knows that, on cinema screens as on museum walls,
there are no emotions. There are only images. And images do not rise
up. Eisenstein had imagined the premiere of Battleship Potemkin,
during which, at the end of the film, the prow of the battleship would
have torn the screen. At that time, they did not have the technological
means that we have today. But the harm, if there is any harm, is deeper
still. Mobile images only ever exist for a spectator in front of whom,
on the screen, they hunt or chase after one another just as much as
they follow each other in a chain. No engineer knows just how the
spectator synthesizes them, nor what this produces. This can be seen
from the comparisons and the metaphors of Eisenstein: he sometimes
makes a comparison between the counterpoint of shock images that
must work on the brains and a primitive carpet made of tangled wool.
Yet we know how much our exhibitions, today, include such “tapestries”
in which the images of violence and revolt that shake our world are

68 69
brought together in a harmonious calm. And, on the contrary,
the “Chinese musical landscape” of mists, of rowboats floating on a
calm sea, and seagulls flying around the buoys that open Potemkin’s
“third act” can have an effect, not by anticipating the unleashing
of the passions of pain and revolt, but on the contrary, by distancing
reality, in the same way as the ancient chorus as Schiller saw it:
not the people intervening on the stage but the ideal barrier
separating the audience from the play. The crying and the raised fists
have an effect, then, insofar as the spectator who is separated from
them by the chorus of mists is not forced to respond to their
solicitation and that the suspense forges a gaze that is generally free
to respond or not to the solicitations that educate the ordinary
way of seeing and of inhabiting the world. To raise up and to rise up,
to move physically and to move emotionally, and to mobilize,
all of these things can be said in different ways, the alignment of which
is always problematic. It may be useful, therefore, to rethink their
interlacing and to suggest hitherto unseen figures for applying
attention anew, for displacing the gaze, the thoughts, and the gestures
that they induce, and to remember that the order of things is no more
necessary today than it was yesterday.
70
Nicole Brenez
COUNTERATTACKS
Images of uprising in the history of class struggle
The main challenge in political cinema is historical effectiveness:
there are three facets to this, and each individual film overlays them
according to the requirements of the specific combat. The short-term
concern is to strike in the present of the assault. René Vautier used
the term “cinema of social intervention” to describe this performative
immediacy, which aims at the success of the struggle in question
and the concrete transformation of a situation of outright conflict
or structural injustice.
In the medium term, the task is to disseminate counter-information
and trigger reactive energies: such is the case of Masao Adachi’s Red
Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War (1971), for example, which
describes the everyday life of armed resistance fighters in occupied
Palestine and calls for the creation of an anti-imperialist Red Army.
The long-term point of filming is to record historical facts, to
document, to bequeath an archive, and to transmit the memory of
the struggles to future generations. This is the underlying stratagem
of Douglas Bravo, Georges Mathieu Mattéi and Jean-Michel Humeau’s
1970 account of the guerrilla war in Venezuela: the film sets out not
only to support the struggle for liberation being waged by the Fuerzas
Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), but also to preserve as
faithfully as possible the words and the aura of Douglas Bravo, then
living under as great a threat in the jungles of Venezuela as that
which Ernesto Che Guevara faced in those of Bolivia. This same urge to
perpetuate permeates Tobias Engel’s No Pincha!, a long black-and-white
documentary shot among the National Liberation Front units in 1972,
in what was then still called Portuguese Guinea. The film follows the
fighters’ daily lives, but, heeding the tragic example of Patrice
Lumumba’s assassination, also sets out to preserve the image of
their leader, Amílcar Cabral. In a more intimate, but equally effective
vein, Yolande du Luart’s Angela Davis: Portrait of a Revolutionary (1971),
was not originally intended to support Davis during her
71
imprisonment—she was arrested between the shooting of the film
and its editing—but was meant to portray the ideas and everyday
existence of a young, militant philosophy teacher, unknown to the
world at large but already drawing fire from her academic superiors.
Activist cinema recognizes the rights of representation as much
as the duties, for it is well aware of the potential ethical and political
price—as distinct from the financial cost—of an image: a price that
can be somebody’s life, as in the case of Raymundo Gleyzer, the
documentary filmmaker and member of the Workers’ Revolutionary
Party murdered by the Argentinian junta in 1976. Speaking in 1974 of
his film Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973), Gleyzer said, “The artist is an
intellectual worker, who, as part of the people, must choose. Either
use his skill in service of the people, urging on their struggles and
the development of a revolutionary process, or openly side with the
dominating classes, serving as a transmitter and reproducer of
bourgeois ideology. … We must therefore serve as the stone which
fig. 1
breaks the silence, or the bullet which starts the battle.”1 Since the
Aaron Nikolaus Sievers, Flacky et camarades. Le cheval de fer (Flacky and friends.
beginnings of cinema, and in every country, filmmakers working alone The iron horse), 1978–2008. Still frame.
or collectively have devoted their energies to revolutionary initiatives
and sided with revolts by peasants, workers, the colonized, and
oppressed minorities and individuals. In the tradition of Joris Ivens,
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard,
Ousmane Sembène, Masao Adachi, Safi Faye, Jang Sun-woo, Ken Jacobs,
and a host of collectives around the world, I want to summon up
an anthology of films often less famous, when not completely
unknown, but just as critically potent. Following the activist model
of Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) and Holger Meins’s Molotov Cocktail (196 ),
there follows an itinerary in the form of a practical user’s guide—bare
of hope, but not of joy—paying tribute to two monuments of
effectiveness: Victor Serge’s What Every Revolutionary Should Know
about Repression (1921–26) and Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of
the Urban Guerrilla (1969).

1895–1996.
To invent the resources for visual diagnosis.
Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory): fig. 2
Auguste and Louis Lumière, Peter Tscherkassky, Harun Farocki, Ivora Cusack, Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up in Subcontracting),
Siegfried Fruhauf (France/Germany/Austria). 2008. Still frame.

A seminal image haunts the cinema. Starting with the three versions
of the Lumière brothers’ century-old film, Harun Farocki’s Arbeiter
verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995) accumulates

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

72 73
sequences showing the permanence and the evolution of the working-
class theme. Emerging from the factory, workers not only hurry
off: they also fight, argue, obstruct each other, and sometimes die.
Analyzing the sequence and the details of the Lumière shots, Farocki
detects in them the programmed oppressions and movements
of resistance that were to structure the twentieth century. The terrain
the Lumières had so blithely put their stamp on—and which had been
crisscrossed since 1909 by philanthropist Albert Kahn’s cameramen,
as they transformed the little artisanal factory’s joyful, largely female
group into a substantial, industrial crowd—is dotted with the history
of workers’ crusades, becoming in the process the bloodily symbolic
locus not only for the class struggle and social control, but also for
sexual conflicts. Farocki’s compilation transforms cinema into visual
diagnosis. Siegfried Fruhauf’s 1998 Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik does not
borrow a single take from the Lumière film, but reuses its title to show
that the workers will in fact never manage to leave the factory: instead
of exiting out of shot, as in the Lumière versions of 1895, their paths
from background to foreground, and then from right to left, form
a shifting cross, in a referencing of their own deaths. The harmonious
Lumière orchestration of a dynamic if humdrum existence is
succeeded here by a funereal elegy. Fruhauf’s film forms a diptych with
Peter Tscherkassky’s Motion Picture : La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine
Lumière à Lyon (1984). Projecting a single frame from the Lumière film
onto fifty unexposed strips of film laid side by side, Tscherkassky
reduces the cinematic system to its photographic determinants,
turning the initial image into an abstract, black-and-white scrolling
that shows the concrete focal point of working with film: the
intermittence between mobility and immobility.
Missing from Farocki’s compendium is one of the emblematic
images of the working-class condition and the radical reverse shot
of the Lumière employees leaving: the woman screaming that she
doesn’t want to go back to the factory after the failure of the general
strike of 1968 and the betrayal of the working class by the CGT
trade union, filmed by Jacques Willemont and Pierre Bonneau in
La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (Resumption of work at the
Wonder factory). In 1996, Hervé Le Roux took this short film as a
starting point, hunting down each character and each detail as he
shaped an overview of working-class ideals and disillusionment:
Reprise. Un voyage au cœur de la classe ouvrière (Resumption: Journey
to the heart of the working class) recounts three decades of struggle
and the first waves of the deindustrialization that would trigger
the gradual disappearance of the First World’s industrial proletariat.
74
2.
Laurent Mannoni, “28 October
1913: création de la société
Le Cinéma du Peuple,” L’année
1913 en France, special issue
of 1895, Revue d’histoire du
cinéma (October 1993): 100–107.
3. which, until its dissolution by the imperial authorities in 1934, made
Quoted by Mamoru Makino
in “Rethinking the Emergence
of the Proletarian Film League
in Japan (Prokino),” trans. Abé
Mark Nornes, in In Praise of Film
Studies: Essays in Honour
of Makino Mamoru, eds. Abé
Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow
(Victoria, British Columbia:
Trafford/Kinema Club, 2001),
37–38.
75
1913.
To seize the means of production.
Le Vieux docker (The old docker), Le Cinéma du Peuple (France)
October 1913 saw the creation of an anonymous film collective,
Le Cinéma du Peuple (The people’s cinema), and its call in the pages of
the weekly Le Libertaire for “a cinema belonging to the working class …
Our aim is to make our own films, seeking in history, everyday life and
the dramas of the workplace, scenarios that will make up for the
sickening fare served up nightly to the working audience.”2 Among the
collective’s seven films are the rushes for the fiction Le Vieux docker,
an account of the death from exhaustion of a worker forced to cling to
an inhuman occupation because the labor legislation of the time
included no provision for retirement for the proletariat. Made all the
more eloquent by their status as filmic residues—as escapees from
destruction—these modest images evoke entire generations of laborers
dying on their feet, literally worked to death by their employers, and in
this respect even worse off than the slaves of old, whose masters at
least ensured they were fed.
1928.
To expand polyphonia.
Genjū Sasa (Japan)
Japanese filmmaker Genjū Sasa was responsible for one of the first
proletarian manifestoes recommending the use of simple
equipment to cooperatives aiming at counter-information. In his article
“Camera—Toy/Weapon,” published in the magazine Senki in June 1928,
he laid down the practical approaches that still characterize cinema
seeking to break free of the mass-market rationale: “It is the worker
farmer style entry into daily lives of photography through amateur
cameras … More than anything, our films at our present stage should
be ones that awaken class consciousness, expose the elements of
present-day society, and thoroughly gouge out all the various social
contradictions. The unorganized masses will become conscious
participants; the organized masses will understand that will to
struggle … Then all materials must be arranged and transferred
according to the desires of the working class. Consequently, the ‘editing’
of documentary film (jissha eiga) means the gravest settlement of that
mission’s accomplishment.”3 Genjū Sasa later helped found Prokino,
forty-eight fiction, documentary, and animated movies, of which to
date only six have been found. In the wake of Le Cinéma du Peuple
and Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, Prokino paved the way for numerous
revolutionary collectives, often Communist and backed by the
Comintern in the 1930s—think the Workers Film and Photo League in
the United States—and Marxist-Leninist or anarchist in the decades
that followed.
1950.
To make an appointment with history.
Afrique 50 by René Vautier (France)
In 1947, the “Zhdanov Doctrine” proclaimed that the Soviet Communist
Party must support the struggles of the colonized countries of
Asia and Africa against the “capitalist bloc.” Viscerally committed to
all battles against oppression, exploitation, and racism, the young
communist René Vautier set off to French West Africa under the
auspices of the Ligue de l’enseignement (Education League), whose
members already included many future leaders of Africa’s liberation
struggles. Among them was Ouezzin Coulibaly, head of the League’s
branch in Treichville, Ivory Coast, where Vautier stayed. In October
1946, Coulibaly co-founded the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain
(African Democratic Assembly), a seminal emancipation movement
whose action is signalled by the demonstrations in the closing
sequences of Afrique 50. The RDA’s first major political events were
organized in 1949, only to be systematically met by increased
repression: a tax strike, for example, was violently put down by the
army. In Vautier’s account, “Coming down from Bamako to Abidjan,
Raymond Vogel and I followed in the footsteps of one of these punitive
military columns”:4 the film records the bloody evidence, making
a comparison with the crimes committed by the Nazis in French
villages; and while the soundtrack recites the profits accruing to French
and other Western companies, the accompanying images tell of
European exactions: the structural, organized plundering of resources
and the crushing of any resistance by the army. In less than twenty
minutes, Afrique 50 leads us from timeless Africa—its plains and rivers,
its crafts and farms, its family life and its children playing—to an
examination of the damage wrought by colonialism; and concludes
with the contemporary emergence of African emancipation
movements—whose initial political successes would have to wait
until 1956.
Afrique 50 thus marries the various aspects of visual polemic:
it recounts a situation of economic and political repression; it dismantles
the ideology of progress, and exposes its racist presuppositions; and
4. en mouvements. Étienne Marey
René Vautier, Caméra citoyenne
(Rennes: Apogée, 1998), 36.
76
it calls for a struggle. And like Vautier’s Une nation, l’Algérie (One nation,
Algeria) of 1955, with its prediction of the ineluctability of
independence, Afrique 50, with the collective optimism of its closing
thrust, stands equally as the making of an appointment with history.
The extraordinary prescience that characterizes Vautier’s oeuvre
simultaneously has its roots, like all his films and everything else he
did, in geopolitical analysis, his experience in the Resistance, and his
unassailable confidence in the power of popular revolution.
1965.
To give up on the audiovisual.
Three films by Ulrike Meinhof (West Germany)
Committed journalist, political analyst, and editor in chief of the
magazine Konkret, Ulrike Meinhof devoted her attentions to the dark
side of Germany’s “economic miracle.” In 1965, she wrote three
documentaries for German television; broadcast as part of a series
titled Panorama, they sank into oblivion but were exhumed in 2010
as experimental filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot worked on A German
Youth (2015), his documentary on the Red Army Faction. Arbeitsplatz
und Stoppuhr (Factory and stopwatch) studies the introduction of a US
method of labor monitoring, MTM (methods-time measurement), into
German factories. On August 9, 1965, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR)
viewers in Germany heard the following: “It has been observed that
each manual act can be broken down into several basic movements:
reaching out, bringing, seeking, inserting, letting go. Thousands of film
takes enabled us to establish constant time values for each movement;
these were then tabulated, making it possible to time each hand action
to within a thousandth of a second. Economically speaking, the gains
offered by this process are unquestionable; but we must ask ourselves,
are they humanly acceptable?”5
Meinhof’s analysis implicitly leads back to the scientific-military
origins of cinema’s invention, to the research of Eadweard Muybridge,
Étienne-Jules Marey, and Georges Demenÿ into what is termed
“anthropotechnics,” the measurement of human and animal
movements to optimize their use by army and industry.6 The
filmmaker’s concrete example—“For four years Waltraud Voss’s job has
entailed making the same five hand movements for eight hours”—
describes the fate of millions of anonymous twentieth-century workers.
But in contrast with those “workers leaving the factory,” the harshness
of the average day, timelessly allegorized by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern
Times (1937), was virtually never documented: filming inside factories
5.
Ulrike Meinhof, Arbeitsplatz
und Stoppuhr, 1965.
6.
See Christian Pociello, La Science
et Georges Demenÿ (1870-1920)
(Paris: PUF, 1999).
77
was forbidden, except for promotional movies commissioned by
the owners. Thus for the realities of industrial labor we have to go
mainly to covertly shot material, such as Bruno Muel’s masterpiece,
Avec le sang des autres (With the blood of others, 1974), or images
from factories on strike, as in the Medvedkine Group’s Sochaux,
11 juin 68 (Sochaux June 11 ’68) of 1970.
Meinhof’s second TV film, Arbeitsunfälle (Industrial accidents),
looks at workplace safety shortfalls, and the third, Gastarbeiter (Guest
worker), offers a step-by-step description of the situation of immigrant
workers in the German Federal Republic: the difficulty of finding
housing, unsanitary conditions in hostels, and the obstacles to family
reunification. The three films document and denounce the living
conditions of the working class in a booming West Germany still
partially under the thumb, politically and economically, of former Nazi
leaders and collaborators. When her public call for a democratically
driven improvement of workers’ and migrants’ lives went unheeded,
Ulrike Meinhof turned to the possibilities offered by revolutionary
individualism.
1967–2003.
To bring the stories back to the surface.
(Brittany, Franche-Comté, Nord-Pas-de-Calais)
In France, the high point of proletarian cinema—cinema created by
workers themselves—came with Chris Marker and Mario Marret’s
encounter with René and Micheline Berchoud of the Centre Culturel
Populaire de Palente-les-Orchamps, near Besançon; with Pol Cèbe,
librarian at the Rhodiaceta factory in Besançon; and with workers
from the factory. The upshot was the creation of the Medvedkine
groups in Besançon, then in Sochaux, with backing from, among others,
René Vautier, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruno Muel, and Antoine Bonfanti. Less
well known are three other significant cinema experiments in working-
class settings: in Brittany, Quand tu disais Valéry (When you said Valéry,
1975), jointly directed by René Vautier, Nicole Le Garrec, and the
workers of the Caravelair caravan factor in Trignac, near Saint-Nazaire,
which methodically outlined strike tactics for other factories. In
Montbéliard, the experiment carried out by Armand Gatti, Hélène
Chatelain and Stéphane Gatti between 1975 and 1977, Le Lion, sa cage
et ses ailes (The lion, its cage, and its wings), a series of self-portraits
from among the immigrant workers at the Peugeot plant. And in the
Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the films made by miners during training
courses organized by Pierre Gurgand in the late 1970s, as the pits were
78
beginning to close. In 2003, this long-forgotten footage was taken in
hand and edited by Aaron Nikolaus Sievers: “The first thing to do was
to home in on what the miners had to say, to home in on their
memories and bring them back to the surface. The film takes the time
to sit down and chat with them in the local bar. To have a drink, listen
to a poem, listen to their stories about work, and anger, and struggle—
and love as well. And what endures amid the hoarse voices of the
silicosis sufferers is the memory of Flaczynski, Flament, Jules, and
Marguerite Grare, the Debarges, Paul Beaulieu’s laugh, the wives of
the Polish miners, Moreels who was in the resistance, and the other
trade unionists whose names we don’t know.”7
1969.
To come up with preventive images.
Nicht Löschbares Feuer (The Inextinguishable Fire) by Harun Farocki
(Germany)
The core of Harun Farocki’s project was the confrontation of dominant
representations with critical analysis. Eschewing words wherever
possible, his works observe the ways bodies are attacked, trained,
tamed, and voided by techniques of of control: a mutilation formally
characterized by simply putting sequences end to end, in series.
Die Schulung (Indoctrination, 1987) shows a seminar where company
executives are learning persuasion techniques; Leben – BRD (How to
Live in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1990) observes the ways
behaviour is standardized in different occupations (police training,
midwifery, insurance); and in their descriptions of mutilated
administrative existences Die Bewerbung (The Interview, 1997) and
Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (The Creators of the Shopping Worlds,
2001) are the ethnological films the West, whether capitalist or
communist, deserves. But embedded between the psychic lines
in each frame is Farocki’s gesture, in Nicht Löschbares Feuer
(The Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), of stubbing out a cigarette on his arm
in an asymptotic representation of the sufferings of the Vietnamese
people bombarded with napalm. This act provides the preventive
image, one of a sovereign simplicity capable of shattering in advance
all the directives of domination; as does, for example, the moment
of hesitation by the rifleman in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin (1925), when his refusal to fire on his comrades triggers
all-out mutiny.
7.
Aaron Sievers, Flacky et
camarades (Le cheval de fer).
Le cinéma tiré du noir de Aaron
Sievers (Marseille: Commune,
2011).
79
1970.
To ensure free circulation of images.
Repression, LA Newsreel (United States)
“We have to unite as one people led by the working class: black, brown,
yellow, red, and white, man and woman.” Thus concludes Repression
(1970), a Marxist-Leninist broadside made by the Angeleno branch
of the Newsreel collective, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. This
internationalist stance was supported by a use of images extending
to scenes lifted from other films, notably Jean-Pierre Sergent and Bruno
Muel’s Rio Chiquito, shot in the Colombian jungle in 1965, when “the
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) was a poor, peasant-
led guerrilla movement, but one capable of standing up to air and
ground attack by the Colombian army.”8 The free circulation of images
between activist collectives—embodied in the practice of René Vautier,
who lost quite a few films that way—foreshadowed a time when
tangible and intangible goods, especially of the cultural variety, would
be available to all and no longer just the property of a few.
1974–1980.
To turn a film into a collective platform.
Pere Portabella (Spain), Rui Simões (Portugal)
After a dictatorship that lasted thirty-six years, Franco died in 1975.
In 1977, Pere Portabella finished a wide-ranging documentary that
exemplifies the principle of political responsibility in the cinema.
Informe general sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección
pública (General report on some questions of interest for a public
screening) literally implements the practice it advocates: drawing
up a concrete discussion platform for facilitating the transition from
fascism to democracy. Initially solipsistic, tormented, and taciturn,
Portabella’s films suddenly became swarming, noisy, and crowded, bent
on clarity and explanation—although still as free-wheelingly
polymorphous as ever. Informe general is utterly unique in its portrait
of a people in the throes of self-organization in a context of conflict,
uncertainty, fragility, and the need for democratic process.
On April 25, 1974, after forty-eight years of dictatorship and thanks
to a handful of courageous army officers inspired by the struggles
for freedom in Africa, Portugal saw the blooming of its Carnation
Revolution. How can a long-suffering people become a historical agent?
And how can it allow the confiscation of its revolution by political
parties? Or how, on the contrary, does it make that revolution work?
Combining the visual and the musical, Rui Simões’s masterpiece, Bom
8. trans. David Davidson, Toronto
Bruno Muel, in “Bruno Muel ou
l’humanisme critique,” program
at the Cinémathèque Française,
Paris, October 2007.
80
Povo Português (The Good People of Portugal, 1980)­, addresses these
fundamental issues in an intermingling of portraits—of crowds,
groups, and individuals—with scenes of political debate and
descriptions of the condition of workers and peasants. As in Raymundo
Gleyzer’s La Tierra quema (The land burns, 1964), a terrifying, age-old
abyss of poverty is revealed through the handful of individuals who
have their say. Most of them are women, but it is a child who has the
last word. In this old Catholic country where, as in Spain, the Church
backed the dictatorship, a teacher is shown questioning a class of small
boys: “Why do you think they died?” (The anonymous “they” referring
to all the unspecified human beings around them). In turn, the
children reel off their replies: “Because God called them home,”
“Because they had sinned,” and so on. The film closes with the answer
of a small, timidly smiling boy: “Because they worked a lot.” People
dead of exhaustion, like the old docker in 1913, and like the billions of
humans and animals swallowed up in the long history of exploitation.
2007.
To bring a collective perspective to the history of struggle.
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind by John Gianvito (United States)
In his prior and sometimes simultaneous incarnations, John Gianvito
has been curator and programmer at the Harvard Film Archive and
at MIT, a professor of film production and direction at the University
of Massachusetts, and a film critic. In other words, when he films he
knows his images’ context, their antecedents, and the artistic and social
sources they can draw on for their impact. Marrying the influences
of Howard Zinn and of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Trop
tôt trop tard (Too Early/Too Late, 1980), Profit Motive and the Whispering
Wind (2007) is a visual hymn to the history of emancipatory struggles
in the United States, from resistance by Native Americans to the
demonstrations against the Iraq War. “To talk about politics, for me,”
he says, “means talking about the politics of images.”9 In the ongoing
battle between free media and the conglomerates, and contrary
to the habitual rhetoric about art’s ineffectiveness, Gianvito
accurately pinpoints cinema’s responsibilities: to foster “productive
contemplation,” to hand on the memory of struggles whatever their
causes, to restore collective perspective in an era of identity
fragmentation, to fortify those taking part in struggles, and to ignite
debate. “If films were unable to bring about any change,” Gianvito
asks, “why have so many of them been banned and censured in so
9.
many countries? Why was there so much effort put into stopping
John Gianvito quoted by the
author in “John Gianvito and
Productive Contemplation,”
Film Review, April 10, 2013,
http://torontofilmreview.
blogspot.fr/2013/04/john-
gianvito-by-nicole-brenez.html.
81
the production of Herbert J. Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954) at each
of its different stages? Why did Raymundo Gleyzer ‘disappear’? Why
is Jafar Panahi under house arrest and under surveillance? Why was the
Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen imprisoned and tortured?”10
2008–2009.
To explore the polymorphic.
Lech Kowalski, Camera War (world)
Lech Kowalski is the embodiment of punk in the cinema: maximum
elation in the discovery of ungovernable weirdnesses that will compel
the great sluggish body of society into movement, hyperlucid
confrontation with social, mental, sexual, and other forms of misery,
rejection of self-preservation, stunning stylistic crudeness, and trash as
the critical resurrection of naturalism. Art not as emotional product but
as productive riot. In 2008, Kowalski set up his Camera War enterprise,
an exemplary application of today’s logistic and artistic guerrilla
possibilities in the visual field: on the site, he posted weekly chapters of
his film fresco, ending up with a total of seventy-nine episodes. Camera
War is at the same time a spontaneous synthesis of the classic forms
of protest cinema and an extension of what they allow in terms of
greater flexibility. Individual portraits (Kellyann, for example, is in the
tradition of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason); giving people their say
(the very structured “prisoner” coming out of prison); all-in descriptions
of natural and urban landscapes (Apartment Building); critical
readymades based on archival material (Holy Year 2000); accounts of
demonstrations whose mass of slogans fill the need for political analysis
(the blistering “Jump, you fuckers!” sign at the bottom of the buildings
on Wall Street): followed by scenes of activity, such as the travels of the
ballot papers, ethnological studies (the roof-dwelling tribe of Before the
Crisis)—and more. In its sampling and transformation of the present
as a historical dotted line, Camera War has room for all kinds of internal
structuring: the division of a situation or an encounter into various
episodes (the trip to Italy; Kellyann); series (Fuck, The Stations of
the Cross); recurrence—the returns to the Domenico, the utopian café
which, you might say, is to space what Camera War is to time: a place
“that changes the collective ambience,” as Lech Kowalski puts it; not to
mention the juxtapositions of the unica episodes—situations, moments,
people, gestures, all of them fleeting and incomparable, adding up to
the “imponderability” of life so dear to Jean Epstein and Henri Langlois.
In general terms, Camera War is an exploration of the stylistic beauties
of rule-breaking as a way of fighting the “Corporate Reality” that
10. Albert Londres, Au bagne (Paris:
Ibid.
82
captions the whole of one of the two episodes made up of TV images:
Barack Obama’s victory ceremony, refilmed from a giant screen and
edited into jump-cut snorts of scepticism. The overall logic is one of
sedimentation, as the Polish miner puts it in On a Clear Day: phenomena
don’t exist in isolation; they’re part of bigger temporal stratigraphies
that move like alluvia, mutually intermingling and fertilizing,
then abruptly sliding away all together, like the episode icons on the
camerawar.tv home page.
Most times, Kowalski is saying, a bit of reality only shows through
when, for example, a hurricane tears the sheet iron roofs from social
invisibility. With its panoramic shots, aerial zooms, and quick-cut
editing, its ways of accosting passing bodies and catching them up
in its energy, its leaps from one continent to another, Camera War is
the swirling gale that peels back belief systems and lays bare a seething
life that is all rough edges, particularities, unexpected shifts—but
does so with no need to destroy. From this point of view, the enterprise
closest to Kowalski’s is less that of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s
Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)—they too question
passersby within a precisely defined temporal framework—than of
Albert Londres who, in an obscure prison colony, was able to note the
wording of all the prisoners’ tattoos and graffiti: words and symbols
wrenched from the utmost depths of a social hell.11 Because the tattoos,
the graffiti and the body that has wound up on the pavement in
President Obama are his starting points, when Kowalski offers us nettle
soup, an Amish in Manhattan, bisons, a comical concert, Cuban cigars,
a Republican, or two Roma eating a hamburger—not to mention
himself explaining his poetics in The Eye—the descriptive method is
in itself a gesture of protest, collecting and combining these harsh
singularities and ranging them against the mechanical crusher of
figurative simplifications and slanders. In this respect, Lech Kowalski
fulfils one of the ideals of popular cinema: a cinema by and for
a people not defined in advance according to some geographical or
national affiliation, but rather getting itself together and shaping
its identity according to signs whose mix of expression and depression
the author gathers in with no presuppositions about consistency.
2008–2012.
To auscultate resignation.
Doméstica (Housemaids) by Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil).
Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up in Subcontracting)
by Ivora Cusack (France)
11.
Albin Michel, 1923).
83
In Doméstica (Housemaids, 2012), Gabriel Mascaro explores an area
of experience utterly unrewarding and devoid of any scope for the
unexpected, adventure, or positive or negative heroism: that of
resignation. Through a system of delegated image-making—teenagers
were asked to film their families’ housemaids—Mascaro sums up the
forms of oppression undergone by seven domestic servants: physical
saturation occasioned by dull, repetitive tasks, affective saturation
occasioned by constantly meeting the needs of others, psychic and
imaginative saturation wrought by radio and television; plus endemic
poverty, exploitation by employers whose niceness only makes matters
worse, exploitation by spouses who have mostly abandoned them,
and exploitation of their image by the teenagers who are filming them.
These housemaids often weep, sometimes break down completely,
sing to forget and to comfort themselves, dance for a brief moment
of pleasure. The seventh episode loops back into the first, generating
a political trajectory extending from telenovelas and their images
of reification to family photographs and their harsh testimony to an
economic fate foretold. Two small girls grow up the closest of friends,
and one ends up as the other’s housemaid; and as the middle-class
employer says in a terrifying moment of symbolic violence, bad
conscience, and hypocrisy, “I had to assert myself as the boss.” In the
course of the film, we see the actual concept of “domestication” taking
shape: self-alienation due to the latent force of family obligations, tacit
consent, psychic self-mutilation. And this among both masters and
slaves. When the mother of a family admits to having taken her
servant to hospital, but also to leaving without waiting for her to give
birth, her tears of contriteness, shame, and self-pity are shot through
with all the everyday violence not only of class conflict, but also
of the way each spinelessly complies with the demands of her social
status. This, not the housemaid’s condition, is true servility:
enslavement to class interests, identification with an economic
situation, compliance with social status rather than loyalty to one’s
own feelings.
We would like to be able to show activist Ivora Cusack’s
documentary Remue-ménage dans la sous-traitance (Big Sweep-Up
in Subcontracting, 2008) to the protagonists of Doméstica. For four years,
two film collectives monitored the struggle of twenty Paris cleaning
women from Senegal, Mauritania, and Martinique. Exploited by a
subcontracting firm and weighed down by all the social handicaps
of tradition and the injustices triggered by globalization, these women
learned to stand up for themselves and fight for their rights—for
their own benefit and for others as well. Supposedly there to ensure
84
cleanliness and order, they have learnt to sow disorder: in their
subservient status as wives and mothers, in the lobbies of the hotels
that employed them and where they returned to enjoy strike picnics,
and in the social and economic system that assigned them the role
of mute, invisible slaves. We would like to see the jubilation of women
who, like Fatoumata Coulibaly, succeeded in overcoming exploitation,
dismissal, personal timidity, ignorance of the labor laws and the
French language, become contagious. We imagine those Brazilian
servants discovering the path followed by their immigrant
counterparts in France. We see them, perhaps in the company of the
marvelous son in Doméstica—the one who brings such political
pertinence to the filming of a housemaid signing an image rights
authorization—turning off the TV and surfing the Internet in search
of the International Labor Organization.
1974–2009.
To create a heritage for the disinherited.
Grève sauvage (Wildcat Strike) by Ratgeb (Belgium),
revisited by Chaab Mahmoud (France)
Since when has the status of filmmaker ceased to embody the social
privilege described in Luc Moullet’s 1967 article, “Le cinéma n’est
qu’un reflet de la lutte des classes” (Cinema is just a reflection of the
class struggle)?12 According to Moullet all directors came from the
middle class. Today directors like Guillaume Massart, of Dragons
n’existent pas (Dragons don’t exist, 2009)—a brilliant film about the last
days of industry in France’s Ardennes region, and the sellout that
sealed its fate—assert their sub-proletarian roots as both an aesthetic
force and a legitimate vantage point for an account of the nightmare
of contemporary pauperization. Thus do efforts to shape a political
and cultural heritage by and for those who deny all value to possession
become hard-hitting affirmations.
A self-described “image worker,” Franco-Syrian-Madagascan Chaab
Mahmoud is seeking here to provide a visual echo of one of the
twentieth century’s most biting pieces of satirical writing: De la grève
sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée (From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-
Management, 1974), by “Ratgeb,” a pseudonym of Raoul Vaneigem.
“Has it ever happened,” Ratgeb asked, “that, outside your place of
work, you have felt the same distaste and weariness as you do inside
the factory? … Haven’t you ever felt the urge to burn some distribution
factory i.e. supermarket, giant store or warehouse) to the ground? …
Is it not your intention, on the first opportunity that arises, to bawl
12.
Luc Moullet, “Brigitte et Brigitte,”
Cahiers du cinéma, no. 187
(February 1967): 44.
85
out your boss or anyone else, who talks down to you? … Aren’t
you dismayed by the systematic destruction of the countryside and
urban green spaces?”13 In continuous black-and-white shots of
deindustrialized wastelands and outlying housing estates where
society’s rejects accumulate, Mahmoud’s Grève sauvage (la genèse)/
Wildcat Strike (Genesis) offers a word for word visual translation of
Vaneigem’s belligerent, cutting questions, which have become
steadily more relevant in the era of financial capitalism. The texts are
in English as well as French, to increase their range as weapons of
reason in our globalizing age.
2006–2010.
To develop forms of conviviality.
Regardez chers parents (Look dear parents) by Mory Coulibaly
(France); Sou Hami. La crainte de la nuit (Sou Hami: The fear of night)
by Anne-Laure de Franssu (France-Mali)
The work of Jean Rouch and Direct Cinema (in Canada in particular)
gave rise to a rich tradition of forms of collaboration and participation
by the subjects. Now, however, we can speak of convivial forms, in Ivan
Illich’s sense:14 there are more and more films putting other people’s
images into circulation, as has already been done by Clarisse Hahn
(Prisons – Notre corps est une arme [Prisons—Our body is a weapon],
2012, for Kurdish activists), Bijan Anquetil (La nuit remue [Night’s
drifters], 2012, for Afghan refugees), and Pilar Arcila (Le Pendule de
Costel [Costel’s pendulum], 2013, for a Roma family). In 2006, in the
midst of evictions in Cachan, France—a thousand people caught up
in the pitiless snare of the French government’s anti-immigration
policy—Mory Coulibaly, an Ivory Coast refugee and the representative
of the expelled families, filmed what happened, helped by Anne-Laure
de Franssu and her association, II mots en images. The result, Regardez
chers parents (Look dear parents), documents and reflects on an
ongoing struggle. The following year, de Franssu and Coulibaly toured
villages in Mali, screening Regardez chers parents for audiences
staggered by its account of police-state violence; often less dismayed
by its own content than by the state of contemporary France,
the film is one of the most powerful critiques so far of European
biopolitics. Sou Hami. La crainte de la nuit (Sou Hami: The fear of night,
2010), the film of the tour and the debate in the wake of the events
at Cachan, is a splendid essay on the role of images in social struggles.
86
13.
Raoul Vaneigem, From Wildcat
Strike to Total Self-Management,
trans. Paul Sharkey, Situationist
International Online, 1974, http://
www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/
postsi/ratgeb01.html.
14. by such other visual poets of the urban as Kenji Mizoguchi, Peter Weiss,
Conviviality: “Autonomous
and creative intercourse among
persons, and the intercourse
of persons with their
environment … [allowing] the
most autonomous action by
means of tools least controlled
by others.” (Ivan Illich, Tools
for Conviviality (New York:
Harper & Row), 11.
15.
René Parize, “Savoir de
soumission ou savoirs de
révolte? L’exemple du Creusot,”
in Les Sauvages dans la cité.
Auto-émancipation du peuple
et instruction des prolétaires
au xixe siècle, ed. Jean Borreil
(Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1985),
91–103.
87
2010.
To draw on savagery.
The Silent Majority Speaks by Bani Khoshnoudi (Iran)
“Each face could be that of a political prisoner or a martyr,” explains
Bani Khoshnoudi in The Silent Majority Speaks, shot in Tehran during
the “green revolution,” and circulated clandestinely as the work of
“The Silent Collective” until 2013. To film a popular uprising against
the dictatorship while taking care not to endanger the participants;
to summarize a century of more or less insurrectional political
upheavals, systematically and bloodily crushed; and to reflect the
pernicious, lethal—or, on the contrary, emancipatory—functions of
images: the way The Silent Majority Speaks carries out all these tasks
is an immediate pointer to what drives this artist, filmmaker, and
producer. Eschewing dogmatism, Khoshnoudi practices what might be
called “issue activism,” which she has successively applied to popular
uprisings in Iran, anti-immigration policy in France, and the Zapotec
culture in Mexico. In Les Sauvages dans la cité (The savages in the city),
a book on self-emancipation—whose title chimes neatly with
La Pensée Sauvage (The savage mind), the Claude Lévi-Strauss-inflected
name of Khoshnoudi’s production company—French historian René
Parize makes a distinction between “the knowledge of submission”
(a single form) and “the knowledges of revolt” (many forms).15 In dealing
not only with political-religious censorship but also strategies of self-
censorship, Khoshnoudi develops both the knowledges and skills of
revolt, taking as her first target the way personal oppression somatizes
and reinforces political repression.
1926–2011.
Not to wait to be in position of strength.
Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time) by Alberto Cavalcanti, Maàlich
by Thomas Jenkoe (France)
In 1926, Alberto Cavalcanti set out to restore the movie camera’s status
as a recorder of contemporary events; the result was Rien que les
heures, the first of the cinema’s urban symphonies. Cavalcanti’s goal
was to shred the clichés and start from scratch in the name of the very
real suffering of society’s rejects. A beggar woman traverses the film,
a small, dark silhouette in a desolate wasteland, a slender compass
needle symbolically signalling the film’s direction. In 2011, Thomas
Jenkoe’s Maàlich took up the torch lit by Cavalcanti, and handed on
Masao Adachi, Lionel Rogosin, and Jérôme Schlomoff. Instead of the
Paris of the 1920s, with its center and its gates—Maàlich comes to earth
in Chinagora, an unlikely hotel complex in the distant suburbs that
denationalizes a site transformed into a hideout for the human flotsam
of economic globalization. Instead of Cavalcanti’s allegorical ragpickers,
people embedded in concrete crannies the way Algerian migrants were
buried in the caves along the banks of the Seine in René Vautier’s
Les Trois Cousins (Three cousins, 1970), are seized in a complexity—
powerfully separate, sometimes even repellent—that the film makes
absolutely no claim to plumb in its entirety. Instead of a sovereign
author picking and choosing among image systems, we find a filmmaker
very likely far more lost than the people he encounters, plunging into
conversations like someone throwing himself off a building towards
a hallucinated pair of saving arms. Instead of extensive exploration
of the descriptive forms appropriate to the cinema during the hours
of daylight, Maàlich forces the unaided viewer down into the optical
resources of night, and only night, the welcoming night that strips
away social constraints and confronts us with the elemental
necessities: sleeping, eating, loving and, in spite of everything, finding
reassurance.
Night as existence reduced to tangible nightmare.
Maàlich: gleams of humanity, flickers of light on the threshold
of meaning.
1999–2015.
To create Ur-information.
Tomorrow Tripoli, Florent Marcie (France-Libya)
The popularization of digital tools for making and diffusing films
means that creators and statement-makers of all kinds now enjoy
total autonomy, in the sense of controlling every link in the chain from
concept to circulation. To the traditional pairing of Disinformation
and Counter-information must now be added Ur-information,
the original information which precedes the official version, which
simplifies, distorts, and betrays it.
The late 1990s saw the simultaneous flowering of Counter-
information collectives such as IndyMedia, and political lone wolves
practicing visual assault as freely as Albert Londres had literary
journalism. Florent Marcie, an exemplary master of the long haul,
made his first trip to Chechnya in 1996; finally edited in 2007, Itchkéri
Kenti (The sons of Ichkeria) was the outcome of ten years of travel and
close observation in the heartland of Chechen resistance—a length of
time reflecting the history of a people struggling against the central
88
government since the late eighteenth century. Images of Russia in
Chechnya, Russian images of Chechens, old ethnographic films: this is
a video record of a present simultaneously experienced and meditated
on, as if Stendhal’s Fabrice del Dongo were watching the Battle of
Waterloo in extreme wide shot and extreme close-up at the same time.
Itchkéri Kenti, a subjective history of a collective situation, takes the
time needed to outline and describe the different kinds of conflict—
palpable, cultural, temporal—that structure a popular struggle. In 2000,
Marcie made Saïa, an experimental documentary shot on a front line
in Afghanistan, and in 2015 he finished the other two segments of his
trilogy on men at war in Chechnya, Libya, and Afghanistan. The second
of them, Commandant Khawani, is a portrait of a young Afghan officer
at Bagram Airfield when Kabul was captured in 2001, while the third,
Tomorrow Tripoli, describes the struggle of the Libyan rebels during
the revolution. A group of ordinary Libyans, organizing gradually,
began by breaking the pro-Gaddafi forces’ siege of their city, Zintan,
in the Nafusa mountains, then made its way down towards the coastal
cities of Zawiya and Tripoli, advancing over mined terrain through a
nonstop hail of rifle and mortar fire. Accompanying the column every
step of the way, Marcie was risking his life with almost each shot
as he composedly documented the guerrilla war in the mountains,
then the street-by-street fighting in the cities. He recounts, too,
startlingly unexpected encounters, including a Zintan fighter who has
read his copy of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three almost to extinction, and
maps Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings about the German Occupation onto
his situation in Libya, as well as an astonishing Darfur mercenary
whose first name is Gaddafi. Even more than the final taking of the
presidential fortress by the Zintan fighters, some of the shots taken
during the column’s advance on Tripoli suffice on their own to justify
the existence of contemporary recording equipment, despite its
habitually reifying effect: in the suburbs, entire families, including
women and children, pour out of their neighbourhoods to fraternize
with the combatants, waving and crying victory, jumping with joy and
enthusiasm as the rebels respond by blowing their horns, as if setting
the seal on a marriage with their newly regained freedom.
89
90
 PORTFOLIO

93
I.
WITH ELEMENTS
(UNLEASHED)

To rise up, as when we say “a storm is rising.” To reverse the

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

94 95
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
Victor Hugo
Toujours en ramenant la plume
(Always coming back
with the quill), 1856
Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Paris
Henri Michaux
Sans titre (Untitled), 1975
Private collection
96
THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
Man Ray
Élevage de poussière
(Le Grand Verre de Marcel
Duchamp), New York (Breeding
dust [Marcel Duchamp’s
Large Glass], New York), 1920
Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris
97
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED) THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

Jean Veber
Le Dompteur a été mangé
(The animal tamer Dennis Adams
has been eaten), 1904 Patriot, “Airborne” series, 2002
Bibliothèque Nationale Centre National des Arts
de France, Paris Plastiques, Paris

98 99
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
Man Ray
Sculpture mouvante
or La France (Moving sculpture
or La France), 1920
Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, Paris,
100
THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz
Parangolé – Encuentros
de Pamplona (Encounters
in Pampeluna), 1972
Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
101
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
Roman Signer
Rotes Band (Red tape), 2005
Roman Signer/Art : Concept,
Paris
102
THE ELEMENTS BECOME UNLEASHED, TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
Jasmina Metwaly
Tahrir Square: Cut Skin, 2011
Open Gallery, London
Jasmina Metwaly
Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, 2011
Open Gallery, London
103
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED) AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

Anonymous (French)
Le Torrent révolutionnaire
(The revolutionary deluge)
Published in Le Charivari, no. 192,
William Hogarth vol. 3, July 12, 1834
The Battle of the Pictures, 1744–45 Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Private collection Paris

104 105
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
Pedro Motta
Natureza das coisas #024
(The nature of things #024),
from the “Natureza das coisas”
series, 2013
Pedro Motta/Galerie Bendana
Pinel, Paris
106
AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?
Francis Alÿs,
with Cuauhtémoc Medina
and Rafael Ortega
When Faith Moves Mountains,
2002
Photographic documentation
of an event, Lima, Peru
Francis Alÿs/Galerie Peter
Kilchmann, Zürich
107
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED) AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

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

Francisco de Goya
Francisco de Goya The Disasters of War:
Los Caprichos, 1799 “Que valor!,” 1810–20
Second edition, 1855 First edition, 1863, plate no. 7
Sylvie and Georges Helft Sylvie and Georges Helft
collection collection

108 109
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED) AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

Pere Català Pic

Tina Modotti Aixafem el feixisme
Bandolier, Cob, Sickle, 1927 (Crush fascism), 1936
Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Museu Nacional d’Art
Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine de Catalunya, Barcelona

110 111
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED) AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?

Saburô Murakami Robert Morris

Passing Through, 1956 Continuous Project
Performance at the Second Altered Daily, 1969
Gutai Exhibition, 1956 Bibliothèque Kandinsky,
Photography: Kiyoji Otsuji Centre Pompidou, Paris

112 113
WITH ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
Eustachy Kossakowski
“Panoramic Sea Happening
– Sea Concerto, Osieki” by Tadeusz
Kantor, 1967
Anka Ptaszkowska collection
114
AND IF THE IMAGINATION MADE MOUNTAINS RISE UP?
Tsubasa Kato
Break it Before it’s Broken
Tsubasa Kato collection
115
II.
WITH GESTURES
(INTENSE)

Rising up is a gesture. Before even attempting to carry out

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

116 117
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Germaine Krull
Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly
(The Dancer Jo Mihaly), 1925
Museum Folkwang, Essen
118
FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING
Germaine Krull
Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly
in “Revolution,” Paris
[Dancer Jo Mihaly
in “Revolution,” Paris, 1925
Museum Folkwang, Essen
119
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Lisette Model
Lisette Model Valeska Gert, “Olé,” 1940
Metropole Café, New York, c. 1946 National Gallery of Canada,
Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid Ottawa

120 121
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Käthe Kollwitz Käthe Kollwitz

Losbruch (Assault), 1902–03 Aufruhr (Riot), 1899
Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln,
Cologne Cologne

122 123
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Tina Modotti Tina Modotti

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

124 125
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre.
Entrée des troupes de première ligne
revenant de la guerre sur la Pariser
Platz (The November Revolution:
Front-line troops returning from
the war enter the Pariser Platz), 1918
Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek
Willy Römer, Berlin
126
FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING
Alberto Korda
El Quijote de la Farola, Plaza
de la Revolución, La Habana,
Cuba (Don Quixote of the
streetlamp, Plaza de la
Revolución, Havana, Cuba), 1959
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
127
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) FROM BURDEN TO UPRISING

Claude Cattelain Claude Cattelain

Video Hebdo 41 Video Hebdo 46
(Weekly video 41), 2009–10 (Weekly video 46), 2009–10
Claude Cattelain collection, Claude Cattelain collection,
Valenciennes Valenciennes

128 129
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Hammer used by Antonin
Artaud at Ivry for “trying out”
his texts and stressing
his diction, 1947
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
130
WITH HAMMER BLOWS
Joseph Beuys
Unbetitlet (Untitled), 1971
Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen
– Sammlung Moderne Kunst in
der Pinakothek der Moderne
München. Leihgabe Sammlung
Klüser, Munich
131
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) ARMS RISE UP

Jack Goldstein
A Glass of Milk, 1972 Maria Kourkouta
The Estate of Jack Goldstein/ Remontages, 2016
Galerie Buchholz, Cologne Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris

132 133
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Gustave Courbet
Révolutionnaire sur une barricade,
projet de frontispice pour
“Le Salut public” (Revolutionary
on a barricade: draft frontispiece
for “Le Salut public”), 1848
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire
de Paris, Paris
134
ARMS RISE UP
Willy Ronis
Rose Zehner, grève aux usines
Javel-Citroën (Rose Zehner
addressing strikers at
the Javel-Citroën plant), 1938
Médiathèque de l’Architecture
et du Patrimoine, Paris
135
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Marcel Gautherot
Sanctuaire diocésain du Bon Jésus
de Matosinhos (The shrine of
BomJesus de Matosinhos), c. 1947
Instituto Moreira Salles, São
Paulo
136
ARMS RISE UP
Leonard Freed
Residents of Guernica in front
of a mural replica of Pablo
Picasso’s painting, 1977
Magnum Photos, Paris
137
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Gilles Caron
Manifestation paysanne à Redon
(Farmers demonstrating
in Redon), 1967
Fondation Gilles Caron
Gilles Caron
Manifestation paysanne à Redon
(Farmers demonstrating
in Redon), 1967
Fondation Gilles Caron
138
ARMS RISE UP
Gilles Caron
Manifestations anticatholiques
à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic
demonstrations
in Londonderry), 1969
Fondation Gilles Caron
Gilles Caron
Manifestations anticatholiques
à Londonderry (Anti-Catholic
demonstrations in
Londonderry), 1969
Fondation Gilles Caron
139
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Julio González
Mà dreta aixecada
(Right hand raised), c. 1942
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
140
Julio González
Mà esquerra aixecada
(Left hand raised), c. 1942
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
Pascal Convert
Soulèvement (Uprising)
Left to right: Paul Vaillant-Couturier,
Charles Michels,
Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 2015
Pascal Convert/Galerie
Eric Dupont, Paris
Paul Vaillant-Couturier was born
in 1892 into a family of lyric artists:
his mother, Marguerite Vaillant,
was a famous opera singer.
Decorated five times during the First
World War, he later became a pacifist
and socialist. A lawyer, journalist,
writer, and politician, he helped
found the French Communist Party
and became editor in chief of the
Communist daily, L’Humanité.
On February 2, 1937, he survived
an assassination attempt, but a
few months later he died suddenly,
at the age of forty-five.
141
Born in 1903, Charles Michels,
the eldest of four children, lost his
father at the age of eleven. Later,
while working as a labourer, he
made ends meet as a boxer at the
Folies-Belleville cabaret. He was
elected permanent secretary of the
CGTU trade union in 1929 and as
a Communist member of parliament
in May 1936. Deprived of his seat on
January 21, 1940 because of his
membership of the Communist Party,
he was interned in May 1941, in the
camp at Choisel, Brittany. After the
execution of a German officer by the
ARMS RISE UP
Resistance, General Stülpnagel ordered
the shooting of 50 hostages: Pierre
Pucheu, the Vichy minister for the
interior, chose 27 internees from
Choisel, all of them with trade union
and Communist Party connections.
Charles Michels was first on the list,
and was shot on October 22, 1941.
His comrade Jean-Pierre Timbaud,
born in 1904, a bronze worker and
secretary of the CGTU Metalworkers
Federation (1931–34), then of
the Paris region CGT trade union
(1936–39), was shot alongside him.
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) THE PASIÓN

Élie Faure
“Portrait de passionaria”
David “Chim” Seymour (Portrait of La Pasionaria)
Federico Garcia Lorca, in Regards, no. 134, August 6,
Dolores Ibárruri, 1936 1936, p. 9
Magnum Photos, Paris Private collection

142 143
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) WHEN BODIES SAY NO

Agnès Geoffray
Métamorphose II
(Metamorphosis II),
“Métamorphoses” series,
2012–15
Agnès Geoffray collection

Agnès Geoffray
Catalepsie (Catalepsy),
“Incidental Gestures”
series, 2011–15
FRAC Auvergne,
Clermont-Ferrand

Following page
Agnès Geoffray
Laura Nelson, “Incidental
Paulo Abreu Gestures” series, 2011–15
Conde Fereira, 2003 FRAC Auvergne,
Paulo Abreu/Light Cone Clermont-Ferrand

144 145
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) WHEN BODIES SAY NO

146 147
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

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

Previous page
Annette Messager
50 Piques (50 pikes), detail, Hiroji Kubota
1992–93 Manifestation des Black Panthers
Annette Messager and Marin (Black Panthers rally), Chicago,
Karmitz collection/Marian 1969
Goodman Gallery Magnum Photos, Paris

148 149
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE)
Julio González
Cap de Montserrat cridant (Head
of Montserrat shouting), c. 1942
Museu Nacional d’Art de
Catalunya, Barcelona
150
MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING
Julio González
Cap cridant (Shouting head),
c. 1936–39
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
Julio González
Montserrat cridant, núm. 1
(Montserrat shouting, no. 1),
c. 1936–39
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
151
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

Graciela Sacco
from the “Bocanada” (A breath Wolf Vostell
of fresh air) series, 1993–94. Dutschke, 1968
Posters in the streets of Rosario, Haus der Geschichte
Argentina der Bundensrepublik
Graciela Sacco collection Deutschland, Bonn

152 153
WITH GESTURES (INTENSE) MOUTHS FOR EXCLAIMING

Art & Language

Shouting Men, 1975
Lorna Simpson MACBA – Museu d’Art
Easy to Remember, 2001 Contemporani de Barcelona,
Lorna Simpson collection Barcelona

154 155
III.
WITH WORDS
(EXCLAIMED)

Arms have been raised, mouths have exclaimed. Now,

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

156 157
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

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

158 159

Charles Baudelaire,
Gustave Courbet, Champfleury,
and Charles Toubin
Le Salut public, no. 2, 1848
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
161
POETIC INSURRECTIONS
Philippe Soupault
Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts
everything), 1921
Chancellerie des Universités de
Paris – Bibliothèque Littéraire
Jacques Doucet, Paris
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Raoul Hausmann
Portrait d’Herwarth Walden à Bonset
(Portrait of Herwarth Walden at Bonset), 1921 Federico García Lorca
Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Archive, Mierda (Shit), 1934
RKD – Netherlands Institute Fundación Federico García
for Art History, La Haye Lorca, Madrid

162 163
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Georges Bataille
and André Breton
Contre-Attaque : union de lutte
des intellectuels révolutionnaires
André Breton et al. (Counter-attack: United front
La Révolution surréaliste, of revolutionary intellectuals),
no. 1, 1924 1936
Bibliothèque Nationale Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris de France, Paris

164 165
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Henri Michaux
Émergences-résurgences
[Emergences/Resurgences] Henri Michaux
Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972 Sans titre (Untitled), 1971
Jeu de Paume, Paris Private collection

166 167
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Iconografia ingiallita
(per un “Poema fotografico”)
Antonin Artaud Antonin Artaud (Yellowed iconography
Notebook no. 326, 1947 Notebook no. 321, 1947 [for a “Photographic poem”])
Bibliothèque Nationale Bibliothèque Nationale Turin: Einaudi, 1975
de France, Paris de France, Paris Jeu de Paume, Paris

168 169
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Marcel Broodthaers
Soleil politique et Fig., Fig., Fig.
(Political sun and Fig., fig., fig.)
(diptych), 1972
Estate Marcel Broodthaers
170
POETIC INSURRECTIONS
Marcel Broodthaers
Carte d’une utopie politique
et Deux petits tableaux 1 ou 0
(Map of a political utopia and
Two little pictures 1 or 0), 1973
Private collection
171
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Gil Joseph Wolman
Prague occupée par les Russes ou
Art scotch (Prague occupied by
the Russians or Tape art), c. 1968
Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
172
POETIC INSURRECTIONS
Bernard Heidsieck
Machines à mots, no. 10 (Word
machines, no. 10), October 1971
Handwriting and collaged
press photograph
Centre National des Arts
Plastiques, Paris
173
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) POETIC INSURRECTIONS

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

174 175
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Anonymous (French)
“La jeunesse française répond :
Merde !” (France’s youth says:
Shit!), Call to action in Libération,
no. 20, March 1, 1943
Private collection
176 177
THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Anonymous (French)
Collection of leaflets
Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Paris
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

178 179
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

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

Previous pages
Joseph Beuys
So kann die Parteiendiktatur
überwunden werden
(Thus can the dictatorship
of parties be overcome), 1971 Anonymous (French)
Pinakothek der Moderne, Cinétracts (Film tracts), 1968
Munich Iskra collection, Paris

180 181
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Hélio Oiticica
Seja Marginal Seja Herói
(Be an outlaw be a hero), 1968
Private collection
182
THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Asger Jorn
Fin de Copenhague
(End of Copenhagen),
1957, Paris: Allia, 2001
Jeu de Paume, Paris
183
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Gérard Fromanger
Film-tract no. 1968, 1968
Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, Paris
184
THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Cildo Meireles
Inserçoes em circuitos ideológicos 2:
Projeto Cédula (Insertions
into ideological circuits 2:
Banknote project), 1970
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía, Madrid
185
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Félix Vallotton
L’Âge de papier (The age of paper),
cover illustration for Le Cri de Paris,
no. 52, January 1898
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
186
Man Ray
Cover, Mother Earth, IX,
no. 6, New York, edited by
Emma Goldman, 1914
David and Marcel Fleiss
collection, Galerie 1900-2000,
Paris
187
NEWSPAPERS
Man Ray
Cover, Mother Earth, IX,
no. 7, New York, edited
by Emma Goldman, 1914
David and Marcel Fleiss
collection, Galerie 1900-2000,
Paris
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) NEWSPAPERS

Carl Einstein
“Unes declarations sensacionals
de Carl Einstein” (A sensational
statement by Carl Einstein), 1938
Article by Sebottomtià Gasch in
Meridià. Setmanari de literatura,
art i política: tribuna del Front
Intellectual Antifeixista (Meridià. Tina Modotti
A weekly of literature, art Peasants reading
and politics: the voice of the “El Machete”, 1927
Anti-Fascist Intellectual Front) Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti,
Private collection Comitato Tina Modotti, Udine

188 189
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Rosa Luxemburg
Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie
[The Crisis of Social Democracy],
Zürich: Verlagsdruckerei, 1916
Akademie der Künste, Berlin,
Nachlassbibliothek Bertolt Brecht
190
MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE
Anonymous (Catalan)
CNT-FAI, Barcelone, 1936
Private collection
Jean Alloucherie
Noches de Sevilla. Un mes entre
los rebeldes (Nights in Seville.
A month with the rebels),
Barcelona-Madrid, 1937
Private collection
191
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
John Heartfield
Art for the dustjacket
of John Reed’s 10 Tage, die
die Welt erschütterten [Ten Days
That Shook the World], Verlag
für Literatur und Politik,
Vienna-Berlin, 1927
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin
192
John Heartfield
Artwork for the magazine
Jahrbuch für Politik,
Wirtschaft, Arbeiterbewegung,
Verlag Carl Hoym Nachf.,
Hamburg-Berlin, 1926
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin
MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE
John Heartfield
“Benütze Foto als Waffe!” (Use photography
as a weapon!), AIZ magazine, no. 37, Neuer
Deutscher Verlag, Berlin, Jg. VIII, no. 37, p. 17, 1929
Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Berlin
193
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Álvaro Sarmiento, Fina Torres,
Neruda. Entierro y testamento
(Neruda: Burial and tribute),
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
Inventarios Provisionales, 1974
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Alfredo M. Bonanno
La Gioia armata [Armed Joy],
Edizioni di Anarchismo, 1977
Jeu de Paume, Paris
194
MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE
Anonymous (Mexican)
Ojo! Una revista que ve
(Eye! A magazine that sees),
Mexico, 1958
First issue of a magazine
self-published by Héctor Garcia
Alexis Fabry collection, Paris
195
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) MAKING A BOOK OF RESISTANCE

Anonymous (French) Anonymous (French) Artur Barrio

Appel, 2003 Tiqqun, 2001 Livro de Carne (Meat book), 1978
Private collection Private collection Artur Barrio collection

196 197
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Anonymous (French)
Manières de dire (Ways
of speaking), 1880
Département Patrimonial
du Service de la Mémoire
et des Affaires Culturelles
(SMAC) de la Préfecture
de Police de Paris
198
THE WALLS SPEAK UP
Anonymous (French)
Élections à la commune.
Gustave Courbet candidat
du VIe arrondissement,
scrutin du 10 avril 1871
(Elections for the Commune.
Gustave Courbet, candidate
for the 6th arrondissement,
election April 10, 1871)
Documentation, Musée d’Orsay,
Paris
199
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED) THE WALLS SPEAK UP

Raymond Hains Raymond Hains

OAS. Fusillez les plastiqueurs Sans titre (Untitled), 1952
(OAS. Shoot the bombers), 1961 FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais,
Private collection Dunkirk

200 201
WITH WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Ever Astudillo Delgado
Cali, 1975–78
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
Ever Astudillo Delgado
Cali, 1975–78
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art
Contemporain, Paris
Ever Astudillo Delgado
Cali, 1975–78
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art
Contemporain, Paris
202
THE WALLS SPEAK UP
Gil Joseph Wolman
Sans titre (la tragédie) (Untitled
[tragedy]), 1966
Natalie Seroussi gallery, Paris
Following double page
Sigmar Polke
Gegen die zwei Supermächte
– für eine rote Schweiz (Against
the two superpowers – for a red
Switzerland) (1st version), 1976
Ludwig Collection, Ludwig
Forum for International Art,
Aix-la-Chapelle
203
204 205
IV.
WITH CONFLICTS
(FLARED UP)

And so everything flares up. Some see only pure chaos.

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

206 207
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Ruth Berlau
American Strikers, 1941–44
Akademie der Künste, Berlin,
Bertolt Brecht Archiv
208
TO STRIKE IS NOT TO DO NOTHING
Henri Cartier-Bresson
École des Beaux-Arts,
Paris, May 1968
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Paris
209
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Jean-Luc Moulène
Series: 39 objets de grève
(39 strike objects), 1999–2000
Jean-Luc Moulène/Galerie
Chantal Crousel, Paris
210
TO STRIKE IS NOT TO DO NOTHING
Manivelle de pédalier
de cycle dit « Le casse-tête » La Bobine Novacore Holgeir Meins Dirty Protest
La Pantinoise Les Souliers de la lutte Le Costume Novacore Casse-tête
211
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Félix Vallotton
La Charge (The charge), 1893
Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, Paris. On loan
to the Musée des Beaux-Arts et
d’Archéologie, Besançon
212
DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK
Georges Grosz
Blutiger Karneval (Bloody
carnival), 1915–16
Private collection
213
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Hans Richter Hans Richter

Revolution, 1918 Orator-Rebellion-Revolution, 1916
Private collection Private collection

214 215
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Agustí Centelles
Rioting after the victory of the
Popular Front at the elections
of February 16, 1936. Plaça de la
República (Plaça Sant Jaume),
Barcelona, February 17, 1936
Museu Nacional d’Art de
Catalunya, Barcelona

Herbert Kirchhoff
Revolución en La Paz (Bolivia)
(Revolution in La Paz,
Bolivia), 1946 Arpad Hazafi
Leticia and Stanislas Budapest, 1956
Poniatowski collection AP/SIPA Agency

216 217
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Ernesto Molina Ernesto Molina

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

218 219
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Héctor López
Poblado la Victoria, Santiago,
Chile (Village of La Victoria,
Santiago, Chile), c. 1986
Anna Gamazo de Abelló
collection
220
DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK
Jesús Ruiz Durand
Lima, Pérou (Untitled, Peru), 1969
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
221
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Funérailles des victimes
de Charonne, Paris, France
(Funeral of the victims
of the “Charonne massacre,”
Paris, France), February 13, 1962
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson Allan Sekula

Manifestation pro-Castro, New
York (Pro-Castro demonstration,
New York), September 1960
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Paris
Two images from the
installation Waiting for Tear Gas
(White Globe to Black, 1999–2000
Institut d’Art Contemporain,
Rhône-Alpes, France

222 223
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Sigmar Polke
À Versailles, à Versailles! Chieh-Jen Chen
(To Versailles, to Versailles!), 1988 The Route, 2006
Musée Départemental d’Art Chieh-Jen Chen/Lily Robert
Contemporain de Rochechouart gallery

224 225
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DEMONSTRATE, PUT YOURSELF AT RISK

Robert Filliou
Optimistic Box no. 1, 1968 Ismaïl Bahri
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Film à blanc (Blank film), 2012
Centre Pompidou, Paris Ismaïl Bahri collection

226 227
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Jules Girardet
La Colonne Vendôme après sa
chute (The Vendôme Column
after being torn down), 1871
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire
de Paris, Paris
228
VANDAL JOYS
Edmond, successor
to Charles Marville
(presumed photographer)
Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris.
Cour des bureaux (Ruins
of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris.
The office courtyard), c. 1871
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris
229
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) VANDAL JOYS

Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Reste du Christ
de l’avenue Baudin détruit à la
suite des troubles de Limoges”
(Remains of the crucifix on
Avenue Baudin, destroyed
during the disturbances in
Limoges), May 8, 1905
Jeu de Paume, Paris

Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Tergnier – La Grève
des Cheminots [III] – Les deux
machines tamponnées sur
la plaque tournante” (Tergnier
– The Railway Workers’ Strike Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X.
[III] – Collision on the Tesauro : Vandalismo
turntable), 1910 (Thesaurus: Vandalism), 2005–16
Jeu de Paume, Paris Private collection

230 231
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Asger Jorn
Brisez le cadre q[u]i [é]touf[ fe] l[’]
image (Smash the frame
that stifles the image),
1968
Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen
232
VANDAL JOYS
Asger Jorn
Pas de puis[s]ance d[’]imagination
sans images puis[s]ante[s]
(No power of imagination
without powerful images), 1968
Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen
233
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Thibault
La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt avant l’attaque par
les troupes du général Lamoricière,
le dimanche 25 juin 1848 (The
barricade on Rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt before the attack
by General Lamoricière’s troops,
Sunday June 25, 1848)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
234
BUILDING BARRICADES
Thibault
La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt après l’attaque par
les troupes du général Lamoricière,
le lundi 26 juin 1848 (The
barricade on Rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt after the attack by
General Lamoricière’s troops,
Monday June 26, 1848)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
235
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) BUILDING BARRICADES

Armand Dayot Armand Dayot

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

236 237
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Grèves de Limoges,
15 avril 1905, Barricade
Ancienne” (Strikes in Limoges,
April 15, 1905, old barricade)
Jeu de Paume, Paris
238
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Raon-l’Étape –
L’Émeute du 28 juillet –
Barricade de la rue Thiers, 1907”
(Raon-l’Étape – The July 28 riot
– Barricade on Rue Thiers, 1907)
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Anonymous (Mexican)
Jesús Carranza acompañado de
varios hombres observan una vía
destruida (Jesús Carranza and
others inspecting destroyed rail
track), “Revolución Zapatista,”
Coahuila, Mexico, c. 1914
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico
239
BUILDING BARRICADES
Voula Papaioannou
Barricades During the Civil War
of December ’44 (Dekemvriana),
Athens, 1944
Benaki Museum Photographic
Archive, Athens
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre:
occupation du quartier de la
presse. Barricades faites de papier
journal. Schützenstrasse, Berlin
(The November Revolution:
Occupation of the press district.
Barricades made of newspaper,
Berlin), 1919
Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek
Willy Römer, Berlin
240
BUILDING BARRICADES
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre:
occupation du quartier
de la presse. Barricades
faites de rouleaux de papier
journal. Devant la maison
d’édition Rudolf Mosse,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin (The
November Revolution:
Occupation of the press district.
Barricades made of newspaper. John Heartfield
Outside the Rudolf Mosse Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland,
publishing house building, Deutschland über alles (Germany,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin), 1919 Germany above all else), 1929
Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Akademie der Künste,
Willy Römer, Berlin Kunstsammlung, Berlin
241
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) BUILDING BARRICADES

Agustí Centelles Jerzy Piórkowski

Barricades, Barcelona, 1936 Miasto Nieujarzmione (City
Centro Documental de la unbroken), Warsaw: Iskry, 1957
Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Private collection

242 243
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Édouard Manet
Guerre civile (Civil war), 1871
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire
de Paris, Paris
244
DYING FROM INJUSTICE
André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri
(attributed to)
Insurgés tués pendant la Semaine
sanglante de la Commune
(Insurgents killed during the
Commune’s “Bloody Week”), 1871
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire
de Paris, Paris
Anonymous (Mexican)
Fusilados por tropas zapatistas
en Ayotzingo (Men shot by
Zapatist troops at Ayotzingo),
c. 1913–17
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico
245
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Anonymous (Mexican)
Fortino Sámano fuma un cigarro
antes de ser fusilado (Fortino
Sámano smokes a cigar before
being shot) Mexico City, 1917
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico
246
DYING FROM INJUSTICE
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Obrero en huelga, asesinado
(Murdered striker), 1934
Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, Paris
247
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration au
Transvaal (no 4) : “Les progrès de
la science” (The concentration
camps in the Transvaal [no. 4]:
“Scientific progress”, published
in L’Assiette au beurre,
September 28, 1901
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
248
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration au
Transvaal (no 5) : “Les progrès de
la science” (The concentration
camps in the Transvaal [no. 5]:
“Scientific progress”), published
in L’Assiette au beurre,
September 28, 1901
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration au
Transvaal (no 19) : “Les progrès
de la science” (The concentration
camps in the Transvaal [no. 19]:
“Scientific progress”), published
in L’Assiette au beurre,
September 28, 1901
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
249
DYING FROM INJUSTICE
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration au
Transvaal (no 12) : “Les progrès de
la science” (The concentration
camps in the Transvaal [no. 12]:
“Scientific progress”), published
in L’Assiette au beurre,
September 28, 1901
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
Dmitri Kessel
Greek National Liberation Front
rally, Athens, December 3, 1944
250
DYING FROM INJUSTICE
Dmitri Kessel
Greek National Liberation Front
demonstrators gathered around
the bodies of three fellow
protestors shot by police during
a rally, Athens, December 3, 1944
Getty Images
251
WITH CONFLICTS (FLARED UP) DYING FROM INJUSTICE

Anonymous (South African)

African National Council
demonstration, Fordsburg, 1952

Anonymous (South African)

Dead and wounded outside Malcolm Browne
the police station in Sharpeville, Self-Immolation by Buddhist Monk
March 21, 1960 Thich Quang Duc, Saigon, 1963
Getty Images AP/SIPA Agency

252 253
V.
WITH DESIRES
(INDESTRUCTIBLE)

But potency outlives power. Freud said that desire

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

254 255
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
Anonymous (Greek member
of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando)
Women being driven towards the
Crematorium V gas chamber,
Birkenau and Burning the bodies
of gassed prisoners in the open-air
cremation pits outside the
Crematorium V gas chamber,
Birkenau, 1944
Archival collection of the State
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum,
Oświęcim
256
THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH
Joan Miró
L’Espoir du prisonnier
(The prisoner’s hope)
Preliminary drawings for
L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II
et III (The hope of a condemned
man, I, II, and III), 1973
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Joan Miró
Preliminary drawings for
L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II
et III (The hope of a condemned
man, I, II, and III), 1974
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
257
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

Joan Miró Joan Miró

Homme torturé s’évadant Prisonnier crucifié
(Tortured man escaping), 1973 (Crucified prisoner), 1974
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

258 259
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

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

260
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THE HOPE OF THOSE CONDEMNED TO DEATH

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

262 263
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) MOTHERS RISE UP

Honoré Daumier Honoré Daumier

Les Femmes socialistes (Women Les Divorceuses (Divorced
socialists), in Le Charivari,  women), in Le Charivari,
April–June 1849 August–October 1848
Bibliothèque Nationale Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris de France, Paris

264 265
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
Bertolt Brecht
Modellbuch [Model] for Mother
Courage and Her Children,
January 11, 1949–April 4, 1961
Akademie der Künste, Berlin,
Bertolt Brecht Archiv
266
Jerónimo Hernández
Soldaderas en el estribo de un
tren en la estación de Buenavista
(Women combatants on the
steps of a train in Buenavista
station), “Tropas federales”
(Federal troops) series, Mexico,
1912
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico
267
MOTHERS RISE UP
Anonymous (Mexican)
Soldaderas en posición para
disparar contra las gavillas
de José Chávez García (Women
combatants ready to fire at
the forces of José Chavez García),
c. 1914
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
Ken Hamblin
Beaubien Street, 1971
Joseph A. Labadie Collection,
Special Collections Library,
University of Michigan
268
MOTHERS RISE UP
Eduardo Gil
Niños desaparecidos. Segcunda
Marcha de la Resistancia
(Murdered children. Second
Resistance March), Buenos Aires,
December 9–10, 1982
Eduardo Gil collection
Eduardo Gil
Paraguas. Segunda
Marcha de la Resistancia
(Umbrellas. Second
Resistance March), Buenos Aires,
December 9–10, 1982
Eduardo Gil collection
269
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY ARE YOUR OWN CHILDREN

Ruth Berlau Agustí Centelles

Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Children playing, Montjuic,
Antigone, 1948 Barcelona, 1936
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Centro Documental de la
Bertolt Brecht Archiv Memoria Histórica, Salamanca

270 271
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
272
Solidarte México
Desaparecidos políticos de Nuestra
América (Solidarte Mexico,
the political disappeared
of our America), 1984
Two posters (Paulo Bruscky,
Manuel Marin)
273
THEY ARE YOUR OWN CHILDREN
Eduardo Gil
Siluetas y canas. El Siluetazo
(Silhouettes and cops. The
silhouette action), Buenos Aires,
September 21–22, 1983
Eduardo Gil collection
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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

274 275
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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

276 277
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

Mat Jacob
Chiapas 2, 1996–2001, 2016
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue

Mat Jacob Mat Jacob

Chiapas 1 (marche 1997) Chiapas 7 (marche 2001)
(Chiapas 1 [March 1997]), 2016 (Chiapas 7 [March 2001]), 2016
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Mat Jacob/Tendance floue

278 279
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
Marie Lechner
Forms of Digital Resistance, 2016
Screenshot of the online
project “Anonymous:
Shared identity in the era
of a global networked Society”
by Robert Sakrowski (2011)
Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris
280
THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS
Hugo Aveta
Ritmos primarios, la subversiòn
del alma (Basic rhythms:
subversion of the soul), 2013
Hugo Aveta/NextLevel Galerie,
Paris
281
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza

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

282 283
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE) THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS

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

284 285
WITH DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLE)
Francisca Benitez
Garde l’Est, 2005
Francisca Benitez collection
286
THEY WHO GO THROUGH WALLS
Maria Kourkouta
Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. Frontière
gréco-macédonienne
(Idomeni, March 14, 2016.
Greek–Macedonian border), 2016
Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris
287
 Georges Didi-Huberman

BY THE DESIRES
(Fragments on What Makes Us Rise Up)

LOSS AND UPRISINGS

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

288 289
“Clearly,” the psychoanalyst concluded, “mourning puts the world into
movement. … The world is shaken with a new mobility as soon
as death suddenly appears evident through a game that symbolically
accomplishes the desire for it.” We should even say that loss, which
overwhelms us initially, can also, thanks to a game, a gesture, a thought,
or a desire, make the world rise up entirely; and this is the principle
force of uprisings.1

THE DEPTHS OF THE AIR ARE RED

The person who tells you that “the depths of the air are red” is no
doubt suggesting that a storm—a “red” communist storm—is going
to rise and is going to raise everything up and carry it away. This is
a meteorological way, a very old one as it happens, to speak of
movements that affect the history of human societies: there are
fig. 1
magnificent pages in Les Misérables on this theme, where Victor Hugo
Chris Marker, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), 1977–88.
compares the Paris insurrection to a gigantic ocean turmoil. Still frame (burying the Charonne massacre dead, 1962).
We could even go back as far as Lucretius and his description of social
turbulence at the time of the Plague of Athens.
In the wonderful prologue to his film, Le fond de l’air est rouge
(A Grin Without a Cat), Chris Marker made recent images—linked to
the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s—rise up, as he did
too with the famous, reedited shots from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin, which tell of the 1905 uprising in Odessa, starting with
the collective mourning around the body of Vakulinchuk, the
murdered sailor whose death “calls for justice.” With Simone Signoret’s
inimitable voice and Luciano Berio’s Musica notturna delle strade
di Madrid, we see a clash between the crowd going down to view the
corpse in Battleship Potemkin and the burial of the dead from the
Charonne metro station in 1962: “Burial of the dead of Charonne,”
wrote Marker in the cut, “A woman wipes her eyes. Potemkin: close-up
of a woman wiping her eyes, finishing the gesture of the woman of
Charonne” ( figs. 1–2).
What does this extraordinary—aesthetic, and no doubt political,
even anthropological—hypothesis tell us, a hypothesis according to
which a gesture filmed in 1925 could “finish the gesture of the woman fig. 2
of Charonne” in 1962? It tells us, firstly, that uprisings, in Marker’s view, Chris Marker, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), 1977–88.
assume a very profound solidarity that links the subjects with their Still frame (woman weeping in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin).

mourning and their desires; but which also joins the times themselves
with their interposed images. It is for this reason that we see a crowd
of fists raised in Battleship Potemkin, like those that were raised on

1.
Fédida 1978, 138.

290 291
March 4, 1972, around the coffin of murdered Maoist worker Pierre
Overney, which was followed through the streets of Paris by around
two hundred thousand people. Or like those fists raised in Chicago,
in the same years, by the Black Panthers. And this is how montage,
in Le fond de l’air est rouge, takes the shape of an atlas of conflicts
where, starting with Odessa (the premise of the October Revolution),
the struggles seem to scatter to every point of the globe, and to every
moment of history, as though to give the multiple image of a whole
world rising up: “Close-up of a woman with disheveled hair lifting her
head [Potemkin] towards a helmeted US national guard with a grenade-
launcher in his fist, who is turning his mask towards the panicked
crowd that is running down the stairs at Odessa. Flight of the
demonstrators who have come to knock against the line of US police
holding up their truncheons with both hands, encircling two terrorized
women [Potemkin] who are watching an approaching line of French
gendarmes holding rifles, followed by a detachment of the US National
fig. 3
Guard, with fixed bayonets, advancing quickly towards a sit-in on a
Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
street in Berkeley. Potemkin: the first bodies roll down the steps. Still frame (the tarpaulin thrown over the sailors).
The face of a woman, stupefied, facing the mask of a riot-policeman.
An extreme close-up of the finger on the trigger. In Berkeley,
the tip of a bayonet threatens the neck of a demonstrator with naked
chest. Potemkin, Berkeley, India, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Pentagon,
charging, fleeing, hand-to-hand fighting, confusion, bloodied face.”
I am not surprised that one of the first images of Potemkin
summoned by Marker was that of a large white sheet: it is the
tarpaulin that an officer ordered to be thrown over the sailors before
shooting them—a great shroud whose cruel drama is created by
Eisenstein—but it is exactly what the sailors would soon throw over
their heads, in a desperate gesture for freedom, which would appear
to be the very first in the film ( figs. 3–4). It would be followed by the
headscarves torn off by the old women in mourning, the shirt torn by
the young rebel when the mourning has yielded to collective anger,
to the “fraternal” sails of vessels that have come to aid the mutineers,
awaiting the hoisting of the red flag atop the mast, even the tearing of
the cinema screen planned by Eisenstein for the film’s premiere in
December 1925.
Between the shroud and the sheet, the sheet and the flag, the flag fig. 4
and the tearing, it is as though the storm of the rebellions found its Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
clearest emblem in the rising up of all the surfaces. Eisenstein Still frame (the tarpaulin thrown by the sailors).

himself established a direct relation between the idea of political

uprising and physical rising up of surfaces, giving as an example—as
the iconographic premises for his own Potemkin—the revolutionary

292 293
 flag associated with the dress in movement that reveals the breast
of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, a figurative
strategy itself, imagined as a “relief” from the despair expressed
by Théodore Géricault in The Raft of the Medusa, with its derisory
and tragic sail.2 ( figs. 5–6)

FREIHEITSDRANG, THE “UPSURGE OF LIBERTY”

A white shroud laid motionless on a body, but which suddenly stirs,

rises up, becomes a wedding dress or a flag hoisted to a treetop, before
being torn joyously: that is what shows in the surfaces—or in what
Aby Warburg called the “accessories in movement,” in reference
to what traveled through the history of art as one of the most ancient
“aesthetic formants,” by which I mean the drapery—the force of
uprisings. This force is therefore manifested in the forms in movement:
fig. 5
it is the forms that make it palpable, however profound its
Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté guidant le peuple
(Liberty Leading the People), 1830 (detail).
psychological source. In his essay on mourning and melancholia
Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. in Metapsychology, Sigmund Freud remarked that loss—if it is the
loss of a beloved object—arouses a fundamental psychological
movement: “Against this demand a struggle (ein begreifliches Sträuben)
of course arises. … This struggle can be so intense that a turning away
from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium
of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis (durch eine halluzinatorische
Wunschpsychose).”
Freud did not yet imagine, in this text, that the “struggle” when
faced with loss might create a new reality corresponding to desire
rather than undergoing a vain hallucinatory satisfaction of this same
desire. We cannot bring back someone’s dead mother. But we can,
perhaps, rebel against some of the constraints of the world that killed
her. Freud, in any case, allowed the possibility to understand the
polarity between “contrition” (Zerknirschung) and “uprising”
(Auflehnung) from the perspective of a dialectics between “the plaint”
alone and the act of “complaining,” that is to say, between the passion
experienced and the passion to act, and to act against. It is the same
dialectics that brings into play all uprising—of which the Potemkin can
fig. 6 offer a first paradigm—born of a plaint in front of a dead body that
Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1819 (detail). “calls for justice.” In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud could
Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. therefore imagine that this Freiheitsdrang, this “drive for freedom”
—or this “push towards freedom”—fully contributes to what he called
a “development of culture,” in spite of a spontaneous aversion to
collective creative processes, above all when they are destructive:

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

294 295
“What makes itself felt in a human community as a desire for
freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and
so may prove favorable to a further development of civilization.”
What makes us rise up? Let us start with the hypothesis that
it is the strength of our memories when they burn with those of our
desires as they are kindled—images that must enflame our desires
from our memories, our memories in the hollows of our desires.
Jacques Lacan noted that, in Freud’s texts, the “genesis of the moral
dimension does not take root anywhere else than in desire itself,” just
as Antigone’s brilliance, l’éclat d’Antigone, that ancient insurrection,
showed its political incandescence. We must then understand—and it
is something that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler have
already suggested—that there would be no uprising worth anything
without the assumption of a certain “radical inner experience” in
which desires are carried so far only because they take note of, or even
take their starting point in, their own buried memories.3
ZEROS FOR CONDUCT
In the repressive boarding school in the film Zéro de conduite
(Zero for Conduct), we see an endless conflict between a small group of
undisciplined children and the adult personnel supposed to supervise
the students. It would be an oversimplification to see no more in this
conflict than a contrast between the two poles of “desire” (on the side
of the children) and “power” (pouvoir) (on the side of the adults). Power
itself is made of desires, like when the stout and libidinous professor
of natural sciences caresses the hair of the pupil Tabard, before placing
his hand a little too heavily upon the child’s: a desire to hold,
something that Tabard would soon depend on through an about-turn
(an uprising of the gesture) and through an insult (an uprising
of words): “Et moi, j’vous dis merde !” (Shit, I say!) (Thus, through
Jean Vigo—the anarchist Vigo—an energy became native, an energy
that was to take shape in his film through what he called the
“collective uproar” of the children who were rising up. Perhaps he
was remembering how adults who had just come out of the great
massacre of the First World War had sought to rediscover and
reconfigure this energy of uprising in their images and in their tracts,
in which there phrases such as “Merde!” or “Dada soulève tout !”
(Dada makes everything rise up!) often appeared. He was most
probably unaware that in the 1930s, the poet Federico García Lorca
was also creating for himself—in order to play or to think, to make
3.
Freud 1917, 126 and 154–155.
Freud 1929, 49. Lacan 1959–1960,
11 and 285–298. Kristeva 1997,
21–22. Kristeva 1998, 31–32. Butler
1997, 167–200.
296
images and words at the same time—a magnificent calligramme
from the term “mierda.”
Whatever the case, in the courtyard of the boarding school in Zéro
de conduite, a “child’s scheme” takes shape, as Vigo described on a title
card. It is, firstly, the extraordinary scene of a “pillow rebellion”
in the dormitory: “In the middle of the night, they mess up the beds.
The fever spreads, and each pupil wants to mess up his neighbor’s
bed. Once all of the beds have been thrown into the air, they read the
proclamation. Tabard, holding his death’s head flag in his hand,
will read the proclamation amidst the uproar of the children crowded
around him, all in their night attire”:
Proclamation text. “War is declared. Down with the supervisors!
Down with punishments! Long live the rebellion! … Freedom
or death … Raise the flag on the roof of our school. Tomorrow,
everyone stand with us. We swear to bombard with old books,
old cans, old shoes—the ammunition’s hidden in the attic—the
ugly old mugs on national holidays … Onward! Onward!”
And the scene continues: “Carrying the banner through the whole
dormitory, Tabard drags his friends into action. All the beds are
undone. … The children increasingly run riot and end up using the
pillows until they burst. The eiderdown is spread over the dormitory
and falls like snowflakes (fig. 7). The beds are turned upside down,
the chamber pots are dragged along the ground. It is through
a thick cloud of feathers that Parrain, the supervisor, exhausted, looks
for a chair to sit down. His chair is taken away from him and
he falls on the ground. The door of the dormitory opens. The school
supervisor appears and, seeing the clouds of feathers, closes the door
immediately. Return to the dormitory, which is increasingly overrun
with feathers from the pillows and comforters. A child does a
dangerous double somersault …. The film then takes place in slow
motion, giving a heightened impression of a dream and a fantasy.”
This explosion of childish revolt saturated with feathers is
an unforgettable image, so full of future. Joy with slowness, lightness
with depth. A pupil majestically rises up in space, like an angel still
flying in spite of the scattering of his wings into thousands of softly
falling feathers ( fig. 8). The demonstration of the half-naked children
attacking an imaginary Bastille happens in the phantasmagoria of the
slowed movements, before the “four rebels,” as Vigo calls them, actually
bombard the school courtyard from the roof with pieces of wood,
shoes, and even—as we see coming from Tabard’s hands—a spring,
297
 which is both a divine and derisory object ( fig. 8). Everything here
bears the mark of an uprising—gestural, verbal, psychological, and
atmospheric—from the slightest gestures of revolt to the “proclamation
text” and the insurgents’ final ascent to the roof of the school, not to
mention the flags thrown in the air and the burst pillows.4

FROM THE DEPTHS

To make the world rise up we need gestures, desires, and depths.

The child who raises up his sheets or who bursts his pillow
becomes—along with his rebel friends, both real and imaginary—
himself a surface to be raised up and a body to be disseminated
throughout space. Joy is spacious, as we know: it is as a fundamental
joy that an uprising broadens, expands the world around us and
gives us its same rhythm. In his psychical or “psychotropic” experiences,
fig. 7
Henri Michaux discovered similar movements: “Whiteness erupts,
Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), 1933.
Still frame (the pillow fight).
colour of chalk. … The gushing begins from white springs at all points
around me. … White sheets, a shaking of white sheets, if such they are,
seized with giddy shudderings. Like entering a new country where, in
place of tricolour, colours and whatever else besides, an insane quantity
of white flags were hoisted, diamond white, no other
colour—a strange new country where the most favoured occupation
is the waving of white linen high in the air in delirious and unending
celebration.” And it is once again in L’Infini turbulent, in 1957, that
the poet spoke of these profound uprisings in which the exaltation
itself occurs only through what he beautifully called “the confidence
of a child”:

Exaltation, abandon, above all, confidence: the approach to

the infinite necessitates these.
You should have the confidence of a child, a confidence which goes
before you in hope, which surges upwards, carrying you with it,
a confidence which, upon entering the seething tumult of this
universe … surges still upwards, prodigiously, extraordinarily, in a
way never before known, surges and surges upwards, beyond itself,
fig. 8 beyond everything miraculously surging and at the same time
Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), 1933. acquiescing with a limitless acquiescence which brings appeasement
Still frame (the attack from the roof). and excitement, which is an overflowing and a liberation, which is
contemplation thirsting for further liberation and yet which gives
birth to the fear that the heart will not stand up to the strain of this
blissful, excessive joy which cannot be housed and came unmerited,

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

298 299
 this over-abundant joy of which one knows not whether one
is the giver or the receiver, and which is excessive, excessive,
ex … cess … ive …
Regenerating, ineffably dilating, increasingly dilating, outside
of oneself, breathing, being breathed.
This is how Henri Michaux opens Une voie pour l’insubordination
(A voice/way for insubordination [a play on voix/voie in French, voice/
way]): a strange text that he also wanted to call Voie pour l’exaspération
or pour l’essentielle contestation-insubordination (“Voice/way for
exasperation” or “for basic challenge-insubordination”). It deals with
the question of “striking spirits” and of “ghost sounds,” everything that
makes up the matter of certain popular beliefs and certain fantasy,
ancient, or contemporary literary genres. Everything that also makes
up the psychical truth of certain gestures that are considered abnormal
or asocial. Doesn’t the shaking of the sheets tell us, from the beginning,
that a specter haunts all of this choreography of uprisings? “Objects
suddenly move by themselves, drawers open, utensils rise up, furniture,
even heavy furniture, and heavy chests change places … stones fall
thrown from somewhere, pieces of tiles with crazy trajectories, quite
unpredictable to the very end.” All of this emanating from a fundamental
force that, above all, is a psychical revolt: the insubordination of a child
who wants to escape from the parental frame and is eager to “move
freely.” It is Zéro de conduite but in a gory version, it is like a beginning
for what George A. Romero called, regarding these films, “zombie
politics,” that of riots (émeutes) and ghostly packs (meutes).
Michaux described the evil, “hitter” and “insubordinate” little girl
in Poltergeist: “For as long as we can observe her, we do not see her
make any suspicious gesture. She usually stays still. No effort appears
at all on her face. No contortion. No tension. Nothing strange in
her composure. [But] she is capable of insubordination, and a famous
insubordination with the force of a giant. Tired no doubt of the
constraining attitudes, she upsets the unbearable interior in which
nothing happens. This is not art—which is a register that does
not interest her—nor farce, nothing moving towards the funny or the
tragic, or towards theater. … No plan. Only scattering. … She carries
out attacks. A response to the daily life by the objects of daily life, she
violates the order of furniture, the apparent law of things inside
a home. Attacks on quietude, on the peaceful, bourgeois atmosphere,
and on the old prohibition on moving.”
The poet is quite right to remark in these pages—as Pier Paolo
Pasolini did, in his own way, too—that insubordination becomes
300
all the more radical when it has nothing to do, first of all, with any
sort of “will for art.” One rises up in order to demonstrate one’s desire
for emancipation, not to display it like an ornament in a window,
a garment on the catwalk, or a “performance” in a contemporary art
gallery. The power and the depth of uprisings come from the
fundamental innocence of the gesture that decides it. Innocence is in
no way an aesthetic quality. Henri Michaux’s “way to insubordination”
is related here to what Federico García Lorca had already written
regarding the cante jondo or “deep song” through the popular—
immemorial and surviving—category of the duende, which is not
unrelated, from an ethnological perspective, to the “hitting spirits” of
the more northern traditions. Depth and uprising of the duende: “The
duende rises inside you” (el duende sube por dentro), a phrase that García
Lorca claimed he heard from an old guitar maestro from Andalusia.
It is important to remember the distinctions established by the
author of Romancero gitano: if the angel was created to elevate us
and the muse to amaze us, the duende raises us up from its unknown
depths, which are our own interior motions, and our most extreme
desires: “It is in the ultimate dwellings of the blood that it must be
awakened,” wrote the poet, by which he meant that, far from any
(religious) transcendence or from any (artistic) ideal, the cante jondo
owes its strength of uprising to the very depth of its duende as a desire
to be free—immanent and free to the point of rupture in which there
are “neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only
know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he
exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry that we have learned,
that he smashes style, that he leans on human with no consolation and
makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English
painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumen,” those
blacks that come from the depths and then become the very matter
of those cries, all of those dark mouths through which the painter was
able to show us, figuratively, what was the “black sound,” the sonido
negro of the song through which rise up plaints, anger, and the energy
of suffering people’s insubordination.5
A GESTURE RISES
Before ever claiming to be acts or actions, uprisings surge forth from
the human psyche as gestures, corporeal forms. They are forces that
make us rise up, no doubt, but it is indeed forms that, anthropologically
speaking, make them perceptible, convey them, direct them, implement
5.
Chrétien 2007, 7–31. Michaux
1957, 16–17 and 40–41. Michaux
1980, 987–992. Thoret, ed. 2007,
passim. García Lorca 1930, 51.
301
them, or make them plastic or resistant, depending on the circumstances.
Against any “anti-expressive” or any “anti-pathetic” vision of politics,
which we find in Alain Badiou for example, Giorgio Agamben sought
to give to the human gesture an intrinsic and even “integral” political
dimension: “Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the
absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.” It is a magnificent
conclusion to a text whose premise is nonetheless debatable, and
according to which “by the end of the nineteenth century, the Western
bourgeoisie had definitively lost its gestures.”
Yet gestures are things that we make every day, all day long, and
without even realizing it. We no more lose our gestures—whether
we are bourgeois, proletarian, or anything else for that matter—than
we lose our “experience” (as Agamben wrote, apocalyptically, in
Infancy and History) or our unconscious desires. If we do not master
our gestures to the end, it is the sign that we have not lost them
(or that they have not let go of us). Gestures are transmitted, surviving
fig. 9
in spite of us and in spite of everything. They are our own living fossils,
Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, 1924.
like a duende that “rises inside us.” The Spanish who fought against Still frame (worker).
the French occupation in 1808, raised their arms—notably in the
images of Francisco de Goya's Disasters—just as the workers raised
their arms in Eisenstein’s Strike in 1924 ( figs. 9–10). And just as the Black
Panthers raised their arms in Chicago in 1969. Or, in 1989, as the
Romanians raised their arms when they came to realize their victory
over Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, as we can see in Harun Farocki
and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution. The examples are
infinite: every minute that passes, somewhere, there are, I imagine,
a thousand arms raised in the streets, in a factory on strike, or in a
schoolyard. In our dreams our arms are raised when our emotions
are peopled and become riotous. It happens even that people in utter
despair fall from high up with their arms raised in a final protest
against the order of the world.
Aby Warburg forged the notion of Pathosformel—or ‘”pathos
formula”—to account for this survival of gestures throughout the
duration of human cultures. Gestures are inscribed in history: they
make up the traces, or the Leitfossilien, as Warburg liked to say,
combining the permanence of the fossil with the musicality and
rhythmicity of the Leitmotif. Gestures are related to a dynamic fig. 10
anthropology of corporeal forms, and as such the “formulae of pathos” Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, 1924.
would be both a visual and temporal way to examine the unconscious Still frame (hands raised).

at work in the infinite dance of our expressive movements. What

Warburg sought was to create a history and a cartography of the
cultural “fields” and “vehicles” through which our most fundamental

302 303
gestures take shape. One of the most important polarities of those
“cultural formants” is found, no doubt, in the psychical and corporeal
dialectics of contrition and uprising.
At first glance, Aby Warburg appears to have been very
concerned with contrition but very little concerned with uprisings.
In Mnemosyne, his atlas of images, a central place is given to the
motif of the lament (plate 42). The introductory plates give us the
idea of a humanity that is unable to escape the frames by which
traditional knowledge determined the very notion of cosmos (plate B).
The Titan Atlas is shown only in his suffering and punishment,
having to bear the entirety of the sky on his shoulders (plate 2).
In plate 5, we see women fleeing a fate that we know is ineluctable
and, in plate 6, Laocoön cannot escape the serpents. Plate 41 shows
the “pathos of annihilation” (Vernichtungspathos) where we see Orpheus
being slaughtered by the furious Maenads. The dead and the injured
in Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios are slumped in a corner of plate 77.
And if anything like a popular fervor—not to mention uprising—
appears in Mnemosyne, it seems to be included only in the
carnivalesque releases (plate 32), the resurrected of Michelangelo
or the deified victors (plates 54–56), even the Roman crowds gathered
in 1929 to celebrate the concordat between Pope Pius XI and the
dictator Mussolini (plates 78–79).
It seems, therefore, that Aby Warburg neglected the Pathosformeln
of the political uprising—and this is no doubt because he was,
himself, very afraid of it, unable as he was to distinguish between
the monstra (the formidable depths of impulse) and the astra
(the beneficent leaps of reason). Thus in the Warburgian collections
of fundamental gestures it is difficult to find images of social and
political struggles contemporaneous to him, the 1917 revolution
in Russia or the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. Yet we know how
lucid Warburg was when considering the history of culture as
a “tragedy” or an immense field of conflicts. This is revealed in his works
on the imagery of political propaganda at the time of the Reformation
(since updated by Robert W. Scribner, then broadened in such
exhibitions as Krieg der Bilder, curated by Wolfgang Cillessen). They
coincide with his passionate interest in the iconography of the First
World War, which of course led him to the monstra of a psychosis
into which he fell repeatedly between endless phases of being
totally overwhelmed, contrition, and very violent episodes of what
we could call uprising.6
6.
Badiou 2005, 67–87. Agamben
1992, 58 and 49. Agamben 1978,
15. Didi-Huberman 2002, 115–270.
Warburg 1927–1929, pl. B, 5–6, 32,
39, 41–41a, and 77–79. Warburg
1920, 597–697. Scribner 1981,
passim. Cillessen, ed. 1997,
passim. Korff, ed. 2007, passim.
Didi-Huberman 2011, 175–296.
304
FROM CONTRITION TO UPRISING
Like in Nietzsche and Freud, there is in Aby Warburg’s work an
extraordinary capacity—and even a theory—for inversion
of values applied to the cultural sphere in general. His public work
had begun with the beautiful “uprising” of the mythological Graces
of Botticelli, and the famous Ninfa fiorentina in Ghirlandaio:
nothing more innocent, it seems. Yet, as with Marilyn Monroe’s famous
dress that rises above a subway grating in Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch,
it already had to do with “erotic pursuits” and, therefore, with a
dialectics of desire from which violence was never completely absent,
as in the case of Botticelli’s Spring or Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne.
Furthermore, Warburg’s Ninfa carries with her, over and above her
fundamental grace comparable to that of Freud’s Gradiva, a critical
function capable of “inverting all values” attributed to images and
to gestures in the traditional practices of historians or art historians.
The “light step of the servant girl,” with her moving “imaginary breeze”
in the fresco by Ghirlandaio, brings with it, then, something like a great
critical wind, or a kind of methodological storm destined to revolutionize
our historical and philosophical approach to images and gestures.
Warburg had immediately understood that gestures have a
remarkable ability to reverse or overturn: physical inversions, while
maintaining their general meaning (as with those caresses that
become violence within a loving gestus), or inversions of meaning
while maintaining their general form. This is the case studied by
Warburg in 1927, when he showed the survival of the gesture of the
Niobids in that of Andrea del Castagno’s David: a survival doubled
with an inversion of meaning, since in one case the gesture indicates
the state of the vanquished, the approaching death, while in the
other case it indicates that of the victor and approaching triumph
( fig. 11). Plate 42 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, for its part, dealt not
only with the iconography of the lament, but rather it bore even in
its title—as well as in its montage—the more profound and dialectical
idea of an “energetic inversion of the pathos of pain” (Leidenspathos
in energetischer Inversion); that which Eisenstein had masterfully
staged in Battleship Potemkin through an “energy inversion”
of the contrition before the body of the sailor Vakulinchuk into
the uprising of an entire people.
It is remarkable, then, that the “testamentary” plate of the
Mnemosyne Atlas—on which Warburg was still working when he died
in October 1929—should have been presented as both an archaeological
and prophetic questioning of absolute powers in politics: on the one
305

fig. 11
Aby Warburg, Lamentation, 1927.
Detail of a plate from Urworte leidenschaftlicher
Gebärdensprache (Primeval vocabulary
of passionate gesticulation), exhibition presented
at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,
Hamburg.
306
7. would call it tragic? This is because what makes us rise up is detached
Warburg 1893, 597–697. Warburg
1900, 198–210. Didi-Huberman
2012, 177–206. Didi-Huberman
2015, passim. Warburg 1925–1929,
88–89. Warburg 1927–1929, pl. 42
and 79. Didi-Huberman 2016,
169–395. Schoell-Glass 1998,
215–346. Warnke 1973, passim.
Warnke 1986, 796–804. Warnke
2011, 280–287. Herding, ed. 1992,
passim. Herding and Reichardt
1989, passim. Kemp 1973, 249–270.
Bredekamp 1975, passim.
Bredekamp 1999, passim. Tanis
and Horst 1993, passim. Erben
1999, 231–263. Erben 2011, 103–
111. Frank 1999, 264–275. Janzing
2003, 51–65. Diers 1997, passim.
Didi-Huberman 2013, 77–114.
307
hand, the throne of Saint Peter (a theocratic emblem) and,
on the other, the triumph of Mussolini (a fascist hero). Between the
two, an allusion to the entire history of Western anti-Semitism,
which made the work of Warburg, according to Charlotte Schoell-Glass,
seem like a genuine plea for a “politics of the spirit” (Geistespolitik).
It should not be surprising that, far from the pseudo-innocence
of Botticelli’s nymphs, Warburg’s methodology found its most fertile
use in what German disciples of the author of Mnemosyne ended up
calling a political iconology, as we can see in the creation of a library,
beginning with Martin Warnke up to Uwe Fleckner, dedicated precisely
to these problems inside the walls of Warburg’s house in Hamburg.
Around Martin Warnke’s pioneering works on iconoclasm and
the role of images in political conflicts, we have seen Klaus Herding go
through the history of revolutionary propaganda, Wolfgang Kemp
create the iconology of the “multitude,” Horst Bredekamp interpret
“visual strategies” at the time of Jan Hus and Thomas Hobbes,
James R. Tanis and Daniel Horst collect images from the time of the
Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), Dietrich Erben study figurative
production at the heart of Masaniello’s uprising in Naples (1647–48),
Christoph Frank examine the image of the Fronde (1648–53), Godehard
Janzing discover the “figure of the partisan” in the representations
of war in Goya, and Michael Diers develop this type of analysis for the
whole contemporary period. All in all, different ways to recognize in
figures—in the visual history of peoples and their gestures—a capacity
to make tangible the very dynamics of real or imagined uprisings.7
IN ORDER TO THROW YOUR SUFFERING OVERBOARD
Our desires are of course what make us rise up. But why are our desires
intent on becoming aggravated in the uprising? Why not calmly await
the hoped-for satisfaction? Why are our desires deployed almost always
in rupture, in a forcing of limits and of such an acute anxiety that we
from the depths of an inextinguishable pain that is its birthplace, its
place of origin. This place of origin, wrote Georg Simmel, is something
that “humanity … tears loose from itself” and “opposes” through a
“tragic opportunity” that he called, quite simply, culture. Aby Warburg
undoubtedly prolonged, in his exploration of formulae of pathos, the
idea that was dear to Simmel—and Nietzsche too—of an unavoidable
“tragedy of culture.” It happened that he spoke, for example, of his
field of iconological study as a vast “treasury of suffering” (Leidenschatz),
whose images were, to some extent, nuggets or precious stones.
There is a philosophical tradition at work here that makes history
as such a history of the pain of humanity. This is exactly what Walter
Benjamin said in his book on German baroque theater, presented as
a study on the baroque exposition of history as a history of the world’s
sufferings (Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt). The fact that this
suffering was “distanced” from an author like Bertolt Brecht did not
prevent Hannah Arendt from claiming that “what brought Brecht back
to reality and almost killed his poetry was compassion (Mitleid).
When the famine occurred, he rose up with the hunger.” And Arendt
cited these lines from Brecht (whose poetry will have survived,
despite the risks): “I am told: You eat and drink—be glad you do! But
how can I eat and drink when I steal my food from the man who is
hungry, and when my glass of water is needed by someone who is
dying of thirst?” Meanwhile, in Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno did
not neglect to push this dark diagnostic to the full, saying that the
historical dimension of things is nothing other than the expression
of the sufferings of the past.
This element of suffering is so widespread, so easy to observe,
and daily for so many people, that it seems to need mythologies that
would sing its fatality and universality: so, here is poor Atlas under
his immense burden and, at the other end of the world, his brother
Prometheus tied to Mount Caucasus, his viscera being torn out.
We know the mythical explanation for such sufferings: they are
punishments, but we might even say political condemnations. Atlas
and Prometheus made the mistake of rising up against the gods on
Olympus, but here they are tamed for good, that is to say, forever.
From Pagan to Judeo-Christian mythologies we encounter the fate
of Eve, for example: having renounced the eternal satisfactions of
Heaven, she now knows desire and knowledge, but with these she has
gained—we must understand that she is punished—suffering and
mortality. This is how our traditions present things: the gods are the
archè, the beginning and the authority of everything. You will be
punished severely if you violate their eternal laws. But should we not
imagine that some kind of mythological class struggle might begin
again? Should we not imagine an Atlas rising and, by an extraordinary
effort that would suddenly change the course of things, imagine him
throwing his burden overboard? Should one not hope for a Prometheus
unchained returning among men with the great fire that he
transmitted to them? Should one not wish for an Eve delivered from
any guilt and from any obeisance towards her regulatory authority?
Perhaps what Warburg was missing was that “destructive character,”
308
which that anarchist of sorts, Walter Benjamin, for his part, was not
without. But we should be careful: the “destruction” evoked in the
famous text from 1931 is not simply a tabula rasa, the annihilation
of everything, for it clearly contains that element of prophetic memory
and children’s game that Jean Vigo was about to stage in Zero for
Conduct: “The destructive character knows only one watchword: make
room (Platz schaffen). And only one activity: clearing away (räumen).
His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful (jung und heiter).
For destroying rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our
own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the
destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, of his own
condition (Radizierung).”
Clearing away, making “a complete reduction” in our own condition,
making room and letting fresh air into present history: this is what
the “destructive character” does. We must, therefore, in order to rise up,
know how to forget a certain present and, with it, the recent past that
put it in place. But Benjamin also wrote—in the same year or the
next—a magnificent text titled “Excavation and Memory,” in which
he outlined how clearing away our fields of actuality assumes that we
bring to light and discover a certain past that the present state sought
to keep prisoner, unknown, buried, or inactive. In uprisings, in short,
memory burns: it consumes the present and with it a certain past, but
also discovers the flame hidden under the ashes of a more profound
memory. It is childish in that children know very well how to kill
the fathers while reconnecting the thread with the grandfathers and
grandmothers. This is why Benjamin did not exempt his character
from a “historical consciousness,” quite the contrary: “The destructive
character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest
emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a
readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.”
“The destructive character sees nothing permanent,” Benjamin
wrote finally: “But for this reason he sees ways everywhere. Where
others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way.
But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from
it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most
refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at
a crossroads.” Whether Atlas casts off his burden, or Prometheus is
unchained, or Eve becomes autonomous, in every case characters
will find themselves at the crossroads—a crossroads far more
open and dangerous than in the traditional, humanist choice of
Hercules between vice and virtue. When we rise up, there is no simple
309
choice between vice and virtue: there is a “swarming of what is innumerable holes filling the space ( fig. 12). To exceed, therefore,
possible”— this is Henri Michaux in Miserable Miracle—“as if there to throw your burden over your shoulder, to come out of the hole you
were an opening, an opening which would be an assembling, fell into. But to exceed what, exactly? Yourself, or another? Alone, or
which would be a world, which would be something that might with another? To exceed, towards what? And how to exceed? Is it not
happen, that many things might happen …” mad to claim, as Michaux did here, that “one defenestrated flies away
To rise up, then, would include—as Michaux suggested in at last”? Or should we not ask the question differently, and ask
Face aux verrous (Facing the locks) —throwing your pain overboard ourselves what kind of realism, perhaps, such a phrase could express?
and following, with others, the dynamics of this launching capable To rise up is to break a history that everyone believed to have been
of turning the whole world upside down: heard (in the sense in which we speak of a “case that has been heard,”
meaning “closed”). It is to break the foreseeability of history, to refute
one defenestrated flies away at last the rule that presided, as we thought, over its development or its
one torn from bottom to top preservation. The political reason through which we understand a
one torn apart all over history is often expressed in terms of power (pouvoir): for many, history
one torn apart never again retied … can be summarized in the passages of power (pouvoir) between people.
movements with multiple jets And so the French Revolution was needed, that “historical moment” if
movements in place of other movements ever there was one, for a monarchic power (pouvoir) to find itself
that one cannot show, but that dwell in the mind overturned by a republican power (pouvoir). But let us approach things
of dust from a different angle, from their state of emergence: when a people
of stars rises up (or even, in order for a people to rise up), the people must
of erosion always start from a situation of “unpower.” To rise up would then be
of crumbling the gesture through which the subjects of unpower would give rise,
and of vain latencies. in themselves, to something like a fundamental potency (puissance) that
feast of stains, range of the arms would erupt or re-emerge. A sovereign potency that would be marked,
movements however, by a tenacious unpower, an unpower that would seem to be
one jumps into the “nothing” marked in turn by inevitability: no less than 8,528 uprisings were needed,
turning efforts between 1661 and 1789, to be able to trigger the revolutionary process
being alone, one is a crowd as such, as Jean Nicolas showed in his masterwork, La Rébellion française.
what incalculable number is advancing Uprisings, then: potencies (puissances) of, or in, unpower itself.
increasing, spreading, spreading! Native potencies (puissances), without, as often happens, the least aim
Adieu, fatigue … or idea of power. Thus, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza
Gestures of exceedance de Mayo in Buenos Aires, never sought power (pouvoir), but rather
Of exceedance news of their children and grandchildren ( fig. 13). Yet, they made a
above all of exceedance.8 whole society, and even the political consciousness of everyone around,
rise up. We must recognize, then, as the necessary premise for any
reflections on the form of the uprising, the conceptual distinction
POTENCY AGAINST POWER, OR THE ACT OF DESIRE between potency (puissance) and power (pouvoir). We can already
sense, albeit confusedly, that potency (puissance) relates to the resource
“Gestures of exceedance,” wrote Michaux. I have often considered and the source, as though it indicated the way in which a torrent creates,
drawings that illustrated his works—Emergences-résurgences, by its intrinsic force, the form that the riverbed will take. We can sense
for example—to be like clamors in India ink, uprisings of forms, that power (pouvoir) relates more to the canal or the dam, as a very
riots of graphic signs, public demonstrations of beings that we would different way to grasp, from the source and its resources, an energy
hitherto not have noticed, and who, suddenly, come noisily out of that is more useful, easier to master, and, all in all, easier to govern.
8.
Simmel 1911, 27 and 75. Warnke
1980, 113–186. Benjamin 1928, 103.
Arendt 1966, 235. Adorno 1951, 13.
Benjamin 1931, 541–542.
Benjamin 1932, 576. Michaux
1956, 9. Michaux 1954, 435 and
438–439.

310 311
 Potency, or potentiality, was defined by Aristotle as “the principle
of process and change” in everything. Everything moves, everything
changes, and the intrinsic motor must be called dynamis, potency
or potentiality (puissance). What is very significant for us here is the
example that Aristotle gave when he said, in the same sentence,
that it is for art (technè) to assume such a function for all things that
will be created by the human hand. If we jump forward a few centuries
to when this question was passionately debated, to the Middle Ages
when God, the supreme artist and creator, was questioned regarding
His “omnipotence” (toute puissance)—Can God only do what He does?
Can God only do the best? Can God make the past not have happened?
etc.—and we can return at once to that phrase “human, all too
human” with which, in his conclusion to Traumdeutung, Sigmund
Freud claimed something essential regarding the indestructibility
of psychical potency (potency), that is to say desire: “By picturing our
wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future.
fig. 12
But this future, which the dream pictures as the present, has been
Henri Michaux, Émergences-résurgences
(Emergences/Resurgences), Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972. molded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.”
A drawing from the book. Could we not say regarding the one who rises up what Freud says
here regarding the dreamer? (We should not smile at how little
consistency there is in this: did Freud not tell us just how much the
potency brackets [puissance] of our dreams makes us “rise up”—like
the duende for García Lorca—and transforms, without our knowing,
the very consistency of our most active, most concrete reality?)
Could we not say that the uprising “leads us into the future” by means
of the potency (puissance) of the desires that it realizes, knowing too
that that future—which has become “present” for the one who has
risen up—is itself modeled by the dynamis of the “indestructible desire”
in the image of a past? Whether it was through clinical experiments on
unconscious desire or by his philosophical readings of Spinoza and
Nietzsche, Freud saw in the dream and the symptom how the psychical
dynamis makes them processes that are both different—new, native,
unexpected, unpredictable—and repetitive because they are moved
according to the “eternal return” of our most fundamental desires.
It should not be any surprise that Gilles Deleuze—taking it from
Freud, with a view to taking it quite far—should also have constructed
fig. 13 his thoughts on difference and repetition in the wake of his readings
Silvio Zuccheri, Marcha de la Resistencia, Buenos Aires of Nietzsche and Spinoza. His 1962 book on Nietzsche, already contested
(Resistance march, Buenos Aires), 1983. the idea that the will to potency (puissance) was to be understood in
Photograph.
terms of power (pouvoir), which is what a whole tradition—definitively
refuted by Mazzino Montinari—had tried to suggest. Nietzschean
potency (puissance) is first of all, pathos, “power to be affected”; and

312 313
it is then “an essentially plastic principle,” that is to say an emergence
of forms perpetually metamorphosing; in this way Deleuze was
to call it “creative and giving,” and consequently tending towards
anything but a power over someone else. This “power to be affected”
would reappear in Gilles Deleuze’s great book on Spinoza and the
problem of expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza).
To be affected does not mean to be passive: there is an essential
potency in feeling affected in us, which we see, not quite written out in
black and white, but written out in gestures in films like Battleship
Potemkin or A Grin Without a Cat, and which presides over, preludes all
of our gestures of uprising. It is another way to recognize, after Spinoza,
that potency (potentia) is in no way a power (potestas), while it may be
in tune with that “force of existence” that the author of the Ethics called
conatus or impulse, “effort,” that very energy—an indestructible
energy—of our desires. Spinoza claimed that this energy or potency
(puissance) formed an “actual essence” (actualis essentia) in which, however
paradoxical it may appear in our traditional categories, the potency
(puissance) is the act itself and not its privation. The potency (puissance)
of desire is never exhausted, except in death (or in the death impulse).
It does not oppose the act to which it never ceases to offer new forms.
And itis in such a potency (puissance) that Spinoza found the fundamental
principles for what makes our desires the desires for freedom.
It is in the name of reason—a reason that did not turn its back on
desires or emotions—that Spinoza hated power (pouvoir) exerted as
a form of political tyranny. How then, if God exists, can His power
(pouvoir) reasonably be obliged to serve us or to tyrannize us? Would
it not suffice to have the potency (puissance)—that freedom of potency
which, consequently, also characterizes the human spirit or mind as
such? A government that would seek to “command minds” (and it
seems today that these forms of government are legion) is, according
to chapter twenty of the Theological-Political Treatise, merely a “violent
government,” the most detestable of tyrannies. Poor Spinoza, who
had to experience such institutional terror himself, and who, among
his many braveries, sought to cover the walls of The Hague with
a poster—on which could be read Ultimi Barbarorum, “the worst
of barbarians”—who wanted to raise up peoples’ minds against
the assassinations of the republicans Johan and Cornelis de Witt,
on August 20, 1672. Spinoza, the philosopher of uprising? It was not
until the courageous and rigorous work of Antonio Negri that
the capital disconnection between potency (puissance) and power
(pouvoir) was developed as far as possible, that is to say towards
emancipatory goals to which we will need to return.9
314
9.
Michaux 1972, 588–602. Nicolas
2002, passim. Aristotle [1998], XII,
I, 1019a. 131. Boulnois, ed. 1994,
21–66. Freud 1900, 615. Montinari
1972–1982, passim. Deleuze 1968a,
passim. Deleuze 1962, 50, 62–63,
and 85. Deleuze 1968b, 83–96,
and 217–234. Deleuze 1970,
101–109. Spinoza 1675, III, 6–7
(217). Alquié 1959, 347–368.
Ramond 1994, 129–172. Revault
d’Allonnes and Rizk, ed. 1994,
passim. Sportelli 1995, passim.
Rovere 2010, 2–6 and 105–141.
Karaoui-Bouchoucha 2010,
passim. Spinoza 1670, 896–897.
Negri 1981, passim. Negri 1992,
passim.
315
DUENDE OF TRANSGRESSION
So in 1921 we could read, all over Europe, this impertinent and
optimistic phrase: Dada raises everything! After the inaugural gesture
of the Dadaists, it is on the potency (puissance) and the indestructibility
of desire that Surrealism founded its own poetical and political
tendency towards uprising. As though Une vague de rêves (A wave of
dreams), the title of a work by Aragon published in 1924, surged onto
peoples’ minds in order to “win the revolution of forces of drunkenness”
and of the unconscious, as Walter Benjamin showed so well from 1929
on: “Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom.
The Surrealists have one. They are the first to liquidate the sclerotic
liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced
that ‘freedom, which on this earth can be bought only with a thousand
of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness
without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts.’”
This is what Benjamin finally called “poetic politics” (dichterische
Politik) which, beyond the familiar injunctions of the Communist
Manifesto, founded the possibility of an “anthropological materialism”
(anthropologischer Materialismus) capable of grasping—or even
producing—that moment when “revolutionary tension becomes bodily
collective innervation” from its intrinsic potency (puissance), which is
desire and its freely invented “image space” (Bildraum). Thus there
will be successive publications, gathering around André Breton, of
La Révolution surrealists between 1924 and 1929, then of Surréalisme
au service de la Révolution between 1930 and 1933, publications in
which—as shown by authors, following Walter Benjamin, such as
Rosalind Krauss, Michel Poivert, and Clément Chéroux—the
photographic image played a paradigmatic role: the role, we might
say, of an operator of transgression. But no one went as far in this
direction as Georges Bataille regarding visual forms, inner experience,
desire and, even, political economics.
The journal Documents, published in 1929 and 1930, appeared
already like a fireworks display—feux d’artifice, beauty born of
explosions—of forms risen up or unswervingly “rising.” Bataille thus
saw the black dancers in the Blackbirds at the Moulin Rouge as “sleazy
and charming feux follets” (not unlike duendes) who “dance and cry”
as though they were rising up above the “immense cemetery” that
will have been built by their cultural domination ( fig. 14). Dust
in Bataille’s eyes? It does not “rise” exactly the way Marcel Duchamp
and Man Ray had said in 1920: rather, it “rises up” against the order
and the tidiness of the bourgeois houses it continues to haunt in
spite of the “maids” recruited to get rid of it. The large toenails,
photographed for Bataille by his friend Jacques-André Boiffard, come
to the surface on the pages of Documents (in our hands) and rise,
though disproportionate and turgescent like sexual and dangerous
organs. If “the dislocation of forms leads to that of thought”—as
Bataille saw in Picasso—then it would follow that their “lugubrious
game” is as subversive as a writing of Sade called up for the occasion.
And if space is capable of “staying roguish” as Bataille wrote, isn’t it
because it manages to rise up against architecture itself the moment
when, for example, the walls of a prison collapse ( fig. 15)?
Benjamin was quite right, then, to recognize the fecundity of
this “anthropological materialism.” Bataille showed, more than anyone
else, both its relevance and its transgressive value when he went,
in a few lines, from the “deviations of nature” to the uprisings in
Battleship Potemkin—according to a fundamental paradigm that
he called the “dialectics of forms” —in spite of his comparison of man
fig. 14
to a volcano that rises (erection), rises up to project its lava (eruption),
Anonymous, Kanaks from Kroua, Koua-oua, undated. Photograph illustrating André
before letting himself go in a “vertiginous fall.” On the ethnological Schaeffner’s article “Les ‘Lew Leslie’s Black Birds’ au Moulin Rouge” (Lew Leslie’s
level, from 1933 on, Bataille made potlatch the principle of an Blackbirds at the Moulin Rouge), Documents, 1929, no. 4, 223.
“expenditure” envisaged as “debauchery” and “rising of pleasure”
over and above any utility—which he would call an “insubordination
of material facts” against the fixed order of things reduced to their
exchange value. Thus, for him, experience in the radical sense then
has the value of an uprising against any rules imposed. Such is
the “potency of unpower” that is inherent in sacrifice—that “joy facing
death” Bataille often invoked—and, above all, in the gesture of revolt.
But what revolt exactly?
Firstly, it is the revolt carried out as a counterattack against fascism
between 1932 and 1939. Bataille participated in the works of the
Democratic Communist circle directed by Boris Souvarine, and in 1933
examined the “psychological structure of fascism” before editing Contre-
attaque with André Breton, a journal in which he argued for “violent
outbursts of potency (puissance)” in the streets against the “impotence”
of political hesitations facing fascist movements. In the context of the
Collège de Sociologie, between 1937 and 1939, he would seek a position
that was neither fascist nor bourgeois, nor communist, by focusing
—in the footsteps of Marcel Mauss—on developing what he then called fig. 15
a Sociologie sacrée du monde contemporain, founded entirely on a Anonymous, Collapse of a prison in Columbus, Ohio, 1930.
philosophical and political notion of the “heterogeneous.” These were Photograph illustrating Georges Bataille’s article “Espace” (Space)
in Documents, 1930, no. 1, 42.
agitated episodes in Georges Bataille’s political course before the
Second World War, on which specialists have not finished commenting.
In any case, it is in the retreat and silence of writing that, between 1939

316 317
and 1945, Bataille sought the duende of revolt deep within himself.
It is the period of the Coupable (the “guilty”), in which human
existence was said—given the state of war—to have risen to the
“summit of a disaster”; then of Inner Experience, in which he attempted
to tell about his “journeys to the ends of the possible” from a “critique
of dogmatic servitude” inherent in traditional religious ideologies
and mysticisms. Consequently, what is it that makes us rise up so
radically in the types of experiences described by Georges Bataille
at that time? Something that “rises within.” A hitting spirit of sorts that
does not overrun as such but exceeds everything, “like in a fall where
one shouts out.” It is “something immense, exorbitant [that] frees
itself in every way with the noise of a catastrophe,” of telescoped
trains or violent riots. Here, for Bataille, is what could be “the most
profound revolution”: an experience in which time itself becomes
“unhinged.”
Once again, we are close to Nietzschean potency (puissance) as well
as the duende according to García Lorca. Was Bataille not, precisely in
this period, in his text on Nietzsche titled Volonté de chance, one of
the first to understand the innocence and playfulness of Nietzschean
potency (puissance)? That Dionysian dance is a real potency (puissance),
that baile jondo that raises souls and bodies far from any “will to power
(pouvoir).” It should be no surprise to see that in 1945—the year
he attempted to tear Nietzsche away from his use by nationalists and
fascists—Georges Bataille returned to the duende as a fundamental
political potency (puissance), one which, close to an “ethos of revolt”
that inspired French Surrealism, led him from Guernica to the peñas
flamencas and to anarchist villages in Andalusia, things that he wished
to call “Free Spain,” even while Europe was freed from Nazism yet
Franco ruled Spain, more than ever, with an iron fist.
Naturally, then, Bataille, after Nietzsche and Warburg, was fascinated
by the immoderation or the excess of Dionysian processions as
potencies (puissances) unfamiliar to any form of government or power
(pouvoir): “It is necessary for me to represent the divinity Dionysus
as the strangest with regard to the need to imbue the divinity
with authority. … It would seem to be the divine in its purest state,
which has not been altered by the obsession with eternalizing a given
order. The divine in Dionysus is the opposite of the Father of the
gospel: he is omnipotent, he is the innocence of the instant …
Poetry—which he embodies—is not the melancholia of the poet,
nor the ecstasy of the silence of a solitary person. It is not the isolated
person but rather the crowd, being less than a being and more of an
overturned barrier. The air around him is filled with strident cries,
318
10. Eroticism.10
Le Bon, ed. 2005, 326, and 333.
Aragon 1924, passim. Benjamin
1929, 215, and 217. Breton et al.,
eds. 1924–1929, passim. Breton
1930–1933, passim. Krauss 1985,
197–235. Poivert 2006, passim.
Bajac and Chéroux, eds. 2009,
20–61. Didi-Huberman 1995,
passim. Bataille 1929a, 186.
Bataille 1929b, 197. Bataille 1929c,
200–204. Bataille 1929d, 212.
Bataille 1930a, 227. Bataille 1930b,
228–230. Bataille 1930c, 11–47.
Bataille 1933a, 302–320. Bataille
1933b, 339–371. Bataille 1932–
1939, passim. Bataille and Breton,
eds. 1935–1936, passim. Hollier,
ed. 1979, 245–251. Bataille 1938b,
passim. Marmande 1985, 39–126.
Surya 1992, 353 89–93, 195–233,
266–277, 318–330, and 385–387.
Kunz Westerhoff 2013, 30–42.
Pic 2013, 81–109. Besnier 2014,
passim. Bataille 1939–1944, 241.
Bataille 1943, 15–17, 19, and 58–59.
Bataille 1945a, passim. Bataille
1945b, 17–18. Bataille 1945c, 24–25.
Bataille 1945d, 11–24. Didi-
Huberman 2008, 147–177. Bataille
1946, 68. Bataille 1948, 322–331.
Bataille 1947a, 405. Bataille 1949,
28–33, and 79. Bataille 1951a
74–103. Bataille 1957, 35–162.
319
laughter, kisses, when the smoking torch of the night veiling
the faces lights the …! Because there is nothing that the mad procession
does not trample.” As in the Andalusian celebrations, it would be
necessary every time to recreate the Dionysian mix of religious ecstasy
and the “drunkenness of taverns.”
Who better than Bataille to have expressed the transgressive
value of desire as the potency (puissance) of uprising. It is significant,
for example, that in L’Alleluiah, written in 1947, he was able to describe
sex acts with visual close-ups—“sex organs copulating like naked
“guenilles,” some bald, others like pink caves”—illustrated also with
sound close-ups: yet, it is only rumors of riots (“rumeurs d’émeutes”),
he said. From there, political economy itself (of commerce and
conflicts inherent in human societies) is entirely regulated according to
a psychical economy of fantasies, desires, and impulses. Hence
the crucial place given to a notion like “expenditure.” It is in the same
movement, therefore, that the two parts of La Part Maudite
(The Accursed Share) were written, the first part concerned with an
economic history of expenditure—or “consumption”—and the second
with a cultural history of eroticism. In each case, it is a question
of the same “exuberance,” the same “revolt,” the same “exceeding
energy,” and the same “transgression,” all of which are notions
that Bataille was to return to scrupulously in 1957, in his text
THE TIME OF THE REVOLT
In 1951, Albert Camus’s L’homme révolté (The Rebel) was published,
with its well-known existentialist phrase: “I rebel—therefore we exist.”
To rebel is a mix of refusal (of the current state of things) and of
assent (regarding a future movement of things). “What is a rebel?
A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself.”
The rebel is, above all, the one who says yes to a desire, the desire to
make an about-turn, to be a turncoat: “In the etymological sense,
the rebel is a turncoat. He acted under the lash of his master’s whip.
Suddenly he turns and faces him. He chooses what is preferable to
what is not. Not every value leads to rebellion, but every rebellion
tacitly invokes a value.” It is in this way, Camus wrote, that “an
awakening of conscience, no matter how confused it may be, develops
from any act of rebellion” when, awakening, it “liberates stagnant
waters and turns them into a raging torrent.”
The time of the revolt would then be the time of a desiring present,
of a protended present, set in motion towards the future by an about-
turn: a present that challenges itself from the inside through the
potency (puissance) of desire which escapes from it. Camus suggested
that this is exactly how time becomes, and how history is constituted:
“The history of man, in one sense, is the sum total of his successive
rebellions.” It is also the history of their betrayed revolts, and the
“Soviet bloc” offered Camus the most striking example: “Dialogue and
personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic,
which are two kinds of monologue. Abstraction, which belongs to the
world of power and calculation, has replaced the real passions, which
are in the domain of the flesh and of the irrational. The ration coupon
substituted for bread; love and friendship submitted to a doctrine and
destiny to a plan; punishment considered the norm, and production
substituted for living creation.” And it is in this way that the Russian
Revolution, unfortunately, turned against the origins of its revolt.
That Camus should speak to us here of “living creation” against any
kind of productivist logic reminds us clearly of the role he wished to
give to artistic creation as the ultimate paradigm of any revolt: “Art
should give us a final perspective on the content of the rebellion,” even
beyond its “metaphysical” foundations (explored in the first part of
the book) or its “historical” incarnations (explored in the central part).
Was Camus recalling the lessons of the Dada and Surrealist avant-
gardes here? Not quite, as we can see in this critique addressed to
the “chief poet” of the Révolution surréaliste: “André Breton wanted,
at the same time, revolution and love, which are incompatible.
Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.” To which
Breton replied that “a few rigged cards have slipped into Camus’s
game.” Before Jean-Paul Sartre violently consummated, in Les Temps
modernes, the political rupture with his old friend.
Georges Bataille, who had already had a dispute, and a harsh one,
with Sartre as well as Breton, was attentive to what was stirred up
by the publication of L’Homme révolté. In 1947, he saw in La Peste
(The Plague) a kind of “slippage,” through which an “ethos of revolt”
could make the novel’s protagonist return to a “depressed ethos.” But,
in 1951, Bataille—as though to reply to the attacks made by Sartre and
Breton—acknowledged L’Homme révolté as “a capital book.” Adding
immediately that “one would need to be blind or to be of bad faith to
deny it,” he seems to suggest the principle protagonists of the polemic:
André Breton in the role of the blind visionary par excellence, and
Jean-Paul Sartre in the role of the philosopher of bad faith. To begin,
then, one must pay homage to an author who was—like Bataille—
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neither a professional philosopher, nor a professional historian,
but who wanted to “grasp the coherence of this excessive and hurried
movement which made the recent centuries a sequence of staggering
destructions and creations.”
But Bataille already exceeds Camus’s humanistic position,
for we have moved, here, from living creation in general to the hard
historical chain of uprisings like so many staggering creations. The
author of La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share), for his part, placed “the
revolt of the oppressed,” who stagger and overturn their state of
submission, on the same level as the “flotsam and jetsam of language,”
which creates the cultural and psychical conditions for political
uprising (the first examples given by Bataille were Sade and Nietzsche).
We understand, then, that the “coherence of these movements” of
revolt is nothing other than a gesture capable of creating by overturning
or of overturning by creating. Bataille acknowledged that André Breton’s
early Surrealism achieved this, as though in order to find a common
ground which, despite the polemics on the surface, would unite
the avant-gardes of the 1920s and the existentialism of the 1940s:
“For Albert Camus, as well as for Surrealism, it is a question of finding
within revolt a fundamental movement in which man fully takes
on his destiny.”
To fully take on this destiny? How difficult a task! How it divides us,
how it exceeds us and twists us around. Bataille would describe
this image with absurd intention: “As though we wanted, through an
act of violence, to tear ourselves out of the morass that linked us and
(the absurdity of this image alone answers the movement) holding
ourselves by the hair, tore us and threw us into a world never seen
before.” But what is the nature of this difficulty (which is also, perhaps,
the source of the debate between Camus and Sartre)? Bataille called it
a dilemma or, better still, “discordances of revolt”: “It seems often, with
regard to revolts, that there are only whim, sovereignty of unstable
humor, and unrestrainedly multiplied contradictions. In fact, enough
to submit revolt indefinitely to the spirit of submission. This necessity
is inscribed in the destiny of man: the spirit of submission has the
efficiency so lacking in the spirit of in-submission. The revolt leaves
the rebel facing a dilemma that depresses him: if it is pure, untreatable,
he renounces the exercising of any power [pouvoir], and pushes
impotence [impuissance] to the point of nourishing facilities of
unrestrained language; if it participates in a search for power [pouvoir],
it links up with the spirit of submission. Hence the opposition between
the man of letters and the politician, the former a rebel at heart,
and the latter a realist.”
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It is not difficult to recognize, in all of these “discordances,” the
fundamental opposition between potency (puissance) and power
(pouvoir). There is indeed within potency something that Bataille calls
“the first movement of full immoderation,” which is the movement
of insubordination or transgression; while power (pouvoir), even for the
one who exerts it, assumes a logic of submission and of imprisonment
in its rules. Yet it is neither as a slave nor as a master that one must act,
but rather as a rebel: and even if the rebel finds him or herself “in the
most equivocal situation,” as Bataille said in 1952, in a conference titled
“Le non-savoir et la révolte” (The unknowing of the revolt). Perhaps the
affair concerning The Rebel gave Bataille, in the end, the opportunity
to imagine, beyond Warburg’s Atlas or Camus’s Sisyphus, the radical
gesture of an Atlas rising who, recognizing the weight of things, would
refuse it just as easily by throwing it far away. “It is essential for people,”
said Bataille to André Gillois, “to manage to destroy that servility to
which they are tied, by the fact that they built their world, the human
world, a world to which I hold, a world that gives me life, but that
nonetheless carries with it a kind of load, something infinitely heavy
that is found in all of our anxieties and that must somehow be lifted.”
In 1958, in his unpublished notes for Le Pur Bonheur (Pure happiness),
Bataille wrote: “The infraction is all that counts.”11
MASSES AND POTENCY
So, there is happiness in violating the rules. Perhaps, then, the potency
(puissance) of transgression (a word that primarily means, the crossing,
despite everything, of a closed border, disobedience towards a rule
that limited our freedom of movement) would give its style to desire.
And perhaps the infraction (a word that means, primarily, breaking
a frame or shackles) would give its movement to desire, though its
form may be broken, breaking, or zigzagging. It is no doubt only a first
approximation regarding the gestures of uprising: potency (puissance)
as desire or desire revealing, in the end, its potency (puissance).
In historical uprisings, this potency animates, they say, the masses. This
is a word whose history—like the history of the word people—seems to
have been condemned to the unanimity of revolutionary slogans as
well as to the authoritarianism of totalitarian governments.
As a result, the masses, the crowds, frighten: they even frighten the
psychoanalyst (Sigmund Freud) when he questions the possibilities
of a “psychology of the masses,” just as they frightened the
cosmopolitan writer (Elias Canetti) when he risked writing an 11. developing a genuine passion for understanding, which was supported
Camus 1951, 28, 19, 20, 23, 78, 78,
120, and 253. Breton 1951, 1049.
Sartre 1952, 90–125. Bataille
1947b, 248. Bataille 1951b,
149–160. Bataille 1952a, 212.
Bataille 1952b, 230–236. Bataille
and Gillois 1951, 98. Bataille 1958,
530.
322
anthropology of the potency of the masses (Masse und Macht).
Freud, of course, started—but, for once, he did not go far enough—with
positivist and reactionary studies, like those of Honoré Antoine Frégier
(1840) or Scipio Sighele on The Criminal Crowd. The latter, like the
criminologists of his time such as Cesare Lombroso or Alphonse
Bertillon, attempted to find the laws for a police theory of “complicity”
that would open onto a whole arsenal of repressive measures aiming
to anticipate and to eventually get rid of any kind of popular uprising.
Today, these works read merely like manuals of police paranoia.
As in the classic book by Gustave Le Bon titled Psychologie des foules
(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular) (1895)—on which Freud leaned—the
masses remain, more or less, in this type of discourse, condemned
to be seen either as “beasts” (imbeciles) that can easily be led by the
nose, exploited, or sent to slaughter, or as “beasts” (animals) that must
be put in a cage because they are wild, dangerous, and enraged.
Freud saw in the masses a desire that he called, paraphrasing Le Bon,
“impulsive” and “changing” (and of course hysteria is not far off):
“Nothing about it is premeditated. It may desire things passionately,
but never for long; it is incapable of any long-term intention. It cannot
abide any delay between its desire and realization of the thing desired.
It has a sense of omnipotence; for the individual in the mass the
concept of impossibility vanishes.”
Freud was the contemporary and the overwhelmed spectator
of warlike nationalism between 1914 and 1918, and then of the great
National Socialist masses in Munich, Nuremberg, and Vienna. This
is probably one of the reasons why he felt incapable of detecting
an authentic “potency” (puissance) of desire at work in society at the
time: in it he saw only the “discontent” and immoderation of
an “omnipotence,” the Allmacht. The tidal wave of nationalism and of
totalitarianism made him envisage the psychology of masses according
to a paradoxical agglomeration of a “gregariousness” (Herdentrieb)
and a “devotion to the ideal” (Hingebung an ein Ideal): the worst of
the monstra on the one hand, the worst of the astra on the other.
Perhaps the masses follow their instinct like a watchword and follow
the watchwords of their leaders like an instinct inherent in their very
constitution. Hence the radical pessimism expressed in 1929, at the
beginning of Civilization and Its Discontent, regarding values—or, rather,
“false standards” (falschen Maßstäben)—which, according to Freud,
almost inevitably corner the masses, societies, and collectives in general.
Elias Canetti shared this fundamental pessimism, which came
from the same historical torments. Yet this did not prevent him from
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by his genius for description: the anthropology of Crowds and Power
is presented as a grand phenomenology of the gestures of the crowds.
Starting from the assumption that “there is nothing that man fears
more than the touch with the unknown,” Canetti immediately wonders
what the gesture of liberation might be outside of that fear. Unlike
Georges Bataille, he does not envisage any role for eroticism in
overcoming this fear of touch, for example. He does not envisage
anything other than the socialized crowd: “It is only in a crowd that
man can become free of this fear of being touched [von dieser
Berührungsfurcht erlöst werden kann]. That is the only situation in
which the fear changes into its opposite.” That opposite is effusion
and fusion: the great celebration—however cruel and violent it may
be—of contact between humans.
Canetti describes the masses or the crowds as a formation:
a morphogenesis. “The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing
before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may
have been standing together—five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing
has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is
black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though
streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has
happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be
there where most other people are. There is a determination in their
movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary
curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits
itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is t
here before they can find words for it. This goal is the blackest spot
where most people are gathered. … As soon as it exists at all, it wants
to consist of more people; the urge to grow is the first and supreme
attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach;
anything shaped like a human being can join it. The natural crowd
is the open crowd.”
At the same time as it opens and spreads, the crowd vibrates
rhythmically. It has spasms—as Victor Hugo described so well
in Les Misérables—or has what Canetti calls the “discharge” (Entladung).
The discharge is liberation from any load or burden. This liberty
produces, through its dynamics, something like a reign of equality:
“Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of
distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the
discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. In that density,
where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against
body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an
immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed
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moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people
become a crowd.” Canetti emphasizes, however, what he sees as
the “fundamental illusion” in such a feeling of liberty: “the people who
suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel
equal for ever.” Moreover, Canetti describes that way in which one
hundred thousand people can become one body from which “every
arm is thrust out as though they all belonged to one and the same
creature”: “They all stamp the ground and they all do it in the same
way; they all swing their arms to and fro and shake their heads.
The equivalence of the dancers becomes, and ramifies as, the
equivalence of their limbs. Every part of a man which can move gains
a life of its own and acts as if independent, but the movements are all
parallel, the limbs appearing superimposed on each other. They are
close together, one often resting on another, and thus density is added
to their state of equivalence. Density and equality become one and
the same. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing,
a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all
performing exactly in the same way and with the same purpose.”
It often happens that the crowds dance in a unanimous movement
under the baton of a dictator. But it happens too—as Canetti knows—
that they dance their refusal to be led by the baton. Consequently, they
dance their desire to overturn everything. “Prohibition crowds,” crowds
of “refusal” (Verbotsmassen), wrote Canetti: “A large number of people
together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly.”
The best example is the strike in which “they are equals in relation to
this common moment of starting and stopping work,” which they
generally are not in the hierarchy imposed by their tasks. We can think
also of the “reversal crowds” (Umkehrungsmassen) for which everything
is like a “storming of the Bastille,” that very destruction calling upon
the ultimate, transgressive joy of “feast crowds” (Festmassen).
But the feast will be a cruel one, and even a terrifying one. Canetti
does not seem to have imagined—unlike Eisenstein in Strike, for
example—that an uprising of the masses could be at the same time
fully liberating and innocent. The destiny of uprisings appears to him
to take shape in what he calls “baiting crowds” (Hetzmassen), as though
every riot (emeute) needed to end in the deployment of a pack (meute),
a terrible word that signifies a pack of wolves, hunting dogs, mad
militiamen, or lynch mobs. Canetti does not want to see that a riot
hunts, first of all, what has oppressed it, to throw it literally outside
of itself; whereas a pack only hunts in order to trap a prey that is more
fragile or more a minority than itself. The riot hunts in order to
relinquish and to free itself, while the pack hunts in order to capture
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and to kill another. In Battleship Potemkin, the lamentation scene
transforms into a revolt in which a member of the Black Hundreds—
an extreme far-right anti-Semitic militia that raged throughout
Russia and that fomented the great pogroms of 1905—was lynched
by the crowd. But the surfaces rise up towards the sky as bodies rising
up towards a surplus of life, unlike the “lamenting pack” (Klagemeute)
described by Canetti as a process going from death undergone
to death given.
This is what he calls also the “destructiveness” (Zerstörungssucht),
the principle emotion of any mass movement: “The crowd particularly
likes destroying houses and objects: breakable objects like window
panes, mirrors, pictures and crockery; and people tend to think that
it is the fragility of these objects which stimulates the destructiveness
of the crowd. It is true that the noise of destruction adds to its
satisfaction; the banging of windows and the crashing of glass are
the robust sounds of fresh life, the cries of something new-born. …
But there is more to it than this. In the crowd the individual feels
that he is transcending the limits of his own person. He has a sense
of relief, for the distances are removed which used to throw him back
on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of
distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries.
He wants what is happening to him to happen to others too; and
he expects it to happen to them. An earthen pot irritates him, for it is
all boundaries. The closed doors of a house irritate him. Rites and
ceremonies, anything which preserves distances, threaten him
and seem unbearable. He fears that, sooner or later, an attempt will be
made to force the disintegrating crowd back into these pre-existing
vessels. To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille.”
The crowd is therefore a monster, which is something Aby Warburg
would not have denied. Canetti saw Europe ransacked by totalitarian
masses. As a result, he only understood collective uprisings as preliminary
steps in a process of crushing any “distance” and any authentic freedom.
Historically, the limits of this approach—however admirable it may
have been—were a result of an inability to think about certain
phenomena of riots (émeutes), rather than of packs (meutes), such as
the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 or the Kronstadt Commune
in 1921. It is no surprise that, philosophically speaking, this limit
was expressed by Canetti in his way of understanding the relations
between “force and power” (Gewalt und Macht).
For Canetti, in fact, potency is not at all the opposite of power.
Instead, it appears to him to be a sort of super-power allegorized
by the image of the cat playing with the mouse it has just captured:
326
12. or Raúl Zibechi (who suggests “dispersing power” rather than
Frégier 1840, passim. Sighele 1891,
passim. Sighele 1894, passim. Le
Bon 1895, passim. Freud 1921, 14,
16, and 55–60. Freud 1929, 10.
Canetti 1960, 15, 16, 18, 49, 32, 55,
56, 19–20,
and 281. Saar 2013, 177–179.
Friedrich 1999, passim. Holloway
2002, passim. Zibechi 2005,
passim.
327
“When force gives itself time to operate, it becomes power, but when
the moment of crisis arrives, the moment of irrevocable decision,
it reverts to being pure force. Power is more general and operates over
a wider space than force, it includes much more, but is less dynamic.
It is more ceremonious and even has a certain measure of patience.
The difference between force and power can be illustrated very simply
by the relationship between cat and mouse. The cat uses force to catch
the mouse, to seize it, hold it in its claws and ultimately kill it. But
while it is playing with it another factor is present. It lets it go, allows
it to run about a little and even turn its back; and, during this time,
the mouse is no longer subjugated to force. But it is still within the
power of the cat and can be caught again. If it gets right away it escapes
from the cat’s sphere of power; but, up to the point at which it can
no longer be reached, it is still within it. The space which the cat
dominates, the moments of hope it allows the mouse, while continuing
however to watch it closely all the time and never relaxing its interest
and intention to destroy it—all this together, space, hope, watchfulness
and destructive intent, can be called the actual body of power, or, more
simply, power itself.”
Now, Macht is indeed the German translation for Spinoza’s
potential; but this word suggests to the German ear, spontaneously,
something like the exertion or the possibility of a force, including
military force (as in the Wehrmacht), or a political power (as in
the Machtergreifung, the “seizing of power” claimed by the Nazis).
It will not therefore be inevitably contrasted with Gewalt, which is
the translation for Spinoza’s potestas. We should not be surprised
that Martin Saar, in his study on the politics of Spinoza, should have
critiqued the opposition established by Antonio Negri, and before that
by Gilles Deleuze, between a “power” (pouvoir) and a “potency”
(puissance), which is closer to a German word that appears to be quite
different yet is etymologically related, and that is the word Vermögen.
Elias Canetti’s philosophical and textual system, according to Peter
Friedrich’s detailed analysis, was therefore linguistically prepared,
if I may say, to direct potential towards the political monster, that
mix of power and potency animated by a gregariousness as much as
by a blind obedience to a leader, to an idealized Führer. How, then,
can we find a coherent place for this politics of desire as found
in the work of Georges Bataille, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze,
or Antonio Negri, and even in political thinkers like John Holloway
(who suggests “changing the world without taking power”)
exerting it)?12 
EVEN THE NEWBORN RISES UP
We do not exercise power the moment we rise up. No doubt the task
of “taking” power—of setting it up and exercising it—falls to a
revolution in due form (but exactly what that “due form” might be
is another question). In an uprising we deploy a potency (puissance)
that is both desire and life. Even Kant was ready to accept it and to join
the three words I have just emphasized together: “Life is the faculty
(Vermögen) of a being to act in accordance with laws of the faculty of
desire (Begehrungsvermögen).” This “faculty” or this “potency [puissance]
to desire” will be defined as the dynamic capable of making a
subject rise up so as “to be by means of its representations the cause
of the reality of the objects of these representations”; which means,
its freedom to produce in reality what will have appeared to him
or her in the imagination, under pressure from a desire.
I have just cited a note from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.
It is fitting to add certain developments by Kant in his wonderful
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View regarding, in particular,
desire as the “self-determination of a subject’s power (Kraft) through
the representation of something in the future as an effect of this
representation.” There is, of course, “passion” or “emotion” in every
desire, and it requires the critical use of reason to temper or to direct it
all. If we observe a popular revolt, for example, we understand
how Kant might have considered a “passion” (Leidenschaft) what he
called the penchant or the “tendency towards freedom” (Freiheitsneigung)
that the revolt expresses. But this kind of a passion is not like any
other: it is fundamental, perhaps even a founding passion for the
human subject, to the extent that Kant wished to interpret the newborn’s
cries as the very expression of this tendency for freedom: “Even the
child who has just wrenched itself from the mother’s womb, seems to
enter the world with loud cries, unlike other animals, simply because it
regards the inability to make use of its limbs as constraint, and thus
it immediately announces its claim to freedom [Anspruch auf Freiheit].”
Human life, then, is indeed a desire for freedom. In Kant’s view,
it is the task of reason—and the famous “enlightened” thinkers
of the Aufklärung—to find the legitimate forms for desire. However,
something like a “thrust for freedom”—or Freiheitsdrang as Freud
was to write later—runs through a number of, if not all, Kantian texts.
In the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781, the freedom of reason is
posited as the potential to begin from itself beyond any imposed or
outside determining forces. In the Critique of Judgment, in 1790, the
“freedom of imagination” is justified in the “agreement of the latter
328
with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason.” In the Lose
Blätter, made up of pages taken from posthumous works by Kant and
cited by Rudolf Eisler, political freedom is said to “consist in the fact
that everyone can seek his own salvation according to his own designs,
and that it is, moreover, out of the question that he may be used as
a means [even] for his own happiness by anyone other than himself.”
It is for this reason that the famous text, Towards Perpetual Peace,
published in 1795, would outline the “republican constitution”—
necessary yet uncreated, according to the philosopher—as the
most “sublime” constitution around, agreeing with the principles
of cosmopolitan law and “universal hospitality.” The moment he
introduced the phrase “republican constitution,” Kant interrupted its
elaboration with a long note on what founded it, in his view, which
is “freedom by right” (rechtliche Freiheit). Popular opinion is incorrect
in its reasoning when it defines this freedom as the authorization
to do anything you want, so long as you do not cause any harm to
anyone else. Kant saw that this cliché contained a sophism, or, rather,
a tautology (“one does not cause harm to anyone … so long as one
does not cause harm to anyone” when one must, on the contrary,
implement the principle according to which freedom “is the right
or privilege of not having to obey any laws except those that I could
have consented to.”
This is indeed how the “state of peace” must be created (gestiftet):
in other words, it is in no way a state of nature. Consequently,
the rights of citizens to rise up against a despotic government will not
be considered “natural” either, as Rousseau had claimed in a famous
passage from his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of
Inequality Among Men: “The despot is only master for as long as he is
the strongest; as soon as he can be expelled, he has no right to protest
against violence. The insurrection which ends with the strangling
or dethronement of a sultan is just as lawful an act as those by which
he disposed the day before of the lives and property of his subjects.”
Kant cools our enthusiasm in reading these lines by Rousseau, for, in
“The Doctrine of Right” from the Metaphysics of Morals, written in 1797,
he went so far as to refute the legitimacy of a “right to rebellion”
(Aufruhr, rebellio), as well as that of the “right to sedition” (Aufstand,
seditio), even if it gives a tension—a compromise, or perhaps a form
of self-censorship, as Domenico Losurdo suggested—to his own
enthusiasm for the French Revolution.
There are several ways to read a great writer. With the work of
the author of Critique of Practical Reason, it is possible to find
restraining that which engages a certain legalism of reason. But we
329
can also see things more generously, as Françoise Proust did
when she revealed in Kant that “outburst” against reason as a “potency
of freedom.” After 1784, Kant would reply to the famous question
“What is Enlightenment?” by referring to the image of the child placed
under the authoritarian tenderness of tutors: the child’s “state of
nature” is in no way savage, but rather it is the state of an imprisoned
subject, whereby the “docile creatures” have been “prevented from
taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they
are tied [by their parents].” It is exactly the same case with the political
subjects whose governments “show them the danger if they try
to walk unaided.” And yet “they would certainly learn to walk
eventually,” Kant affirms, even if the jealous concern of their
governments intimidates them and “usually frightens them off from
further attempts.”
It is in this way that Kant claims the term “Enlightenment”
(Aufklärung) as an expression, if not of an uprising in the strict sense,
then, at least, of a liberating emergence: “man’s emergence from his
self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own
understanding without the guidance of another.” In The Conflict of
Faculties, in 1798, the famous “progress of human reason” was to be
thought about only in the dynamics of such an “emergence”—a notion
in which we can already sense the harmonics of evasion, escape, of
crossing borders, of transgression out of the “leading-strings,”
everything from which uprisings can be inferred. The most pressing
philosophical question, before even knowing “how to direct one’s
thoughts,” would be the question of “how to bring thought itself” out
of that immaturity or guardianship that precedes and oppresses it.
The question then becomes, again in the Conflict of the Faculties,
how to give content and a form to our desire for freedom. How, Kant
asked, should we give ourselves the “prediction of free actions”? It is a
difficult question. We can predict the revolution of the stars thanks to
the laws of astronomy, but who can predict that of peoples in history?
What German philosopher was not surprised by the event of the
French Revolution? Moreover, what is an “event”—the taking of the
Bastille, for example—when the one who observes it from Königsberg
does not know what outcome to expect? What is a historical event that
bears the mark of such an “emergence” and that functions, then, as
an integral “historical sign” (Geschichtszeichen)? This, Kant claimed, is
not to be judged only by the current efficiency of the event—meaning,
whether or not and by whom the Bastille has been taken—but by
a complete temporal beam whose “sign” must be the bearer: “signum
rememorativum demonstrativum pronosticum” wrote Kant in Latin;
330
13. with regard to Foucault’s eloquently formulated question: “What is the
Kant 1788, 7 note 4, 54. Kant
1798a, 149 and 168. Kant 1781–
1787, 535. Kant 1790, 288. Eisler
1929, II, 626. Kant 1795, 7, 11, 6, and
10. Rousseau 1755, 135. Kant 1797,
55. Losurdo 1983, passim. Renaut
and Sosoe 1991, 369–387. Proust
1991, 5–38. Kant 1784, 43–44. Kant
1798b, 149–153. Foucault 1984,
32–50.
331
that is to say, with the authority given to the most fundamental
precepts. In other words, a sign is not “historical” unless it is those
three things: carrying a memory, showing an actuality, and announcing
a desire, which Kant called a fundamental “tendency of the human
race viewed in its entirety.”
It is clear that for Kant the French Revolution provided the major
“historical sign” of its time, memorial of very long-term efforts towards
emancipation—the innumerable uprisings during the Ancien Régime
or the memory of the Roman Republic, for example; it was current in
its political adventures; and it was prognostic in its capacity to open a
universal future for this “tendency of the human race” to emerge from
its plurisecular immaturity and guardianship. It is here that we see
the return of that fundamental “enthusiasm” that the peoples’ uprising
is capable of producing beyond itself—beyond even, says Kant,
its factual success or failure: “The Revolution of a gifted people which
we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may
be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man,
were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time,
would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost—this
revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who
are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that
borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught
with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than
a moral predisposition in the human race. This moral cause inserting
itself [in the course of events] is … first, that of the right, that a nation
must not be hindered in providing itself with a civil constitution,
which appears good to the people themselves.”
Michel Foucault commented on these lines and proposed to join
the question “What is Enlightenment?” with the following, equally
burning question: “What is Revolution?” His intention was to insist
on what Kant called the moral predisposition of humanity, which
increases the enthusiasm in all hearts when a people rises up against
tyranny—and regardless of the outcome, whether great or small,
successful or failed, of the event which is then understood as an
uprising of historical time itself. An uprising whose potency (puissance)
would need to be imagined—potency in the sense of force and
virtuality—rather than merely the capacity to seize power (pouvoir):
“The Revolution, in any case, will always risk falling back into the rut,
but as an event … its existence attests to a permanent virtuality that
cannot be forgotten.” It is for this memory to reconfigure our desires
current field of possible experiences?”13
DESIRE, STRUGGLE, DOMINATION, RECOGNITION
Anyone who examines the question of desire, in the context of Western
modernity, cannot avoid returning to Hegel. It is in the chapter in the
Phenomenology of Spirit on the constitution of “self-consciousness” that
we see desire irrupt. The Other is presented in front of the Self, and
the philosopher will tell us what happens then, even if it appears to
be slightly abstract. On the one hand, writes Hegel, “self-consciousness
is thus certain of itself only by superseding (durch das Aufheben) this
Other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life”;
on the other hand, that “superseding” is not entirely a superseding,
since it is a dialectical operation of “raising” (Aufhebung) that signals
towards the constantly reviewed force of “desire” (Begierde): “Thus self-
consciousness, by its negative relation to the object, is unable to
supersede it; it is really because of that relation that it produces the
object again, and the desire as well. It is in fact something other than
self-consciousness that is the essence of desire.”
The fact that this relation of desire is at the same time a principle
element, a reproducible one, and one that can be launched ad
infinitum in the tension that it creates, reveals its fecundity, its power,
and, as Freud was to say, its “indestructibility.” But we know too what,
in the Hegelian drama, this relation of desire becomes: a “life and
death struggle” (Kampf auf Leben und Tod), a struggle through which
the potency (puissance) of desire engages with the most prototypical
of power (pouvoir) relations: the relation of “domination and servitude”
(Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) in which, of course, the position of the
master will be defined as that of “potency [puissance] that dominates”
the Other. We might be surprised, in Spinoza’s terms, when such a
“potency” (puissance) (Macht), being dissatisfied with expressing itself
by itself or in the desire that links it to the Other, should finally, as
Hegel wrote, be raised “above” (über) the Other. Doesn’t an authentic
desire place us at the same height as, and on an equal level with,
the Other?
It is, however, in a different—and crueler—direction that things
go in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it becomes the fate of potency
(puissance) to be raised by a relation of power (pouvoir), and the fate
of desire to be raised by a relation of domination. What threw us,
formerly, towards one another and with one another, now throws
us against one another or over one another. But this implacable
dialectics would finally see its moment of reconciliation: Hegel
calls it “recognition” (Anerkennung). It is when the Self and the Other
recognize each other and initiate the “duplicating of self-consciousness
332
in its oneness.” In the end, therefore, the struggle and the relation of
domination-servitude occurs in “this moment of recognition, viz. that
the other consciousness sets aside its own being-for-self” and attains
the ethical status par excellence—and even the political status—of
being for the other. It is an innate moment for all human and social
existence: as though Hegel’s grand constructions of the System of Ethical
Life and the Principles of the Philosophy of Right could be developed
from there.
The philosophical narrative of the Phenomenology of Spirit is so
seminal—or so abyssal—that it has been read, interpreted, and torn
apart in the most diverse ways. Should we, in particular, read this text
from the point of view of potency (puissance) or of power (pouvoir)?
In other words, are domination and recognition aspects of or
counterparts to desire? Or inversely, are desire and recognition aspects
of or counterparts to domination? Alexander Kojève, in his famous
seminar on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939 at the École Pratique
des Hautes Études—a seminar that was attended by the French
intelligentsia, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Raymond
Aron, Jean Hippolyte, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roger Caillois,
Michael Leiris, Raymond Queneau, and Henry Corbin—redirected
his reading, in light of the political situation, towards power (pouvoir)
and domination, made clear by the exergue to his lessons that he
borrowed from Karl Marx. No doubt, he wrote, “the human being is
formed only in terms of a Desire directed towards another Desire, that
is—finally—in terms of a Desire for recognition.” But the struggle to
the death and the domination-servitude relation will then engage
this desiring potency (puissance) in a relation of force or a relation
of power (pouvoir).
As Judith Butler described in her book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian
Reflections in Twentieth-Century France in 1987—before Michael Roth
in 1988 or Allan Stoekl in 1992—the French reception of Hegel,
although directed by the lessons of Alexandre Kojève, tended
towards an “ontology of desire” rather than a political anthropology
of domination, for example. It is a pattern that we encounter from
Sartre to Derrida, and includes, of course, Jacques Lacan. The latter,
in his famous article from 1960, titled “Subversion of the Subject and
the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” sought to take
at face value the Hegelian dialectic as Kojève explained it in 1933,
when he spoke of a “Desire directed towards another Desire.” Then
he distributed it, to an extent, in the two concomitant directions
of the unconscious, potency (puissance) and the intersubjective power
(pouvoir): unconscious, desire “tied to the desire for the Other,” but
333
initiating also, symbolically, a position of “Absolute Master” for
“the Other as preliminary site of the pure subject of the signifier.”
This is a position taken recently by Slavoj Žižek in his exploration
of Hegel in the light of Lacan, and Lacan in the light of Hegel.
Yet, there is another position available, one that is less “pure”
and more risky, for it leaves many a possibility, plasticity, and even
conceptual erraticism to the imagination, and that is the position
adopted, or rather experimented, demanded, and approached painfully
by Georges Bataille. This is very clear, after numerous sketches that
could already be glimpsed here and there in Documents, through
a text titled “La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne”
(Critique of the foundations of the Hegelian dialectic). Written with
Raymond Queneau for the journal La Critique sociale in March 1932—
before Kojève’s seminar had begun—the context was clearly political.
And yet, it was already a question of playing potency (puissance)
against power (pouvoir). To do this, it became necessary to contest the
philosophical power of ideas developed in systems, even if these ideas
were, as in the case of Engels, notoriously “materialist.” Surrealism
made necessary the renouncing of the certainties of the general idea,
and to reclaim the sovereignty of experience against the authority
of doctrinal constructions. This assumed a return to a younger, more
romantic Hegel: a dreamed Hegel, perhaps, one that in any case
believed in the “fall of the idea” from the moment when he accepted
that negation was not a mere operation of logic, but, as Bataille wrote
later, that it was “at the same time a revolt and a nonsense.”
Five years later, when Kojève was commenting on the imposing
edifice of Hegel’s philosophy of history, Bataille composed the
extraordinary “Lettre à X, chargé d’un cours sur Hegel” (Letter to X, in
charge of a class on Hegel). It was of course addressed to Kojève himself,
and concerned the continuation of a discussion that had perhaps been
severe since, in this letter, Bataille mentioned that he wanted to give
the philosopher his reply to the “trial that you have put me through.”
But it was Bataille, in reality, who was putting the Hegelian system
through a trial that professional philosophers would call absurd or
even mad: “The open wound which is my life—constitutes all by itself
the refutation of Hegel’s system.” This radically subjective position,
regulated on the existential sensation of a wound, paradoxically reveals
a great potency (puissance): it has the very notion of potency
(puissance) at stake, albeit the “potency [puissance] to be affected”
as we find in Nietzsche. That would be negative potency (puissance) as
such, a potency (puissance) that Bataille calls “negativity without use”:
an unrecoverable negativity in the dialectical synthesizing in which
334
the “negation of negation” manages always to reinitiate the reign
of the positive. It is no coincidence that, in a text from February 1938,
Bataille sought to situate this “negative potency [puissance]” around
unconscious desire and around what psychoanalytic experience can
bring to light.
Clearly, this is a rather unconventional reading of Hegel, and
it was enough to irritate numerous philologists and philosophers all
too familiar with Hegel’s text—notably because they were no longer
surprised by the asperities of his language or the boldness of his
theoretical imagination. Thus, Jürgen Habermas criticized a relation
to Hegel in Bataille that was regulated on “his own efforts to carry
the radical critique of reason with the tools of theory.” Furthermore,
it was only made worse by the fact that he did this through writing,
in the way that his reader is “assaulted by obscenity, gripped by
the shock of the unexpected and unimaginable, is jolted into the
ambivalence of loathing and pleasure.” It is difficult, then, to join Inner
Experience by Bataille with The Theory of Communicative Action by
Habermas, The Accursed Share (Bataille) with Between Facts and Norms:
Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Habermas),
or The Tears of Eros with Justification and Application: Remarks on
Discourse Ethics. Habermas seeks norms for social relations where
Bataille invoked the enormity of a desire understood both as
a matrix and an irreducible negativity of social relations and political
standards.
It is a new return to Hegel that drives the work of Axel Honneth—
major figure, after Habermas, of the Frankfurt School today. A study
from 2008, titled “From Desire to Recognition,” clearly shows the
distance that separates the French reception of Hegel, directed by a
wide anthropology of desire, and this new approach destined to make
recognition itself the central concept of social, moral, and political
sciences. While Lacan, for example, defined desire and recognition
very strongly in his reading of Hegel and in his reconceptualization
of psychoanalysis, Honneth firmly separates them, making desire a
mere “failure” of self-consciousness, a process of “self-referentiality”—
which is very surprising—or “satisfaction” of “animal or ‘erotic’…
organic needs”; something well beyond, in fact, any ethical or political
sphere. For Honneth, desire would be purely “egocentric,” deprived of
that reciprocity that characterizes recognition. It is essentially a matter
of knowing whether recognition is a moment that is inherent to desire
itself (as Kojève, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault thought) or if,
as Honneth thinks, recognition can only be understood as separated
from desire as such.
335
This choice of paradigm, in Honneth’s thinking, implies an explanation
with the contributions of the post-Hegelian and Marxist traditions
—focused, notably, on Georg Lukács, inventor of the concept of
“reification”—and a particular attention to the journey that unites,
in Hegel himself, the struggle with recognition, something that is
therefore also, as Honneth calls it, a struggle for recognition. In this
conflict—visible everywhere in life in society—Honneth pertinently
identified what he called the “pathologies of freedom,” even if this
means redefining, by this choice of words, the relation to the histories
of Critical Theory and of Freudian psychoanalysis; even if this means
suggesting that we should—but who would that life-saving “we” be?—
cure such pathologies rather than rise up against the unjust and
aberrant norms of the societies we inhabit. The fateful reification of
consciousness and social relations, on which Honneth wrote an entire
study, would be the central “pathology” against which the ethical norms
and the “right to freedom” would stand up. We get the impression,
however, that the conflict, introduced in a remarkable way by Honneth
in his interpretation of the “struggle for recognition,” leaves room, in
the end, for a consensual issue of “recognition of norms” intended to
“institutionalize social freedom,” as explained recently by Louis Carré
or the researchers brought together in 2014 by Mark Hunyadi.
But what is a recognition when unilateral positions of domination
persist? The Hegelian horizon of reconciliation, with which the master
also ends up “recognizing” his or her slave, is far from the real historical
world in which our masters are very unwilling to recognize or
acknowledge the smallest amount of dignity in their slaves. What, then,
in these circumstances, does the notion of ethical norms become,
a notion that is inherent in the theories of Habermas and Honneth?
Paul Audi explained it recently when he wrote that “the issue could
be summarized as follows: what is to be said about the respect (and,
therefore, the recognition) that we owe to those who say no to the
common rule or general regulations, and who experience their constitutive
freedom in the subversion of the norms in effect, or in the refusal to
reinforce the armature of the social and political order that they cannot
tolerate and that oppresses them?” Shouldn’t this respect and this
recognition be torn from those who refuse from their master position?14
POLITICAL EROS
Would it not be necessary, then, to rise up—a gesture of desire, and
of refusal too—for even the least amount of recognition on the part
336
14. Frankfurt School more or less agreed to undertake a relentless critique
Hegel 1807, I, 109, 114, 112 and 116.
Hegel 1802–1803, passim. Hegel
1821, passim. Hegel 1822–1830,
passim. Kojève, 1933–1939, 7 and
14. Butler 1987, 61–100 and 175–
238. Roth 1988, passim. Stoekl
1992, passim. Lacan 1960, 683.
Žižek 2012, passim. Bataille 1932,
279. Bataille 1937, 369–371.
Bataille 1938a, 321–322.
Habermas 1985, 237. Habermas
1981, passim. Habermas 1991,
passim. Habermas 1992, passim.
Honneth 2008, 76–90. Honneth
1981, 80–96. Honneth 1989, 23–37.
Honneth 1990, 79–90. Honneth
1992, passim. Honneth 1994,
39–100. Honneth 2001a, passim.
Honneth 2001b, 151–180.
Honneth 2001c, 231–238.
Honneth 2003a, 231–252.
Honneth 2003b, 325–348.
Honneth 2005, passim. Honneth
2006, 263–288. Honneth 2011,
passim. Carré 2013, 101–113.
Hunyadi, ed. 2014, passim.
Audi 2015, 26.
337
of those in front you who want to preserve their dominant position?
In a recent preface to the French edition of his texts, Axel Honneth
emphasized that in the French readings of Hegel, from Kojève to
Derrida, Bataille to Lacan, “the struggle triggered by the desire for
recognition can [never] open onto a superior stage of integration or
freedom … which is something we could describe as a negativism.”
It is as though desire maintained its negative position—all the more
negative when the unconscious is involved—and regardless of its “stage
of integration or freedom,” as Honneth calls it. It is not impossible
that this difference in philosophical traditions is the result of the
acceptance (with Honneth) or the refusal (with the French) of Anglo-
Saxon developments in psychoanalysis, “positive” works, or even
“positivist” works, bitterly criticized by Lacan as normative illusions
and attempts to place unconscious desire outside of the playing
field—that desire which Bataille never stopped elaborating, right up
to Tears of Eros, the “lugubrious game,” the rebellious game, or the game
of the negative.
Facing this negativity of Eros, the position taken by the theorists
of the Frankfurt School was not at all unanimous—as we can see
in the great histories of that movement, those by Martin Jay, Rolf
Wiggershaus, and Jean-Marc Durand-Gasselin. For example, negativity
does not at all have the same status or the same use value in Adorno,
on the one hand, or in Habermas or Honneth on the other. Just as
desire itself does not have the same place in different people. But why
is this so? It is because the function given to desire is the result, every
time, of a crucial philosophical decision which was itself determined
by the anthropology that supported it. All of the members of the
of the “reification” diagnosed in 1923 by Georg Lukács in History and
Class Consciousness: inherent in the commercial structure of capitalist
society, “reification” touches all social relations and engenders a
“dislocation of the subject,” as though the “fetish character of
commodities,” analyzed by Karl Marx in the first book of Capital, were
able to spread to the most intimate or spiritual domains—those of
psychology and culture in particular.
It is no coincidence that Lukács chose, as the exergue to his central
chapter on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,”
a phrase by Marx from his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”:
“To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however,
the root is man himself.” In short: tell me what your anthropology
is and I will tell you (or I will have an idea) who you are, not only
on the philosophical and psychological levels, but also on the ethical
and political levels. Consequently, the notion of reification depends
entirely on how we understand the human subject from the start,
and, above all, how we understand its fundamental desires. This is how
Axel Honneth claims his return to Lukács, which was something that
certain critics, like Yves Charles Zarka, would challenge nonetheless.
This is how Herbert Marcuse took an extremely original approach,
which went from a psychological critique of reification to a flamboyant
political assumption of desire.
It required the reconstruction of a more general anthropological
hypothesis taken—unsurprisingly—from Hegel’s phenomenology
as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory
of Historicity appeared in 1932, and was based on Marcuse’s own thesis,
written under the direction of Martin Heidegger. It is an attempt
to formulate, from Hegel, a historical ontology already at odds with
Heideggerian notions of being and time (since temporality, for
Heidegger, is in conflict with historicity). It offers close commentaries
on the Logic and the Phenomenology of Mind. It defines “being as
motility,”“happening as movement,” and “motility as transformation
or perpetual dialectical metamorphosis.” Then, at the heart of this
“universal motility of life” (allgemeine Bewegtheit des Lebens), we
discover the fundamental instance of human desire that engages us,
as an “originary” (ursprünglich) mode of being, well beyond any strictly
psychological matter. Desire does not require a psychology alone,
but rather, at least, a metapsychology or an anthropology.
Desire, writes Marcuse, appears for the human being as the
“essential becoming” (wesentlich), indicating “the actual task lying
ahead of Life, namely, to become ‘essential’ for itself”: “The desire for
being expresses the longing for one’s own proper being.” This longing
is nothing less than a movement of assumption towards being for
the other, as Hegel said. And Marcuse describes, in his particular way,
the famous master-slave dialectic, with the image of the struggle,
of domination, and of recognition. This would be to say that such
a model remains imperfect so long as history itself has not yet created
the political conditions for what Hegel called, later in his
Phenomenology of Spirit, the “free nation” or “freie Volk”—which made
him write, in turn, that “in a free nation, therefore, Reason is in truth
realized.”
There are therefore many different ways of “being for the other”:
we can be so by submission or by domination: to be underneath or
above. We can be so through emancipation or liberation too: we can
rise up—be against—in order to construct the historical conditions
to accomplish being-towards or being-with. “The free and true
338
independence of Life can realize itself only in and through this
being-for-another,” wrote Marcuse regarding Hegelian desire, while
subtly delivering the conditions for his own philosophy, a “philosophy
of emancipation” as Gérard Raulet called it. It is worthwhile
recalling how Marcuse, in 1919—when he was twenty-one-years
old—participated in a soldiers’ council during the Spartacist uprising
in Berlin. Disgusted by the compromise with the far right, he had left
the Social Democratic Party after the assassination of Karl Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg. Then, because he was both Jewish and leftist,
he had to leave Germany from 1933 to go, after Switzerland and France,
to the United States, where he became involved in the Institute of
Social Research in New York under the direction of Max Horkheimer.
In 1939, he published, in English, his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and
the Rise of Social Theory, a work in which he developed, against “fascist
Hegelianism,” his commentary on Hegel on the level of a “birth of social
theory” that prefigured the contemporary positions of Critical Theory.
It was then that the explanation with Hegelian desire was
succeeded—via an anthropological and political point of view inspired
directly by Marx—by an explanation with Freudian desire. Eros and
Civilization appeared in 1955 as a double response, if you will, to Hegel’s
Reason in History and to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. The
opening line of the book claims that the “psychological categories”
employed by Marcuse will be used with the critical awareness that
“they have become political categories.” It is not a question of “applying
psychology in the analysis of social and political events” but the
contrary: “to develop the political and sociological substance of the
psychological notions.” In this way we are informed that to speak of
desire will immediately be to speak about politics; and thinking about
politics will not be done without thinking about desire. How can a
history and how can social relations be possible without the process of
desire? But how are these very processes used, directed, reconfigured
by political relations, choices, or events? It is a crucial question, one
that is both practical and theoretical, in which it is not difficult to see,
once again, the alternative between potency (puissance) and power
(pouvoir).
With regard to power (pouvoir), here is how things appear to
Marcuse: first of all, Freudian theory assumes a generally admitted
equivalence between the process of civilization and the “methodical
sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful
activities and expressions.” But socially useful to whom? Freud does
not seem to ask the question and appears to overlook, beyond the
class struggle in general, any relation between sacrifice of subjects
339
and domination of those whose subjects they are. This is where
Marcuse focuses his work: in the space of this paradox—one that
is inherent in the modern history of the West—according to which
“intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified
unfreedom.” The impulsive renunciation becomes renunciation
of desire, that is to say of repression, and the latter becomes a large
structure of alienation or mental reification, leading to an ethos of
slaves that was fomented and demanded by the masters of the social
game. We can then understand how Marcuse was able to dispute the
evidence according to which “civilization demands a more and more
intense repression.”
The paradox is cruel and in a way leads to the conclusions found
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, published ten years earlier by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. It recognizes the bitter truth that
the safeguard of the “reality principle,” or the psychical structures of
guilt, easily becomes the prison guard of our desires and thoughts.
Perhaps it is the mental necessity of repression? No doubt. But should
this necessarily develop into the political scandal of repression? Is
the only choice left one that is between a first-level barbarousness
(one that is regressive and instinctual) and a second-level
barbarousness (which is rational and progressive), both of them
coming from unhealthy uses of desire and repression? Between the
two, everything is, of course, a matter of dialectics—or politics—of
desire. This is what appears very clearly when the potency (puissance)
of uprisings is diluted into the power (pouvoir) of counter-revolutions,
recurrent phenomena that Marcuse saw in Freud’s perspective, that
of guilt: “At the societal level, recurrent rebellions and revolutions have
been followed by counter-revolutions and restorations. From the slave
revolts in the ancient world to the socialist revolution, the struggle
of the oppressed has ended in establishing a new, ‘better,’ system of
domination. … An element of self-defeat seems to be involved in this
dynamic (regardless of the validity of such reasons as the prematurity
and inequality of forces). In this sense, every revolution has also been
a betrayed revolution. Freud’s hypothesis on the origin and the
perpetuation of guilt feeling elucidates, in psychological terms, this
socio-logical dynamic: it explains the ‘identification’ of those who
revolt with the power against which they revolt.”
It is as though things were fixed, reified only on the level of
relations of identification and power (pouvoir). But Marcuse sought
to re-examine his approach by returning to Hegel’s idea of desire
(domination and recognition), and Nietzsche (pleasure and joy). Before
proposing this (which cannot be reduced to Wilhelm Reich’s idea
340
of desire): “In a world of alienation, the liberation of Eros would
necessarily operate as a destructive, fatal force—as the total negation
of the reality principle which governs the repressive reality.” If the
famous “reality principle” has become a prison guard destined to block
any new reality, and therefore to preserve our state of alienation or
“unfreedom,” then we must wonder what might be “Beyond the Reality
Principle,” which is the title of the second part of Marcuse’s text. What
is to be done? First of all, it is necessary to assure a critical and precise
consciousness of the conditions of our servitudes: the way, for example,
in which the “performance principle” in contemporary societies leads
to what Marcuse calls a “repressive organization” which touches our
infra-subjective structures—in the intimacy of our sexuality—as well
as our social relations.
It is necessary, in the end, to move towards potency (puissance).
Marcuse claims that we will find in the imagination, “phantasy,”
all the premises for a liberation that should not be limited to the
private sphere or the mere personal “fantasy.” It is a matter, for him,
of introducing—via a reference to Theodor Adorno speaking on
contemporary music—the question of the work of art as “negation
of unfreedom.” For Marcuse, there is a true “critical function of
phantasy” as soon as desires, including sexual desires, find a form that
can liberate from the barriers of social domination: a form both of
affirmation and of “great refusal” as he says. A form of “protest.” An
image of the “struggle for the ultimate form of freedom,” he will say.
And it is as though the “tears of Eros” were making room for Eros
himself, understood as a decisive arm against our contemporary
servitudes.
In 1964, Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, an indictment against modern
capitalist society. After the forced, brutal integration of classic
totalitarianisms, capitalism proceeds with its social integration by
other means. In so doing it brings back a type of closed society; and it
is a closed society because, as Marcuse explains, it curbs and integrates
all dimensions of existence, including the public and the private. It is
closed because it becomes a society without any opposition, capable
of diluting every thought into the torpor of criticism. And Marcuse
examines—before Foucault and Deleuze—the “new forms of control”
by which a “state of well-being” agonizingly coexists with a “state of war,”
immobilizing any attempt at social change, absorbing any antagonisms
into a general indifference that is no weaker than future indifferences
in the postmodern age. Marcuse then endeavors to dismantle the logic
inherent to the “language of total administration,” which he calls
341
the “closed universe,” in pages that, once again, suggest Michel
Foucault’s future analyses on the discursive order of power (pouvoir).
But in this analysis of systems, Marcuse never abandons the point
of view of desires. He does this, logically, through Hegel first of all (for
example, when analyzing what he calls “the conquest of the unhappy
consciousness”) and then through Freud (when he returns, for example,
to the question of guilt). If it is true that desire is indestructible, then
it is necessary to find what, in the folds or in the holes of this “one-
dimensional society,” in the shadows or in the fractures of these “reified
forms,” allows for a possibility for desire to create, not a mere phantasm,
but a reality, an alternative to common servitudes. Eros, therefore, is
the Marcusian way to take back and to return to the motifs of hope
in Walter Benjamin (cited at the very end of the work) or of utopia in
Ernst Bloch.
In so doing, Marcuse created a bridge between the Critical Theory
of his Germanic culture and the practices of the “Great Refusal,” as he
fig. 16
called it, in those he observed in the American social and political
Michael Ruetz, Freie Universität, Berlin, August 5, 1968.
struggles of his time: “However, underneath the conservative popular Photograph.
base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and
persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the
unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is
the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable
conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary
even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system
from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an
elementary force that violates the rules of the game and, in doing so,
reveals it as a rigged game. When they get together and go out into the
streets, without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most
primitive civil rights, they know they face dogs, stones, bombs, jail,
concentration camps, even death. Their force is behind every political
demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start
refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning
of the end of a period.”
Marcuse, as we know, followed his critique of “one-dimensional
society” to the very end, castigating, with regard to power (pouvoir),
the hypocritical “repressive tolerance” of contemporary democracies;
and seeking, with regard to potency (puissance), the way to a “liberation” fig. 17
that would be possible through the “subversive forces” inherent in the Michael Ruetz, Herbert Marcuse in the main lecture theater,
assumption of Eros and all the “new revolutionary sensibilities” that Freie Universität, Berlin, May 13, 1968. Photograph.

he will decry, in 1972, in Counter-Revolution and Revolt. It is no surprise

then to find that Marcuse was a leading figure in the student uprisings
of 1968. In a series of photos taken at the Freie Universität in Berlin by

342 343
Michael Ruetz, we can see two very interesting images. The first, dating
from May 8, 1968, shows a student demonstration at the Konvent, the
university “parliament”: on the blackboards all kinds of slogans are
written, including Studium ist Opium (Study = opium) and alle
Professoren sind Papiertiger (All professors are paper tigers) ( fig. 16).
In a photograph taken five days later, we can see numerous dissenting
students speaking together in the university’s large auditorium, after
listening to Herbert Marcuse on the theme of “History, transcendence
and social change”: the old philosopher is in shirtsleeves, seated in the
middle of his students (on his left we see Jacob Taubes), and attentive
to everything that is being said ( fig. 17). As though something powerful
is going on between the old Spartacist in exile and the young students
from Berlin—but modestly, since Marcuse was not there in a position
of mastery nor of prominence—a common desire for liberation.15
REFUSAL, OR THE POTENTIAL TO DO OTHERWISE
The evidence of uprisings is perhaps, first of all, that of the gesture by
which we refuse a certain state—one that is unjust and intolerable—of
things that surround us, that oppress us. But what does to refuse mean?
It is not simply not to do. It is not, inevitably, to enclose refusal in the
realm of mere negation. To refuse, a fundamental gesture of uprisings,
consists above all in using dialectics: by refusing to do what one has
been abusively prescribed, we can and indeed we must not leave it at
that. We do not refuse a certain mode of existence by choosing not to
exist. We only refuse, therefore, to decide to exist and to do otherwise.
Where some think they refuse by merely not, taking away—depleting
—their potency (puissance), others take the risk of exposing their
refusal to the point of giving potency to do something other. And when
I say that they expose themselves, I mean that they do not fear—from
their minor position, the place of “unpower”—“to do something” in
the public sphere in spite of all. It is probably what Walter Benjamin
wanted to show by his phrase “to organize our pessimism.”
This often starts with arms being raised: despair, indignation,
then anger, then a call “to do something.” This starts also with a
clamor, a shout. In 1793, in the wake of the French Revolution, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte wrote a Revendication de la liberté, which appealed
directly to a shouting out as a first way, or a first voice, towards political
emancipation: “Shout, shout out on every level to the ears of our
princes, until they hear it, that you will not let them take away the
freedom to think, and show them by your behavior that they can
344
15.
Honneth 2013, 21. Bankovsky and
Le Goff, eds. 2012, passim. Bataille
1961, passim. Jay 1973, passim.
Wiggershaus 1986, passim.
Durand-Gasselin 2012, passim.
Marx 1867–1883, 152–167. Lukács
1923, 83, 84, and 110–256.
Honneth 1990, 79–90. Honneth
2005, 21–32. Zarka 2015, 39–53.
Marcuse 1932, 243, 256. Hegel
1807, I, 214. Marcuse 1932, 256.
Raulet 1992, passim. Marcuse
1939, passim. Marcuse 1955, xxi,
xxii, 3, 4, 91, 95, and 149. Marcuse
1965–1968, passim. Marcuse 1969,
passim. Marcuse 1972, passim.
Ruetz and Sachsse 2009, 8–9, and
60.
345
trust what you assert. Do not let yourselves be dissuaded by fear.”
Fear, indeed, seems to be the greatest enemy of uprisings: it imposes
silence and immobility on bodies, gestures, desires and the will.
It is when they get rid of their fear that people produce a murmur
first of all, that “dull sound” or that “dull plaint” that, in the expression
“the murmuring of the people,” used to mean entering into rumor,
that is to say into sedition or uprising itself, as Jean Nicolas showed,
citing the Encyclopédie, in his important book La Rébellion française.
Murmur, rumor: soon an exclamation, a great clamor. The shout
must however not be lost in the desert. We must, therefore, know
how to work our shout, to give it shape, and to labor over it, long and
patiently. Our cries can come in thousands of different forms. One
form is the book, that banal, discreet form, reproducible and extremely
mobile, with its black letters on a white background, its words and
phrases wisely—in appearance—arranged on the rectangle of the page.
When the shout is worked in this way, the act of refusing consists in
fusing together new images, new thoughts, or new possibilities of action
in the public consciousness, which receives it in this form. To refuse
only has meaning if it invents new forms of living and acting.
One example among many others: on June 27, 1957, Germaine
Tillion’s L’Algérie was published by Éditions de Minuit, followed by two
collective works—Pour Djamila Bouhired and La Question algérienne—
then, followed, in early 1958, by Henri Alleg’s La Question and L’Affaire
Audin by Pierre Vidal-Naquet. “Between 1957 and 1959,” wrote Anne
Simonin in Le Droit à la désobéissance, “Éditions de Minuit confronted,
almost single-handedly, the denunciation of the Algerian War, relayed
by the La Joie de lire bookshop, which was just as small and stubborn
as they were, founded and directed by François Maspero, who
circulated the books of Éditions de Minuit even (and above all) when
they were banned. … Among the twenty-three books published by
Éditions de Minuit concerning Algeria between 1957 and 1962, only
nine were seized, three of which were seized twice, making a total
of twelve confiscations … for reasons as serious as an attack on state
security or inciting disobedience among the military.”
We know how much Jérôme Lindon made Éditions de Minuit into
a perpetual “actualization of the resistant past”—an expression used
by Anne Simonin in another work, titled “Le devoir d’insoumission”—
which traced the clandestine adventures of this publishing house
between 1942 and 1944. It is as though, before even publishing Leon
Trotsky’s La Révolution permanente, Lindon had sought to regulate
all of his activities according to a permanent resistance that in 1957
the Algerian War and the behavior of the French army made more
necessary than ever. Between 1944 and 1956, intellectual and literary
life in France was haunted by that dreamed revolution whose hope
the Resistance had outlined, as shown in the major study, Révolution
rêvée by Michel Surya. The books published by Jérôme Lindon between
1957 and 1962 undoubtedly deserve to be read as argued refusals of a
situation that saw, a decade or so after the Liberation, the French
army using techniques that were similar to those of the Gestapo.
It required the full rigor and doggedness of someone like Pierre
Vidal-Naquet to show that in June 1957, Maurice Audin—a university
member of the Algerian Communist Party—died under torture
at the hands of French soldiers.
Beyond even their patiently argued refusal, the small works
published by Jérôme Lindon at this time appear like active refusals
or acted refusals, kinds of tracts whose editor knew well, from
experience, that they risked, as soon as they appeared, disappearing
from all bookshops. Three things remain striking when we see—before
even opening them—these works: they are small (good for hiding
in a pocket), their titles are written in red (like miniscule political
posters); and the words of their titles appear like political strategies
that are very simple, very subtle, and very efficient. For example,
La Question ( fig. 18) appears at once in what it questions as a principle
(is it possible that a republican army carried out torture?) and in
fig. 18 fig. 19
the thing it designated (the “question” of the inquisitors signifying the
Henri Alleg, La Question (The question), Provocation à la désobéissance (Call for disobedience),
torture itself). Similarly, La Gangrène, an anonymous work published Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1962.
with a postscript by Jérôme Lindon in 1959—it was composed of Cover. Private collection. Cover. Private collection.
seven direct testimonies of torture—shows in red letters the notorious
word turned against the military authorities that used it to indicate
the dispute within the army itself; but, moreover, it plays phonetically
with the word vulgarly used for the instrument of torture that was
most common at the time, the gégène, the hand-operated electrical
generator for field telephones.
We could say the same about the work by Charlotte Delbo—another
important figure, along with Germaine Tillion, of the Resistance—and
published in 1961, under the somewhat ironic title Les Belles Lettres.
Somewhere, therefore, between the freedom of any self-respecting
literature and the faculty of refusal of any political thought attentive
to state compromises and lies, and said with words that doubtless
strike the reader with their persistent relevance:

Why do we write letters? Because we burst with outrage. Is this

anything new? Have there not always been reasons to be outraged?
Undoubtedly. But whereas before—if we think of the years before

346 347
 the war in 1939—the outrage exploded into demonstrations and
collective actions, and transformed into acts by means of the unions
and political parties, it has no more ways to express itself today.
The Parliament no longer exists but by name, elections are but
gratuitous acts. Citizens are called upon to answer yes or no to
questions to which they would like to be able to reply: yes but. The
Ministerial Councils are secret gatherings. There is no more political
life. … Deprived of any means to react, we write letters.
In 1961, Jérôme Lindon was indicted for publishing Le Déserteur,
a novel published under the pseudonym “Maurienne”—a choice
equivalent to that of “Vercors” in the time of the Resistance. The final
judgment, ten pages long, had the following conclusion: “The public
prosecutor … declares [Jérôme] Lindon guilty of the offense of public
provocation to disobedience.” The answer—the acted refusal—by
the publisher was, the following year, the work Provocation à la
désobéissance ( fig. 19), a title that could not be attacked since it cited the
judgment itself, and became a call and, in fact, a provocation.
The political genius of the publisher leaned, once more, on the
experience of the Occupation for contesting the very principle
contained in the accusation by the Public Ministry:
Every French person knows that, since June 18, 1940, disobedience
does not necessarily constitute a crime in itself, and that one even
risks in some cases—this was seen during the Liberation, for
example, or after April 22—being sentenced for not disobeying
one’s superiors.
This is because there exist some illegal orders. Torture is one. …
Particularly significant was the exchange between the president
and the witness Jean Clay who had just explained the
circumstances under which he assisted at the interrogation, by the
gendarmes, of a young Algerian he had just arrested for not having
his identity papers on him:
Jean Clay: – … Then they attached him to a bench and began to
torture him.
The President. – Did you not protest?
Jean Clay: – I did protest, but these men were fifty years old,
and had been in charge of the region for a long time …
The President: – You could have left, protesting!
To leave in protest. It was perhaps the only possible solution.
Yet what the advised in the particular case that Lieutenant Clay
brought to the bar, was condemned, in absolute terms, by the
348
characters in the novel by Maurienne. And it was decided finally
that by allowing them to express such opinions in a book, the
author and the publisher were guilty of public provocation to
disobedience.
I appealed against this judgment.
We know that meanwhile—in July 1960—a Déclaration sur le droit
à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie (Declaration on the right to
insubordination in the Algerian War), signed by a group of 121 artists
and intellectuals, was a landmark in the historical and political context,
relayed by an important publication by Éditions François Maspero
(of which Julien Hage recalled the essential elements in a “brief
history” of the publishers). The text was written collectively, by Maurice
Blanchot, Jean Schuster, Dionys Mascolo, and Maurice Nadeau. It is
reprinted in Maurice Blanchot’s Écrits politiques, where we quickly sense
the right to uprising which the “121” saw as a right for the Algerian people
against the colonial police operations carried out by the French army:
In fact, with a decision that was a fundamental abuse, the state
firstly mobilized entire classes of citizens with a view to
accomplishing what it considered a police task against an oppressed
population, which had rebelled only for reasons of basic human
dignity, since it demanded to be recognized at last as an
independent community.
Neither a war of conquest, nor a war of “national defense,” the
Algerian War has more or less become an act proper to the army
and to a caste that refused to yield before an uprising whose
meaning even the civil authorities, becoming aware of the general
collapse of colonial empires, seemed to acknowledge.
Georges Bataille did not sign the “Manifeste des 121,” as he was already
suffering from his illness and, above all, claiming an “unconditional
refusal” that characterized his political position statement, since the
anti-Franco publication Actualités in 1945, on the basis of a refusal to
take part. He had explained this in advance in a private letter to Dionys
Mascolo—whose 1953 work Le Communisme can be read, in part at
least, as an essay on politics in the style of Bataille—who echoed
the message in the first issue of the journal Le 14 Juillet in July 1958.
With a text titled “Refus inconditionnel” (Unconditional refusal),
Mascolo learned about Bataille’s position: it supposes, firstly, that to
refuse is an “enterprise,” that is to say a long-term project, and not
simply a way to say no. But he answers his friend by saying that this
349
refusal—“against everyone”—is not in any way a position of ascetic
or aristocratic solitude: “This [your ‘unconditional refusal’] is not solitude.
This is said in a certain way about being together, being numerous.
We are less alone than ever.” This was a way for the militant to pay his
or her respects to the solidary form of this solitary position—although
not a haughty or patronizing position—that Bataille has adopted.
The fact that this act of refusal should be founded on a solitary
decision capable nonetheless of engaging a solidary “enterprise,”
is something that Maurice Blanchot wanted to indicate, in an article
in the second issue of the journal Le 14 Juillet, in 1958. It is titled
“Le Refus” (The refusal):
At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we
must refuse. The refusal is absolute, categorical. It is not disputed,
nor does it give its reasons. Yet it remains silent and solitary, even
when it is affirmed, as it must be, in the open. Those who refuse
and who are linked by the force of the refusal know that they are
not yet together. The time of the common affirmation has been
taken away from them. What remains is the irreducible refusal,
the friendship, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous
No, which makes them united and solidary.
In the act of refusal, therefore, it is a solitude that exclaims No! How
could the “frankness that no longer tolerates complicity,” as Blanchot
called it, not be solitary in its principle decision? Refusal becomes
engaged then alone, and solitarily engages the moment of the no.
But it does much more: it engages solidarily, inclusively, an “enterprise”
that is the work, if not of everyone, at least of an us. It is a solidary
act founded, according to Blanchot, on the “very poor beginning” of
suffering experienced by “those who cannot speak,” those that Walter
Benjamin had called in 1940 the Namenlosen, the “nameless.” Those
of whom Blanchot spoke in 1958: and it is of course the Algerians as
a people oppressed by the police operations carried out by the French
army. “When we refuse, we refuse by a movement without contempt,
without exaltation, a movement that is anonymous, as much as it can
be, for the power (pouvoir) to refuse is not accomplished by us, nor in
our name, but rather by a very poor beginning that belongs first
of all to those who cannot speak.”
That insubordination should be considered a right and not a duty,
as Blanchot said in 1961, means perhaps the same thing again from the
viewpoint of what is supposed by the act of refusal. The duty is at once
collective, when the right allows everyone to avail, or not, of a common
350
base. In 1964, Herbert Marcuse sought to conclude One-Dimensional Man
on the theme of the emancipatory “Grand Refusal,” in order to give
homage to both Maurice Blanchot (for his “refusal” in 1958) and Walter
Benjamin (for his “hope of the hopeless” in the 1930s). As Christophe
Bident explained—in a biography with the evocative title: Maurice
Blanchot, partenaire invisible (invisible partner)—the 1960s were first
of all, for the writer, a time of “personal distress” made worse by illness.
A moment of exclusion. Thus, towards the end of 1967, “the personal
renunciation of any presence in public seems stronger than ever.” But
it is from within this solitary position that the solidary moment par
excellence arose: May 1968.
“With Blanchot, during those few weeks of the ‘May revolution,’”
wrote Bident, “the least surprising element is not his health nor his
continuing energy despite weakness and fatigue, which were to make
him live, in the complicity between his body and his mind, through
nocturnal confrontations, diurnal protests, interminable committee
sessions, and hugely crowded meetings. He rarely shouted, and those
close to him often had to support him, even wait anxiously during
police proceedings. But he liked running riot with the students, in his
short runs, started to the sound of Go! Go! Go!, which regularly
accelerated the pace. He spoke at assemblies, presided over committee
meetings, with a gentle authority, a slow and dry voice, often out of
breath but that, thanks perhaps to that weakness, immediately
captured its listeners. He scrutinized events, observed movements of
bodies and the bodies of graffiti, writings on leaflets, and spoke on
familiar terms with everyone except his friends. Every day he walked
along the streets with Dionys Mascolo, Robert and Monique Antelme,
Louis-René des Forêts, Maurice Nadeau, Marguerite Duras, and often
Jean Schuster and Michel Leiris. This is how he walked until exhaustion,
from République to Denfert, on May 13, in the biggest demonstration
Paris had seen since Charonne and the Liberation” ( fig. 20).
Blanchot was to participate in this way in the occupation of
the Société des gens de lettres, on May 21. He asked his friend, Jacques
Derrida, to write a few leaflets. He sought titles for a bulletin to be
published: Non, or l’Impossible, or Rupture, or even Commune …
or, of course, Le Refus. He published, on June 18, 1968, a declaration that
began with “the power of refusal” and continued with “the incessant
movement of struggle” necessary for the “revolutionary demand.”
Another text from this period is titled “Affirmer la rupture” (Affirming
the rupture). It concerns taking refusal out of its merely negative
position by giving to theoretical discourse—but outside of any doctrinal
or dogmatic program—that precious affirmative task: “The theoretical
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 does not consist in developing a program or a platform, but consists
instead, outside of any programmatic project or of any project at all,
in maintaining a refusal that affirms, and in freeing or maintaining
an affirmation that is not resolved, but rather that disturbs and that
disturbs itself.”
This has brought us from the “unconditional refusal” to the “refusal
that is affirmed.” It is a path along which Blanchot continued, in 1981,
in a reply to a questionnaire on artistic engagement titled “Refuser
l’ordre établi” (Refusing the established order). But let us dig a little
deeper into this paradox: what exactly does the refusal affirm? In
Blanchot’s experience, it is nothing other than that community
imagined ethically and ontologically—in the wake of Georges Bataille
and Emmanuel Levinas, with a number of tumultuous interferences
from elsewhere—as friendship. If there is a political thought that is
worth noting in Blanchot, from L’Amitié to L’Entretien infini, it is indeed
here that it is to be found, in the bridge constructed between the
fig. 20
potency (puissance) of refusal and the recognition of the friend:
Anonymous, Ciné-tracts (Film tracts), 1968.
Still frame.
We must give up knowing those with whom something essential
links us; that is, we must welcome them in the relation to the
unknown in which they welcome us too, in our distance. Friendship,
that relation without dependence, without episode and in which
comes nonetheless all the simplicity of life, passes by recognition
of being strangers both, which does not permit us to speak of our
friends but only to speak to them, not to make them a theme of
conversation (nor of articles), but the movement of the entente in
which, speaking to us, they maintain, even in the greatest familiarity,
the infinite distance, that fundamental separation from which that
which separates becomes a relation.

Jacques Derrida made no mistake regarding the political profundity

of this lesson— “the recognition of shared strangeness”—by situating
the origins of a whole development of his Spectres de Marx in
Blanchot’s L’Amitié, or by titling two of his later works Politiques de
l’amitié (in 1994), and Politique et amitié (in 2011). We know that,
meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy, a disciple and friend of Derrida—but not
of Blanchot—devoted a very important essay to the question of both
refusal and community: written in 1983, as an article for the journal
Aléa and published as a volume in 1986, La Communauté désœuvrée
(The disavowed community) began with the “dissolution, dislocation,
or conflagration of the community.” A far cry, then, from “communism
as the unpassable horizon of our time” announced previously by

352 353
Jean-Paul Sartre. And, furthermore, lost are the “immanence and
intimacy [of our] communion.” All of that written through a rereading
of Bataille, whose notion of experience founded an essential disavowal:
“The community cannot come from the domain of the work. We do
not produce it, we experience it (or its experience makes us) as an
experience of the finitude.” If it remains a “voice” of the community,
it can only, however, be the voice of “interruption,” suggests Nancy:
“a voice or a music withdrawn.” An “unavowable” voice, in short. This
voice is called literature.
What unusual urgency pushed Maurice Blanchot to publish his
reply to Nancy in La Communauté inavouable in 1983? We cannot deal
with this at length here, but it is suffice to note, in order to examine
the “reproach,” or even the “differend” that Blanchot held against Nancy,
how much the latter spoke of community according to Bataille, without
ever embodying it in what was his friendship with Blanchot (but also
Michel Leiris, Dionys Mascolo, and still others). Furthermore, Nancy
spoke of disavowal and of literature without ever having recalled the
motifs that are nonetheless everywhere, even in their theoretical
conjunction, in the texts of Blanchot. Consequently, Bataille’s phrase—
“the community of those who have no community”—used as the
exergue for La Communauté inavouable, is a reply, perhaps, not only
to “the name of Bataille,” but above all it would refer “negative
community” that the author of Expérience intérieure had shaped with
Blanchot himself, and that Nancy had neglected to bring into play in
La Communauté désœuvrée.
Blanchot probably did not intend to retrace Bataille’s thinking—a
task that Jean-Luc Nancy did so well—so much as bear witness,
directly, in his own name, to a politics of friendship in his own life: his
life as a writer for whom “literature” meant Part du feu and “right
to death,” a work exposed to its own disavowal, as we read everywhere
in L’Espace littéraire, Le Livre à venir, and L’Entretien infini. The latter,
moreover, opens with texts that are as radical as “The most profound
question” (which is a political question) or the “Great Refusal” (which
concerns “the absence of a work” in the literary work), and it reaches
into extraordinary essays like “L’insurrection, la folie d’écrire,” meaning
“insurrection, the madness of writing” (on the uprising of language
and of thought in all literature worthy of the name).
The challenge for Maurice Blanchot was, therefore, at the same time
that of a politics of friendship and a politics of literature, which, as he
wrote at the end of La Communauté inavouable, “makes us responsible
for the new relations that are always threatened, always hoped for,
between what we call work (œuvre) and what we call lack of work
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(désœuvrement).” We must therefore know how to refuse even works
that we believe strongly built: but we must also know how to
work (œuvrer) even on the refusals that we think we make against
the world. Jean-Luc Nancy perhaps pays homage to this dialectic in
La Communauté affrontée (The confronted community), a book
dedicated to Blanchot in recognition of the “reproach” contained
in La Communauté inavouable: “Blanchot means for me, or rather
signals, the unavowable. Appended to but contrary to the inoperative
[désœuvré] in my title, this adjective suggests we think that under
the uprising there is still the work, an unavowable work.” He then
published, under the title Maurice Blanchot: passion politique, the
famous “letter-story” of 1984, concerned with the writer’s activities as
a “far-right insurgent” between 1936 and 1939: “the project of gathering
non-conformists from the right and non-conformists from the left—
what I called dissidents—was quite familiar to me at that time.”
“Neither right nor left”? We know, clearly, from the historical works
by Zeev Sternhell, that this was a founding and central motif in fascist
ideology in France (Sternhell evoked Blanchot twice in his study).
We know too that following the special issue of the journal Lignes
devoted to “Politiques de Maurice Blanchot” in 2014—with articles
in which the notion of “impossible politics” shifted from an elegiac
value in the mode of Bataille, to a much more critical viewpoint—
and with Michel Surya’s book, L’Autre Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy wished
to finish, quite recently, battling with the author of L’Amitié: thus,
in La Communauté désavouée, he situated the “unavowable” in politics
according to Blanchot near a “return to myth”—which was a severe
way to judge the writer when we imagine the prior work of Nancy
(with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) titled Le Mythe nazi. It is a way,
as he said himself—yet what a strange subjective position—to “help
Blanchot with his avowal,” his avowal of fascism or quasi-fascism.
His avowal or his admission at least, of an “aristocratic and anarchic”
position (Nancy does not say “anarchistic”), that is, in any case, a
fundamentally anti-democratic position. And this is what allows Nancy
to speak, with regard to Blanchot, of an “evaporation of politics” in the
doing nothing of the inoperation (désœuvrement) or—as we can read
in the interview with Mathilde Girard titled Proprement dit (Well
said)—of an impossible that would call upon the myth, the “appeal to a
foundation”: “This is called, in political terms, a right wing, even extreme
right-wing thinking.”
What does all of this tell us, to finish, about the economy of refusal
in Maurice Blanchot? And of the refusal of this kind of refusal in
Jean-Luc Nancy? I am struck, in this debate—which seems far from
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its conclusion—by the fact that the position of the writer becomes
progressively isolated and immobilized as it is questioned. Should
we not imagine a questioning that would not be the “question” in the
sense that Blanchot himself, writer and signatory of the Déclaration
sur le droit à l’insoummision, radically disputed in 1960? With the author
of Thomas l’obscur, there is not only a dialectics of “writing of the day”
(of the extreme right) and “writing of the night” (extremely profound).
His “writing of the day” itself—its political position—followed the
dialectical path, the transformation of a type of refusal into another,
quite different from the first, and which completely overturned it.
Blanchot’s political path could, from this viewpoint, teach us
something more about a possible dialectics of refusal. On the one hand,
we would find the refusal that hates: that refusal is a refusal of what
is hated, of any possibility of existing. It is an aggressive refusal, a
power-refusal (refus-pouvoir). It is imposed upon the other, and wants
to be total and destructive. It is totalitarian, claiming to found its
rejection on an “impossible” thought like “myth,” as Jean-Luc Nancy
showed in his analysis. This would probably correspond to everything
that Blanchot, in his texts from the 1930s, communicated to his
readers: “traditionalism,”“feverish passion for France,”“obsessive
anticommunism,” and a “certain anti-Semitism (in the sense of certain
anti-Semitism and moderate anti-Semitism …),” as Michel Surya put it.
But something else would happen: something that doubles first of all,
like an invisible hem, Blanchot’s participation in the maréchalistes
journals during the Occupation; something that would become, soon,
“the turning over of all value” (to echo Nietzsche) and a conversion
of thought.
It has to do with his friendship with Georges Bataille. In the 1930s,
Bataille and Blanchot were at opposite extremes: “The very moment
Bataille critiqued the idealism of all materialism, Blanchot critiqued
the materialism of all idealism,” writes Christophe Bident. But, from
the beginning of the 1940s, the meeting between these two writers
began an essential, profound, transforming friendship for each of
them; a literary and philosophical friendship; a political friendship,
for indeed, the basis of friendship is political. It is this friendship with
Bataille—and that with Emmanuel Levinas—which would, forever,
disorient Blanchot in his positions as a “far-right dissident.” And it this
too, curiously (because they know all of this by heart), that neither
Jean-Luc Nancy nor Michel Surya wanted to explore more deeply.
Yet, the consequences of this meeting and this friendship—recounted
in detail by Christophe Bident—were that a refusal was followed by
a very different refusal: a refusal that exceeds and not one that hates.
356
It is a refusal that allows existing and not one that imposes itself
authoritatively, but that exceeds any fixed position: it is a potency-
refusal (refus-puissance). It is linked to the “impossible” as desire
or ethical demand, and not to the mythical foundation of everything.
That is exactly what Blanchot said he admired in the uprisings
of May 1968:
May 68 showed, without any plan, without any plot, in the
suddenness of a happy encounter and like a celebration that shook
the accepted or wished-for social forms, how explosive
communication could be affirmed (affirmed beyond the usual
forms of affirmation), the opening that allowed everyone, without
distinction of class, age, gender, or culture, to befriend the first
person they saw, as though with a loved one, precisely because
he was the unknown familiar.
“Without any plan”: that was the characteristic, one that was both
worrying and fortunate, of a kind of incomparable society that
did not let itself be seized, that did not let itself be called to subsist,
to settle, even through the multiple “committees” with which
a disordered order, an imprecise specialization was simulated.
Unlike “traditional revolutions,” it was not only about taking
power to replace it with another, nor about taking the Bastille,
the Winter Palace, the Elysée, or the Assemblée Nationale, which
were unimportant objectives, nor about overturning an old world;
instead it was about allowing to show, outside of any utilitarian
interest, a possibility of being together that gave everyone the
right to equality in fraternity through the freedom of speech that
raised everyone up. Everyone had something to say, sometimes to
write (on the walls)—what that was didn’t matter. The Saying took
precedence over the said. Poetry was daily.
And when Blanchot speaks here of a “presence of the people in
limitless potency [puissance],” when he says that this potency, “in order
not to be limited, accepts doing nothing”—he does not mean that its
manifestation is composed of thousands of Bartlebys preferring not
to, so that “politics evaporates,” as Jean-Luc Nancy stated. What is meant
is simply that doing otherwise led the Parisian people, for a moment
between two conflicts, on February 13, 1962, to “make a procession
with the dead of Charonne [in] immobility, in a silent multitude” of
collective mourning: this is what Chris Marker, in A Grin Without a Cat,
sought to compare with the great lamentation scene in Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin ( figs. 1–2). It is, finally, what Blanchot wished to call
357
a “declaration of impotence” as “supreme potency, because it included,
without feeling diminished, its virtual and absolute potency.”
No, then, the refusal did not do “nothing”: to go on strike, for example,
does not in any way amount to “doing nothing.” This refusal simply
suspended the carrying out of its own desire for a moment, a moment
of suspense, in which the gesture of mourning in order to “walk in a
procession with the dead” helped even more to announce the gesture
of future uprisings.16

DESIRING, DISOBEYING, DOING VIOLENCE

There is nothing more ancient, in its very urgency, than desire.

16.
If it is true that desire constitutes us—not in the sense in which it Benjamin 1940b, 350. Fichte 1793,
might give us a stable “constitution,” a nomos, but rather in the sense 82. Nicolas 2002, 27. Tillion 1957,
passim. Alleg 1958, passim. Vidal-
that it raises us, gives us the very force of our dynamis—then we
Naquet 1958, passim. Simonin
could say that there is nothing more ancient than desire, even 2012, 9–13. Simonin 2008, 309–
though it is what always gives the rhythm to our present, to every 324 and 474–504. Trotsky 1923–
1936, 245–439. Surya 2004, 7–33. fig. 21
instant, in our movements to what will happen, towards the future.
Evans 1997, passim. Vidal-Naquet Clandestine leaflet printed by the “Liberation”
When he published his explosive (although genuinely neutral and 1958, passim. Vidal-Naquet 1998, Resistance group in France’s southern zone, 1942.
“objective”) book, Provocation à la désobéissance ( fig. 19), Jérôme 13–160. Alleg 1958, passim. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
Lindon remembered perhaps a clandestine leaflet printed by Libération La Gangrène 1959, passim. Delbo
1961, 9–10. Maurienne 1960,
and circulated in France during the Occupation. In the republication passim. Provocation à la
of the book by Pierrette Turlais, we can read: “Disobedience is the désobéissance 1962, 136–139.
wisest of duties” ( fig. 21). And the subsequent text clarifies many things: Le Droit à l’insoumission 1961,
passim. Hage 2009, 106–112.
Blanchot et al. 1960, 28–29.
You will sabotage the enforcement of German law by all means; Mascolo 1953, passim. Mascolo
You will slow the census operations by delaying and giving inexact 1958, 81–83. Blanchot 1958, 11–12.
Blanchot 1961, 38. Marcuse 1964,
declarations; 279 and 281. Bident 1998, 469,
You will use any excuse regarding health and family to avoid 471–472,
your deportation to occupied territory, then to Germany. and 479. Blanchot 1968a, 87.
Blanchot 1968b, 105. Blanchot
You will be professionally downgraded if necessary;
1981, 151–153. Blanchot 1971, 328.
You will oppose to the very end any requisitioning by passive Derrida 1993, 39–66 (reference to
and absolute disobedience. Blanchot 1971, 109–117). Derrida
1994, passim. Derrida 2011,
Against a general disobedience, the police will be impotent.
passim. Nancy 1986, 11, 35, 78, and
to vanquish the enemies of the homeland: disobedience, 156–157. Blanchot 1983, 9 and
again disobedience, and always disobedience. 23–25. Blanchot 1949, 291–331.
Blanchot 1955, 48–52, 60, and
225–232. Blanchot 1959, passim.
To disobey: here is a verb that works well with the verb to desire. Blanchot 1969, 12–34, 46–69, and
To disobey is as ancient, and often as urgent, as to desire. Lindon knew 323–342. Blanchot 1983, 93.
this well, having translated in 1955 the biblical Book of Jonah, a major Nancy 2001, 9 and 38–39. Nancy
2011 (and Blanchot 1984), 49.
prophetic text—which is read, during the celebration of Yom Kippur, Sternhell 1983, 212 and 534.
Amar 2014, 140–152. Manchev
2014, 196–215. Surya 2015, passim.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
1980, passim. Nancy 2014, 73–78,
125, 131, and 134. Girard and
Nancy 2015, 110. Surya 2015, 18.
Bident 1998, 62 and 167–180.
Blanchot 1983, 52–55.

358 359
“at night, the moment when life and death is decided, the moment
when everything shows that our fates are being decided”—beginning,
so abruptly, with a disobedience against God, and such a radical
about-turn: “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of
Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it;
for their wickedness is come up before me.’ But Jonah rose up [but
only] to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” Must we
then know how to disobey in order to be a true prophet?
How can we not, once again, call on the mythologies of Atlas or
Prometheus? Or the story of Eve? Did she not disobey in full knowledge
of the consequences? Not to follow the pernicious commandments
of the serpent, but rather to undertake fervently her desire to know
and to desire, even if it meant facing all of the consequences: the pains
of childbirth, the efforts of work, and even mortality? To disobey
would be refusal in action, and, altogether, the affirmation of a desire
as something irreducible. With heroes and heroines who appear so
close to us only because they are dogged by such a cruel zero tolerance:
Antigone facing the law of the city, in the tragedy by Sophocles; or
Lysistrata (whose name means “she who disbands the army”) in the
comedy by Aristophanes. It will always be a nomos or a power (pouvoir)
that will be disobeyed by a more fundamental dynamis or potency
(puissance).
There is, of course, a modern story of disobedience. Everyone knows,
or ought to know, the extraordinary figure Henry D. Thoreau who
founded the notion of “civil disobedience” in the context of modern
democracies. After six years refusing to pay tax to the US State that was
intended to finance the unjust war of conquest in Mexico, in July 1849,
Thoreau was, very briefly (for a single night), thrown in prison. The text
he wrote in 1849, reflecting on this experience of conflict with the state,
Resistance to Civil Government, was published in a volume titled Civil
Disobedience. The premise suggests Spinoza: is it not a philosophical
contradiction for citizen to “resign his conscience to the legislator?
Why has every man a conscience then?,” why is this so if it is true
that the conscience alone is what, inside us, can judge everything
in complete freedom? The conclusion comes quickly: logically, we must
recognize every person’s “right to rebel” against the state:
How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be
associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political
organization as my government which is the slave’s government
also. All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to
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refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny
or its insufficiency are great and unendurable. … In other words,
when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken
to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico]
is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected
to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men
to rebel and revolutionize.
There have been many extensions of this seminal text and of its
experience of “doing otherwise” written about by Thoreau in Walden,
numerous extensions which can give the impression that the word
freedom could explode in every direction, in very different directions
in particular, in very conflictual directions, as we sense in the adjectives
“libertarian,”“liberal,” or even “neoliberal.” To give just a few examples
here chosen from the left, we should remember that Thoreau appears
as a tutelary figure for all movements of civil disobedience of which
a few summaries—those of Hugo Adam Bedau in 1991, Chaim Gans in
1992, José Bové in 2004, or Simon Critchley in 2007—show the major
tendencies: philosophical anarchism (according to the very general
expression by Chaim Gans); nonviolent political action (Gandhi and
his philosophy of nonviolence, Martin Luther King and his nonviolent
revolution, and even Lanza del Vasto and his technique of nonviolence
or Joseph Pyrronet and his nonviolent resistances; and, lastly, alter-
globalization and political ecology (César Chávez, Chiapas, civil
disobedience in front of GMOs, etc.).
In the Anglo-Saxon context, Henry D. Thoreau founded a great
philosophical and political movement, called radical democracy,
beginning with his own contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson right up
to our own contemporary Stanley Cavell. In any case, as Sandra Laugier
has shown, it is a matter of claiming a right and granting a right to
the claim itself. Against the liberal conformism of the American
governmental system—which by an abuse of language uses the word
“democracy” as an immutable given, acquired and preserved by real
society—“radical democracy” attempts to reinvent, on the basis of an
assumption of disobedience, the very conditions of which “democracy”
should want to speak. Stanley Cavell’s major work, The Claim of Reason,
attempted, on a fundamental level, to extend a philosophy of
knowledge (from Wittgenstein) towards the ethical and political
problems already contained in the word claim.
Can we establish disobedience as a general principle? “The reasons
to rebel are not lacking,” wrote Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier at
the beginning of their book, Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie?
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“In a democracy, the specter of the opposition to the power in place
goes from the vote to the insurrection, including abstention, boycotts,
petitions, demonstrations, strikes, moderate or symbolic use of
violence, riots, and so on.” But “another form of political action is
civil disobedience, that is the refusal to respect the law—or one
of its provisions—regularly voted by a majority of representatives
of the people.” This form of political action could, eventually, be
relayed or organized by parties, unions, associations, civic forums,
the blogosphere, etc. Certainly, the “voice” is inscribed in the principle
of representative democracy. But “to claim is what makes a voice when
it is founded solely on itself in order to establish assent [or common
dissent]: to be founded on I in order to say what we say. … It is the
possibility of this claim—by the voice—that makes it possible today
to extend the model of disobedience.”
Civil disobedience, then, can be seen for what it fundamentally is:
“a form of political action that constitutes [rather than negates]
democracy.” This means that we must re-establish the space of political
representation, no less, as claimed by the same authors in a subsequent
book, Le Principe démocratie, which is presented as an “investigation
into new political forms” today. For political forms do not cease to
change, even though they may be sustained by the still fresh memory
of anterior forms: there was 1968, then 1989. In 2011, there were
uprisings all over the world: in Tunis and Cairo, in Madrid and Athens,
in New York and London, Quebec and Paris, Tel Aviv and Sana’a, Dakar
and Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Kiev, Bangkok, Phnom Penh …
Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier recognize the potency (puissance)
of these uprisings; it is what they call “the force of the streets.” But,
keeping with philosophical tradition, they stick to the path that
confuses the ethical and individual position of Henry D. Thoreau with
a political position strictly marked by nonviolence:
In democracy, the demonstration is a right both recognized and
guaranteed, even if the more and more drastic regulations tend
to limit the freedom to meet and to frame the modalities of its
expression. … The riot is simply unacceptable under any regime
at all; and, in order to maintain law and order, to keep the civil
peace or to safeguard private goods, it is systematically pacified
by the police or the army, more often than not with the agreement
or the relief of the population (so long as their intervention
remains reasonable)—even if it is often a signal that a power rarely
misses taking things into consideration to prevent the risk of
a new explosion.
362
Hence the conventionally “liberal” pattern: on the one hand, Weber’s
vision of the state as the one that lays claim to the legitimate use of
violence: on the other hand, the idea of the “use of violence [facing the
state] inevitably leads to a distortion and a perversion of the struggle,”
the political struggle. This is not enough. It is to push violence to the
side, when in fact it constitutes the nexus of the problem of any
politics, in the complete array, from tyranny to emancipation. Violence
would be at the center of politics: it would be the whirlwind that
distresses and threatens to bring down the history of human societies
in confrontation. It is the hardest thing to think about (and I can sense,
writing this phrase, that my own subjective position facing this
question is not unfamiliar with such an admission of weakness: what
stops me, petrifies me in a sense, faced with the question of violence).
In 1921—when he was not even thirty years old—Walter Benjamin
courageously attempted a “Critique of Violence,” which appeared
in the third issue of Archiv für für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
(a journal whose editors were Edgar Jaffé, Werner Sombart, and
Max Weber, who had just died). Beyond this article we find, notably,
an unpublished fragment titled “The Right to Use Force” (1920),
written as a critique of an article by Herbert Vorwerk, whose title
he used (Das Recht zue Gewaltanwendung). Benjamin asked himself,
to sketch the problem, what he wanted to call a combinatory of
four “possible critiques”:
Critical possibilities
A) To deny the right of the state and the individual to use force.
B) To recognize unconditionally the right of the state and the
individual to use force.
C) To recognize the state’s right to use force.
D) To recognize the individual’s sole right to use force.
In one of the notes, Benjamin remarked that this table of “critical
possibilities” was founded on an opposition between the individual
and the state—and that, to make things clear, the “individual stands
opposed not to the living community.” Thus there is something
typically anarchistic in this opposition, even though “ethical anarchism”
(ethische Anarchismus), as he calls it using quotation marks a few lines
later, seems to him to be “contradictory as a political programme.”
Benjamin then explains that “there can be no objection to the ‘gesture’
of nonviolence, even where it ends in martyrdom,” in order to give
this ethico-religious example distinct from any anarchist position:
“When communities of Galician Jews let themselves be cut down
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in their synagogues without any attempt to defend themselves,
this has nothing to do with ‘ethical anarchism’ as a political program;
instead the mere resolve ‘not to resist evil’ emerges into the sacred light
of day as a form of moral action.” Dating from 1920–21, the famous
“Theological-Political Fragment” projected the problem into the space
of a “metaphysical anarchism”—as Gershom Sholem noted, while
commenting on this text—anarchy according to which the messianic
horizon of human history would be “total evanescence,” even if political
action is used to “search for that evanescence.”
Beyond the “Critique of Violence” we find the great text by Benjamin
on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, a text in which, among many other
motifs, it is poetry or literary work in general that was given the
virtues of the “search for evanescence” that could be considered the
search for liberty: “The literary work of art in the true sense arises only
where the word liberates itself from the spell of even the greatest task.”
Here we find the demand for the emancipation of the word (Wort)
through poetry, as it would appear later through the space of images
(Bildraum) invented by the artists of the avant-garde in the 1920s, from
Brecht to John Heartfield, Chaplin to Paul Klee, Eisenstein to the
Surrealists (in what Benjamin was to call the necessary “politics of
drunkenness,” of artistic drunkenness).
Why, then, is there a “Critique of Violence”? Because the first
violence—that which Max Weber had called “legitimate”—is that of
the state struck by the “individual” and the “living community.”“Ethical
anarchism,”“Messianism,”“poetry,” or “politics of drunkenness,” are
some of the experimental notions that Benjamin called upon to
imagine the means by which to escape from this first violence, and
to refuse it in the state, by disobeying. “The task of a critique of violence
can be summarised as that of expounding its relation to law (Recht)
and justice (Gerechtigkeit).” This relation is posited as something
disjunctive, yet this is not because violence is opposed to law, quite the
contrary, for it is violence itself that, historically, creates law. Instead, it
is because “justice” defines an ethical space that is opposed, according
to Benjamin, to the legal one of “right” or “law.” This is what firmly
contrasted Benjamin’s perspective with that of Carl Schmitt, for whom
the law makes the impassable horizon of any political decision, even
in the famous notion of “a state of exception.” The fact that the right/
law (Recht) should monopolize violence is what divides us at present,
depending on whether we find that “legitimate” or, on the contrary,
dangerous for justice and even for equity (Gerechtigkeit). Why,
for example, does the state accept to give workers a “right to strike”?
More often than not, it is insofar as the right or law might limit its acts
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of violence, or sabotage the tools of work. But it is quite a different case
for the “revolutionary general strikes”: these are violently repressed,
and that is why Benjamin was ready to follow Georges Sorel—and his
Reflections on Violence—on the level of a refusal of any “legal foundation”
of revolutionary action.
Therefore it is necessary, according to Benjamin, to reject all
founding violence of the law/right (Recht) as well as all violence that is
constitutive of the law, which is its violence administered by the police,
at the service of its leaders and their discretionary violence, the
violence that will strike the oppressed and persist in protecting the
oppressors. The question to be asked, then, is the following: is there a
human violence that could be said to be “just” in the ethical sense,
rather than “legitimate” merely in the legal sense? If the word Gewalt
means both “violence” and “power,” is there a human violence that
could be about potency and not power? On the one hand, Benjamin
replies by stating that “the critique of violence is of the philosophy of
its history,” which is one way to warn that violence as a gesture surpasses
any prior models for a general or abstract philosophical doctrine.
On the other hand, or even as a result, the text offers no conclusion:
Benjamin ends by opening his text completely, opening it to Messianic
evanescence, in order to leave it both philosophically and politically
unfinished. Antonia Birnbaum, in her book on Benjamin’s “Greek
detour,” commented on the fact that a knowledge of violence “is
forever inaccessible” and that this very inaccessibility—via the
mythical example of Niobe punished by Divine violence, an example
that Benjamin often returned to himself—fundamentally touches
the problem of the “pure violence of the tragic hero.” In parallel, in
an illuminating chapter in his book Walter Benjamin, Die Kreatur, das
Heilege, die Bilder, Sigrid Weigel reminds us that this inaccessibility
touches what is “monstrous” (ungeheur) in humanity: Benjamin recalls,
by this adjective, the translation of Sophocles’s Antigone by Friedrich
Hölderlin—an inexact translation of the Greek deinos but one that
is so illuminating. Thus, the tragedy reclaims its rights over violence:
“its rights” which are not “the law,” exactly because it speaks to us,
finally, about the disobedience to the laws of the state.
We return, therefore, to our initial question. This is a question
that Hannah Arendt sought to address in her collection, On Violence,
in 1962: for this, she had to provide a conceptual order—or even
an argumentative and dialectical orientation—for the three chapters,
independently of the chronology of their writing. Thus, she dealt
firstly with the theme of “Lying in Politic” (an article from 1971),
“Civil Disobedience” (a text from 1970), and finally, the crucial
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question, “On Violence” (1969). We understand from her text on
the state’s lies that we should not fear to disobey. In the chapter on
civil disobedience, she goes from Henry D. Thoreau all the way back
to Socrates to give a philosophical substratum to disobedience,
anchored in the most ancient tradition. She acknowledges, however,
the considerable political importance of contemporary civic
movements in the United States, notably facing the question of
intolerable racial segregation.
Hannah Arendt’s text “On Violence” seems to be marked, albeit
silently, with her reading of Benjamin’s 1921 essay. We can see this from
the initial thesis on the “instrumental nature of violence” and its link,
as a “means,” with a history of technology (military technology in
particular). We sense it also in the return to the same text by Georges
Sorel, Reflections on Violence: “The problems connected with violence
have, until now, remained very obscure.” But the difference with
Benjamin appears also in the divisions traced by Arendt: far from
joining power (pouvoir) and violence, she dissociates the two and
proposes a different typology, one more academic than genuinely
dialectical. Far from the “ethical anarchism” and the Benjaminian
dilemmas between power and potency, or between “conservative
violence” and “pure violence,” she ends by suggesting that power
(pouvoir), as such, does not exert violence but rather allows us to avoid
it: “We know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open
invitation to violence—if only because those who hold power and
feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they
the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation
to substitute violence for it.”
This relative confidence that is finally granted to power—inasmuch
as it protects us from violence in the name of its own “legitimate
violence”—is in huge contrast to the established historical facts of
which Arendt was nevertheless well aware. She described correctly,
for example, the state violence that was contemporary, insisting on
the “weird suicidal development of modern weapons,” which went
hand in hand with the “massive intrusion of criminal violence into
politics.” She saw in the “politics of nonviolence,” as she called it, a
coherent response to this globalized violence, and she concluded
that between the Vietnam War and the anticolonial struggles a politics
of violence prevails as though unavoidably and which is embodied,
for example, in Frantz Fanon’s watchword in Les Damnés de la terre
(The Wretched of the Earth), a watchword accentuated by Jean-Paul
Sartre in the famous preface to the book: “only violence pays.”
Thought, however, appears to sleepwalk in this domain, suspended by
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a thread. It barely moves forward, as though indefinitely slowed down
by the balance between the political response to be given to state
violence—could this response remain nonviolent until the end?—and
the ethical warning regarding all violence in general. Arendt, in this
sense, insists on the fact that the apologists of political violence,
Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto, or Frantz Fanon, “were motivated by a
much deeper hatred of bourgeois society and were led to a much more
radical break with its moral standards than the conventional Left.”
It goes without saying that a moral philosophy, in the classical sense,
cannot justify violence as such. In the Dictionnaire d’éthique et de
philosophie morale, edited by Monique Canto-Sperber, the entry on
“Violence,” written by Giuliano Pontara, attempts to give the “condition
of normative adequacy” of a definition of violence: “An adequate
definition of the word violence must make plausible the judgment
according to which a violent act is a morally negative act,” as though
this judgment preceded the definition itself … and yet “the question
of legitimacy of the use of violence in whatever conflictual situation
remains to be asked.”
This, it would seem, is a good way not to get anywhere, between
the abyss of ethics and the abyss of politics. It is a way to cast violence
outside of moral questions, like a gesture judged in advance (negatively,
of course). According to this viewpoint, there would be, to finish, simply
no possible ethics of violence as such, as though the disjunction
between ethics and politics followed us everywhere with its negative
double bind: “One must not use violence, even when one must.” I am
not surprised that, in this normative article, the methodological lesson
from Benjamin—with its questioning entirely on violence—should
have gone unseen: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its
history”—and not the philosophy of its morals sub specie aeternitatis.
It is significant, here, that the Dictionnaire d’éthique in question does
not offer any entries on the notion of refusal, of disobedience, or of
revolt, and offers even less, if that were possible, on uprisings.
There is, however, an “ethical disobedience,” from that of Socrates
or Thoreau all the way to Elisabeth Weissman, for example, if we study
recent history (regarding the “resistance in public services” of the
French state). There is, among thousands of examples, the emergence
of “new politics of civil disobedience” that have been analyzed for
a few years by the journal Multitudes. There is the rhizomatic atlas of
contemporary forms of uprising, the Constellations or Trajectoires
révolutionnaires du jeune 21e siècle published by the Collectif Mauvaise
Trope in 2014: from Palestine to China, from Larzac to Genoa, from
Italian Autonomy to the occupation of the banks, not to mention the
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role of hackers and of “electronic civil disobedience” that the Critical
Art Ensemble gave an example of in the years 1994–96. The list is,
fortunately and unfortunately, endless.
We do not refuse, we do not disobey, we do not rebel, and we do not
rise up without violence, to whatever degree. The question is to know
how, in each case, to critique—which does not mean to judge in
advance—this in history, as Walter Benjamin showed as a philosophical
task. There would, therefore, be a possible path between the ethics
of the “right to rebel” (to rebel against the right/law itself) according
to Henry D. Thoreau and the politics of “we have the right to rebel,”
according to the famous phrase by Jean-Paul Sartre. We rebel only
rarely without violence. To rise up, as we know, is often Violence to
Violence, as the German anarchist Ernst Friedrich wrote, in the 1920s, in
his work War against War; or as, before him, Auguste Blanqui had called
for a “War against capital” in his ‘”Instructions for a taking up of arms”
in 1868. It is nonetheless necessary to analyze how uses of violence
brought certain revolutionary groups—the Red Army Faction in
Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, Action directe in France, or the
Japanese Red Army, for example—towards a “sectarian functioning
and a total [political and popular] de-contextualisation to compensate
for the spectacularization of actions,” as Isabelle Sommier remarked in
her study La Violence révolutionnaire on contemporary revolutionary
violence. At the same time, how can we forget the leaflet from
Libération ( fig. 21), when it called so clearly, as the “wisest of duties,”
to “sabotage the enforcement of German law by every means”?
To defend one’s rights or the rights of others is “the wisest” of ethical
duties, even if it obliges us to violate an existing but iniquitous right/
law. But this is perhaps what can demand the exercising, de facto,
of political violence, albeit in “legitimate defense.” We know that ethics
and morals are today at the heart of the human sciences, whether
it has to do with history or economics, ethnology or sociology, as seen
in a recent anthology edited by two anthropologists, Didier Fassin and
Samuel Lézé. To acknowledge the founding position of desire for any
transindividuality—as maintained in a tradition first Spinozist and then
Hegelian, right up to psychoanalysis and beyond—goes hand in hand
with an acknowledgment of an ethical potency (puissance). To rise up,
says Bernard Aspe, carries us towards an overturning of values that
“obliges us to consider the ethical element in which everyone’s capacity
to change is at play.” It is then that the potency (puissance) of desire finds
its place of expression or expansion in the bridge that it builds between
the dimension of thought, speech, and that of the political act as such.
Antigone would be the tragic heroine of this overturning, of this
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uprising or this bridge dangerously spanning between two banks of
transindividual life. Her political act consists in following the sovereign
impulse of an ethical potency (puissance) that is “justice” itself (in which
we could easily recognize the Gerechtigkeit that Benjamin spoke of).
But she contravenes: she disobeys, she opposes and, in a sense, does
violence to the interdiction and to the violence of the “right/law”
(Recht) in the city. When writing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel was
aware just how much this point of overturning, or of uprising, spoke
to us of the fundamental conflict between “human law” (civic right
embodied by Creon) and “divine law” (the sacred right to bury the
dead) or between “government [as] a negative potency and the ethical
relation of man and woman embodied so well in the ‘relationship
unmixed’ between brother and sister” in Sophocles’s tragedy.
It fell to Hölderlin, in his eccentric translation of Antigone, to produce,
at the very heart of the tradition, that “caesura of the speculative”
that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe spoke of so well: a modern uprising
of ancient tragedy, so to speak.
Modern uprisings, moreover, ended up changing space, and
therefore temporality. We are no longer in the little village of Thebes,
but in the great metropolises of the industrial revolution; and
very soon in the space of the bizarre, undifferentiated times of
postmodernism and of neo-capitalism. Class struggles, then, or as
is sometimes said, classless struggles. Contemporary Marxist thinkers
wonder about this, thinkers like Immanuel Wallerstein and Étienne
Balibar. How should we rethink the movements by which an ethical
potency is capable of calling for a political act? It is no surprise that
Balibar places the problem on the level of violence. How should we
understand what ties “civility,” as he calls it, to omnipresent “civil war”?
What link should be created between justice, right, exception, war,
and revolution? So many questions asked by Balibar in the opening
to his collection of texts titled Violence and Civility:
About violence in its “individual” and “collective” forms (one of
the insistent questions before us is precisely whether that
distinction can be maintained), its “old” (perhaps even archaic) or
“new” (not just modern but also “postmodern”) forms, we should
surely be able to say something other than that it is unbearable and
we are against it—or again, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous formula
about the “state of nature”, taken up by Immanuel Kant, that “we
must leave it.” But it must be frankly admitted that we do not know,
or no longer believe we know, how to “leave it.” And we sometimes
find ourselves suspecting that, by a new ruse of history less
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 favorable than the old one, this inability of ours is becoming a
condition and form of the reproduction and extension of violence.
War or racism, aggression or repression, domination or insecurity,
sudden explosion or latent threat, violence and all different kinds of
violence may today be, at least in part, precisely the consequence of
this nonknowledge.

Western bourgeois societies seem to speak, in effect, with one voice to

“condemn all violence”: we are scandalized when the white shirt
of a company’s director of human resources is torn from him, a man
who, moreover, at once throws a few hundred employees into
unemployment for years to come. It falls to the oppressed class—in
17.
this case, the workers brutally thrown out into the street—to contest
Provocation à la désobéissance
the institution when it monopolizes—not only the means of production 1962, passim. Turlais, ed. 2015,
but also—violence, albeit in contempt of any moral or social justice. 204. Jonas 1955, 20 and 27.
Thoreau 1849, 383, and 389.
How, then, can we not oppose this through the “extra-legal, and
Thoreau 1854, passim. Bedau, fig. 22
therefore revolutionary, figure” of a violence of uprising? Étienne Balibar ed. 1991, passim. Gans 1992,
Mikhail Kalatozov, Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), 1964.
agrees, saying that one should look also at the idea of insurrection, or at passim. Bové and Luneau 2004,
Still frame (a drive-in screen on fire).
passim. Critchley 2007, passim.
the idea of permanent insurrection, and in the widest possible sense.
Gandhi 1927–1948, passim. King
The idea supposes that we do not forget the intimate dimension of 1958, passim. King 1963, passim.
uprisings in our daily spaces and temporalities. According to Balibar, it Lanza del Vasto 1971, passim.
is true that no one can be set free by anyone but him or herself, but Pyronnet 2006, passim. Laugier
2004a, 222–225. Laugier 2004b,
also that no one can free themselves without the help of others; and 99–124. Cavell 1979, passim.
here the philosopher proposes the notion of “anti-violence”—neither Ogien and Laugier 2010, 47
“nonviolence” nor “counter-violence”—in order to rethink, again and 192–193. Ogien and Laugier
2014, 270–280, 207–208, 211,
through Karl Marx, the conflicting relations between instituted powers and 213. Benjamin 1920,
and revolutionary politics in contemporary societies, to the point of 231–234. Benjamin 1920–1921,
seeking to trace a path—an astonishing one—between Lenin and 305–306. Benjamin 1922–1925,
323. Benjamin 1929, 207–221.
Gandhi.17 Benjamin 1921, 236–252. Sorel
1908, passim. Birnbaum 2008,
59–99. Weigel 2008, 88–109.
Arendt 1970, 14, 65, and 87. Fanon
THE MESSAGE OF THE BUTTERFLIES
1961, 1–52. Pontara 1996, 2050.
Canto-Sperber 1996, passim.
It does not suffice to disobey. It is critical, also, that disobedience—the Weissman 2010, passim.
Multitudes 2010, passim.
refusal, the call for insubordination—be transmitted to others in the
Multitudes 2001, passim
public space. To rise up? First of all, to make our fear rise up, to throw Multitudes 2012, passim.
it far away, or even to throw it directly in the face of those who gain Collectif Mauvaise Troupe 2014, fig. 23
their power (pouvoir) from manipulating our fears. To throw it faraway, passim. Critical Art Ensemble, Mikhail Kalatozov, Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), 1964.
1994–1996, passim. Friedrich 1924, Still frame (flying leaflets).
but, also, to circulate this very gesture. To give it, in this way, a political passim. Blanqui 1868, 257–271.
meaning. This means to raise up our desire. It is to take it—and with Sommier 2008, 140. Fassin and
it our expansive joy—in order to throw it into the air, so that it spreads Lézé, eds. 2013, passim. Aspe
2006, 37 and 111 (and in general,
over the space in which we breathe, the space of others, the entirety 67–117). Hegel 1807, 553. Hölderlin
1804, passim. Lacoue-Labarthe
1978, 39–69. Wallerstein 1979,
155–168. Balibar 1987, 207–246.
Balibar 2010, 1. Balibar 1994,
17–18, 23–24, and 38. Balibar 2001,
251–304. Balibar 2004, 305–321.
Balibar 2009, 435–461. Balibar
2015, 15–50.

370 371
of the public and political space. There are two images for this—two
concomitant images—in an admirable film that was for so long
censored, Soy Cuba by Mikhaïl Kalatozov. These images concern the
popular uprising, the student uprising first of all, which was aborted
in 1956, in the streets of Santiago de Cuba and Havana. The first image
concerns a firebrand or a fire ship: we see young students throwing
Molotov cocktails at the screen of a drive-in theater that is showing
official images of the dictator Fulgencio Batista ( fig. 22). A fire ship is
a vessel loaded with inflammable materials or explosives, used to ram
or to set fire to an enemy building. The word firebrand is used today
to describe political subversives or leaflets calling for revolt.
The other image is that of the leaflets distributed by the same
revolutionary students. In French, they are called papillons, “butterfly
tracts,” due to their size and difference to posters or placards for
example; these butterfly tracts rise up towards the clouds, without us
knowing if their message will be lost in the emptiness of the sky
or if their potency (puissance) of expansion is showing its irresistible
character in this way ( fig. 23). The paper butterflies rise up: we do not
know who will receive the message of uprising carried by the wind. It
is like a moment of extreme lyricism included in the implacable logic
of a scene of extreme violence (a scene of police repression on the
grand stairs of the University of Havana evokes, irresistibly, the great
massacre in Battleship Potemkin on the Richelieu Steps in Odessa).
A lyrical moment and a fragile moment: what is the worth of those
poor butterflies calling, as a last resort, the clouds to revolt, when
down below, the young rebels themselves are being murdered by
the police?
Yet, it is a necessary moment, a moment in spite of all. The leaflets
that we see here rising up to the sky—the contrary, then, of those
propaganda tracts dropped over Cuba by the USAAF airplanes, for
example—would be to the political space what fireflies are to a
summer night or what butterflies are to a bright summer day. They are
the sign of a desire that flies, that goes wherever it wants, that insists,
that persists, that resists in spite of all. There is a double meaning in
the word tract. On the one hand, it is a “short treatise,” a literary genre
that gave rise to those numerous pamphlets and brochures that have
addressed political, moral, or religious questions since the fifteenth
century. On the other hand, and according to a more recent meaning,
it is a simple little piece of paper handed out for political propaganda.
In both cases, the etymology of the Latin substantive tractatus survives,
a word that means the act of dealing with a subject, of deliberating,
carrying on a discussion, or delivering a sermon; but also, and above
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all, the act of touching in order to grasp, or (as in the French verb
tracter, or the English word “tractor”) to pull or tow something
or someone away from his or her initial place.
Spinoza created “tracts” in the two senses of the word: the
considerable Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as well as the modest
placard Ultimi Barbarorum that he wrote and sought to stick on the
walls of The Hague following the murder of the Republicans Johan
and Cornelis de Witt in 1672 (but his friend Van der Spick wisely held
him back, for Spinoza would probably have been killed in turn. The
text of the first (the “treaty”) was devotedly printed, transmitted from
generation to generation, while the second (the “tract”) has not been
available for a very long time, to my knowledge. The tract form is
perhaps tied to the paradox of being a written text … but one that
does not “stay,” a written text that “flies” or that “flies away” like those
words of urgency that we throw into the air without thinking of the
consequences, without worrying about making them monuments
engraved for the future. Spoken words fly away and written words stay
it seems, but tracts are midway, merely writings destined to fly away.
The German word for “tract,” Flugblatt, says this so well, meaning
literally “flying page.”
What do we write on a tract? How do we write so that the writing
will fly so quickly towards those who were not expecting it? With
slogans and watchwords, perhaps. But something else is needed for
the words to genuinely fly away: we must make language rise up, create
poetry, however critical or trivial it may be. When Charles Baudelaire
took up his pen on February 27, 1848, for the first “flying page”’ of Salut
Public, he began simply, in harmony with all his friends, with “Vive la
République!” But very soon afterward, his sentences sought to dig
deep into the heart of what he saw around him in the revolutionary
effervescence, which he called “the beauty of the people”: “A free man,
whoever he is, is more beautiful than marble …” In 1871, Arthur
Rimbaud wrote, in the wake of the Paris Commune, sentences that
were no doubt private—taken from his letters to Georges Izambard—
that quickly became the perfect tracts concerning poetic
insubordination for generations to come: “Poetry will no longer
rhythm action; it will be ahead.”
And what of Victor Hugo? Petitions, political writings, placards,
position statements, trials, exiles, public speeches, etc. The tracts
are everywhere and sumptuous. We could even go so far as to read the
chapter titles of Les Misérables as tracts: “For the dark hunt a silent
pack”; “Cemeteries take what they are given”; “Help from below may
be help from above”; “What horizon we see from atop the barricade”;
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“Supreme shadow, supreme dawn.” Much later, in March 1937, protesting
with all his strength against the fascist attack by Franco on the Spanish
Republic, René Char was to publish Placard pour un chemin des écoliers,
a collection of poems whose dedication was printed on a sheet of
paper that was sold at the Spanish Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition,
for the benefit of the children of Spain:
Children of Spain—O, how RED, to cloud forever the burst of steel
that tears you apart; - To you … Children of Spain, I shaped this
placard while some of you with morning eyes had not yet learned
of the purposes of death that flowed in them. Sorry for dedicating
them to you. With my last reserves of hope.
Better than anyone, the poet knows the meaning of a butterfly. It flies
away, but often clumsily. It passes very close to you, beating its wings
and surprising you with its beauty. And that can change your life.
It can very easily fall into the nets of predators or police. It does not
seem to know where to go, yet it manages to cross all the frontiers
and to find recipients. But for what message? Georg Büchner was
not yet twenty years old when he printed, secretly, his famous tract
Der Hessische Landbote. The message was clear: “This sheet wishes
to announce the truth in the land of Hesse, but the one who says the
truth will be hanged; it is possible that the one who reads the truth
will be punished by false judges.” The tract is certainly a little thing,
a mere sheet of paper with words written on it. But this can also be as
dangerous as a weapon. Hence the precautionary statements addressed
by Büchner to his reader: hide the tract and, yet, do everything to
communicate it to friends, etc. The call to rebel that was contained in
that Flugblatt in 1834 was, to finish, punctuated by calls to “lift your
eyes,”“lift your arms” and overturn the walls of prisons to “build a
house of freedom” against what the poet already called the policing
“violence of the law.”
As a brief form, the tract brings to the surface, at the heart of its call
to action, something like a condensed pathos: a lyricism of the gesture
we might say, inherent to the political decision to rise up. This is what
we already sense in the—obviously illegal—tracts written in 1916 by
Rosa Luxemburg, in which the political and economic reflections
written in a severe style leave room, as though rhythmically, for vibrant
calls that are often quite different from mere watchwords. “This cannot
be, this should not be!” In 1943, when young students Christoph Probst
and Hans and Sophie Scholl threw their “White Rose” tracts around
the corridors of the University of Munich, they were resorting to the
374
philosophical wisdom that was taught them by their professor, Kurt
Huber (who was also executed in the spring of 1943): Aristotle and his
critique of all political tyranny, but above all the German romantics,
beginning with Fichte (“And you must behave/ as though upon you
and your act alone/ depended the fate of an entire people”), Schiller
(“Everything can be sacrificed for the greater good of the state,
everything, except what the state itself must serve, for it is never an
end in itself”), Novalis (“celebrate peace”) … Beginning, of course,
with Goethe himself:
The hour has come when I find
My friends assembled in the night
For the sleepless silence
And the beautiful word of liberty
We murmur it, we stammer it
Till extraordinary novelty …
This poem by Goethe, copied out on an anti-Nazi tract in 1943,
evokes the whole situation concerning the writer of the tract itself:
the “butterfly” is formed in the shadows and, in this sense, making
a tract is like a clandestine literary and artisanal activity that
has nothing directly “heroic” or “sublime” about it, as Inge Scholl insists
in her account of The White Rose. But, once written, the tract calls
out to all space, seeking to move in the air so that the ambient
oppression will make room for something like the expression of a
desire, an anticipation, a call to live in the free air. But for this, it must
first be patiently copied. The White Rose’s tract, having copied out
Goethe’s poem, ended then with a call to recopy again: “We ask you
to copy out this tract, and to pass it on.” Thus, like fireflies and like
butterflies, tracts only have meaning when they are used to throw out
their multiple signals, when they make up a crowd, however dispersed
they may be. Tracts need the fundamental condition of their
technical reproduction.
How can we not be struck by a certain resemblance that links
Goethe’s poem, copied out by Hans Scholl in Munich in 1943, with
Paul Éluard’s famous poem “Liberté,” written in Paris during the same
period? But how can we not see, too, that the difference between
these two poems—the “classical” and the “modern”—hangs on Éluard’s
incessant repetition of the line “I write your name”: “On my school
notebook/ On my desk and the tree/ On the sand on the snow/ …
On every page read/ On every blank page/ Stone blood paper or ash”?
Could we not understand, from this, the repetition of the line “I write
375
your name” as a reference to the gesture by he or she who, in the
clandestine night, copies out or reproduces, on every possible
medium, tracts destined to be disseminated in broad daylight to
a country in which repression still reigns?
It is exactly this which initially impresses the reader who consults,
in the collections of printed matter in the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, the thirty-two enormous binders in which more than twelve
thousand clandestine tracts produced and distributed in France
during the Nazi occupation are collected, put together by Paul and
Renée Rou-Fouillet, studied by Anne Plassard, and, then made available
by Pierrette Turlais in a magnificent anthology. Every technique
of reproduction, from the most professional to the most primitive,
was employed to create these tracts: lead-typography or photogravure
when the tracts come from well-equipped clandestine press
organizations, such as Libération (thus, the printed tract which cites the
text of the headline in Libération dated March 1, 1943: “French youth
answer: SHIT!” ( fig. 24).
When the creation of these tracts comes from a marginal milieu,
the means and the printing procedures are more ephemeral and
fig. 24 fig. 25
artisanal: typewriters (with the successive carbons becoming more and
Clandestine leaflet printed by the “Liberation” Clandestine stickers included in a letter sent
more blurred), rubber stamps (with the successive stampings becoming Resistance group in France’s southern zone, 1943. to the Prefecture from Police Headquarters in Belfort.
paler), stencils, reproductions by mimeographs (Gestetner, Neostyle, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
Roneo), but also the improvised cut-out stencils, and even handwriting
demanding a laborious copying. Someone, for example, writes with a
pen, in miniscule letters, on the back of a postage stamp: “Dirty Kraut.”
Another sends anonymous and furious postcards to Marshal Pétain
himself. Another writes their message on little school notebook tags.
On April 12, 1941, the police chief in Belfort sent a letter to his superior
at the Préfecture: “Manuscript butterflies found on the public road.”
On the letter he stuck nine minuscule tracts that were written in pencil,
as though by a high school pupil: “Hitler to the stake” or “Victory”
with a very big “V” ( fig. 25). The same year was to be that of the famous
“battle of the V,” summarized by Jean-Pierre Guéno in the second
volume of his illustrated work titled Paroles de l’ombre: blossoming
everywhere we see “V” for victory, including in tracts in which the letter
is cut in color paper, as children do for school celebrations ( fig. 26).
Whatever the case, the instructions were always the same: “Copy fig. 26
out … Act quickly … Pass on.” But what was to be copied and circulated? “V,” clandestine Resistance leaflet, 1942.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
What could have pushed someone to act? What words? What kinds of
phrases (for illustrations were rare at this time)? The range of literary
genres is considerable: there are watchwords, of course; appeals
(beginning with that of June 18, reproduced so many times); stories

376 377
(of deportation, of repression, like when we are told of the executions
of Georges Politzer and Jacques Solomon, of Gabriel Péri and Lucien
Sampaix); information (on the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy, for example);
encrypted messages with their special “alphabets”; testaments (like
the last letter of Danielle Casanova) … but there are also poems (like
the “Ballade des pendus” (Ballad of the hanged) composed in the style
of François Villon and dedicated “to the patriots hanged in Nîmes
on March 2, 1944” by the SS), songs that are alternatively militant (like
“Hymne des francs-tireurs”) and ironic (like “Maréchal, nous voilà !”).
The librarians even reserved a special section for facéties (tricks,
schemes), ironic ballads pastiching classical authors, hijacked banknotes
(Pétain strangled by a worker) or New Year cards predicting the allied
invasion, and more. To which the German services responded by
creating false communist tracts, terrifying ones) or simply, misinformation.
With the very wide range of watchwords we find also the range
of affects—the feeling of oppression, hatred, the injunction not to give
in, the cry of hope which seems to contain an inherent despair felt
when faced with the situation, that of the Jews at Drancy, for example,
for whom a tract was circulated in Paris titled “Nazi Atrocities.” We
could, quite easily, imagine a montage of these 12,000 tracts from which
would surge something like the oceanic poem of uprisings, revolts
experienced, demanded, and acted out against the oppressor, and
about which a few sentences, gleaned by chance, already give an idea:
“Upright, stay free”
“Parisians, stand up”
“Stand up against Hitler”
“Everyone, stand up, onward!”
“We are being suffocated”
“Demonstrate in front of the town halls”
“Demonstrate en masse against deportation”
“Disobedience is the wisest of duties”
“Down with anti-Semitism! No racism in the Latin Quarter!”
“Demand the immediate suppression of the yellow star”
“Sabotage—Resistance—Strike”
“Comrades, sabotage the German war machine”
“Falsify lists, destroy files, lose orders”
“Miners of France, go on strike for May 1st”
“Young people, hide: resist!”
“For armed struggle!”
“We want potatoes”
“Bread, bread! Let’s see the mayor!”
378
“Open the prisons”
“Long live the Red Army!”
“They murdered Gabriel Péri”
“Remember our dead”
“And the vengeance is already burning”
“There is no insignificant act”
“Repeat this around you”
And it is in this way, with every butterfly tract, however modest
it may be, that the “extraordinary novelty” of the word liberty is
experienced as it was used in Goethe’s poem, copied onto tracts by
the White Rose. This novelty or this singularity concerns gesture as
much as action. It concerns gesture in the same way as the raised arm
drawn by Courbet and then engraved on the frontispiece of Salut Public
during the 1848 revolution: it is lyrical, it calls upon a poetry that
would be in tune with the “beauty of the free man” that Baudelaire
sang of on the same sheet. But it is also action: that is to say concrete,
technical, precise (as we see, for example, through the actions of the
man who escapes in the film by Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped). Here,
the precision and the technique are a question of life and death, and
that is why the “concrete,”“down to earth” tracts are among the most
moving, as seen in the recipes for making explosives or “mimeograph
paste ink,” lists of double agents, the indication of radio frequency
waves. Or the tract titled Indications à donner aux hommes qui veulent
prendre le maquis:
Effects and objects to be taken with you: 2 shirts, 2 underpants,
2 pairs of woollen socks, 1 woollen jumper, 1 muffler, 1 pull-over,
1 woollen cover, 1 spare pair of shoes, laces, thread, needles, trouser
buttons, safety pins, soap, a flask, a bowl, knife, spoon, fork, cup,
torch, compass, weapon if possible, sleeping bag if possible. Wear
warm clothes, a beret, a raincoat, a good pair of cleated shoes. …
Come with even just a false civil status document, but which is
perfectly in line with the work card to cross roadblocks, carry
provision cards and ticket sheets. The latter are indispensable
to facilitate provisioning.
There are, therefore, many ways to conceive, to write, to create, and
to receive tracts. There are at least as many kinds as there are of
butterflies. Like butterflies, tracts are double, dual, and thereby
efficient: they are fragile and resistant at the same time, poetic and
strategic, made of shadows and of light, of gestures and actions,
379
desperate and full of that power that is called uprising. Are they texts
at all? Yes, since their task is to transmit very important messages.
Are they images at all? Yes, since they resemble butterflies, to the point
of being able to, like them, appear and disappear. They beat their wings
and rise into the air. Their symmetry—like on the wings of the adult
butterfly that we call imago—often hide an enigma at the same time
as they deliver its beauty. We fold a tract in order to hide the message
and so it will fly better in the wind. Or we fold it to reveal, as in the
tract that I had in my hand before and that I could not find again in
the volumes of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Written in capital letters,
it praised Hitler and Pétain:

let us love and admire chancellor hitler

eternal england is unworthy of living
let us curse and crush the people overseas
only the nazi on land will survive
be then a support to the german fuhrer
navigator boys will finish the odyssey
to them alone belongs a just punishment
the victor’s palm awaits the swastika fig. 27

But it was enough to fold the butterfly in the middle—like any proper
butterfly—and use the poetic resources of Alexandrine verse to cut the
fig. 28
hemistich to suddenly have two Resistance tracts: Clandestine leaflet, Buckmaster Network,
folded and unfolded, 1942. Private collection, Paris.
let us love and admire chancellor hitler
eternal england is unworthy of living
let us curse and crush the people overseas
only the nazi on land will survive
be then a support to the german fuhrer
navigator boys will finish the odyssey
to them alone belongs a just punishment
the victor’s palm awaits the swastika

I have just found a visual equivalent to this folding strategy in

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

380 381
It is indeed in every possible sense that these tracts appear, to finish, and when there is a strike, show images of the strike.” The Godardian
as double objects, divided, duplicable, or even dual. As gesture objects, dazibao edited in Kinopraxis in 1970 by David C. Degener, would be
they transmit affects (uprising as the pathos of revolt), as we saw, considered the “apogee of the agit-prop” in the domain of cinema,
everywhere, in May 1968: “Imagination in power.” As action objects, at a time when the slogan “Liberate expression” was still in everyone’s
they create the tactics and the techniques (uprising as praxis of mind. But was it not also a way of summoning recording and
confrontation) as we see, for example, in a tract written on May 17, 1968, duplication techniques—16 mm cinema, and soon video—with a
and distributed by the Mouvement du 22 mars to explain how view to “sending butterflies,” in the same way that Courbet’s engraving
to protect themselves against the teargas the police used against the and the typography composing the text by Baudelaire had done this
demonstrators: on the small sheet of Salut public in 1848? Shouldn’t the lyricism
of uprising be given the technical tools of a craft that is capable
Against gas. of diffusing the butterflies’ fragile message?18
Preventative measures:
If you have no gas mask: diving goggles, motorbike goggles,
ski goggles, etc. (airtight). Hold half of a lemon in your mouth
(to breathe). Cloth around the nose and mouth.
Do not stay in a gas cloud, pour water onto the cloth placed
around your mouth, open the hydrants (do not put water in
your eyes or face for it can release toxic products).
Do not breathe the gas from the grenades (they make a loud
explosion).
On the skin: a layer of foundation or thick cream.
For the eyes: eye drops or hydro-cortisone.

Before even turning towards semioticians who are ready to

appropriate student tracts—for example those of the “Liaison des
étudiants anarchistes,” by “taking measure of [their] vocabulary and
[their] content,” which is what a team of scholars did in 1975, organized
by Michel Demonet—it is worth recalling that the revolts of 1968
were prepared, in part, by an anonymous tract from 1966, from the
Situationist International, De la misère en milieu étudiant, and in 1967
by a genuine tractatus, the Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes 18.
Spinoza, 1670, 597–908.
générations by Raoul Vaneigem. In the tract, he called for a “day without
Baudelaire, 1848, 1028, and 1032.
hindrance,” and the treaty affirmed that the “imagination is the exact Rimbaud 1871, 92. Hugo
science of possible solutions.” This is a remarkable phrase, opening the 1845–1862, 353, 415, 470, 723, 942,
and 1125. Char 1937, 266. Büchner
possibility for Chris Marker’s cine-tracts, and those of Alain Resnais,
1834, 75, and 91–92. Rosa
Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Gorin in the following years: these Luxemburg 1916–1918, 200.
are brief militant films that take up the principles of efficiency Scholl, 1953, 17–19, 59, 117, 123 and
explained in the 1920s by Dziga Vertov under the names “ciné-réclame” 125–126. Éluard 1939–1945, 57.
Roux-Fouillet 1954,
or Kino-pravda. V–XXIII. Plassard 2002, 31–34.
“Militant images, struggling images and sounds,” wrote Godard Turlais, ed. 2015, passim. Guéno
in 1969, in his “Initiation révolutionnaire au cinema”: ‘That is to say, 2011, 40–41. Novak 2015,
24–25. Lewino 1968, passim.
images and sounds that are neither in the press nor on television … Mouvement du 22 mars 1968,
15. Liaison des étudiants
anarchistes 1966–1968, passim.
Demonet et al. 1975, passim.
De la misère 1966, 34. Vaneigem
1967, 348. Vertov 1923, 38–46.
Vertov 1924, 62–70. Godard 1969,
119. Godard 1970, 342–350. Brenez
and Schmitt 2006, 115–116.

382 383
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INDEX OF ARTISTS
Anonymous (Catalan)
CNT-FAI, Barcelona, 1936
Book
Private Collection
p. 191, top
Anonymous (French)
Appel, 2003
Book
15 × 10.2 cm
Private collection
p. 196, left
Anonymous (French)
Barricade de la rue
Saint-Florentin (vue prise
de la place de la Concorde)
(Barricade on Rue Saint-
Florentin [taken from
Place de la Concorde]),
Paris sous la Commune,
par un témoin fidèle:
la photographie (Paris
under the Commune,
by a faithful witness:
photographs), no. 24,
Paris, Au bureau de vente,
17 rue du Croissant,
[1872]
Album
27 × 37.3 cm (closed)
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris
Anonymous (French)
Cinétracts (Film tracts),
1968
Films: color/silent, each
2:00 to 3:00 min.
Iskra collection, Paris
p. 181
395
Anonymous (French)
Élections à la commune.
Gustave Courbet candidat
du VIe arrondissement,
scrutin du 10 avril 1871
(Elections for the
Commune. Gustave
Courbet, candidate for
the 6th arrondissement,
election April 10, 1871)
Poster
Documentation, Musée
d’Orsay, Paris
p. 199
Anonymous (French)
La Guerre sociale (The social
war), Paris, 1906–15
Magazine
61 × 47 × 4.5 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
Anonymous (French)
“La jeunesse française
répond : Merde !” (France’s
youth says: Shit!), Call
to action in Libération,
no. 20, March 1, 1943
Leaflet
21 × 29 cm
Private collection
p. 176
Anonymous (French)
La Pomme de pin[s]
(The pine cone), 1921
Proof for an unpublished
leaflet
22.5 × 14.3 cm
Chancellerie des
Universités de Paris –
Bibliothèque Littéraire
Jacques Doucet, Paris
Anonymous (French)
Le Torrent révolutionnaire
(The revolutionary deluge)
Published in Le Charivari,
no. 192, vol. 3, July 12, 1834
Engraving
15 × 20 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, Paris
p. 105
Anonymous (French)
Letter from a nineteen-
year-old prisoner in the
Fleury-Mérogis Prison,
1971
Roneoed leaflet
29.7 × 21cm
IMEC, Institut Mémoires
de l’édition Contemporaine,
– Abbaye d’Ardenne,
Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
Herbe
Fonds GIP/Groupe
d’information sur les
prisons
Anonymous (French)
Manières de dire (Ways
of speaking), 1880
Lead pencil and black ink
20.1 × 31 cm
Département Patrimonial
du Service de la Mémoire
et des Affaires Culturelles
(SMAC) de la Préfecture
de Police de Paris
p. 198
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Grèves de
Limoges, 15 avril 1905,
Barricade Ancienne”
(Strikes in Limoges, April 15,
1905, old barricade)
“Crosper Batier, pho-édit.,
Limoges – Repr. Int”
Postcard
9 × 14 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
p. 238, top
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Les troubles
de Méru – La tête de la
colonne des Grévistes,
conduite par des Femmes,
édi E.L.D” (The disturbances
in Méru – The head
of the column of strikers,
led by women, pub. E.L.D),
1908
Postcard
9 × 14 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Raon-l’Étape –
L’Émeute du 28 juillet –
Barricade de la rue Thiers,
1907” (Raon-l’Étape – The
July 28 riot – Barricade on
Rue Thiers, 1907)
“L. Cuny, édit; Raon-l’Étape,
1907”
Postcard
9 × 14 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
p. 238, bottom
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Reste du Christ
de l’avenue Baudin détruit
à la suite des troubles
de Limoges” (Remains of
the crucifix on Avenue
Baudin, destroyed during
the disturbances in
Limoges), May 8, 1905
Postcard
9 × 14 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
p. 230, bottom
Anonymous (French)
Postcard “Tergnier – La
Grève des Cheminots [III]
– Les deux machines
tamponnées sur la plaque
tournante” (Tergnier – The
Railway Workers’ Strike [III]
– Collision on the
turntable), 1910
“Tergnier – Impr. Ch.
Poulain – Cliché Collet”
Postcard
9 × 14 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
p. 230, top
Anonymous (French)
Tiqqun, 2001
Magazine
30 × 20 cm
Private collection
p. 196, right
Anonymous (French)
Un coin de la salle
des fusillés
Paris sous la Commune,
par un témoin fidèle:
la photographie (A corner
of the room for those who
have been shot. Paris under
the Commune, by a faithful
witness: photographs), no. 5.
Paris, Au bureau de vente,
17 rue du Croissant, (1872)
Album
26.7 × 37.2 cm
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris  p. 227
396
Anonymous (French)
“Une barricade dans les
prisons [Daniel Defert]”
(A barricade in the prisons
[Daniel Defert]). In
“J’accuse,” supplement to
La Cause du peuple, no. 15,
December 18, 1971
Newspaper
58 × 42 cm
IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
l’Édition Contemporaine –
Abbaye d’Ardenne,
Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
Herbe
Fonds GIP/Groupe
d’information sur les
prisons
Anonymous (Greek
member of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando)
Burning the bodies of gassed
prisoners in the open-air
cremation pits outside the
Crematorium V gas chamber,
Birkenau, 1944
Contact print with two
images
12 × 6 cm
Archival collection of the
State Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum, Oświęcim
p. 256
Anonymous (Greek
member of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando)
Women being driven towards
the Crematorium V gas
chamber, Birkenau, 1944
Contact print with two
images
12 × 6 cm
Archival collection of the
State Auschwitz-Birkenau
Museum, Oświęcim
p. 256
Anonymous (Italian)
Potere operaio
(Workers’ power), 1968
Magazine
41 × 27.7 cm
Private collection
Anonymous (Italian)
Rosso (Red), 1968
Magazine
61 × 45 cm
Private collection
Anonymous (Mexican)
Fortino Sámano fuma un
cigarro antes de ser fusilado
(Fortino Sámano smokes
a cigar before being shot)
Mexico City, 1917
Modern gelatin silver print
4 × 5 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 6013
p. 246
Anonymous (Mexican)
Fusilados por tropas
zapatistas en Ayotzingo
(Men shot by Zapatist
troops at Ayotzingo),
c. 1913–17
Modern gelatin silver print
4 × 5 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 63752
p. 245, bottom
Anonymous (Mexican)
Jesús Carranza acompañado
de varios hombres observan
una vía destruida (Jesús
Carranza and others
inspecting destroyed rail
track), “Revolución
Zapatista,” Coahuila, Mexico,
c. 1914
Modern gelatin silver print
2 × 3 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 32942
p. 239, left
Anonymous (Mexican)
Ojo! Una revista que ve
(Eye! A magazine that sees),
Mexico, 1958
First issue of a magazine
self-published by Héctor
Garcia
38.5 × 28.5 cm
Alexis Fabry collection,
Paris
p. 195
Anonymous (Mexican)
Soldaderas en posición para
disparar contra las gavillas
de José Chávez García
(Women combatants ready
to fire at the forces of José
Chavez García), c. 1914
Modern gelatin silver print
4 × 5 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 63945
p. 267, bottom
Anonymous (Mexican)
Soldaderas preparan comida
en el techo de vagón de
tren (Women combatants
cooking on the roof of
a train), c. 1914
Modern gelatin silver print
5 × 7 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 6388
Anonymous (Mexican)
Soldados y campesinos
caminan por calle, México
(Soldiers and peasants
walking in the street,
Mexico), c. 1914
Modern gelatin silver print
5 × 7 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 5317
Anonymous (Russian)
Izvestia of the Provisional
Revolutionary Council
(nos. 7, 8, 9, 10),
March 9, 10, 11, and 12, 1921
Newspaper
48 × 31.5 cm
Bibliothèque
de Documentation
Internationale
Contemporaine – BDIC,
Nanterre
Anonymous
(South African)
African National Council
demonstration, Fordsburg,
1952
Gelatin silver print
10 × 15 cm
p. 252, top
Anonymous
(South African)
Dead and wounded
outside the police station in
Sharpeville, March 21, 1960
Gelatin silver print
10 × 15 cm
Getty Images
p. 252, bottom
Paulo Abreu
Conde Fereira, 2003
Video: black and white, 4/3,
sound, 1:22 min.
Paulo Abreu/Light Cone
p. 144
Dennis Adams
He’s no terrorist, “Airborne”
series, 2002
C-print mounted on
aluminum
102.7 × 136.5 × 2.3 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques, Paris,
inv. FNAC 03-243
397
Dennis Adams
Patriot, “Airborne” series,
2002
C-print mounted on
aluminum
103 × 137 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques, Paris,
inv. FNAC 03-241
p. 99
Dennis Adams
Payback, “Airborne” series,
2002
C-print mounted on
aluminum
102.5 × 137 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques, Paris
inv. FNAC 03-242
Henri Alleg
La Question, Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958
Book
Private collection
p. 347, left
Jean Alloucherie
Noches de Sevilla.
Un mes entre los rebeldes
(Nights in Seville.
A month with the rebels),
Barcelona-Madrid, 1937
Book
Private collection
p. 191, bottom
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Obrero en huelga,
asesinado (Murdered
striker), 1934
Gelatin silver print
18.8 × 24.5 cm
Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, Paris
p. 247
Francis Alÿs, with Ever Astudillo Delgado
Cuauhtémoc Medina Cali, 1975–78
and Rafael Ortega Vintage gelatin silver print
When Faith Moves on baryta paper
Mountains, 2002 8.3 × 11.4 cm
Cinematographic Leticia and Stanislas
documentation of an event, Poniatowski collection
Lima, Peru p. 202, top
Francis Alÿs/Galerie Peter
Kilchmann, Zürich Ever Astudillo Delgado
p. 107 Cali, 1975–78
Gelatin silver print
Art & Language 8.5 × 11.6 cm
Shouting Men, 1975 Fondation Cartier pour
Screenprint and felt pen l’Art Contemporain, Paris
on paper p. 202, middle
9 sections, 75 × 60.5 cm
(each) Ever Astudillo Delgado
MACBA – Museu d’Art Cali, 1975–78
Contemporani de Gelatin silver print
Barcelona, Barcelona 8.5 × 11.6 cm
p. 155 Fondation Cartier pour
l’Art Contemporain, Paris
Antonin Artaud p. 202, bottom
Notebook no. 321, 1947
Manuscripts and drawings Ever Astudillo Delgado
22.5 × 17.5 cm Cali, 1975–78
Bibliothèque Nationale Gelatin silver print
de France, Paris 8.5 × 11.6 cm
p. 168, bottom Fondation Cartier pour l’Art
Contemporain, Paris
Antonin Artaud
Notebook no. 326, 1947 Hugo Aveta
Manuscripts and drawings Ritmos primarios,
22.5 × 17.5 cm la subversiòn del alma
Bibliothèque Nationale (Basic rhythms: subversion
de France, Paris of the soul), 2013
p. 168, top Video loop: 16/9, color,
sound, 8:11 min
Antonin Artaud Hugo Aveta/NextLevel
Hammer used by Galerie, Paris
Antonin Artaud at Ivry p. 281
for “trying out” his texts
and stressing his diction, Ismaïl Bahri
1947 Film à blanc (Blank film),
50 × 15 × 4 cm 2012
Bibliothèque Nationale Series made during
de France, Paris a residency at Fabrique
p. 130 Phantom
Videos: 16/9, silent,
duration variable
Ismaïl Bahri collection
Artur Barrio Francisca Benitez Ruth Berlau Joseph Beuys Désiré-Magloire Marcel Broodthaers Gilles Caron Henri Cartier-Bresson
Livro de Carne Garde l’Est, 2005 Props for Bertolt Brecht’s So kann die Parteiendiktatur Bourneville Carte d’une utopie politique Manifestations École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,
(Meat book), 1978 Still frame Antigone, 1948 überwunden werden Hystéro-épilepsie, et Deux petits tableaux 1 anticatholiques May 1968
Photographs Francisca Benitez collection Gelatin silver print (Thus can the dictatorship hallucinations: angoisse ou 0 (Map of a political à Londonderry (Anti- Gelatin silver print, 1984
Each 35 × 45 cm p. 286 15 × 10 cm of parties be overcome), (Hysterical epilepsy: utopia and Two little Catholic demonstrations 41 × 28.6 cm
Artur Barrio collection Akademie der Künste, 1971 hallucinations, anxiety), pictures 1 or 0), 1973 in Londonderry), 1969 Fondation Henri Cartier-
p. 197 Francisca Benitez Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Printed plastic bag, felt 1875 Card mounted on canvas, Contact sheet, modern Bresson, Paris
Garde l’Est, 2005 Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_025 96/500, published by art Vintage albumen print ink, felt pen, printing, print, 2016 p. 209
Georges Bataille Still frame intermedia, Cologne 9 × 5.5 cm collage, drawing, and 30 × 40 cm
and André Breton Francisca Benitez collection Ruth Berlau 68 × 48 × 1.2 cm Private collection handwriting Fondation Gilles Caron Henri Cartier-Bresson
Contre-ttaque : union de American Strikers, 1941–44 Pinakothek der Moderne, 119 × 185.5 cm; p. 139, bottom Funérailles des victimes
lutte des intellectuels Ruth Berlau Gelatin silver print Munich Désiré-Magloire 27 × 35 cm (each) de Charonne, Paris, France
révolutionnaires (Counter- Props for Bertolt Brecht’s 10 × 15 cm pp. 178–179 Bourneville Private collection Gilles Caron (Funeral of the victims
attack: United front of Antigone, 1948 Akademie der Künste, Hystéro-épilepsie: contorsions p. 171 Manifestations étudiantes à of the “Charonne massacre,”
revolutionary intellectuals), Gelatin silver print Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Joseph Beuys (Hysterical epilepsy: Paris (Student demonstrations Paris, France), February 13,
1936 15 × 10 cm Archiv, inv. BBA_B018_004 Unbetitlet (Untitled), 1971 contortions), 1875 Marcel Broodthaers in Paris), 1968 1962
Leaflet Akademie der Künste, p. 208, top 15.8 × 16.3 cm Vintage albumen print Soleil politique et Fig., Modern gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print, 1980s
27 × 21 cm Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Pencil on card 9 × 5.5 cm Fig., Fig. (Political sun and 40 × 30 cm 20.4 × 25.3 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_016 Ruth Berlau Bayerische Private collection Fig., fig., fig.) (diptych), 1972 Fondation Gilles Caron Fondation Henri Cartier-
de France, Paris p. 270, top American Strikers, 1941–44 Staatsgemäldesammlungen Printing and collage Bresson, Paris
p. 165 Gelatin silver print – Sammlung Moderne Désiré-Magloire on paper Gilles Caron p. 222, top
Ruth Berlau 10 × 15 cm Kunst in der Pinakothek Bourneville 27 × 36 × 44 cm and Manifestations étudiantes à
Taysir Batniji Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Akademie der Künste, der Moderne München. Untitled, undated 36 × 44 cm Paris (Student demonstrations Henri Cartier-Bresson
Gaza Journal intime Antigone, 1948 Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Leihgabe Sammlung Klüser, Vintage albumen print Estate Marcel Broodthaers in Paris), 1968 Manifestation AIDA
(Gaza diary), 2001 Gelatin silver print Archiv, inv. BBA_B126_004 Munich 9 × 5.5 cm p. 170 Modern gelatin silver print pour la libération de 100
Video: 4/3, color, sound, 4:52 15 × 10 cm p. 208, bottom p. 131 Private collection 30 × 40 cm artistes argentins disparus,
min Akademie der Künste, Malcolm Browne Fondation Gilles Caron Paris (AIDA demonstration
Taysir Batniji/Galerie Eric Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Ruth Berlau Alfredo M. Bonanno Désiré-Magloire Self-Immolation by Buddhist for the freeing of
Dupont, Paris Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_028 American strikers, 1941–44 La Gioia armata Bourneville Monk Thich Quang Duc, Gilles Caron 100 abducted Argentinian
pp. 276–277 p. 270, bottom Gelatin silver print [Armed Joy], Edizioni Untitled, undated Saigon, 1963 Manifestation paysanne artists, Paris), 1981
10 × 15 cm di Anarchismo, 1977 Vintage albumen print Modern gelatin silver print à Redon (Farmers Gelatin silver print, 1990s
Charles Baudelaire, Ruth Berlau Akademie der Künste, Book 9 × 5.5 cm 24 × 30 cm demonstrating in Redon), 20.4 × 25.3 cm
Gustave Courbet, Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Jeu de Paume, Paris Private collection AP/SIPA Agency 1967 Fondation Henri Cartier-
Champfleury, and Antigone, 1948 Archiv, inv. BBA_B018_003 p. 194, bottom p. 253 Modern gelatin silver print Bresson, Paris
Charles Toubin Gelatin silver print Bertolt Brecht 40 × 30 cm
Le Salut public, no. 1, 1848 15 × 10 cm Ruth Berlau Enrique Bostelmann Modellbuch (Model) for Gilles Caron Fondation Gilles Caron Henri Cartier-Bresson
Newspaper Akademie der Künste, American Strikers, 1941–44 América – un viaje a través Mother Courage and Her Manifestations p. 138, left Manifestation AIDA
27.2 × 22 cm Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Gelatin silver print de la injusticia (America – a Children, January 11, 1949– anticatholiques à pour la libération de 100
Bibliothèque Nationale Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_018 10 × 15 cm journey through injustice), April 4, 1961 Londonderry (Anti-Catholic Gilles Caron artistes argentins disparus,
de France, Paris Akademie der Künste, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, Photomontage demonstrations in Manifestation paysanne Paris (AIDA demonstration
Ruth Berlau Berlin, Bertolt Brecht 1970 Page from a booklet Londonderry), 1969 à Redon (Farmers for the freeing of
Charles Baudelaire, Props for Bertolt Brecht’s Archiv, inv. BBA_B126_010 Book 30.1 × 25 × 0.5 cm Modern gelatin silver print, demonstrating in Redon), 100 abducted Argentinian
Gustave Courbet, Antigone, 1948 27 × 20 cm Akademie der Künste, 2006 1967 artists, Paris), 1981
Champfleury, Gelatin silver print Joseph Beuys Jeu de Paume, Paris Berlin, Bertolt Brecht 30 × 40 cm Modern gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print, 1990s
and Charles Toubin 15 × 10 cm Diagramma Terremoto Archiv, inv. BBA Fondation Gilles Caron 40 × 30 cm 20.7 × 25.7 cm
Le Salut public, no. 2, 1848 Akademie der Künste, (Diagram of an Bruno Boudjelal MB_031_248 p. 139, top, cover Fondation Gilles Caron Fondation Henri Cartier-
Newspaper Berlin, Bertolt Brecht earthquake), 1981 Sur les traces de Frantz p. 266 p. 138, right Bresson, Paris
30.5 × 22.5 cm Archiv, inv. BBA_B101_024 Pencil on ECG paper Fanon (In the footsteps
Bibliothèque Nationale 10 × 340 cm of Franz Fanon), 2012 André Breton et al. Henri Cartier-Bresson
de France, Paris Isabel and Agustín Coppel 6 photographs, modern La Révolution surréaliste, Comité Information
p. 160 collection, Mexico prints, 2016 no. 1, 1924 Défense, Palais de la
p. 180 40 × 40 cm Magazine Mutualité, Paris, France, 1969
Bruno Boudjelal/Agence 29.2 × 20.5 × 0.8 cm Vintage gelatin silver print
VU’ Bibliothèque Nationale 20.2 × 25.6 cm
pp. 274–275 de France, Paris Fondation Henri Cartier-
p. 164 Bresson, Paris

398 399
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Manifestation AIDA
pour la libération de 100
artistes argentins disparus,
Amsterdam, Pays-Bas
(AIDA demonstration for
the freeing of 100 abducted
Argentinian artists,
Amsterdam, Netherlands),
September 12, 1981
Gelatin silver print, 1980s
20.3 × 25.3 cm
Fondation Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Paris
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Manifestation pro-Castro,
New York (Pro-Castro
demonstration, New York),
September 1960
Gelatin silver print, 1970s
20.5 × 25.3 cm
Fondation Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Paris
p. 222, bottom
Cornélius Castoriadis
et al.
Socialisme ou barbarie,
no. 23 (1959–60)
Magazine
22.7 × 14.4 cm
IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
l’Édition Contemporaine –
Abbaye d’Ardenne,
Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
Herbe
Pere Català Pic
Aixafem el feixisme
(Crush fascism),
1936
Photomechanical print
29.6 × 19.5 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 111
Claude Cattelain
Video Hebdo 41 (Weekly
video 41), 2009–10
Pal video: 4/3, color, sound,
3:12 min.
Claude Cattelain collection,
Valenciennes
p. 128
400
Claude Cattelain
Video Hebdo 46 (Weekly
video 46), 2009–10
Pal video: 4/3, color, sound,
6:30 min.
Claude Cattelain collection,
Valenciennes
p. 129
Agustí Centelles
Barricades, Barcelona, 1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
p. 242, top
Agustí Centelles
Barricades, Barcelona, 1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
p. 242, bottom
Agustí Centelles
Barricades, Barcelona,
1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
Barricades, Barcelona,
1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
CNT trade union trucks,
Barcelona, 1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
Children playing, Montjuic,
Barcelona, 1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
p. 271
Agustí Centelles
Children playing, Montjuic,
Barcelona, 1936
1936
Modern gelatin silver print
12 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
Amnestied prisoners leaving
the model prison, Barcelona,
1936
Modern gelatin silver print
15 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
Amnestied prisoners leaving
the model prison, Barcelona,
1936
Modern gelatin silver print
15 × 17.3 cm
Centro Documental
de la Memoria Histórica,
Salamanca
Agustí Centelles
Rioting after the victory
of the Popular Front at the
elections of February 16, 1936.
Plaça de la República (Plaça
Sant Jaume), Barcelona,
February 17, 1936
Gelatin silver print
on baryta paper
16.8 × 23,1 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 216, top
Agustí Centelles
Belchite, Teruel, Aragon
Frontline, September 1939
Gelatin silver print
24.7 × 36 cm
Private collection
Chieh-Jen Chen
The Route, 2006
35 mm film transferred
onto DVD: color and black
and white, silent, 16:45 min.
Chieh-Jen Chen/Lily
Robert gallery
p. 225
Léon Cogniet
Les Drapeaux (The flags),
1830
Oil on canvas
19 × 24 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Orléans
Pascal Convert
Soulèvement (Uprising)
Left to right: Paul Vaillant-
Couturier, Charles Michels,
Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 2015
Palladium contact print
on pure linen paper
47 × 30.7 cm, 47 × 74.3 cm, 47
× 30.7 cm
Crystal on mirror, glass,
and charcoal
H 10 x L 56 x W 11 cm
Edition 1/2
Pascal Convert/Galerie
Eric Dupont, Paris
p. 141
Gustave Courbet
Révolutionnaire sur une
barricade, projet de
frontispice pour “Le Salut
public” (Revolutionary
on a barricade: draft
frontispiece for
“Le Salut public”), 1848
Charcoal on paper
9.5 × 12.5 cm
Musée Carnavalet –
Histoire de Paris, Paris
p. 134
Honoré Daumier Armand Dayot Edmond, successor Michel Foucault
Les Femmes socialistes L’Invasion, le Siège, to Charles Marville “The situation in the prison
(Women socialists), la Commune (The invasion, (presumed is intolerable …,” 1971
in Le Charivari,  the siege, the Commune), photographer) Manuscript of the leaflet
April–June 1849 1870–71 Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville, accompanying the
Lithograph Original edition Paris. Cour des bureaux investigation by the Prisons
36.5 × 25 cm 35.5 × 28 × 3.5 cm (Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, Information Group (GIP)
Bibliothèque Nationale Bibliothèque Nationale Paris. The office courtyard), in France
de France, Paris de France, Paris c. 1871 21 × 15 cm
p. 264, left Albumen print IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
Guy Debord et al. 27 × 36.8 cm l’Édition Contemporaine –
Honoré Daumier Internationale Bibliothèque des Arts Abbaye d’Ardenne,
Les Femmes socialistes situationniste… nouveau Décoratifs, Paris Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
(Women socialists), théâtre d’opération p. 229 Herbe
in Le Charivari,  dans la culture (Situationist GIP Collection
April–June 1849 International: New theater Carl Einstein
Lithograph of cultural operations), “Unes declarations Leonard Freed
36.5 × 25 cm 1958 sensacionals de Carl Residents of Guernica in
Bibliothèque Nationale Leaflet Einstein” (A sensational front of a mural replica of
de France, Paris 40 × 21 cm statement by Carl Einstein), Pablo Picasso’s painting, 1977
p. 264, right Bibliothèque Nationale 1938 Gelatin silver print 
de France, Paris Article by Sebottomtià 40 × 30 cm
Honoré Daumier Gasch in Meridià. Setmanari Magnum Photos, Paris
Les Divorceuses (Divorced André-Adolphe Eugène de literatura, art i política: p. 137
women), in Le Charivari, Disdéri (attributed to) tribuna del Front Intellectual
August–October 1848 Insurgés tués pendant Antifeixista (Meridià. Gisèle Freund
Lithograph la Semaine sanglante de la A weekly of literature, International Congress
36.5 × 25 cm Commune (Insurgents killed art and politics: the voice of Writers for the Defense
Bibliothèque Nationale during the Commune’s of the Anti-Fascist of Culture, 1935
de France, Paris “Bloody Week”), 1871 Intellectual Front) Contact sheet
p. 265 Albumen print Magazine page 20 × 23 cm
21 × 27 cm 30 × 20 cm IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
Honoré Daumier Musée Carnavalet – Private collection l’Édition Contemporaine –
Les Divorceuses (Divorced Histoire de Paris, Paris p. 188 Abbaye d’Ardenne,
women), in Le Charivari, p. 245, top Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
August-October 1848 Élie Faure Herbe
Lithograph Marcel Duchamp “Portrait de passionaria” p. 174
36.5 × 25 cm and Man Ray (Portrait of La Pasionaria)
Bibliothèque Nationale “Élevage de poussière” in Regards, no. 134, Gisèle Freund
de France, Paris (Breeding dust) August 6, 1936, p. 9 International Congress
Littérature, no. 5, 1923, Magazine of Writers for the Defense
Armand Dayot p. 10 36 × 27.5 cm of Culture, 1935
Journées révolutionnaires Magazine Private collection Gelatin silver print
1830-1848 23.5 × 17.5 × 2 cm p. 143 24 × 30 cm
(Revolutionary days), Bibliothèque Nationale IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
Paris: Flammarion, 1897 de France, Paris Robert Filliou l’Édition Contemporaine –
Book Optimistic Box no. 1, 1968 Abbaye d’Ardenne,
15 × 22 cm Wood, sandstone, and Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
Private collection paper Herbe
pp. 236–237 11 × 11 × 11 cm p. 175, top
Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Pompidou,
Paris
p. 226
401
Gisèle Freund
International Congress
of Writers for the Defense
of Culture, 1935
Gelatin silver print
24 × 30 cm
IMEC, Institut Mémoires de
l’Édition Contemporaine –
Abbaye d’Ardenne,
Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-
Herbe
p. 175, bottom
Gérard Fromanger
Film-tract no. 1968, 1968
16 mm film: color, silent,
2:45 min.
Gift of the artist, 2006,
Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Pompidou,
Paris
p. 184
Federico García Lorca
Mierda (Shit), 1934
Calligram
Indian ink
25 × 25 cm
Fundación Federico García
Lorca, Madrid
p. 163
Marcel Gautherot
Pèlerinage à l’occasion
du jubilé du sanctuaire
diocésain du Bon Jésus de
Matosinhos (Pilgrimage for
the jubilee of the shrine of
Bom Jesus de Matosinhos),
c. 1950
Modern gelatin silver print
45 × 45 cm
Instituto Moreira Salles,
São Paulo
p. 136, bottom
Marcel Gautherot
Sanctuaire diocésain
du Bon Jésus de Matosinhos
(The shrine of Bom Jesus
de Matosinhos), c. 1947
Modern gelatin silver print
45 × 45 cm
Instituto Moreira Salles,
São Paulo
p. 136, top
402
Agnès Geoffray
Catalepsie (Catalepsy),
“Incidental Gestures” series,
2011–15
Modern gelatin silver
print
35 × 50 cm
FRAC Auvergne,
Clermont-Ferrand
p. 145, bottom
Agnès Geoffray
Laura Nelson, “Incidental
Gestures” series, 2011–15
Modern gelatin silver print
22 × 16 cm
FRAC Auvergne,
Clermont-Ferrand
p. 146
Agnès Geoffray
Métamorphose II
(Metamorphosis II),
“Métamorphoses” series,
2012–15
Photograph
55 × 75 cm
Collection of the artist
p. 145, top
Jochen Gerz
Calling to the Point
of Exhaustion, 1972
Betacam, black and white,
sound, 19:30 min.
Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Pompidou,
Paris
p. 148
Eduardo Gil
Niños desaparecidos.
Segcunda Marcha
de la Resistancia (Murdered
children. Second Resistance
March), Buenos Aires,
December 9–10, 1982
Modern gelatin silver print
50 × 60 cm
Eduardo Gil collection
p. 269, top
Eduardo Gil
Paraguas. Segunda Marcha
de la Resistancia (Umbrellas.
Second Resistance March),
Buenos Aires, December
9–10, 1982
Modern gelatin silver print
50 × 60 cm
Eduardo Gil collection
p. 269, bottom
Eduardo Gil
Siluetas y canas. El Siluetazo
(Silhouettes and cops.
The silhouette action),
Buenos Aires, September
21–22, 1983
Modern gelatin silver print
50 × 60 cm
Eduardo Gil collection
p. 273
Jules Girardet
La Colonne Vendôme après
sa chute (The Vendôme
Column after being torn
down), 1871
Oil on wooden panel
21 × 27 cm
Musée Carnavalet –
Histoire de Paris, Paris
p. 228
Jack Goldstein
A Glass of Milk, 1972
Film: color, sound, 3:42 min.
The Estate of Jack
Goldstein/Galerie Buchholz,
Cologne
p. 132
Julio González
Mà dreta aixecada (Right
hand raised), c. 1942
Bronze
44 × 15.2 × 12.6 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 140, left
Julio González
Mà esquerra aixecada
(Left hand raised), c. 1942
Bronze
37.2 × 19 × 15.2 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 140, right
Julio González
Cap cridant (Shouting
head), c. 1936–39
Oil on canvas
46 × 33 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 151, top
Julio González
Cap de Montserrat cridant
(Head of Montserrat
shouting), c. 1942
Bronze
31,5 × 19,8 × 29,3 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 150
Julio González
Montserrat cridant, núm. 1
(Montserrat shouting, no. 1),
c. 1936–39
Oil on canvas
46 × 33 cm
Museu Nacional d’Art
de Catalunya, Barcelona
p. 151, bottom
Jean-Pierre Gorin
and Jean-Luc Godard,
“Que faire dans le cinéma ?
Participer aux luttes
et nouvelles méthodes
de travail” (What is to be
done in the cinema?
Take part in struggles
and new working methods),
in Politique Hebdo,
no. 23, March 11, 1971
Magazine
Open: 42 × 55 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Francisco de Goya
The Disasters of War:
“Que valor!,” 1810–20
First edition, 1863, plate
no. 7: etching, aquatint,
burnisher, and drypoint
15.5 × 21 cm
Sylvie and Georges Helft
collection
p. 109, bottom
Francisco de Goya
Los Caprichos, 1799
Second edition, 1855,
etching, aquatint, and burin
21.4 × 15 cm
Sylvie and Georges Helft
collection
p. 108
Francisco de Goya
Los Disparates (The follies),
1815–24
Third edition, 1891, plate
no. 1, etching, aquatint,
burnisher, and drypoint
24.3 × 35.3 cm
Sylvie and Georges Helft
collection
p. 109, top
George Grosz
Blutiger Karneval
(Bloody carnival), 1915–16
Lithograph
25.6 × 20.5 cm
Private collection
p. 213
Raymond Hains
OAS. Fusillez les plastiqueurs
(OAS. Shoot the bombers),
1961
Torn poster on canvas backing
50 × 73 cm
Private collection
p. 200
Raymond Hains
Sans titre (Untitled), 1952
Slashed poster on canvas
backing
50 × 50 cm
FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais ,
Dunkirk
p. 201
403
Raymond Hains
Sans titre (Untitled), c. 1957
Slashed posters on canvas
backing
81 × 102 cm
Galerie Max Hetzler,
Berlin/Paris
Private collection, France
Ken Hamblin
Beaubien Street, 1971
Modern gelatin silver print
15 × 20 cm
Joseph A. Labadie
Collection, Special
Collections Library,
University of Michigan
p. 268
Raoul Hausmann
Portrait of Herwarth
Walden at Bonset, 1921
Postcard sent by
Raoul Hausmann to
Theo van Doesburg
14 × 9 cm
Theo and Nelly van
Doesburg Archive, RKD –
Netherlands Institute for
Art History, La Haye
p. 162
Arpad Hazafi
Budapest, 1956
Modern gelatin silver print
24 × 30 cm
AP/SIPA Agency
p. 217
John Heartfield
“Benütze Foto als Waffe!”
(Use photography as
a weapon!), AIZ magazine,
no. 37, Neuer Deutscher
Verlag, Berlin, Jg. VIII,
no. 37, p. 17, 1929
Magazine
37.8 × 27.5 cm
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin,
inv. JH 2265
p. 192
John Heartfield
Kurt Tucholsky,
Deutschland, Deutschland
über alles (Germany,
Germany above all else),
1929
Book
23.2 × 49.6 cm
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin,
inv. JH 1646
p. 241, bottom
John Heartfield
Art for the dustjacket
of John Reed’s 10 Tage,
die die Welt erschütterten
[Ten Days That Shook the
World], Verlag für Literatur
und Politik, Vienna-Berlin,
1927
20.3 × 42.5 cm
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin,
inv. JH 722
p. 192, top
John Heartfield
Artwork for the magazine
Jahrbuch für Politik,
Wirtschaft,
Arbeiterbewegung, Verlag
Carl Hoym Nachf.,
Hamburg-Berlin, 1926
24.7 × 22 cm
Akademie der Künste,
Kunstsammlung, Berlin,
inv. JH 1423
p. 192, bottom
Bernard Heidsieck
Machines à mots, no. 10
(Word machines, no. 10),
October 1971
Handwriting and collaged
press photograph
Ink, photograph, and
collage
64 × 50 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques, Paris,
inv. FNAC 94-257
p. 173
Bernard Heidsieck
Machines à mots, no. 28
(Word machines, no. 28),
October 1971
Handwriting and
collaged press photograph
Ink, photograph, and
collage on Arches paper
64 × 50 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques,
Paris, inv. FNAC 94-258
Bernard Heidsieck
Machines à mots, no. 35
(Word machines, no. 35),
October 1971
Handwriting and collaged
press photograph
Ink, photograph, and
collage on paper
62 × 50 cm
Lent by the Centre National
des Arts Plastiques, Paris,
inv. FNAC 94-259
Jerónimo Hernández
Soldaderas en el estribo
de un tren en la estación
de Buenavista (Women
combatants on the steps
of a train in Buenavista
station), “Tropas federales”
(Federal troops) series,
Mexico, 1912
Modern gelatin silver print
5 × 7 cm
Secretaria de Cultura, INAH,
Sinafo, fn, Mexico, inv. 5670
p. 267, top
William Hogarth
The Battle of the Pictures,
1744–45
Etching
17.8 × 19.8 cm
Private collection
p. 104
Alvaro Hoppe
Concentración de la
oposición (Santiago de Chile)
(Opposition rally [Santiago
du Chili]), 1984
Vintage gelatin silver print
on baryta paper
21.2 × 31.8 cm
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
Victor Hugo
“Anniversaire de la
révolution de 1848”
(Anniversary of the
revolution of 1848), 1855
In Actes et paroles.
Pendant l’exil
Manuscript
44.5 × 38 × 9 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
pp. 158–159
Victor Hugo
“Pétition pour l’abolition
de la peine de mort”
(Petition for the abolition
of the death penalty),
1855
In Actes et paroles.
Pendant l’exil
Manuscript
45.5 × 37 × 10 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
Victor Hugo
Toujours en ramenant
la plume (Always coming
back with the quill), 1856
Brown ink and wash
drawing
10.5 × 28 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 96, top
Mat Jacob
Chiapas 1 (marche 1997)
(Chiapas 1 [March 1997])
Photograph and inkjet
print on textured paper
15 × 20 cm
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue
p. 278
404
Mat Jacob Asger Jorn Herbert Kirchhoff Eustachy Kossakowski Hiroji Kubota Rosa Luxemburg Man Ray
Chiapas 2, 1996–2001, Brisez le cadre q[u]i [é] Revolución en La Paz “Panoramic Sea Happening Manifestation des Black Die Krise der Fireworks, 1934
Photograph and inkjet touf[ fe] l[’]image (Smash (Bolivia) (Revolution – Sea Concerto, Osieki” Panthers (Black Panthers Sozialdemokratie [The Crisis Solarized gelatin silver print
print on textured paper the frame that stifles in La Paz, Bolivia), 1946 by Tadeusz Kantor, 1967 rally), Chicago, 1969 of Social Democracy], 29.2 × 22.5 cm
15 × 20 cm the image), 1968 Vintage gelatin silver Gelatin silver print Modern gelatin silver print Zürich: Verlagsdruckerei, Musée National d’Art
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Five-color offset lithograph print on baryta paper 45 × 56 cm 40 × 30 cm 1916 Moderne, Centre Pompidou,
p. 279, top 50.1 × 32.7 cm 16 × 23 cm Anka Ptaszkowska Magnum Photos, Paris Book Paris
Statens Museum for Kunst, Leticia and Stanislas collection p. 149 15.7 × 14.1 cm
Mat Jacob Copenhagen Poniatowski collection p. 114 Akademie der Künste, Man Ray
Chiapas 3 (Marcos 1996), p. 232 p. 216, bottom Marie Lechner Berlin, Nachlassbibliothek Sculpture mouvante or
(Chiapas 3 [Frames Maria Kourkouta Forms of Digital Resistance, Bertolt Brecht, Nb bb D La France (Moving sculpture
1996]) Asger Jorn Käthe Kollwitz Remontages, 2016 2016 01/037 or La France), 1920
Photograph and inkjet Pas de puis[s]ance d[’] Aufruhr (Riot), 1899 16 mm film transferred Production: Jeu de Paume, p. 190 Gelatin silver glass plate
print on textured paper imagination sans images onto video (loop): black Paris negative. The image was
15 × 20 cm puis[s]ante[s] (No power Engraving (etching, and white, silent, 5:00 min. p. 280, text p. 406 Édouard Manet obtained by reversing
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue of imagination without drypoint, aquatint, emery Production: Jeu de Paume, Guerre civile (Civil war), 1871 the values obtained from
powerful images), 1968 paper, and roller) Paris Jérôme Lindon (editor) Two-tone lithograph on the negative.
Mat Jacob Five-color offset lithograph 55 × 70 × 2.5 cm p. 133, endpapers Provocation à la thick paper 9 × 12 cm
Chiapas 4 (Dignité 50 × 33.2 cm Käthe Kollwitz Museum désobéissance. Le procès 47 × 52.5 cm Donation in lieu of taxes,
rebelle 1996) (Chiapas 4 Statens Museum for Kunst, Köln, Cologne Maria Kourkouta du Déserteur (Call for Musée Carnavalet – Histoire 1994, Musée National d’Art
[Rebellious dignity] Copenhagen p. 123 Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. disobedience: The deserter de Paris, Paris Moderne, Centre Pompidou,
1996) p. 233 Frontière gréco- on trial), Paris: Les Éditions p. 244 Paris,
Photograph and inkjet Käthe Kollwitz macédonienne (Idomeni, de Minuit, 1962 p. 100
print on textured paper Tsubasa Kato Die Freiwilligen (The March 14, 2016. Greek– Book Man Ray
15 × 20 cm Break it Before it’s Broken, volunteers), 1920 Macedonian border), 2016 18 × 11.5 cm Élevage de poussière Man Ray
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue 2015 Charcoal and red chalk HD video loop: color, sound, Private collection (Le Grand Verre de Marcel Cover, Mother Earth, IX,
Video: color, sound, 45 × 60 cm 36:00 min. p. 347 Duchamp), New York no. 6, New York, edited by
Mat Jacob 4:49 min. Fritsch collection Production: Jeu de Paume, (Breeding dust [Marcel Emma Goldman, 1914
Chiapas 7 (marche 2001) Cameraman: Taro Aoishi Paris Héctor López Duchamp’s Large Glass], Magazine
(Chiapas 7 [March 2001]), Tusbas Kato collection Käthe Kollwitz p. 287 Poblado la Victoria, New York), 1920 30 × 20 cm
Photograph and inkjet p. 115 Losbruch (Assault), 1902–03 Santiago, Chile (Village Vintage gelatin silver print, David and Marcel Fleiss
print on textured paper, Sheet 5 of the Peasants’ Germaine Krull of La Victoria, Santiago, with cropping of the glass collection, Galerie 1900-
2016 Dmitri Kessel War cycle Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly Chile), c. 1986 negative, c. 1960 2000, Paris
15 × 20 cm Greek National Liberation Engraving (etching, (The Dancer Jo Mihaly), Gelatin silver print on 11.5 × 17.2 cm p. 187, left
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Front rally, Athens, drypoint, aquatint, resist, 1925 baryta paper Galerie Françoise Paviot,
p. 279, bottom December 3, 1944 and soft ground) Modern gelatin silver print 20 × 30.3 cm Paris Man Ray
p. 250, left 68 × 86 × 2.5 cm 22 × 15.9 cm Anna Gamazo de Abelló p. 97 Cover, Mother Earth, IX,
Mat Jacob Käthe Kollwitz Museum Museum Folkwang, Essen collection no. 7, New York, edited by
Chiapas 8 (marche 2001]) Dmitri Kessel Köln, Cologne p. 118 p. 220, top Man Ray Emma Goldman, 1914
Mexico (Chiapas 8 [March Greek National Liberation p. 122 Élevage de poussière Magazine
2001], Mexico) Front rally, Athens, Germaine Krull Héctor López (Le Grand Verre de Marcel 30 × 20 cm
Photograph and inkjet December 3, 1944 Alberto Korda Die Tänzerin Jo Mihaly Poblado la Victoria, Duchamp), New York David and Marcel Fleiss
print on textured paper p. 250, right El Quijote de la Farola, in “Revolution”, Paris (Dancer Santiago, Chile (Village (Breeding dust [Marcel collection, Galerie 1900-
15 × 20 cm Plaza de la Revolución, Jo Mihaly in “Revolution”, of La Victoria, Santiago, Duchamp’s Large Glass], 2000, Paris
Mat Jacob/Tendance floue Dmitri Kessel La Habana, Cuba Paris), 1925 Chile), c. 1986 New York), 1920 p. 187, right
Greek National Liberation (Don Quixote of the Modern gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print Vintage gelatin silver print,
Asger Jorn Front demonstrators streetlamp, Plaza de la 21.3 × 12.3 cm on baryta paper contact from glass negative, Germán Marin
Fin de Copenhague gathered around the bodies Revolución, Havana, Cuba), Museum Folkwang, Essen 20 × 30.3 cm 1990 Chile o Muerte (Chile or
(End of Copenhagen), 1957, of three fellow protestors 1959 p. 119 Anna Gamazo de Abelló 10 × 12.5 cm death), Mexico City:
Paris: Allia, 2001 shot by police during Vintage gelatin silver print collection Galerie Françoise Paviot, Editorial Diógenes, 1974
Book a rally, Athens, on baryta paper p. 220, bottom Paris Book
25 × 17 cm December 3, 1944 29.9 × 38.1 cm 22 × 19 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris p. 251 Leticia and Stanislas Bibliothèque
p. 183 Poniatowski collection de Documentation
p. 127 Internationale Contemporaine
– BDIC, Nanterre
405
Charles Marville
Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville,
Paris (Ruins of the Hôtel
de Ville, Paris), c. 1871
Albumen print
36.3 × 27.8 cm
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris
p. 225
Charles Marville
Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville,
Paris (Ruins of the Hôtel
de Ville, Paris), c. 1871
Albumen print
27.8 × 36.8 cm
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris
Charles Marville
Ruines de l’Hôtel de Ville,
Paris. Salle de réception
(Ruins of the Hôtel de Ville,
Paris. Reception hall),
c. 1871
Albumen print
25.3 × 36.8 cm
Bibliothèque des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris
Cildo Meireles
Inserçoes em circuitos
ideológicos 2: Projeto Cédula
(Insertions into ideological
circuits 2: Banknote
project), 1970
27 offset prints on paper
with ink-stamped texts and
slogans
5 × 15 cm (each)
Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
p. 185
Annette Messager
50 Piques (50 Pikes), 1992–93
Soft toys, colored pencils
on paper, various materials,
and 50 metal pikes
279.4 × 127 × 71 cm
Annette Messager and
Marin Karmitz collection/
Marian Goodman Gallery,
Paris
p. 147
406
Jasmina Metwaly Joan Miró Joan Miró Tina Modotti Robert Morris Friedrich Nietzsche Pier Paolo Pasolini
Tahrir Square: Cut Skin, Preliminary drawings L’Espoir du prisonnier Bandolier, Cob, Sickle, 1927 Continuous Project Altered Götzen-Dämmerung Iconografia ingiallita
2011 for L’Espoir du condamné (The prisoner’s hope) Modern gelatin silver print Daily, 1969 [The Twilight of the Gods], (per un “Poema fotografico”)
Video-painting, part of à mort I, II et III Preliminary drawings 18 × 23 cm Multiples, New York , 1970 1921 (Yellowed iconography
a series of 12 (edition of 7), (The hope of a condemned for L’Espoir du condamné Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, 10.8 × 30.6 cm Leipzig: Alfred Köner [for a “Photographic
5:05 min. man, I, II, and III), 1974 à mort I, II et III (The hope Comitato Tina Modotti, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Book poem”])
Open Gallery, London Pen on paper of a condemned man, Udine Centre Pompidou, Paris Private collection Turin: Einaudi, 1975
p. 103, top 15.5 × 21.4 cm I, II, and III), 1974 p. 110 p. 113 Book
Fundació Joan Miró, Colored pencils and pen Hélio Oiticica 19 × 13.3 cm
Jasmina Metwaly Barcelona on paper (notepad) Tina Modotti Pedro Motta Seja Marginal Seja Herói Jeu de Paume, Paris
Tahrir Square: Metro Vent, p. 257, bottom 7.7 × 12.5 cm Woman with Flag, Natureza das coisas #024 (Be an outlaw be a hero), p. 169
2011 Fundació Joan Miró, Mexico City, 1928 (The nature of things #024), 1968
Video-painting, part of Joan Miró Barcelona Modern gelatin silver print from the “Natureza das Private collection Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza
a series of 12 (edition of 7), Preliminary drawings p. 257, top 23.3 × 28.7 cm coisas” series, 2013 p. 182 Et ils vont dans l’espace
4:38 min. for L’Espoir du condamné Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Mineral print on cotton qu’embrasse ton regard
Open Gallery, London à mort I, II et III Joan Miró Comitato Tina Modotti, paper, edition of 3 + 2 Hélio Oiticica (And they go into the
p. 103, bottom (The hope of a condemned Prisonnier crucifié Udine artist’s proofs and Leandro Katz space taken in by your
man, I, II, and III), 1974 (Crucified prisoner), 1974 p. 125 61 × 55 cm Parangolé – Encuentrosde gaze) (study, screenshot),
Henri Michaux Pen on paper Colored pencils and Private collection Pamplona (Encounters 2016
Émergences-résurgences 17 × 18 cm pen on paper Tina Modotti p. 106 in Pampeluna), 1972 HD video
[Emergences/resurgences] Fundació Joan Miró, 21 × 14 cm Worker, Mexico, 1928 C-print on paper and card Production: Jeu de Paume,
Geneva: Albert Skira, 1972 Barcelona Fundació Joan Miró, Modern gelatin silver print Jean-Luc Moulène 23.5 × 49 cm Paris
Book Barcelona 17.5 × 23.7 cm Series: 39 objets de grève Museo Nacional Centro p. 282
21.5 × 33 cm Joan Miró p. 259 Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, (39 strike objects), 1999–2000 de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Jeu de Paume, Paris Homme torturé s’évadant Comitato Tina Modotti, Casse-tête p. 101 Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza
p. 166 (Tortured man escaping), Lisette Model Udine Dirty Protest Et ils vont dans l’espace
1973 Metropole Café, New York, p. 124 Holgeir Meins Voula Papaioannou qu’embrasse ton regard
Henri Michaux Colored pencils and pen c. 1946 La Bobine novacore Barricades During the (And they go into the space
Face aux verrous on paper Gelatin silver print Tina Modotti La Pantinoise Civil War of December ’44 taken in by your gaze)
(Facing the locks) 19.8 × 15.5 cm 50.8 × 40.6 cm Peasants reading Le Costume novacore (Dekemvriana), Athens, (study), 2016
Paris: Gallimard, 1992 Fundació Joan Miró, Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid “El Machete”, 1927 Les Souliers de la lutte 1944 HD video
Book Barcelona p. 120 Modern gelatin silver print Manivelle de pédalier Modern gelatin silver print Production: Jeu de Paume,
Private collection p. 258 16.5 × 22 cm de cycle dit “Le casse-tête” 24 × 30 cm Paris 
Lisette Model Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Cibachrome prints under Benaki Museum p. 283
Henri Michaux Joan Miró Valeska Gert, “Olé,” 1940 Comitato Tina Modotti, diasec Photographic Archive,
Sans titre (Untitled), 1975 L’Espoir du condamné Vintage gelatin silver Udine 47 × 36 cm (each) Athens Pablo Picasso
Acrylic on paper à mort, I, II et III print p. 189 Jean-Luc Moulène/Galerie p. 239, right Marianne, no. 194, July 8,
32.5 × 50 cm (The hope of a condemned Gift of the Estate of Lisette Chantal Crousel, Paris 1939
Private collection man, I, II, and III), Model, 1990, by direction Ernesto Molina pp. 210–211 Voula Papaioannou Newsprint witha drawing
p. 96, bottom February 9, 1974 of Joseph G. Blum, Sín título (Untitled), 1977 Prisoners’ notes written of a dove and handwritten
Acrylic on canvas New York, through Newspaper cuttings Saburo Murakami on the wall of the German annotations by Picasso on
Henri Michaux 267 × 351 cm the American Friends and paper Passing Through, 1956 prison on Merlin Street, the first page, “Dora mia,” in
Sans titre (Untitled), Fundacio Joan Miró, of Canada, inv. 35154, 27.9 × 21.5 cm Performance at the Second Athens, 1944 red, blue, and yellow pencil
1971 Barcelona National Gallery Anna Gamazo de Abelló Gutai Exhibition, 1956 Modern gelatin silver print 58 × 38 cm
Indian ink and acrylic pp. 260–261 of Canada, Ottawa collection Photography: Kiyoji Otsuji 30 × 30 cm Musée National Picasso,
on paper p. 121 p. 218 Modern gelatin silver print Benaki Museum Paris, acquisition,
50 × 65 cm 19.8 × 30 cm Photographic Archive, 5151AP/H/49/1
Private collection Tina Modotti Ernesto Molina Seiko Otsuji, Makiko Athens
p. 167 Bandolier, Corn, Sín título (Untitled), Murakami, and Musashino pp. 262–263 Jerzy Piórkowski
Guitar (Composition for 1977 Art University Museum Miasto Nieujarzmione
Henri Michaux a Mexican song), 1927 Newspaper cuttings & Library/Courtesy of (City unbroken), Warsaw:
Sans titre (Untitled), Modern gelatin silver print and paper Taka Ishii Gallery Iskry, 1957
1957 29.5 × 22.3 cm 27.9 × 21.5 cm Photography/Film, Estate Book
Indian ink on paper Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti, Anna Gamazo de Abelló of Saburo Murakami 33 × 24 × 2 cm
56.5 × 76.5 cm Comitato Tina Modotti, collection and ARTCOURT Gallery Private collection
Private collection Udine p. 219 p. 112 p. 243
407
Sigmar Polke
À Versailles, à Versailles!
(To Versailles, to Versailles!),
1988
Mixed media on fabric
229 × 300 × 15 cm
Musée Départemental
d’Art Contemporain
de Rochechouart
p. 224
Sigmar Polke
Gegen die zwei Supermächte
– für eine rote Schweiz
(Against the two
superpowers – for a red
Switzerland) (1st version),
1976
Spray paint and stencil on
paper
254 × 339 cm
Ludwig Collection, Ludwig
Forum for International
Art, Aix-la-Chapelle
pp. 204–205
Enrique Ramirez
Cruzar un muro (Passing
through a wall), 2013
HD video: color, sound,
5:15 min.
Enrique Ramirez/Michel
Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels
pp. 284–285
Jacques Rancière et al.
Les Révoltes logiques,
no. 1, no. 13, no. 14/15,
1975–81
Magazine
15 × 11 cm
Private collection
Réseau Buckmaster
(Buckmaster network)
Clandestine leaflet,
1942
Paper
17 × 25 cm
Private collection
p. 381
408
Hans Richter
Orator-Rebellion-Revolution,
1916
Ink on paper
28 × 21.5 cm
Private collection
p. 215
Hans Richter
Revolution, 1918
Pencil, wash, and chalk
on paper
42 × 34.5 cm
Private collection
p. 214
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre.
Entrée des troupes de
première ligne revenant de la
guerre sur la Pariser Platz
(The November Revolution:
Front-line troops returning
from the war enter the
Pariser Platz), 1918
Modern gelatin silver print
13 × 18 cm
Kunstbibliothek, SMB,
Photothek Willy Römer,
Berlin
p. 126
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre:
occupation du quartier
de la presse. Barricades faites
de papier journal.
Schützenstrasse, Berlin
(The November Revolution:
Occupation of the press
district. Barricades made
of newspaper, Berlin), 1919
Modern gelatin silver print
13 × 18 cm
Kunstbibliothek, SMB,
Photothek Willy Römer,
Berlin
p. 240
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre:
occupation du quartier de la
presse. Barricades faites de
rouleaux de papier journal.
Devant la maison d’édition
Rudolf Mosse,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin
(The November Revolution:
Occupation of the press
district. Barricades made
of newspaper. Outside
the Rudolf Mosse
publishing house building,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin),
1919
Modern gelatin silver print
13 × 18 cm
Kunstbibliothek, SMB,
Photothek Willy Römer,
Berlin
p. 241, top
Willy Römer
La Révolution de novembre:
occupation du quartier de la
presse. Barricades faites de
rouleaux de papier journal.
Devant la maison d’édition
Rudolf Mosse,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin
(The November Revolution:
Occupation of the press
district. Barricades made
of newspaper. Outside
the Rudolf Mosse
publishing house building,
Schützenstrasse, Berlin),
1919
Modern gelatin silver print
13 × 18 cm
Kunstbibliothek, SMB,
Photothek Willy Römer,
Berlin
Pedro G. Romero/Archivo
F.X.
Tesauro : Vandalismo
(Thesaurus: Vandalism),
2005–16
Paper edition
Private collection
p. 231
Willy Ronis
Rose Zehner, grève aux usines
Javel-Citroën (Rose Zehner
addressing strikers at the
Javel-Citroën plant), 1938
Gelatin silver print
40 × 30 cm
Médiathèque de
l’Architecture et du
Patrimoine, Paris
p. 135
Jesús Ruiz Durand
Lima, Pérou (Untitled, Peru),
1969
Vintage gelatin silver print
on baryta paper
17.9 × 22.5 cm
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
p. 221
Graciela Sacco
Bocanada (A breath of fresh
air), 1993–94
9 photographs
50 × 70 cm (each)
Graciela Sacco collection
Photograph shown
p. 152: from the “Bocanada”
(A breath of fresh air),
series. Posters in the
streets of Rosario,
Argentina
Armando Salgado
Halcones (Falcons), 1971
Vintage gelatin silver print
on baryta paper
12.3 × 17.5 cm
Leticia and Stanislas
Poniatowski collection
Armando Salgado
Halcones nunca más.
Memoria contra la
impunidad (No more
falcons. Memory against
impunity), Mexico City:
Editorial Miguel Ángel
Porrúa, 2011
Book
17.5 × 20 × 0.5 cm
Alexis Fabry collection,
Paris
Álvaro Sarmiento and
Fina Torres,
Neruda. Entierro y
testamento (Neruda: Burial
and tribute), Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Inventarios
Provisionales, 1974
Book
15 × 22 cm
Jeu de Paume, Paris
p. 194, top left and top
right
Allan Sekula
Waiting for Tear Gas (White
Globe to Black), 1999–2000
Photography installation: 81
slides
Institut d’Art Contemporain,
Rhône-Alpes, France.
Acquired from Michel Rein
gallery in 2001
p. 223
David “Chim” Seymour
Dolores Ibárruri, s’adressant
au 8e régiment (Dolores
Ibárruri addressing the 8th
regiment), 1936
Contact sheet
20 × 30 cm
Magnum Photos, Paris
David “Chim” Seymour
Federico Garcia Lorca,
Dolores Ibárruri, 1936
Contact sheet
20 × 30 cm
Magnum Photos, Paris
p. 142
Roman Signer
Heufieber (Hayfever), 2006
Video: color, sound, 2:27
min.
Camera: Aleksandra Signer
Roman Signer/Art : Concept,
Paris
Roman Signer
Rotes Band (Red tape), 2005
Video: color, sound, 2:07 min.
Camera: Aleksandra Signer
Roman Signer/Art : Concept,
Paris
p. 102
409
Roman Signer
Schwebender Tisch (Floating
table), 2005
Video: color, sound,
2:27 min.
Camera: Aleksandra Signer
Roman Signer/Art :
Concept, Paris
Lorna Simpson
Easy to Remember, 2001
Film: color, sound, 2:56 min.
Lorna Simpson collection
p. 154
Solidarte México
Desaparecidos políticos de
Nuestra América (Solidarte
Mexico, the political
disappeared of our
America), 1984
Two posters (Paulo Bruscky,
Manuel Marin)
p. 272
Philippe Soupault
Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts
everything), 1921
Collage
14.3 × 10.6 cm
Chancellerie des Universités
de Paris – Bibliothèque
Littéraire Jacques Doucet,
Paris
p. 161
Philippe Soupault
Dada soulève tout (Dada lifts
everything), Paris, January
12, 1921
Leaflet on cream paper,
black ink, printed front and
back, 1 sheet
27.5 × 21 cm
Bibliothèque Kandinsky,
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Thibault
La Barricade de la rue Saint-
Maur-Popincourt avant
l’attaque par les troupes
du général Lamoricière,
le dimanche 25 juin 1848
(The barricade on Rue
Saint-Maur-Popincourt
before the attack by
General Lamoricière’s
troops, Sunday June 25,
1848)
Daguerreotype
11.7 × 15 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris,
acquired with the
assistance of Patrimoine
Photographique, 2002
p. 234
Thibault
La Barricade de la rue
Saint-Maur-Popincourt après
l’attaque par les troupes du
général Lamoricière, le lundi
26 juin 1848 (The barricade
on Rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt after the attack
by General Lamoricière’s
troops, Monday June 26,
1848)
Daguerreotype
11.7 × 15 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
p. 235
Félix Vallotton
L’Âge de papier
(The age of paper),
cover illustration for
Le Cri de Paris, no. 52,
January 1898
Photomechanical print
and etching
28.5 × 19 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 186
Félix Vallotton
La Charge (The charge), 1893
Proof
Woodcut on paper
19 × 26 cm
Gift of Adèle and Georges
Besson, 1963, Musée
National d’Art Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, Paris.
On loan to the Musée des
Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie,
Besançon
p. 212
Jean Veber
Le Dompteur a été mangé
(The animal tamer
has been eaten), 1904
Engraving
43.3 × 57.2 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 98
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration
au Transvaal (no 4) :
“Les progrès de la science”
(The concentration camps
in the Transvaal [no. 4]:
“Scientific progress”,
published in L’Assiette au
beurre, September 28, 1901
Photographic reproduction
of a print
32 × 24.5 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 248, bottom
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration
au Transvaal (no 5) :
“Les progrès de la science”
(The concentration camps
in the Transvaal [no. 5]:
“Scientific progress”),
published in L’Assiette au
beurre, September 28, 1901
Photographic reproduction
of a print
32 × 24.5 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 248, top

Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration
au Transvaal (no 12) :
“Les progrès de la science”
(The concentration camps
in the Transvaal [no. 12]:
“Scientific progress”),
published in L’Assiette
au beurre, September 28,
1901
Photographic reproduction
of a print
32 × 24.5 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 249, right
Jean Veber
Les camps de reconcentration
au Transvaal (no 19) :
“Les progrès de la science”
(The concentration camps
in the Transvaal [no. 19] :
“Scientific progress”),
published in L’Assiette au
beurre, September 28, 1901
Color photographic
reproduction of a print
32 × 24.5 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, Paris
p. 249, left
Wolf Vostell
Dutschke, 1968
Polymer paint on canvas
104.7 × 103.5 × 3.5 cm
Haus der Geschichte der
Bundensrepublik
Deutschland, Bonn
p. 153
Gil Joseph Wolman
Prague occupée par
les Russes ou Art scotch
(Prague occupied by
the Russians or Tape art),
c. 1968
162 × 114 cm
Tape art on canvas, ink
Les Abattoirs, Toulouse
p. 172
410
OVERVIEW OF DIGITAL RESISTANCE
Gil Joseph Wolman BY MARIE LECHNER
Sans titre (la tragédie)
(Untitled [tragedy]), 1966 Forms of Digital Resistance, 2016
Tape art on canvas Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris
24 × 41 cm p. 280
Natalie Seroussi gallery,
Paris
p. 203
The early days of the Internet seemed to signal the coming The only people to have really managed to bring crisis to
of an autonomous, global, and connected electronic agora, the political scene would seem to be among hackers and
and with it a promise of more democracy, participation, whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning,
and power for civil society. Dating from the last century, and Edward Snowden: individuals forming a kind of
this utopia has failed to survive the commodification of the virtual collective, standing out against state secrecy and
network and its transformation into an infrastructure radicalizing democratic demands, while at the same
of control by governments and the giants of the web. time eluding such standard political catchalls as public
Back when the Internet was still in diapers, the American space, collective commitment, and national loyalty.
collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE, founded 1987), which
operates at the junction of art, technology, and political
activism, was the first to conceptualize the idea of
“electronic civil disobedience,” because of its realization that
capitalism in a post-industrial world was first and foremost
a matter of flows. “Nomadic power must be resisted in
cyberspace rather than in physical space,” CAE points out
in its founding manifesto, The Electronic Disturbance (1994).
“Just as authority located in the street was once met by
demonstrations and barricades, the authority that locates
itself in the electronic field must be met with electronic
resistance.” In the course of events numerous artists
and hacktivists began exploring this new contestation
space and coming up with new ways of resisting, ranging
from the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s virtual sit-ins to
the DDoS (Disributed Denial of Service) attacks by
hydra-headed Anonymous: actions that became more
sophisticated as their network infrastructures were
reinforced. At the same time electronic civil disobedience
is only a tool: the goal is to succeed in “aligning” data bodies
with real bodies in the streets, as happened with the
protests against the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999, when
the alter-globalization movement was born.
As the Internet itself spread through urban space,
energizing streets and squares with its mobile, wireless
technologies, citizens mobilized online via social networks
felt the need to assemble somewhere physically, and
thus reactivate what Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has
called the “erotic body of society.” Despite the massive
mobilizations that accompanied the “occupy movement,”
which began on Tarhir Square in Egypt in 2011 and found
different forms in Spain, the United States, Turkey, and
France, demonstrators did not succeed in changing the
balance of power between the state, capital, and society.
411
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EXHIBITION

An exhibition like Uprisings requires the work and the help This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Isabel Marant chose to support
of too many people for me to be able thank each one Uprisings (Soulèvements) presented at the Jeu the exhibition Uprisings in Paris.
individually. Concerning those with whom I worked directly, de Paume, Paris, from October 18, 2016 to January 15, 2017, at
ISABEL MARANT
I can say that they listened to me while I in turn was the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona,
enriched by them well beyond what is normal, I believe, from March to June 2017,
in this kind of project. First of all, Marta Gili offered me her at the Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, The Uprisings exhibition and accompanying catalogue
incomparable trust, generosity, and rigour; and all quite Buenos Aires, from August to October 2017, were supported by the Amis du Jeu de Paume.
naturally, with a joy in her work, a profusion of ideas, and at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico,
a capacity for making decisions, all of which made from December 2017 to May 2018 The Jeu de Paume is supported by
everything both simple and exciting. and at the Galerie de l’UQAM, Université du Québec, the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
These past months spent with the team at the Musée Montreal, from September to November 2018.
du Jeu de Paume have also been a pleasure: my thanks first
of all to Véronique Dabin, Franziska Scheuer, and Chloé This exhibition is produced
Richez with whom everything began for me; and to by the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Judith Czernichow and Marie Bertran who, with patience,
passion, skill, and friendship, fulfilled my wishes for Curator of the exhibition
particular works as far as possible for this exhibition, Georges Didi-Huberman It is supported by Neuflize OBC
looked for missing items and found solutions when the and the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre,
obstacles appeared to be insurmountable. Jeu de Paume its principal partners.
My great thanks to Muriel Rausch—but also to the Marta Gili, Director
entire team at Gallimard—for having so remarkably guided Maryline Dunaud, Jade Bouchemit, General Managers
the creation of this catalogue. Thanks to Nino Comba for
his beautiful scenography. Thanks to Marta Ponsa, Anne Claude Bocage, Administration and Finances
Racine, and Pascal Priest, who, with their teams, broadened Véronique Dabin, Exhibitions
the very message of the exhibition. Pierre-Yves Horel, Technical Services
I was very touched by the trust given to me by those Marta Ponsa, Public Programs
who lent the works, by my friends and co-authors of the Pascal Priest, Bookshop
catalogue, and by the artists themselves, particularly Anne Racine, Communications and Fundraising
those—Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza and Maria Kourkouta— Sabine Thiriot, Educational Programs
who created specific pieces for this project, as well as Marie
Lechner for her important contribution to the question Exhibition
of social networks. Judith Czernichow, Marie Bertran,
The Uprising exhibition will travel and while travelling assisted by Chloé Richez and Franziska Scheuer,
will be transformed and enriched with new contributions. Exhibition Coordination
The work already sketched out with Pepe Serra and Juan Maddy Cougouluègnes, Registrar
José Lahuerta in Barcelona, Anibal Jozami and Diana Matthieu Blanchard, Pascale Guinet, Alain Tanguy,
Weschler in Buenos Aires, Cuauhtémoc Medina in Mexico Technical Coordination
as well as Louise Déry and Guillaume Lafleur in Montréal,
already heralds new joys of work and discovery. Catalogue
Muriel Rausch, Publications
Georges Didi-Huberman
Scenography
Nino Comba [N-workshop] assisted by Kathy Khine

412 413
The Jeu de Paume and the curator of the exhibition Karmitz collection Agnès Geoffray
would like to extend their sincerest thanks to all the private Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln, Cologne Jochen Gerz
and public lenders: Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer, Berlin Eduardo Gil
Les Abattoirs, Toulouse Sylvie and Georges Helft
Agence AP/SIPA Light Cone, Paris Mat Jacob
Agence VU’ Lily Robert gallery, Paris Tsubasa Kato
Akademie der Künste, Archiv, Berlin Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Sammlung Ludwig, Maria Kourkouta
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Nachlassbibliothek Bertolt Aachen Annette Messager
Brecht MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Ernesto Molina
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv Barcelona Pedro Motta
Archival collection of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Magnum Photos, Paris Jean-Luc Moulène
Museum, Oświęcim Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York Anka Ptaszkowska
Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti – Comitato Tina Modotti, Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza
Udine Musashino Art University Museum & Library  Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski
Art : Concept gallery, Paris Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris Enrique Ramírez
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Pedro G. Romero
Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München. Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain, Rochechouart Jesús Ruiz Durand
Leihgabe Sammlung Klüser, Munich Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon Graciela Sacco
Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans Lorna Simpson
Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Contemporaine – BDIC, Nanterre Musée National Picasso, Paris And to those who wish to remain anonymous.
Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid The Jeu de Paume would also like to thank all the people
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Museum Folkwang, Essen who provided assistance during the preparation
Buchholz Gallery, Cologne NextLevel Galerie, Paris of the exhibition and this accompanying publication:
CNAP – Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris Open Gallery, London
Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca Préfecture de Police, Paris – Département Patrimonial du Catherine Amé, Louis Bachelot, Ana Belèn Lezana, Sylvain
Chancellerie des Universités de Paris – Bibliothèque Service de la Mémoire et des Affaires Culturelles (SMAC) Besson, Dominique Blain,  Anne Blondel, Bruno
littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris Michel Rein gallery, Paris Bonnenfant, Daniel Boos, Paula Bossa, Emeline Bourdin,
Estate Marcel Broodthaers RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, Chloé Braunstein-Kriegel, Marianne Caron-Montely, Doriana
Estate Jack Goldstein Archives Theo and Nelly van Doesburg Secretaría de Capenti, Nathalie Chemouny, Alain Chevalier, Nathalie
Estate Eustachy Kossakowski Cultura – INAH, Mexico Cissé, Christelle Courregelongue, Ghislaine Courtet, Philippe
Estate Saburo Murakami / Artcourt Gallery Taka Ishii Gallery Photography Crousaz, Laetitia Dalet, Violaine Daniels, Bénédicte De
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris University of Michigan, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Donker, Laure Defiolles, Rebecca Donelson, Christiane Dole,
FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand Special Collections Library Raphaëlle Drouhin, Marie-France Dumoulin, Sophie
FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais Duruflé, Lydie Échasseriaud, Sébastien Faucon, Victoria
Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid Fernández-Layos Moro, Valérie Fours, Jean-Marie Gallais,
Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid And also to the artists and collectors who made this Hélène Gasnault, Claire Giraudeau, Friederike Gratz, Valérie
Fondation Gilles Caron exhibition possible: Guillaume, Geneviève Guilleminot, Laure Haberschill, Heinz
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris Hanisch, Nadine Henn, Carole Hubert, Jennifer Hsu, Ralph
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona Paulo Abreu Jentsch, Alice Joubert, Michiko Kiyosawa, Simone Kober,
Galerie 1900-2000 Dennis Adams Chantal Lachkar, Virginie Lanoue, Emmanuel Lefrant, Joëlle
Galerie Bendana-Pinel, Paris Hugo Aveta Lemoine, Antonio Manuel, Olga Makhroff, Michel Marcuzzi,
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris Ismaïl Bahri Claire Martin, Gabrielle Maubrie, Nathalie Mayevski,
Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris Artur Barrio Isabelle Mesnil, Stefanie Mnich, Brigitte Moral-Planté,
Galerie Françoise Paviot, Paris Taysir Batniji Patricia Morvan, Julia Mossé, Rabih Mroué, Annja Müller-
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin/Paris Francisca Benitez Alsbach, Sophie Nawrocki, Marie Okamura, Chiara
Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris Bruno Boudjelal Pagliettini, Agnès Petithuguenin, Mathilde Polidori, Aude
Getty Images Claude Cattelain Raimbault, Jeanne Rivoire, Annemarie Reichen, Perrine
Haus Der Geschichte der Bundensrepublik Deutschland, Chieh-Jen Chen Renaud, Mélina Reynaud, Nicolas Romand, Alix Rozès,
Bonn Pascal Convert María Sanz, Anett Schubotz, Frieda Schumann, Christina
IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine – Isabel and Agustin Coppel Sodermanns, Patricia Sorroche, Miriam Stauder, Sally Stein,
Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe Alexis Fabry Anne Steiner, Ina Steiner, Annabelle Tenèze, Corinna
Institut d’Art Contemporain, Rhône-Alpes David and Marcel Fleiss Thierolf, Yoann Thommerel, Aliki Tsirgialou, Anne Verdure-
Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo Gérard Fromanger Mary, Johanna Wistrom
Iskra Anna Gamazo de Abelló

414 415
CREDITS
Artists
Paulo Abreu: © Paulo Abreu/Light Cone — Dennis Adams: © Dennis Adam/Courtesy
Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie — Francis Alÿs: © Francis Alÿs/Courtesy Galerie Peter
Kilchmann — Art & Language: © Art & Language — Antonin Artaud, Taysir Batniji,
Joseph Beuys, André Breton, Marcel Broodthaers, Pascal Convert, Jochen Gerz,
Raymond Hains, Raoul Hausmann, Bernard Heidsieck, Alberto Korda, Annette
Messager, Henri Michaux, Jean-Luc Moulène, Robert Morris, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wolf
Vostell, Gil Joseph Wolman: © ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Manuel Álvarez Bravo: © Manuel
Álvarez Bravo — Ever Astudillo: © Estate Ever Astudillo — Hugo Aveta: © Hugo Aveta
— Ismaïl Bahri: © Ismaïl Bahri — Arturo Barrio: © Arturo Barrio — Francisca Benitez:
© Francisca Benitez — Bruno Boudjelal: © Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’ — Ruth
Berlau: Copy by R. Berlau/Hoffmann — Gilles Caron: © Gilles Caron/Fondation
Gilles Caron — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Freed, Hiroji Kubota, David Seymour:
© Magnum Photos, Paris — Pere Català Pic: Estate of Pere Català Pic — Claude
Cattelain: © Claude Cattelain — Chieh-Jen Chen: © Chieh-Jen Chen courtesy galerie
Lily Robert — Marcel Duchamp: © succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 —
Robert Filliou: Courtesy Estate Robert Filliou and Peter Freeman, Inc. /© Estate Robert
Filliou — Gérard Fromanger: © Gérard Fromanger — Marcel Gautherot: © Marcel
Gautherot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection — Agnès Geoffray: © Agnès Geoffray
— Eduardo Gil: © Eduardo Gil — Jack Goldstein: © The Estate of Jack Goldstein —
George Grosz: © The Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/ ADAGP, Paris, 2016
— Ken Hamblin: © Ken Hamblin — John Heartfield: © The Heartfield Community
of Heirs/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Mat Jacob: © Mat Jacob/Tendance floue — Asger Jorn:
© Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Tsubasa Kato: © Tsubasa Kato —
Leandro Katz: © Leandro Katz — Käthe Kollwitz: Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne —
Eustachy Kossakowski: © by Anka Ptaszkowska — Maria Kourkouta: © Maria
Kourkouta — Germaine Krull: © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen
— Man Ray: © MAN RAY TRUST/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Cildo Meireles: © Cildo Meireles/
Courtesy Galerie Lelong New York — Jasmina Metwaly: © Jasmina Metwaly/Courtesy
Open Gallery — Joan Miró: © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Lisette Model:
© The Lisette Model Foundation, Inc. (1983). Used by permission — Ernesto Molina:
© Ernesto Molina — Pedro Motta: © Pedro Motta/Courtesy galerie Bendana-Pinel —
Saburo Murakami: Estate of Saburo Murakami — Helio Oiticica: © Projeto HO —
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: © Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza — Sigmar Polke: © The Estate
of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 — Enrique Ramírez: © Enrique Ramírez/
Courtesy Galerie Michel Rein — Pedro Romero: © Pedro Romero — Hans Richter:
Estate of Hans Richter — Willy Ronis: Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine,
Paris/Donation Willy Ronis – Ministère de la culture et de la communication (France)
— Jesús Ruiz Durand: © Jesús Ruiz Durand — Graciela Sacco: © Graciela Sacco —
Allan Sekula: © Allan Sekula Studio LLC — Roman Signer: © Roman Signer/Courtesy
Art: Concept — Lorna Simpson: © Lorna Simpson — Philippe Soupault: Estate
Philippe Soupault
416
Reproductions
Coll. Les Abattoirs-Frac Midi-Pyrénées © ADAGP ; photo: Grand Rond Production: 172
— © Paulo Abreu/Light Cone, Paris: 144 — Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht
Archiv: 190, 208 (top and bottom), 266, 270 (top and bottom) — Akademie der Künste,
Berlin, Kunstsammlung,: 192 (top, inv.-Nr.: JH 722), 192 (bottom, inv.-Nr.: JH 1423), 193
(inv.-Nr.: JH 2265) — akg-images/Album/oronoz: 19 (right) — © Manuel Álvarez Bravo
– Cliché: Musée d’Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet: 247 — Courtesy Francis Alÿs and
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich: 107 — The Archival Collection of the State Auschwitz-
Birkenau Museum in Oświęcim: 256 — Archives de la Préfecture de Police/All rights
reserved: 198 — Archivio Riccardo Toffoletti – Comitato Tina Modotti – Udine – Italy:
110, 124–125, 189 — Pepe Avallone: 180 — Courtesy Hugo Aveta: 281 — Courtesy Ismaïl
Bahri: 227 — Courtesy Arturo Barrio: 197 — Courtesy Taysir Batniji and galeries Eric
Dupont and Sfeir Semler: 276–277 — © 2016 by Benaki Museum Athènes: 239 (right),
262–263 — Courtesy Francisca Benitez: 286 — Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs,
Paris: 229 (top and bottom) — Bibliothèque nationale de France: 96 (top), 98, 105, 130,
158–160, 164, 165 (left and right), 168 (top and bottom), 186, 248–249, 264–265, 359, 377
(top right and left bottom) — Bruno Boudjelal/Agence VU’: 274–275 — © BPK, Berlin,
Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BPK: 126, 240, 241 (top) — © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-
Grand Palais/Haydar Koyupinar: 178–179 — Jean de Calan: 108–109, 169 — © Gilles
Caron/Fondation Gilles Caron/Gamma Rapho: cover, 138–139 — © Henri Cartier-
Bresson/Magnum Photos, Paris: 209 (PAR104625), 222 (top and bottom, PAR106371 and
PAR35007) — Courtesy Claude Cattelain: 128–129 — © Centre Pompidou – MNAM CCI
– Bibliothèque Kandinsky: 113 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Image obtenue par inversion des valeurs du
scan du négatif: 100 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/
Georges Meguerditchian: 226 — © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/ Service audiovisuel du Centre Pompidou: 148, 184 — © Centre Pompidou/Musée
national d’art moderne/Cliché Pierre Guenat, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et
d’Archéologie: 212 — Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire
Jacques Doucet, Paris: 161 — Courtesy Chieh-Jen Chen and galerie Lily Robert gallery:
225 — © CNAP/Dennis Adam/Courtesy Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie: 99 — © CNAP/
ADAGP, Paris/photo: Yves Chenot (inv. FNAC 94257): 173 — Collectif de l’Hôpital social
de Thessalonique, all rights reserved: 21 — Collection Eric Coulaud/Published in Anne
Steiner, Le temps des révoltes, L’échappée, 2015: 230 (bottom) — © Ivora Cusack/360°
et même plus: 73 (bottom) — © André A. E. Disdéri/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet:
245 (top) — © Les Éditions de Minuit: 347 (left and right) — With the kind authority
of the publishers L’échappée: 381 (left and right) — España. Ministerio de Educación,
Cultura y Deporte. Centro Documental de la Memori: 170–171 — Courtesy Estate
Germaine Kull, Museum Folkwang, Essen: 118–119 — Courtesy Estate Hans Richter:
214–215 — Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris: 202 (midle and
bottom) — Collection FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais: 201 — © Leonard Freed/Magnum
Photos, Paris (PAR111535): 137 — Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC: 174 — Fundació Miró:
257–261 — Colecciones FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE: 120 — Galerie 1900-2000, Paris: 187 (left
and right) — Courtesy Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York/Jack Goldstein: The Estate
of Jack Goldstein: 132 — Courtesy Chantal Crousel, Paris and Jean-Luc Moulène: 210–
211 — Courtesy Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris: 141 — Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery:
147 — Galerie Françoise Paviot/Centre Georges Pompidou: 97 — Courtesy Galerie
Natalie Seroussi, photo Thierry Ollivier: 203 — © Gaumont, département Arkeion: 133,
293 (top and bottom), 303 (top and bottom), endpapers — © 1933 Gaumont: 298
(top and bottom) — Marcel Gautherot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection: 136 (top
and bottom) — Courtesy Agnès Geoffray: 145 (top and bottom) and 146 — Photo
Popperfoto/Getty Images: 252 (bottom) — Courtesy Eduardo Gil: 269, 273 — Haus der
Geschichte, Bonn: 153 — IAC, Villeurbanne: 223 (top and bottom) — © IMEC, Fonds
MCC, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Gisèle Freund: 175 (top and bottom) — © Iskra, Paris: 181
(top, center, bottom), 291 (top and bottom), 352 — © Mat Jacob/Tendance floue: 278–279
— © Mikhaïl Kalatozov/Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos
(ICAIC)/MOSFILM: 371 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Tsubasa Kato: 115 — Photo Dmitri
Kessel/Time and Life Pictures/all rights reserved : 250 (left and right) — Photo Dmitri
Kessel/Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images: 251 — Courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum,
417
Cologne: 122–123 — Courtesy Maria Kourkouta: 133, 287, endpapers — © Hiroji Kubota/
Magnum Photos Paris (PAR56868): 149 — Jean-Louis Losi: 96 (bottom), 143, 166–167, 183,
194 (top right and left), 230 (top), 236–237, 238 (top and bottom), 241 (bottom), 243 —
Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen: 204–205 — MACBA Collection.
MACBA Consortium. Long-term loan by Philippe Méaille/Photo: Àngela Gallego: 155
— Michel Marcuzzi: 200 — Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris/
Donation Willy Ronis – Ministère de la culture et de la communication (France): 135
— Courtesy Jasmina Metwaly and Open Gallery, London: 103 (top and bottom) —
Courtesy Pedro Motta and galerie Bendana-Pinel: 106 — © Musée Carnavalet/Roger-
Viollet: 134, 228, 244 — Collection Musée départemental d’art contemporain de
Rochechouart/photography: Freddy Le Saux: 224 — © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-
Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier: 294 (bottom) — Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya,
Barcelona: 111, 140 (left and right), 150–151, 216 (top) — National Gallery of Canada –
Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, Ottawa: 121 — Collection National Gallery of
Denmark, Copenhagen © SMK Photo: 232–233 — © Seiko Otsuji, Makiko Murakami and
Musashino Art University Museum & Library/Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery
Photography/Film, Estate of Saburo Murakami and ARTCOURT Gallery: 112 — Courtesy
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: 282–283 — Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofia: 101, 185 — Courtesy Projeto HO: 182 — Courtesy Enrique Ramirez/
Galerie Michel Rein: 284–285 — Collection RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History:
162 — © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michèle Bellot: 19 (left) —
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski: 234–235 — © RMN-Grand
Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Daniel Arnaudet: 294 (top) — Courtesy Pedro Romero: 231
— © Michael Ruetz/Agentur Focus: 343 (top and bottom) — Courtesy Graciela Sacco:
152 — Sammlung Klüser, Munich, photo: Mario Gastinger: 131 — Sammlung Migros
Museum für Gegenwartskunst: 114 — © Secretaria de cultura. INAH. SINAFO. FN. MX:
239 (left, inv. 32942), 245 (bottom, inv. 63752), 246 (inv. 6013), 267 (top, inv. 5670), 267
(bottom, inv. 63945) — © David Seymour/Magnum Photos Paris: 142 — © Aaron
Nikolaus Siever/Shooting by the interns of the Institut national d’éducation populaire:
73 (top) — Courtesy Roman Signer and Art: Concept, Paris, photogrammes: Alexandra
Signer: 102 — Courtesy Lorna Simpson: 154 — © Sipa presse: 217, 253 — Toluca Fine
Art: 127, 195, 202 (top), 216 (bottom), 221 — Torreal: 218–219, 220 (top and bottom) —
University of Michigan, Special Collection Library: 268 — VEGAP, Madrid: 163 —
© The Warburg Institute: 306 — Wikimedia Commons: 104 — © Silvio Zuccheri,
all rights reserved: 312 (bottom)

All rights reserved

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Éditions Gallimard
Nathalie Bailleux, editorial director of illustrated books
Jean-François Colau, editor
Anne Lagarrigue, artistic director
Pascal Guédin, graphic designer
Cathy Piens/Pays, layout artist
Marie-Agnès Naturel, production manager
Bronwyn Mahoney, copy editor and proofreader
Béatrice Foti, assisted by Françoise Issaurat, public relations
Hélène Clastres, editorial coordinator for co-editions

Translation from the French by Shane B. Lillis

(texts by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière)
and John Tittensor
(texts by Nicole Brenez, Marie-José Mondzain, and index of artists)
Translation from the Italian by Arianna Bove
(text by Antonio Negri)
Translation from the Spanish by Karel Clapshaw
(text by Marta Gili)

© Éditions Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2016

© Georges Didi-Huberman for his texts

Book set in Replica, a Lineto typeface,

and in Mencken Text, a Typofonderie typeface
Papers (inside): Munken Print White 115g/m2
and CreatorSilk 170g/m2
Photoengraving: Reproscan
ISBN (Gallimard): 9782072697296
Printed in September 2016
by Geers in Ghent
Printed in Belgium
Legal deposit: October 2016

Publication number: 308 544

gallimard.fr
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