A Violence Other than Violence Carvalho, Luhuna
The South Atlantic quarterly,
01/2023, Letnik:
122, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article looks at several attempts to conceptualize a legitimate use of revolutionary violence in the anti‐authoritarian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The central problem ...confronting the repertoire of action in this period lay in understanding how a violence deployed to fight power could avoid reproducing instances of this same power. Some, like Guy Debord, proposed a framework in which the revolutionary subject employs violence without becoming subject to such violence itself. Others, like Antonio Negri, sought to distinguish among various regimes of violence, arguing that true state violence was modally distinct from revolutionary violence, or the concrete materialization of a proletarian potentiality. Although opposed, both of these perspectives strive to mitigate or restrain the brutal subjectivation attending the exercise of violence. Placing this debate against the background of Walter Benjamin's claim, in his “Critique of Violence,” that a “divine violence” that would neither sustain nor uphold law is “undisclosed to human beings,” this article argues that the
movement in 1970s Italy reveals how such undisclosedness, such invisibility, becomes incarnated in a social form. If it is only by abandoning a concept of sovereign victory that a form of divine violence can appear, this is because its appearance coincides with the destitution of the cohesion of the social body upholding state sovereignty. Revolutionary violence is not nonviolence but, rather, a violence other than violence, a form of power whose content is a subjectivation beyond the problematic of sovereignty.
Several contemporary critical currents, from post-operaismo to autonomist Marxism, report their conceptual lineage to the Italian political struggles of the 60s and 70s, a period known as the "long ...68". Operaismo's famous claim of a political primacy and autonomy of the working class within the reproduction of capital is synthesized as the essential trope of the period's legacy and set as the keystone for ulterior developments. While partially accurate, such assertion erases the complexity of the conceptual debate around the period's intense antagonism. In different ways, operaismo, a theoretical current, and autonomia, an insurrectional social movement, sought to derive a theory of antagonism rather than establish a normative periodization of the transformations within the relations between capital and labour. This thesis reads such effort as an attempt to conceive a repertoire of forms of action and being within real subsumption. Within operaismo and autonomia, alongside the constituent claim of class primacy, a tentative theory of a destituent power is also to be found. It is the confrontation between these positions that will spell out the movement's development and demise. This first part of the thesis addresses how the categories of refusal of labour, antagonism, and movement emerge out of the confrontation between Marx's critique of political economy and the period's autonomous struggles. The antinomies of Marx's concept of labour are read as an open problematic from which operaismo grasps emerging repertoires of dissent: the refusal of labour as social form. Antonio Negri affirms this as the position from which to fully understand the Marxian critique of political economy as a theory of class antagonism. This effort, however, grounds Negri's attempt to derive a political leadership to the burgeoning self-consciousness shown within the struggles themselves. The widespread generalization of the proto-insurrectional practices associated with the refusal of labour throughout the 70s unearths an assemblage of wildly contradictory positions and repertoires that coalesce around the attempts to build a common ontology of antagonism and refusal while refusing any process of institutionalization. The second part of this thesis looks at such ontology of refusal. While autonomia was seemingly split along "organized" and "creative" factions, in both we find a shared understanding of political action as an undoing of capital's apparatuses of command. Giorgio Agamben's work, a seemingly unlikely figure in this context, emerges as the most earnest attempt to deduct the categories of such undoing, an effort which reaches its apex in his theory of a destituent power. Going beyond the aporias of Agamben's exposition of the problematic, the possibility of a "negative care" is found, of a common gesture of aid and antagonism that does not attempt to affirm any identity or method.
This is a roundtable with reflections on Tahrir Square, Egypt; Syntagma Square, Greece; Rossio Square, Portugal; 15-M Puerta del Sol, Spain; Gezi Park, Turkey; and Occupy Wall Street, USA. Five years ...on from the birth of the movements of the streets and the squares in Tahrir Square, what has changed? This roundtable brings movement participants together in reflection on themes such as legacies, key practices and knowledge, cultural creation, and links to institutional politics. Contributors share their understanding of the situations in Egypt, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey and we present their reflections in full and virtually unedited. Note: for reasons of space this print version of the roundtable excludes the contributions from OWS (Anonymous) and a shortened version of the contribution from Wiam El-Tamami. The full version is available as an open access download at the Social Movement Studies website (Available to download at the Supplemental Files section attached to this article at
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csms20/16/1
). The full version is also available in Spanish with additional content at Alexia (
http://revistaalexia.es/
).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A emergência do conceito Antropoceno, uma nova proposta de periodização geológica que coloca o “humano” enquanto referente causal do aquecimento global, suscita múltiplos campos de problematização. ...No centro da hipótese estão entendimentos particulares do “humano” e da “natureza” que são dispostos enquanto pressupostos de uma estrutura de medidas e considerações económicas, sociais e políticas. O processo de validação científica do termo assenta numa argumentação que, de modo paralelo, estabelece uma ontologia dos elementos em jogo e separa dela as questões do impacto transformativo do capital, identificando os seus modos, processos e elementos com a própria “natureza humana”. A par da emergência do conceito Antropoceno surgiram também perspectivas críticas que referem explicitamente as limitações dos pressupostos históricos, económicos e políticos que lhe servem de base: o capitaloceno, o aceleracionismo e a comunização. Procuramos ver de que modo estes campos críticos e teóricos interrogam não apenas as problemáticas da periodização geológica e ambiental mas também as aporias do seu tempo. A pesquisa é concluída com a sugestão de que questões políticas, subjectivas e técnicas saem reformuladas pelas problemáticas abordadas.
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