#1 12-09-2024 16:26

12-08-2023

as found on the web

you will only find problematic translations here, that is to say not those of a third party

(I only looked at Difference between reality because someone suggested another translation, but all the changes are minor and detailed)

12-08-2023

Re : as found on the web

The Riot

 

At present there is no conscious debate concerning mankind's finality. Mankind's goal, necessarily, is to come to an end. This is why the absence of any debate goes against this goal.

The debate about the end of humanity is the very content of history. As well, this debate alone is the criterion for what is historic and what is not. Today's lack of a debate is not only fortuitous, for human society is organized in the absence of debate, including the filling in of this real lack with the appearance of a debate. This is why those who fight this organization fight this absence. Today, this combat has been driven outside of consciousness. So completely has alienation invaded consciousness that consciousness appears to be a moment of alienation.

But while this phenomenon of history's absence becomes general in history, it cannot suppress history. On the contrary it is the debate about humanity which supersedes this phenomenon. This debate about humanity finds itself outside of consciousness, and against alienation. Alienation no doubt has invaded all mediation and all organization, but it cannot capture immediacy and spontaneity. Here is where the real debate about humanity, the world and their finality has found refuge and is concentrated. It is a practical debate where words once again become onomatopoeia and ideas become punches. But this rough, raw, savage negativity remains the only one present.

The riot is the only practical and public moment in which alienation is criticized as the organization of society, which blocks any debate about mankind's finality. Once it is organized, a riot is no longer a riot. It is the strength and weakness of that which constitutes the only tribune for those who want to master humanity: this tribune is just a surge of life without consciousness. The riot is at present the only one of thought's activities which moves faster than alienation.

Riots are easy to recuperate, discredit or crush; except when and where they take place. In time's depths where we now find ourselves, each riot is like the awkward, angry scraping of a flint, but what results transforms coldness and obscurity into their opposite. Always too quickly swamped or stamped out, riots nonetheless are the living refusal of submission and alienation, a crowbar that opens horizons. And their limits are such that it is tempting to call them limitless. For limits like these the key of consciousness has become rusty.

Roman plebeians' riots, peasant uprisings, or nineteenth century working class riots are very different from modern ones, contrary to what is generally assumed. It is their content which is different: a Roman senator, a feudal lord or even a nineteenth century wheeler-dealer prince could not have imagined what today reveals-that the richness of humanity has taken refuge in these poor revolts of the poor. The conditions which give rise to them are also different: they always menace the State in a world entirely divided into States; they are always urban in an entirely urbanized world. They are a battle for thought in a world in which thought has freed itself from human grasp; when there are leaders, leaders are outflanked, where there are commodities, commodity value is destroyed. Their actors are different from the past: they are anonymous. Contrary to what is generally assumed, there are no longer any manipulated riots. Potential manipulators have relinquished mastery over the world, and in leading them astray, they have lost mastery of the crowds. Whatever the number of participants, a modern riot is out of measure. Semi-literate, poor and unsatisfied, riot's enemies resemble potential rioters more than potential recuperators. But the reverse is also true: modern rioters are bursting with ideology, fear and satisfaction. And their separations, that this unique modern festival threatens to supersede, constitute their first police, as well as an end of any form of police. Last of all, more than the fear they provoke it is the immensity of the shame of what they reveal which, unlike in the past, makes it impossible to attribute them to any party. This cover of silence discredits them as well.

A riot is something very short in time, it usually lasts a few hours, rarely a few days. A riot is very localized in space, it always takes place in a city, often in just one neighborhood and often in a marginalized neighborhood. Today, rioters active in the world are only a tiny minority of the world. Separated from each other, even the account and motivations of their emotion have been relinquished to those who took no part in it, unless in combating them. Today it is hardly unheard of for rioters to put more faith in what they see on the news than in what their memory recalls. Almost always defeated in the streets (to the extent that many believe that the very fact of fighting is a victory, which at times contributes to their defeat), they are also defeated with respect to theorizing their beginning of a debate, thus abetting the liquidation of this debate.

Professional rioters, which are at times evoked during these liquidation campaigns, exist: but they are uniformed or plainclothes policemen and informers. No one else is paid to be present. Rioters are amateurs: no hierarchy, no specialists. And if you run into the same rioters in different riots, that means they are real amateurs.

The rioter risks his life. Anyone judging the riot without having participated in it only runs the risk of shame. At today's going rate for shame there is no comparison between rioter and non-rioter when they express themselves. Courage and fear, which in the riot reach paroxysms that cinema and literature still attribute to wars between States, are always abstract outside the riot, allowing those absent–the observer, the enemy–to minimize and hush it up. But when courage and fear are liberated limitlessly, other violent emotions are freed as well. And to know which ones, when it is a question of riots and not of wars between states, it is necessary to have finished reading, and get on with it. There lies the beginning of the debate about the end of the debate.

The Bibliothèque des Emeutes will commit no other incitement to riot. In effect, since the riot is spontaneous, we find inciting it contradictory. Consciousness cannot incite unconsciousness. You don't go to a riot, you are in a riot. Today's practice of emotion, that is, taking the draining of emotions as the only limit, is either falsified as a spectacle or has fallen into modus operandi-less immediacy. The riot and the emotion of life are no longer premeditated, and this is wherein lies their poetry. On the other hand, inciting to riot is against the law in most States of the world. That constitutes one of their lesser contradictions: today they are a principal and perpetual incitement to riot, the truth-suffocater that makes it explode.

In itself, riot is just an intense moment that is both weightless and profound. Its inherent goal is to spread. When a riot spreads from a neighborhood to a city, and from a city to every city in a State, from one day to the next and then to an entire week, from scorn to respect, and from ignorance to universal consciousness, this is what is known as an insurrection. An insurrection which overflows State borders, which takes the totality as its goal and reveals the ground of the human dispute, is a revolution. There is no known example of a revolution which did not start with a riot.

 
 
This text, from April 1990, is the opening article in the Bulletin n° 1 of the Bibliothèque des Emeutes.
 
 
 
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https://archive.org/details/anarchy_desire_armed_44/page/n47/mode/2up?view=theater

12-08-2023

Re : as found on the web

But Which History Is This?

this long translation of Definition of History does not deserve to be reproduced one more time:

usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/adreba-solneman-but-which-history-is-this

  

Re : as found on the web

On Max Stirner

 

Ours is a time when more and more precocious adolescence enters publicity¹ organized in gangs. A time when in 150 years the number of individuals on the planet has gone from one to five billion. A time when egalitarian bourgeois democracy has suppressed² heroes and conquerors. A time when one must enter the clandestinity of anonymity to avoid being degraded by becoming an image. A time when an incapacity to make it move calls history into question. Never has the individual been confronted with a dilemma like the following: one’s immediate glory–celebrity–is the contrary and the impossibility of true, historical glory. Never has the individual been so excluded from the individual’s own history.

Inversely, after a sterile struggle between “individualism” and “collectivism” which was long undecided on the class front, the dominant ideology has proclaimed the triumph of the individual. With state managers as with managers of commodities, or in the ex-working class, individualism is everywhere the victor. The liberal egalitarianism born of the bourgeois counter-revolution has teamed up with the most radical subjectivism born of the negation of culture and the defeat of the 1921 revolution in order to promote the individual, a promotion now extended to nobodies, animals and to commodities themselves. Thus whereas modern communication everywhere hems in, narrows, annihilates, separates and flattens the individual out into a representation, everywhere it proclaims, shores up, manifests, constructs and communicates about this individual turned monstrous.

This wrenching apart of the triumphant-while-denied concept is a source of doubt and confusion. Thus the Bibliothèque des Emeutes finds itself put in a category with ultra-individualist tendencies, notably neo-Stirnerist ones. No longer satisfied in effect with divisions of humanity as they appear to function according to theoretical underpinnings which have now been refuted, we reject the dominant divisions based on the need to procreate (race, ethnicity, nation) and at the same time those based on the need to eat (“social” classes). And the indeterminacy which results seems, but only seems, during the course of our observation, like an acceptance of individualism. Since (to the provisional benefit of this indeterminacy) we think that the debate still belongs to everyone who takes part, and revolt to those who do in effect revolt, we defend respecting each of these folks with a certain jealousy; but since in this world such people are a rare find, for us their individuality counts even more and we accord it the widest liberty. All the more so since, in the first place, we are ourselves composed of a very limited number of associated individuals. As well, our association supports a certain number of principles which are identical to those of ultra-individualism. Egoism: if everyone knew how to count on him or herself alone, if everyone knew that responsibility is entirely his or hers, it would at least get rid of the hypocrisy–which is an impediment–and a large number of forms of submission which are found in every hierarchy; a solidarity founded upon egoism–one that, therefore, is beyond morality and guilt; complete access to all decisions for each individual, and a form of delegation in which the person mandated is just the executor of the person mandating, who alone retains complete arbitrary and discretionary control over the mandate: a mode of functioning and decision-making which we term democracy; according pre-eminence to personal pleasure (more theoretical than practical, unfortunately), although this pre-eminence does not outstrip everything³; and, therefore, what to us today would seem the widest individual liberty conceivable. All excesses, bizarreness, moods, irrationalities and inventions which spring from an individual would seem to be possible bases for the debate we intend to promote.

This general tolerance, however, is subject to the following particular intolerance: these nonconforming expressions must be coherent with respect to the already existing foundations of our theoretical framework–or demonstrate its incoherence; that these expressions, in other words, tend to concretely bring about this missing debate. Similarly, in no way do we accord the individual primacy over the history of humankind; evidence from humankind's current history already manifestly ridicules such a pretension. The individual does not count in history as an individual. Our epoch has amply completed disarming the individual vis-à-vis society and humankind through the spectacular magic of alienation, whose domination now takes on grandiose forms when revealing its essence. If it is the human individual who produces alienation at the source (of the brain and heart), alienation, precisely, is what escapes from the individual, like the backfire of a moped. Alienation has become the generic manifestation of the individual and the manifestation of humankind in the individual. This is the paroxysm of history which confronts us, here and now.

In 1844 Max Stirner published his major work, The Ego and Its Own. His viewpoint is simple: Me. His (more brilliant than rigorous) way of setting it out is very radical. Nothing takes precedence over Me. Stirner does a sort of inventory of every abstract concept which constrains the individual, reviling and critiquing their domination over Me and inverting the relationship by making them submit to Me. God, the State, society, love, humanness, liberty, truth, etc. are simply means of subordinating individuals to an idea, one, however, which is created by them, but which outstrips them, ceasing, thus, to be their property. What is the property of the individual? All that can be mastered, all that one’s might can attain. Therefore, for example, to the extent that it constitutes an external commandment I believe in, truth is just an additional pledge of my submission, whereas my truth is my property, a pledge of my liberty, which stretches as far as I can, wish or desire to make it stretch. Or free thought: for Stirner this becomes thought which is free from the individual, which subordinates the individual, which is in opposition to thought mastered by the individual, whose liberty the individual assigns limits to–since an individual is not thought alone. The goal? Personal pleasure. Society is humanity’s original state from which, little by little, individuals emerge, forming themselves and making themselves stand out. The first objection to cross his critics’ minds–that I, the Unique One, is a new abstract concept that simply substitutes itself for the others–is rejected by Stirner: the Unique One is, precisely, unique, a non-determinable, contentless concept because generality is lacking. The result of this initial limit is that neither Stirner nor Mackay, who retrieved Stirner from oblivion a hundred years ago, nor the “L’Unique et Son Ombre” neo-Stirnerists talk about themselves, as if speaking were already a generalization, as if talking about oneself were already to accord a content, a determination, as if the property of the individual excludes expressing it. Thus in the journal of the latter one finds a very tiresome paean to love via Plato, Breton and Freud, laboriously measuring the extent to which they conform with the theory of love they attribute to Stirner, leaving out what would be a lot more interesting–the personal love experience of the author and the author’s theory based on his or her own unicity. All the more so since love is precisely one of the rare activities where no general theory to date seems consistent with particular experience, predisposing it to scrutiny from Stirner’s viewpoint. But besides, love is precisely in no way the least of the ambiguities in Stirner’s work. In “Some Provisional Remarks Concerning a State Founded Upon Love”, he makes the sharpest distinction between the egoist, to whom he accords his approval, and the lover: “Lovers are something else entirely. Egoism doesn’t change people, whereas love transforms them. ‘Since he fell in love, he’s become an entirely different person,’ as the saying goes. For, when they love, lovers really do something to themselves—they destroy everything in themselves that is at variance with the loved one. Willingly, with abandon, they let themselves be determined and, transformed by the force of love, they give in to the other person.” With respect to the neo-Stirnerists, this clearly signifies that Stirner is opposed to love, contrary, it would seem, to their understanding. In “The Ego and Its Own” on the contrary, Stirner implies that love can be a form of slavery. So what if it is out of egoism?

This is the first big limit to be found in Stirner, one that reduces his work to pure vanity. Because if someone can be a slave out of egoism, every individual lives according to Stirner’s precepts. I believe in Society, Truth, God, Humanity, Freedom, etc., let's say. But out of pure egoism! In effect Stirner reproaches putting egoism on trial on the one hand while on the other he repeats that ultimately everyone is an egoist. This trial, then, is part of the egoism. Any hypocrite can say that the hypocrisy of this trial, to the extent that Stirner rejects any moral impediment, is only an expression of my own egoism. If egoism is basic to all of us, if slavery, even to love, is egoism, then this entire world down to its most mind-boggling sacrifices is egoist. This entire world, then, is according to Stirner’s wishes. It’s just a new version of Leibniz’s best of all worlds, unless, more simply, its a hoax, or, more seriously, sophistry.

In fact, in attempting to put himself at the center of, but above the world, Stirner commits two errors of manipulation. The first is in the fact that this post-Hegelian curiously thinks that thought is just a thought in a head and hence nothing. This misappreciation of alienation, which was very much in fashion with nineteenth century materialists, remains current today, and not just among managers. A thought in the head is not nothing. And the fact that a thought leaves a head to become other is evident, notably, in the principal target of Stirner’s critique–abstraction placing this thought above us in order to subjugate us, a very common feature of alienation. Likewise, in postulating society as initial–what individuals separate themselves from in taking form–Stirner does not explain how and why this initial abstraction came into being, nor, as well, why Hegel’s theory about progression toward the origin is therefore false. Nor does he explain which aberration makes non-egoist hypocrites believe in humanness, God, love, truth, and all things to be made real. Truth in particular escapes Stirner in the sense (which implies the difference between existence and reality) that making something become true is to make it real. Even if it exists, an idea is only true when it is made real. Communism or the individual, for example, are far from having been made real, and, therefore, being true. Placing Me not only at the center of the totality but making it the totality itself is to display a fundamental lack of knowledge about thought on Stirner’s part. What is beyond Me exists (for now the same cannot be said about thought): it is alienation.

The second erroneous presupposition seems to be very much a part of the period that was starting then since one finds it in Marx’s case and in materialism as a whole. Stirner, like the materialists with the atom, takes the individual as the smallest, indivisible part. And, quite logically, he constructs everything else from it; he simply finds it scandalous and ridiculous that parts have emancipated themselves to the point of substituting themselves for the indivisible essence–the individual. However, this positivist desire to build on a solid positiveness, a sort of basic unit, necessitates the process which justifies Stirner’s entire opus–everything in the individual which is not the individual’s must be purged. The idea of humankind, of God, of the State, etc., must also be rigorously denounced, separated, cast out from the individual before the individual reappropriates what is suitable to his or her personal pleasure. But I am not in agreement with Stirner’s division: this external thought inside me is me as well. My goal is not to separate the me augmented with humankind but, on the contrary, to unite it in a relationship which determines my life and my relationship to other lives. In other words, I–a particular individual–am not separate from what is foreign to me. On the contrary, what is foreign attracts me–as though only through it can my self-realization find its truth. And far from accepting Stirner’s Unique One as indivisible, I affirm that it is itself also divisible. The only thing which is no longer divisible is something which has come to an end. Therefore if Stirner’s Unique One were indivisible, it would have to have come to an end.

Thus Stirner is obliged to deny that humanity has a goal, that I as an individual pursue a generic goal, one which, in the way it reveals itself to my consciousness, is beyond my will and which, as a result, guides my will. Thus Stirner can only deny history, or reduce it to its perpetually completed representation: a strange past which is the movement of the general toward the particular, of society toward the individual. His goal–personal pleasure–is the same as de Sade’s. But the difference between the two is that, in Stirner’s case, personal enjoyment is subject to Me, whereas with de Sade, Me is subject to personal pleasure. Also, we are very thankful to de Sade for talking about personal pleasure; we regret that Stirner did not talk about his personal pleasure and about de Sade, who, presumably, he was aware of. But once again, to talk about it is to negate it. Which is why, with respect to goals, I go further: it is necessary to end with the end.

 
 
From the Bibliotheque des Emeutes Bulletin No. 6.
 
 
 
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(ajoda#41, 1995)

  

Re : as found on the web

NOTES

1. “Publicity” means, according to the concept created by Jean-Pierre Voyer, the independent, separated totality of communication in the world (see Voyer's Introduction à la science de la publicité, Ed. Champ Libre). In English only Voyer's Reich: How to Use is available. Write to: Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701, U.S.A.

2. The word “suppress” is used here in a dialectical sense which goes much beyond its common, merely “negative” meaning; the German verb “aufheben” can mean either “raise”, “lift”, “keep”, “put aside” or “suppress”; the movement of suppression (aufheben) as described by Hegel, does not annihilate something, but only destroys its immediacy, while (“negatively”) revealing the Concept; this process, as well, is identical in essence to the one of realization.

3. “Everything” does not mean every thing, each particular thing to be considered, but the totality itself.

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Re : as found on the web

at best these notes are instructive in general–but as regards the Bibliothèque des Emeutes the first two are wrong, the third indifferent