The Time of Revolt. Donatella Di Cesare
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Название: The Time of Revolt

Автор: Donatella Di Cesare

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

Серия:

isbn: 9781509548408

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ overwhelming and uncontainable. It surged forth from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, from Rio de Janeiro to Beirut, and from London to Bangkok.

      The fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis. George Floyd’s final words, spoken as his executioner continued to suffocate him – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become emblematic. The importance of these words is no accident but owes to a coincidence revealed by the secret synchronism of history. George Floyd’s terrible death was the result not of the virus stopping him from breathing but, rather, the work of a racist tyranny perpetrated through police techniques.

      Suddenly, the right to breathe appeared in all its existential and political significance. ‘I can’t breathe’ rose up as the battle-hymn of revolt – both an accusation against the abuse of power and a denunciation of that asphyxiating system which steals the breath away.1 In capital’s compulsive vortex – that catastrophic spiral that has turned the right to breathe into a privilege for the few – what comes to the fore is breathlessness of the exploited, those who have to submit to an accelerated, relentless rhythm, the most vulnerable, confined to an oppressive, anxious scarcity. ‘I can’t breathe’ has thus become the slogan that claims the right to breathe – the political right to exist.

      This is not to say that the police are illegal. Rather, they are authorized by law to carry out extra-legal functions. They do not stop at administering the law but constantly re-establish its boundaries. Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘ignominious’ aspect of the police as an institution, situated in the ambiguous sphere where all distinction between the violence that founds the law and the violence that maintains it disappears.3 This ambivalence also helps to explain the police’s juridical extraterritoriality, which makes them an exceptional case even within the logic of institutional power. In short, the police monopolize the interpretation of violence, for they redefine the norms of their own actions and, appealing to ‘security’, increase their grip over individuals’ lives. Their violent sovereignty is as slippery as it is spectral.

      In this light, just as these acts of violence reveal the true essence of the police, they also shed light on the architecture of a politics which captures and banishes, includes and excludes. This is an architecture in which discrimination is always already latent. Suddenly we can see the borders of immunodemocracy, where the defence reserved for some – the guaranteed, the protected, those who cannot be touched – is denied to the others, the rejects, the exposed, reduced to superfluous, unwelcome bodies who can ultimately be got rid of. Coronavirus has made the immuniz­ation of the people within these borders even more exclusive and the exposure of those on the outside even more implacable. The police make this immunopolitics visible in the public space.

      The close connection between revolt and public space thus again becomes apparent. We find further confirmation of this in the protests that have targeted statues, especially in US cities. Some vilify these protests as iconoclastic riots; and yet, when we look at them more closely, we see that they express the need not only to reoccupy the urban landscape but also to rearticulate its memory. The struggle projects itself onto a past celebrated in monuments to Confederate generals, slave traders, genocidal kings, architects of white supremacy, and propagandists for fascist colonialism. Why go on living in this suffocating atmosphere, surrounded by these statues? If it is wrong to erase the past, it is no less of an error to reify it. Faced with the honours and glory conferred on butchers and oppressors, asserting the perspective of the conquered is an urgent necessity. This gives rise to a clash over rights and memory.

      The public space has long been disciplined and controlled. The right to demonstrate can no longer be taken for granted; today, marches, rallies and sit-ins require authorization. If the new revolts are ever more nomadic and transitory, it is no accident that they have taken to any number of sites far beyond the city squares, from the open sea to cross-border spaces and even the decentralized web. Hence the recourse to creative acts and unprecedented means of action. And hence their capacity to reinterpret even biosecurity measures such as antibacterial masks, which are now employed as an outward display of invisibility and openly declared anonymity. The political use of masks sublimates their use as a tool of immunity.

      It is, therefore, worth asking whether a politics outside this regimented and surveilled public space is possible. It had become difficult to act in this space even before it was occupied by the sovereign virus. To answer this question, we ought to reconsider the mechanism of public space and turn our gaze to the anarchist extra-politics which is preparing itself through the new revolts.

       Notes

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