and vulnerability are powerful and irreducibly risky; they require boundaries. They can never be obligations or duties.
We have also found that Spinoza’s concept of sadness can be very misleading. In contrast to joy, it means the reduction of one’s capacities to affect and be affected. Initially we had been calling rigid radicalism “sad militancy,” drawing on others in the Spinozan current.8 But while the concept of sad militancy was immediately intuitive for some, for others it was frustrating because of its resonance with grief and sorrow, which are an irreducible part of life and struggle. Interpreted in this light, it could be seen as belittling grief and pain. For that reason, we have decentered the concept of sadness in this book, while trying to hang onto what Spinoza was getting at. In its place, we often use words like stagnation, rigidity, and depletion, connoting a loss of collective power and the way Empire and rigid radicalism keep us stuck there. With joyful militancy we are trying to get at a multiplicity of transformations and worlds in motion, but there is a danger of implying that we are all in the same situation, and erasing difference and antagonisms. BIPOC women, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit people, in particular, have worked hard to show the specificities of the oppression they face and the specificity of their resistance and the worlds they are making.
In the face of this, we have mostly questions and tentative ideas: Can joyful militancy affirm and explore a multiplicity of struggles and forms of life without homogenizing them? By attuning us to open-endedness of situations, can joy help us undo some of the universalizing and colonizing tendencies of radical Western theory and practice? Can movements be explored in ways that enable mutual learning and transformation rather than erasing difference?
Here we want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive, responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere but as ways of relating that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.
How do we know when to be open and vulnerable and when to draw lines in the sand and fight? Who to trust, and how? When are relationships worth fighting for, and when do they need to be abandoned? These are not questions with pre-given answers; they can only be answered over and over again in a multiplicity of ways. A crucial outgrowth of joy and fidelity to it, we suggest, is that people will take different paths and have different priorities. Movements and forms of life will diverge and sometimes come into conflict. There is no trump card that can be used to dictate a path to others: not the state, not morality, and not strategic imperatives of unity or movement-building. Encountering difference might lead to new capacities, strong bonds, and new forms of struggle. Or it might be more ambivalent and difficult, mixing distance and closeness. Or it might mean being told to fuck off. For all these reasons, we try to share some of our own values, and some of the struggles and movements that deeply inspire us, without saying that they are right for everyone or that others should share our priorities.
Structure of the book
This book is laid out in five core chapters. Each chapter looks at Empire from a different perspective, showing how it is being undone at the edges and cracks. Chapter 1 suggests that increasingly Empire works through subjection and the accumulation of powerlessness. Backed by violence, its promises of happiness work like an anesthetic, closing subjects off from transformation. Joy is the growth of an embodied thinking and doing that undoes this stifling subjection.
In chapter 2 we look at how Empire maintains its hold through morality and toxic relationships. As an alternative to the false choice between duty-bound moralism or isolated individualism, we recover a conception of relational ethics from the Spinozan current. In conversation with others, we use this relational ethics to think through the potentials and pitfalls of alliances across the settler colonial divide and other forms of oppression, suggesting that Empire’s hold is undone by selective openness, fierce boundaries, and new and old forms of kinship and friendship.
We deepen this relational ethics in chapter 3, arguing that joyful militancy is sustained by emergent values—common notions—of trust and responsibility. We suggest that these capacities have been stolen from us by forced dependence on Empire’s infrastructures and institutions, which monopolize the ways we live and die together. Drawing on stories from transformative justice, youth liberation, and Indigenous resurgence, we look at some of the ways people are able to undo this dependence and figure things out together.
Chapters 4 and 5 track the ways that Empire has seeped into radical movements and spaces. Attempts to root out Empire have paradoxically fueled some of its most debilitating tendencies, including suspicion, moralism, rigidity, and shame, turning radical politics into a competitive performance rather than a shared and enabling process. In chapter 5 we tell three tangled stories about the historical emergence of rigid radicalism, looking at the way ideology has permeated Marxism, anarchism, and other movements; how schooling has promoted a paranoid search for flaws and limitations; and how moralism crops up in radical spaces, leading to guilt, shame, and puritanism. In each of these stories, we try to show how rigid radicalism is constantly being undone and warded off by other ways of being, ethical responsiveness, strong relationships, and common notions.
Ultimately we want joyful militancy to be about questions and curiosity, not fixed answers or instructions. In this spirit we hope that this book contributes to ongoing conversations and that it supports people in figuring out for themselves what thriving resistance looks like and how rigidity and stagnation can be warded off.
Chapter 1: Empire, Militancy, and Joy
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
—Brian Massumi1
Personally, I want to be nurturing life when I go down in struggle. I want nurturing life to BE my struggle.
—Zainab Amadahy2
Resistance and joy are everywhere
Anyone who has been transformed through a struggle can attest to its power to open up more capacities for resistance, creativity, action, and vision. This sense of collective power—the sense that things are different, that we are different, that a more capable “we” is forming that didn’t exist before—is what we mean by joyful transformation. Joyful transformation entails a new conception of militancy, which is already emerging in many movements today. To be militant about joy means being attuned to situations or relationships and learning how to participate in and support the transformation rather than directing or controlling it.
Everywhere people are recovering, sustaining, and reinventing worlds that are more intense and alive than the form of life offered up by Empire. The web of control that exploits and administers life—ranging from the most brutal forms of domination to the subtlest inculcation of anxiety and isolation—is what we call Empire. It includes the interlocking systems of settler colonialism, white supremacy, the state, capitalism, ableism, ageism, and heteropatriarchy. Using one word to encapsulate all of this is risky because it can end up turning Empire into a static thing, when in fact it is a complex set of processes. These processes separate people from their power, their creativity, and their ability to connect with each other and their worlds.
We say worlds, in the plural, because part of Empire’s power is to bring us all into the same world, with one morality, one history, and one direction, and to convert differences into hierarchical, violent divisions. As other worlds emerge through resistance and transformation, they reveal more of the violence
