against the menace of the ethnic, sexual, or political minority—a gesture which often seems to extend to the point of including, at one moment or another, almost everyone. From the entrails of these masses long wandering in the neoliberal desert, they resurrect a new People of resentment.
We seem to have passed from a regime of war through pacification to one of war itself, almost without knowing it. Such a situation threatens to remove us from the agenda of things to come, of what counts or not, of what polarizes or evokes indifference. The enemy, no longer confined to capitalist dispossession, set foot at our door, threatening to pull the rug out from under our feet. The enemy sought to capture the very energies of opposition to the liberal order, to put them at the service of a governmental machine uninhibited of any sense of social acceptability. Far from bringing the refined techniques of governance of the “society of control” to an end, the new autocrats merely added a new helping of brutality. Justice openly conspired with the alt-right to shut down antifascists in the United States, the image of antifascist resistance was mobilized to maintain a “hyperreal” war in the Ukraine, and emergency laws were even established to suspend the French constitution. And all this happened “in the name of the People.”
In the face of this convocation of the people at the altar of the Nation, the movements that rise up in response are also characterized as “popular,” for want of more clear determinations. It is nevertheless clear, for example, that the effervescence of the Arab Spring or the French movement against the El Khomri law were largely due to the decay of unions and other classic organs of mobilization. Even at the podium of Nuit Debout in France, as with the Spanish indignados or Occupy in the United States, the meticulously articulated, formally democratic call to the People, crying out in the name of a totality, finally shattered through its own exhaustion.
We have seen, once the winds of the movement of the squares ran out of breath, new leftist populist machines rush onstage in a last attempt to save the good from the bad people. We have seen the capture and channeling of “popular” anger—for the benefit of a kingdom without foundation nor imagination—collapse in real time. And the enthusiasm evoked by Syriza, Podemos, or Bernie Sanders for the prospect of a People supposed to suddenly awake from its anomie, take hold of itself again and reconstitute a heroic figure by bringing down the rising fascist beast—we have seen all this perish in a simple vote. Once again, the “People” have spoken.
All this makes one wonder whether the figure of the People still has anything to say to us, or if we should finally let it die in peace. For Marcello Tarì, the People will remain absent “as long as this present is in force. For now, the breach opened by revolt offers one of the few ways in which this lack can appear in the world, if only for the duration of a flash.” It is really only these brief flashes, short durations of enthusiastic contagion—where the cruel absence of something like a People becomes the most glaring—that keep us from the postmodern cynicism so pleasurably proclaiming the end of every possibility.
If revolution is important to us, it is not in hopes of a new redistribution of riches or territorial control. Far from any discourse on political method, the age hardly leaves any choice but to think a revolutionary existence without subject, project, or heritage, including that “of the people.” In a certain way, it consists of recognizing the failure of politics as we have always known it, even the politics we have loved. But an admission of failure is not an admission of impotentiality. Power designates that which has not yet come to light, and is up to us to bring into being. Liaisons desires to contribute to this task by opening a plane of transoceanic, partisan research. For Friedrich Schlegel, a dialogue is always “a chain or garland of fragments,” and the intimate alterity of distant friendships is undoubtedly the best means of finding oneself again—by way of another.
In the middle of the 1940s, after having frightfully noted “the age of a finite world is now beginning,” Paul Valéry prophesied a near future in which “nothing can be done without having the whole world interfere.” Today, obviously, we’re here. While the global interferes in the most minimal detail, the local takes on a truly global resonance.
It is also the case that ocean returns unto ocean, but in doing so is not the same. The infinite of the ocean always reveals itself in some sensible form: from the dramatic bursts of the Saint Lawrence through the violence of the Lachine Rapids, to the Seine’s winding wander through wooded groves until it meets the English Channel, or the docile dispersion of the Hudson into the Atlantic, under the glare of the metropolis’ cruel gaze. Likewise, planetary political phenomena, whether planned or travelling by way of viral contagion, only imprint themselves on reality by embracing the singularity of local forms. In the face of each event that threatens its order, planetary standardization responds by way of a permanent restructuring, showing the extent of its latent tactical and strategic resources. Hence the urgency, in what concerns us, to consider these global phenomena in relation, but also to connect among and between them specific forms of local resistance and to construct situated revolutionary hypotheses able to resound millions of miles away. So as to not cede transoceanic communications to the enemy, we must take up a planetary conversation.
The question of knowing where a hypothetical revolutionary movement might stand today can only be considered by asking, if we are anywhere at all, where we are. This begins from the sentiment of belonging to the furthest thing, being linked and held by forces that exceed us in beauty and grace, opening us to our common worldliness.
— March 2018, between two continents joined by the Atlantic
SEPARATING SEPARATISMS
On Quebecois and Indigenous Nationalisms
“History, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have to go through and beyond in order to think what we are.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Foucault
To launch this new venture, Liaisons, we propose to share a series of local hypotheses from a transnational, revolutionary perspective. It has been said of the global era that it has allowed us to see “the entire world in a fragment.” Every corner of the earth takes on an exemplary significance, which communicates a situated instantiation—and yet virtually universal—of the same world system. Even so, if the evolution of the system matters to us, it is less so for us to understand the system itself, but rather to understand what it seeks to attack. Ultimately, this enemy can only be explained by what it can’t keep from destroying in order to grow. Partisan research thus must start by collecting from the rubble of the ruins of history, the living—friend and revolutionary alike—who never cease to resist their own unmaking. This foreclosure forces us to confront the most monstrous entanglements in order to find who, exactly, are our historical friends. Let us hope that by trying to unravel the ones that ensnare Quebec, others may be inspired to attack their own “national” demons, knowing that it is there where the critical details are hidden.
The situation in our corner of the world is indissociable from its history, invisible and yet so present. Crucially, “our” territory was the theater of the inaugural conflict of modernity, in the catastrophic meeting of foreign worlds. It was this shock, and the ensuing genocide, that illuminated the Enlightenment, which has never ceased to infiltrate the crooks and crannies of the globe. The clash between indigeneity and immigration has ravaged every part of the world, which further fuels the fire of current populist tensions. But the form it took here—that of the colonized colonizer—has produced a discontinuity between two secession movements: Quebecois and Indigenous. It is from this disconnect, from its separation between different separatisms on the same territory, that we wish to explore.
I:
