This was largely written in the wake of Aaron Bushnell’s brave and tragic self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, in response to the feelings this stirred in me—parts of me that felt a deep sense of recognition in the likely motivations for their act of sacrifice, and parts of me that recoiled at this sense of recognition. This was an attempt to reconcile these parts of myself. A year has passed since then, and these different parts of myself have become more integrated, and I feel more sure of myself and less brainwormy about this stuff. I’m publishing this to release these thoughts and feelings and musings, to make way for something new. It is by no means a finished piece of writing, rather a snapshot of my brain from a moment in time, though I’ve edited it somewhat for cohesion and clarity. As I’m sure no one need be reminded, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues unabated, despite Israel’s pretenses at a ceasefire. For Hind Rajab, Yahya Sinwar, Refaat Alareer, and the far too many martyrs who’ve fallen in the struggle, we will continue to traverse the tension between joy and sacrifice as we tear down this ruling order.

I feel like I have two competing worldviews inside of me:

one that is like all playfulness and affirmation, wanting everything to be light and nbd, eschewing sacrifice and seeing it as synonymous with ressentiment/bad conscience, even to the point of desiring a sort of superficiality bc what’s the used getting bogged down?

and the other that is like, this world is soaked in blood, perceiving the “truth” of this world is necessarily to be overcome by horror and hatred, and this horror and hatred is a vital resource to be put to use in militant sacrifice towards liberation; martyrdom is desirable, and as a settler whose livelihood and status as a subject comes from colonization, self-destruction is a viable tactic.

I am seeing this as the tension between joy and sacrifice. On the one hand, whatever, it doesn’t matter, we’re all going to die no matter what, it is good to feel good, and feeling good might as well be my guiding light because morality is fake and life is what you make of it, and I want to enjoy my life. On the other, the weight of obligation to the dead, the knowledge of how much death makes my way of life possible. 

There is of course a type of self-sacrifice, of self-martyrdom, that I still do thoroughly reject. The type where you shoulder burdens that aren’t ‘yours,’ becoming resentful of those around you for things that are actually your responsibility to deal with. The type that sees sacrifice as a moral good in itself, that sees desire as something to repress and pleasure as something to fear. This is the logic of self-sacrifice that cultivates the dreaded ailments of ressentiment and bad conscience that our old weirdo Nietzsche spoke of. I am familiar enough with this way of being. Long have I felt mistrustful of ‘good feelings,’ of too strong of pleasures and especially ‘undeserved’ pleasures, of following the paths of desire too far afield—in short, a fear of intensity, loss of control, and waywardness. There are events in my past that contribute to these fears: sexual trauma, the disciplining environment of school and the family, and the deep internalization of pain common to transfeminized people all play a part. Currently, I try to welcome these fears with open arms, thank them for the protective role they have played and are still trying to play, deeply apologizing that they have had to carry this burden, and gently suggesting that they do not need to play the same role in the present. Kind of basic Internal Family Systems stuff¹. Asserting to myself that it is safe to feel pleasure is new for me. 

So I have been trying to cultivate joy. I tend to think of joy in a Spinoza-by-way-of-Deleuze way: as an increase in my capacity to affect and be affected. The book Joyful Militancy is great on this. Important to this conception of joy is that it doesn’t shun ‘negative’ affects; every feeling is valuable, because every feeling increases my capacity to be affected, which increases my capacity to affect, my power of existing. The deeper the impressions that I let these affects bore into me, the deeper my reservoirs of feeling I have to bring to bear. (As a dear friend has said to me about breakups, “sometimes you just have to let yourself feel the wind blowing through the holes you made in yourself to contain their love”). So this conception of joy in theory has ample room for my hatred of this world, for my rage, my guilt and horrible sense of responsibility as a settler whose every breath is subsidized by mass suffering, my shame at not doing “enough,” and the immense reservoir of grief that hasn’t even begun to truly spill. 

However, in practice I find it hard to integrate all of this together, and it often splits off into the competing perspectives I mention above. Cultivating joy turns into running from difficult feelings and hiding from the struggle; embracing negative affects turns into becoming trapped in the perspective of hatred, or fear, or resentment, perceiving danger in the smallest of social interactions and feeling the weight of the future as a monster of undifferentiated agony bearing down upon me. Neither of which is particularly conducive to living the way I want to live: joy and struggle entwined with each other, pleasures of all kinds sought with no need for moral justification, me feeling enabled to act proportionally to the crises which structure my life but not do so out of fear, etc. These words from Bonanno ring true: “All this separation between ourselves and joy depends on our being ‘separate’ from ourselves, divided in two by the process of exploitation.” For Bonanno, joy is cultivated through “the search for play” in the process of the “refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values.” The most immediate value to be refused is that of “work as a value,” or the work-ethic, but also on the chopping block are duty, sacrifice, and death in general². The association of death with capital is problematic for me, as is the wholesale rejection of sacrifice. As a counterpoint, Bædan assert that “the death drive names that permanent and irreducible element which has and will always produce revolt. Species being, queerness, chaos, willful revolt, the commune, rupture, the Idea, the wild, oppositional defiance disorder—we can give innumerable names to what escapes our ability to describe it. Each of these attempts to term the erratic negation intrinsic to society. Each comes close to theorizing the universal tendency that any civilization will produce its own undoing.” For me, a near synonym for joy would be the affirmation of life, and I believe that this affirmation is intimately entangled with the searing lacerations of the death drive. I have an erotic fascination with self-harm and death, and while some parts of myself are pretty uncomfortable with that, from a more grounded perspective I think it just makes good sense. The deepest and truest affirmation of life comes from the equanimous embrace of death as an ever-present, latent possibility, as something we carry around with us and which will one day consume us. The desire to create a triumph of life over death, as seen in Bonanno, seems to come from a place of fear towards death, and results in the futile attempt to control and suppress it. This fear is the fear of the unknown. For all we know, to die may be to come home. 

This intimate entanglement of death and joy is articulated best in At Daggers Drawn: “We can choose not to live. That is the most beautiful reason for opening oneself up to life with joy. ‘There is always time to put an end to things; one might as well rebel and play’—is how the materialism of joy talks.” In a world that seems to do everything it can to make us want to kill ourselves, embracing suicidality as a line of flight towards joy and struggle seems like one of the few worthwhile paths to take.

.

Idris Robinson said that for the current era of revolutionary struggle, “we need to go past the hedonism of ‘68.” To this end, he has been exploring ideas of martyrdom. He says that, “in seeking (…) justice, which is beyond life and death—whether your life or someone else’s life—the martyr transforms themself. In this context, in our context, this transformation is what it means to be a traitor to the white race. That’s the abolitionist project, and it coincides with martyrdom.” Not sure I rock with any form of the concept of justice, but besides that I fuck with this. The concept of martyrdom as “beyond life and death” appeals to me. 

More on sacrifice: I fear that I don’t have the hardness and discipline necessary to do what must be done. ‘Necessary’ is an apt word, in fact, because one way this anxious narrative frames itself is the suggestion that I don’t know how to embrace necessity. I feel that I shun doing hard and difficult things, and that if I just could do more hard and difficult works of struggle, then I could help push things forward towards where they need to go—insurrection towards absolute rupture with the existent. I probably am not giving myself credit for the hard and difficult things that I do every day. But even so, I sometimes feel that any experience of life that fails to reveal the entire world and every available way of living save life-as-struggle as a horrifying sham is falling short of the truth. Truth and reality also figure heavily into this way of thinking and feeling. In this mindset, the truth of the world is as Walter Benjamin put it, that “hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.” Taking any glance at the footage coming out of Gaza—glances that I hardly let myself take anymore—confirms this. Hell is a world where everything can explode into fire and rubble and death at a moment’s notice, where even the places they sent you to for safety are bombed, where losing everyone you love is a near-certainty, and if they don’t get blown up, you might have to watch them die slowly of starvation or thirst or untreated wounds or preventable sickness. And all of this because you had the misfortune to hail from a piece of land that a genocidal empire wants to claim for itself. Hell is a world where you can see this happen from a million different angles, streamed from a device made with rare earth metals which another people are genocided and exploited for, and assembled in sweatshops by desperate and underpaid workers in yet another part of the world, and all you can do is watch, share the video and its misery, or ignore it and let yourself be bought off. Or revolt in the most destructive way you know how to. A politics of joy grounded in the here-and-now seems very difficult to make viable when “this life here and now” is hell. When I let myself feel the full weight of all of this, sacrificing everything seems like the only path forward. Reality is a pitiless place, and since we know that it is prison that produces society and not the other way around³, at every waking moment we are surrounded by prison bars of various types.

Hell is the truth of this world. But truth is fragmented, containing multiplicity. The reality of this world is that it is soaked in blood, and the unlucky, or anyone with a heart that beats, are prisoners-in-waiting or future murder victims of the state. But reality is multiple as well. There is a certain sense that a fixation with the evil in the world is itself the perspective of domination, that convincing ourselves that there is only one true reality, that of genocide and climate destruction and the enclosure or extermination of anything free and held in common, is exactly what those in power want. The feeling is that to embrace pleasure and the moment and the possible is to deny this reality, but it’s not. The tension can remain a tension; the multiple and fragmentary can remain what they are. There is an aestheticization and a madness that must be embraced in order to hold horrific truths but keep living nonetheless; and the best way to keep fighting is to keep living.

1. An approach to psychotherapy that recognizes that we as individuals are made up of many different fragmented selves, many of whom are younger versions of ourself that have been stuck at various moments in the past due to burdens they were forced to take on in order to survive traumatic experiences, and provides a framework for gently and sweetly parenting this ‘internal family system’ to attain a state of better integration of self. As with the majority of therapeutic approaches, this can be done in a very normativity-enforcing, model-citizen-producing way, which IFS’s emphasis on homeostasis may help to encourage (though probably the material structure of the mental health industry is equally responsible for this use of it). However, as a crazy tranny bitch, I’ve used the framework (or my take on it) both to gain more of a sense of mental stability, and to open myself up to the unknown and absolutely other within myself and the world. You could call these different uses traumatophobic–that which aims solely at ‘resolving’ trauma, maintaining psychological homeostasis, and approximating an ideal of mental health–and traumatophilic–that which affirms the self-shattering pleasures of repeating, revisiting, and in general playing with one’s trauma, pleasures that can lead to new understandings of self (see Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avge Saketopoulou).

2. “There is no joy in sacrifice, death and revenge. (…) If life is something serious death is an illusion, in the sense that so long as we are alive death does not exist. (…) So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness. (..) On the contrary, the refusal of this stupid world, the pursuit of joy, dreams, utopia in its declared ‘lack of seriousness’, hides the most serious thing in life: the refusal of death.” (Bonanno)

3. “The phrase “prison is the solitary confinement of society” is true only with the corollary that there is no “society.” It is not “society” that produces prisons. On the contrary, it is prison that produces society. It is by asserting, by constructing its own fictitious outside, that Empire creates the fiction of an inside, an inclusion, a belonging.” (Tiqqun, Preliminaries to Any Struggle Against Prisons)

Hello friends, rivals, enterprising local law enforcement officers and bored federal agents, here is my new blog. I have reposted everything I’d published on my old blog and nuked it.  I am aiming to post on here semi-regularly, mainly to try and build the habit of finishing something and getting it published, regularly. So quality may be uneven. Maybe this will occur as often as once a month? No promises. I have a couple ideas already in progress, but the issue has always been finishing. Anyways, thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for reading my future posts here. Tune in for: insurrectionary anarchy, anti-state communism of a vaguely “communization”-type flavor, anti-colonial theory, potentially engagements with afropessimism, potentially local/regional analysis, gay and trans shit, ETC. ♥️ -I.D.

This is the summary of some thoughts I’ve been having recently, trying to articulate what “communism” means to me. Being influenced by a good deal of nihilist, anti-civilization, or other explicitly not-communist forms of anarchism has given me cause to grapple with why exactly communism is a motivating concept for me, as an insurrectionary anarchist or whatever (tendency labels are always so imprecise). Originally published 9/26/20

Communism is the mode of existence in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” AKA wherein the already spurious contradiction in interests between individual and collective is materially dissolved. The singularity and uniqueness of individual persons flourishes with and because of their connection to each other. Importantly this implies not a flattening of difference, or even of conflict, but rather their most nourishing expression.

The traditional manner of thinking about communism is to posit it as a society-wide condition after an eschatological revolution. But in addition to being a condition, it is also a process: “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Just as with communism as an end goal, communism as process describes a unity, or at least a complementary relationship, between individual and collective interest. To the extent that one of these is overemphasized, it is not communism in practice and will fail to produce communism as an end goal. Therefore, the fact that statist, militaristic, authoritarian, and vanguardist approaches to producing communism continually fail is no surprise—you can’t just pivot from some entrenched despotic collectivism towards the cohesively individual-collective mode of existence that is communism.

This, to me, is the meaning of the term ‘communization’: that, to actualize communism one has to make communism in the present. Communism as an end goal relies upon (perhaps is, all along) the process of communism. Therefore, there might be a post-revolution communism, but it is necessarily preceded by an accumulation of smaller communisms, localized communisms, a swarm of communist war machines. This is an immanent conception of communism. While I still maintain the possibility of an all-encompassing revolution, I feel that what is more likely is the increasing balkanization of capitalist states under conditions of worsening climate collapse, with pockets of libertarian autonomy opening up just as surely as pockets of grassroots fascism and outright dead zones.

I believe that this view of communism is well suited to these conditions we find ourselves in: not waiting for a revolution, but reaching around us to grasp what vital communal relations we can, to arm our loves for a communism extant within, against, and beyond this world. Obviously, the goal is still to make an irreversible break with racial capitalist civilization and extinguish its presence on the earth, but we cannot wait for that possibility to approach. We need each other, now.

This is intended as a living document, as a way to get my thoughts in order, and should not be viewed as finished product. Basically I realized that I’d never post anything theoretical if I wanted it to be exactly how I wanted, so I decided to post something intentionally incomplete to open myself up to feedback. I’ll probably do more of these. I encourage debate and discussion on what I say here, and would love if this prompted some collaboration with friends. Originally published 6/26/20

I think it could be extremely generative to connect contemporary understandings of trauma as a physiological experience, and empirically-grounded treatments thereof, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of ressentiment and the bad conscience. For Nietzsche, these concepts refer to embodied experiences, and their description resonates with contemporary understandings of trauma. Trauma can sometimes stem from experiences of powerlessness and immobility during situations of pain and violation, and it is proven that one way to treat trauma is to approximate the traumatizing situation but this time act to defend oneself or to attack, wielding agency that was before inaccessible (cf. The Body Keeps the Score). I believe that this method of trauma therapy could be named revenge. Here, I am interested in connecting these methods of trauma treatments to anarchist, queer, feminist, and anti-colonial meditations on revenge as liberatory practice. To put it another way, I am interested in surveying the literature on these conflictual trauma therapy methods and investigating to what extent these therapeutic methods could be described as revenge, and conversely surveying radical literature about revenge and investigating the extent to which their descriptions of and advocations of revenge could be mobilized as trauma therapy. I am curious to see how comfortably this might sit with the mobilization of Nietzschean concepts, though there is clearly a precedent for using Nietzsche to talk about revenge in a positive light (cf. Hostis, Bonanno, “Deleuze, Active Nihilism, Revolt”).

One concern I have about using Nietzsche is that sometimes the way that he talks about “sickness” is sort of ableist, in the sense that he sometimes seems to imply that one can just voluntaristically refuse sickness, premised on one having an essentially healthy nature (for example, “I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition for this (…) is that one be healthy at bottom.” Ecce Homo, “Why I am So Wise,” Aphorism 2, pg. 224 in my copy). While it is certainly important to emphasize the real agency that people can and do exercise in recovery and healing, essentializing people as inherently healthy or sick does no one any favors, in fact does the opposite of maximizing agency, and simply does not square with reality. However, there are plenty of other moments in Nietzsche that can be mobilized for non-ableist approaches to health and recovery, and it is likely that his ableism can be discarded as neatly as his misogyny.

Another concern I have is that this study of revenge as trauma therapy/trauma therapy as revenge definitely runs the risk of privileging spectacular, ultraviolent forms of action. It’s important to acknowledge that healing, from trauma or from other afflictions, is a whole holistic process, built more through routine and small steps than through rupturous events. I am curious if there is a way to extend the concept of revenge to events, moments, or processes that one might not usually associate with the word, or if this would stretch the concept so far as to reduce its usefulness. One area I have little knowledge but would probably be generative to look into on this question are alternative therapy practices (or alternatives to therapy) experimented in by the anti-psychiatry movement(s).

Themes, Sources:

Differentiating revenge from justice (important to this will be Alfredo Bonanno’s evolution in thought regarding revenge from “Armed Joy” to “I Know Who Killed Police Superintendant Luigi Calabrese”).
Material practices of revenge (Bash Back!, burning the 3rd Precinct, burning down Wendy’s. the bulk of this so far was brainstormed before the start of the George Floyd uprisings, but I would argue that many moments in the past month are powerful examples of revenge in action).
Revenge as trauma therapy? Trauma therapy as revenge? This quote from Jackie Wang’s “Against Innocence” is relevant here: “For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent — liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.” (emphasis mine) Need to read Frantz Fanon, clearly (if I recall correctly the bits Wang is quoting from above are from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth).
With all of these, the role of guilt, ressentiment, the bad conscience…should maybe locate a good secondary source on Nietzsche to handle this effectively (Deleuze? well and of course Lucrezia’s “Deleuze, Active Nihilism, and Revolt” piece).

Originally published 4/24/20

sometimes my eyes despise everything they see, and
seeing is everything
seething—

I can bend backwards to feel a stretch
and some relief
if I care to
if I care to stop self-abuse for a short while
I don’t always care to.

I am nothing if not soulful
at holiest war with myself—
always the warden venting frustration
and the prisoner simmering with resentment
biding time.
what a curse it is to have a prison cell as vessel from which salvation must spring
the body is prisoner of the
Soul.
(or perhaps rather the soul is the very architecture that allows for and maintains this hostage situation in the first place, that perhaps could allow for no other situation, that is built for this purpose alone)

absence bears down upon me like an incoherent behemoth
and when I seek shelter it makes itself gaseous, seeping
into the smallest moments, where my guard is down.
I was once so much more full, and it won’t let me forget this

sometimes you’re just not okay and it just won’t
get better
and there’s no pleasant conclusion because life isn’t a fucking novel
shit just falls apart and it’s up
to you to pick up the pieces and put them
together again in poetry or in song or in
sex or in paints applied to canvas or paints
applied to walls and street signs and car windows or
in newspaper boxes and trash cans and those same street signs
and old mattresses and maybe even an old beater car
piled into the middle of the street
stopping traffic in lieu of our hearts but likewise “for honor’s sake”

blessed is
           the match
                    the flame
                             the heart

but really what is there to actualize of the above?
there is poetry, written on my laptop on the desk next to
the plants, writing punctuated by uncontrolled bouts of
crying in full view of the window, of the world.

there is song, occasionally, but not like before, when I was more
full, or filled up
with sights and sounds and the energy of fellow bodies,
and with a freshness and inspiration and audacity towards creation—
how far I am from that face-to-face world weaved with song, that I
weaved with song.

there is occasionally sex, but only with myself
and only occasionally is it sex;
it mostly is coping
with an absence.

I don’t have any paints or canvas
but have been meaning to get some spraypaint
it is the medium that I feel most connected to maybe, right now,
I like that it is equally an artform and
a weapon.

as for the rest:
that’s all pretty hard to pull off with just your depressed ass as
a form of weird, symbolic conflict therapy
isn’t it?
one day, surely (isn’t that what I always tell myself though?);
but perhaps I can grant myself the vote of confidence that
not only will the day, days, of fighting back come
but that they will be lived with friends, that we will
take care of each other, that we will
have joy and also have
tactics and strategies that we perfect and revise, that
together we can forge something within rupture that is
not just a dignified way to die.

I just feel lacking the patience for the delicate
and sometimes not so delicate
task of building a life worth living
it allegedly happens due to consistent construction of habit
and not in one earth-shattering instant!
I’m not interested in this tepid incrementalism!
but all is not exciting.

thinking of a spirituality without the soul: “what is marginal,
paranormal and unformed within
and between us”
being without interiority
let the inside out//let the outside in

dreaming of a redemption,
of a salvation without eschatology.
delicately kissing my wounds 1000 times a day
a communization of the psyche
a sharing of the
“troubling nuances of our collective selves”

but the very idea that there is a formula
to make it all right
doesn’t sit overly well with me.
I think the desire for neat and tidy answers
is part of the problem.
probably we have to befriend contingency and indeterminacy
in order to love ourselves
in order to love each other
to love our selves-as-other and others-as-self
.
.
.
this rain keeps me more locked inside myself
soulful
but is ultimately a friend I cannot live without—
I hope it helps ward away the worst of the fires
(though maybe too little too late)
I worry for all our lungs.

Originally published 1/14/19

You were always so solid…that a few bullets could cut you down must be a lie. But then again, this world is built on lies. You knew this, yet you were always so true. Intractably true; impossibly true. You carried zones of clarity with you. A few times I shared in it. And we raised our fists…

My fist is still raised. For you, for me, for all that exists and circulates between the people you touched, forever. So, to a friend I longed to know better; to a great lover and a great fighter; to someone whose every gesture and every word was revolution. To those friends and family most entwined with you who are left alive in your absence. The moon and the stars belong to you now. The liberation you saw in the distance we will taste. I know that is the greatest gift we could possibly give to your memory.

Originally published 12/18/18

Hydrate well, consume responsibly. Move your body vigorously. Become an effective self-regulating system. Enact self-care. Bootstrap self-love. Maintain your productivity. Adapt perfectly; integrate seamlessly. Name each feeling, track them on a chart. Happiness levels up, all others down. Good job.

Monitor yourself. Keep a schedule. Plan your work and work your plan. Your movements—clockwork. Account for everything. Maybe still surprise yourself once and a while, but we can fix that. Everything you want for yourself and your life can be acquired through the perfection of productivity. A schematized and profitable existence is what you want, after all.

Everything can be measured, you see, and indeed it is better when it is. After all, the brain is a computer—what is a human being but a computer too, a machine to be perfected? Sure, the other day you wept with sudden grief on the bus, looking around at the dead faces, remembering the childhood wonder that has left your body and whose memory hardly feels real anymore; and sure, every vanishingly-scarce moment you spend with your partner conjures (even briefly) the thought that maybe you don’t give a fuck about this career and would rather desert your post indefinitely to stroke their hair, feed each other strawberries, and talk shit in a field of daisies for the rest of your finite lives… But we can fix these thoughts! Glitches in the mainframe, nothing more.

Just like those moments of ruinous weakness, even that loathsome notion of ‘finite’ life is receding happily into the primitive past! New organs for when yours fail, new eyes to see better, maybe new arms hell yeah you can type fassst now, replace them quarterly and don’t forget to upgrade that heat shield. Imagine what you’ll be able to get done when you no longer have to take an indulgent ‘mental health day’ to get through your 80-hour work weeks! That is, if you still clock out (protip: winners never do). Just remember—every project must be extraordinary, you must look good but make it look effortless, be desirable but minimally desirous, not exceed or fall short of the body-shape quotas, maintain good skin pigmentation, have a commanding presence and also an inviting docility, keep your business commitments and toss all others, never ever complain, and be aware that They Are All Watching You. Enjoy immortality.