Speaking of revolt’s exigency in the face of insurmountable forces, a return to Blessed is the Flame seems to be in order. We’ll look at roughly the first half, from the beginning through “Spontaneous Resistance and Time” (pp. 1-77). Don’t let the page count give you a start, the pages are small and quite rarified.

“Neither victory nor defeat is important, but only the beautiful shining of our eyes in combat.” — Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

A couplet of suicidal readings are up this week. “Is Suicide a Solution?” from La Revolution Surréaliste No. 2 paired with Jacques Rigaut’s “The General Suicide Agency” (pp. 97) from 4 Dada Suicides.

Via divertissements both welcome and inevitable, Leonora Carrington’s autobiographical nervous breakdown; Down Below. Harpes harpactum.

Leonora Carrington: “Map of Down Below”

Taking a break from Perlman to read a piece engaging with his text. From Alejandro’s The Impossble, Patience; “History as Decomposition”.

“Taking on this rupture involves not only extricating, or trying to extricate, forces that tend toward rupture from their integration into established society but also acting so that in reality and each time that it is exercised, without ceasing to be an active refusal, refusal is not merely a negative moment. Politically and philosophically, this is one of the most important features of the movement. (…) The theoretical [task] obviously does not consist in elaborating a program or a platform but, on the contrary, outside of any programmatic project and even any project, in maintaining a refusal that affirms, in releasing or maintaining an affirmation that does not come to any arrangement but that undoes arrangements, even its own, since it is related to dis-arrangement or disarray or even the nonstructurable.“

— Maurice Blanchot, “Affirming the Rupture”