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”

Late on the post, on the post… been on a trip and forgot. Let’s continue Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, this time chapters 4-8 (pp. 47-92). See ya.

Next week we’ll begin reading Fredy Perlman’s Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, starting with Chapters 1-3 (pp. 1-46). And that’ll be just fine.

I feel that I shortchanged someone last week by vetoing their suggestion that we read a few pieces on a touchy issue. So let’s do those this week and start up Perlman in two. The readings will concern children, their sexuality, and the potential limits of free love. We’ll look at a friend’s piece from the ‘80s on the topic and the response some anarchists made to it a few years ago, as well as read a few pieces from an old issue of AJODA (pp. 13-19 and all the pieces therein — “I was fifteen, she was forty-three”, “Girl Love”, “Liberating Sexuality”, “Sexuality and the mystique of innocence”, and “Save the Children”). Obviously we’ll be discussing some uncomfortable topics, perhaps even more so depending on yr experiences, so just be ready for that if you drop by.

We’ll complete our reading of “Against the Gendered Nightmare” from baedan 2 next week; going from “Second Mythos: Lilith and Eve” to the end.

“The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, instabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumas fils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania, —before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down.”

~Lautréamont: Poesies

Next time, the first half of a piece from Baedan 2 on gender as domestication — “Against the Gendered Nightmare”. Let’s go through section XI, stopping at “Second Mythos: Lilith and Eve” (pp. 81).

Coming up, a favorite from Tiqqun #2, republished by a friend in Montreal. “A critical metaphysics could emerge as a science of apparatuses…” will receive our consideration. On Tuesday, then.