The Time of Revolt. Donatella Di Cesare. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Donatella Di Cesare
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509548408
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      Donatella Di Cesare

      Translated by David Broder

      polity

      Originally published as Il tempo della rivolta © Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino, 2020

      This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4838-5

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4839-2 (paperback)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939487

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      My hope is the last breath …

      My flight is revolt,

      My heaven the abyss of tomorrow.

       Notes

      1  1 Heiner Müller, ‘Three Angels’, in Gerhard Fischer (ed.), The Mudrooroo/Müller Project. Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1993, p. 45.

      Revolt is breaking out all over the world. It flares up, it peters out, then it continues its spread once more. It crosses borders, it rocks nations, it agitates continents. A glance at the map of its sudden outbreaks and countless eruptions reveals its intermittent advance across the bumpy political landscape of the new century. Its vast scale is matched only by its intensity. Its topography outlines a landscape in which confrontation turns to opposition, discord and open struggle. Protests spread, acts of disobedience multiply, and clashes intensify. This is the time of revolt.

      The fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis. George Floyd’s final words, spoken as his executioner continued to suffocate him – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become emblematic. The importance of these words is no accident but owes to a coincidence revealed by the secret synchronism of history. George Floyd’s terrible death was the result not of the virus stopping him from breathing but, rather, the work of a racist tyranny perpetrated through police techniques.

      Suddenly, the right to breathe appeared in all its existential and political significance. ‘I can’t breathe’ rose up as the battle-hymn of revolt – both an accusation against the abuse of power and a denunciation of that asphyxiating system which steals the breath away.1 In capital’s compulsive vortex – that catastrophic spiral that has turned the right to breathe into a privilege for the few – what comes to the fore is breathlessness of the exploited, those who have to submit to an accelerated, relentless rhythm, the most vulnerable, confined to an oppressive, anxious scarcity. ‘I can’t breathe’ has thus become the slogan that claims the right to breathe – the political right to exist.

      This is not to say that the police are illegal. Rather, they are authorized by law to carry out extra-legal functions. They do not stop at administering the law but constantly re-establish its boundaries. Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘ignominious’ aspect of the police as an institution, situated in the ambiguous sphere where all distinction between the violence that founds the law and the violence that maintains it disappears.3 This ambivalence also helps to explain the police’s juridical extraterritoriality, which makes them an exceptional case even within the logic of institutional power. In short, the police monopolize the interpretation of violence, for they redefine the norms of their own actions and, appealing to ‘security’, increase their grip over individuals’ lives. Their violent sovereignty is as slippery as it is spectral.