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Sea and Earth

The far right wants to decolonize. In France, far-right intellectuals routinely cast Europe as indigenous victim of an ‘immigrant colonization’ orchestrated by globalist elites. Renaud Camus, theorist of the Great Replacement, has praised the anticolonial canon – ‘all the major texts in the fight against decolonization apply admirably to France, especially those of Frantz Fanon’ – and claimed that indigenous Europe needs its own FLN. A similar style of reasoning is evident among Hindu supremacists, who employ the ideas of Latin American decolonial theorists to present ethnonationalism as a form of radical indigenous critique; the lawyer and writer Sai Deepak did this so successfully that he managed to persuade decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo to write an endorsement. Meanwhile in Russia, Putin proclaims Russia’s leading role in an ‘anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony’, with his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov promising to stand ‘in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonization’.

The phenomenon goes beyond the kinds of reversal common to reactionary discourse. A decolonial perspective is championed by the two foremost intellectuals of the European New Right: Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin. In the case of de Benoist, this involved a major departure from his earlier colonialist allegiances. Coming to political consciousness during the Algerian War, he found his calling among white nationalist youth organizations seeking to prevent the collapse of the French empire. He praised the OAS for its bravery and dedicated two early two books to the implementation of white nationalism in South Africa and Rhodesia, describing South Africa under apartheid as ‘the last stronghold of the West from which we came’. Yet by the 1980s, de Benoist had shifted course. Having adopted a pagan imaginary and dropped explicit references to white nationalism, he began to orient his thought around a defence of cultural diversity.

Against the onslaught of liberal multiculturalism and mass consumerism, de Benoist now argued that the Nouvelle Droite should struggle to uphold the ‘right to difference’. From here, it was a short distance to claiming a belated kinship with the plight of Third World nations. ‘Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness’, he wrote with Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012). The authors insisted that the Nouvelle Droite ‘upholds equally ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures under the threat of extinction’ and ‘supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism’. Today, the preservation of anthropological difference and a sense of indigenous fragility are common tropes on the European far right. ‘We refuse to become the Indians of Europe’, proclaims the manifesto of the neo-fascist youth group Génération Identitaire.

Dugin, a close associate of de Benoist, has integrated this decolonial spirit into his worldview even more deeply. His system of thought ­– what he calls neo-Eurasianism or The Fourth Political Theory – is underpinned by a critique of Eurocentrism derived from anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss. Russia, he claims, shares much with the postcolonial world: it, too, is a victim of the assimilating drive inherent to Western liberalism, which forces a world of ontological diversity into a flat, homogeneous, de-particularized mass (we can think of Renaud Camus’s ‘Undifferentiated Human Matter’ or what Marine le Pen called ‘the flavourless mush’ of globalism). Contra this universalizing agenda, Dugin asserts, we live in a ‘pluriverse’ of distinct civilizations, each moving according to its own rhythm. ‘There is no unified historical process. Every people has its own historical model that moves in a different rhythm and sometimes in different directions.’ The parallels with the decolonial school of Mignolo and Anibal Quijano are hard to miss. Each civilization blossoms out of a unique epistemological framework, but such efflorescence has been stunted by the ‘unitary episteme of Modernity’ (Dugin’s words, but they could be Mignolo’s).

Modernization, Westernization and colonization are ‘a synonymous series’: each involves imposing an exogenous developmental model upon plural civilizations. That the ethnonational identities Dugin defends are artefacts of the colonial production of difference – the racial regimes through which it differentiates, categorises, and organizes exploitation and extraction – is not considered. Nor, for that matter, is the quintessentially modern character of many anticolonial movements, which sought not to return to a traditional culture but rather to remake the world system. As Fanon put it, decolonization could neither renounce ‘the present and the future in favour of a mystical past’ nor base itself on ‘sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry’ of a debased Europe that was, at the time he was writing, ‘swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.’ 

Dugin and de Benoist are unfazed by such contradictions. ‘The Fourth Political Theory has become a slogan for the decolonization of political consciousness’, Dugin claims, whose first practical expression is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is understood as a long-awaited struggle in the reunification of Eurasia, an ancient pan-Slavic civilization dismembered by Western designs, but also the first stage in what he calls the Great Awakening, a millenarian battle to overturn the liberal world order and usher in a multipolar world. Dugin envisages a coalition of movements across the world participating in this battle: ‘American protestors will be one wing and European populists will be the other wing. Russia in general will be the third; it will be an angelic entity with many wings – a Chinese wing, an Islamic wing, a Pakistani wing, a Shia wing, an African wing and a Latin American wing’. But isn’t the war in Ukraine an imperial war, or a war of ‘competing imperialisms’, as Liz Fekete put it? Dugin would agree. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a key step in its ‘imperial renaissance’.

How is it possible to speak the language of imperial renaissance and decolonization in the same breath? Here, Dugin and de Benoist draw their principal resources from Carl Schmitt. In his writings on geopolitics, Schmitt identifies in the ‘sea power’ of the Anglo-American maritime empires a particular kind of imperial domination – one that is dispersed, deterritorial, floating, financial, liquid. Sea power breeds a scattered empire lacking in territorial coherence and generates a spatial-juridical framework that reads the surface of the earth as merely a series of traffic routes. This imperialism also generates its own epistemology: ‘The juridical way of thinking that pertains to a geographically incoherent world empire scattered across the earth tends by its own nature towards universalistic argumentation’, Schmitt writes. Under the guise of abstract universals such as human rights, this imperium ‘interferes in everything’. It’s ‘a pan-interventionist ideology’, he writes, ‘all under the cover of humanitarianism.’

Against the deterritorial imperium, Schmitt opposes what he considers to be a legitimate, territorial imperialism. This is based around his concepts of the Grossraum and the Reich: a Grossraum can be understood as a civilizational bloc, while the Reich is its spiritual, logistical and moral centre. As Schmitt writes, ‘every Reich has a Grossraum into which its political idea radiates and which is not to be confronted with foreign interventions’. If the imperium corresponds to an ‘empty, neutral, mathematical-natural scientific conception of space’, the Grossraum involves a ‘concrete’ conception inseparable from the particular people that occupies it. This territorial notion of space, Schmitt writes, ‘is incomprehensible to the spirit of the Jew.’ As de Benoist proclaims: ‘The fundamental distinction between the earth and the sea, the land and sea powers, which define the distinction between politics and trade, solid and liquid, area and network, border and river, will become more important again. Europe must stop being dependent on US sea power and be in solidarity with the continental logic of the earth.’ Land is being colonized by water, the heartlands by the port cities, sovereign authority by flows of transnational capital.

With this opposition between the imperium and the Grossraum, Schmitt’s thought provides an impressive realignment: territorial empire-building becomes compatible with a certain anticolonial sentiment. In Dugin and de Benoist’s recent writings, ‘colonization’ is a despised deterritorial affair, while ‘imperialism’ is reserved for a more noble, territorial form of expansion. Colonialism thus comes to mean less a phenomenon of political or military domination than ‘a state of intellectual enslavement’, in Dugin’s words, less a matter of territorial annexation than a form of subjection to ‘colonial ways of thinking’. It is the ‘sovereignty’ of minds, words and categories that is violated. Colonialism dominates the world by stripping away identities: no more women, only Gender X (to use Giorgia Meloni’s terminology). It is ‘ethnocidal’ at its core; cultural erasure and demographic replacement are its principal tools. ‘Military, administrative, political and imperialist colonizations are certainly painful for the colonized,’ Renaud Camus tells us, ‘but they are nothing compared to demographic colonizations, which touch the very being of the conquered territories, transforming their souls and bodies.’

With the meaning of colonization transformed to refer to shifting migration patterns (wrought by nothing other than the colonial structure of the global economy), changing gender norms and a homogenizing liberal culture, the far right can present themselves as champions of popular sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples. They can also stage an imaginary struggle against the ravages of transnational capital. To decolonize, for these thinkers, is to split off one kind of capitalism from another, a procedure well established within far-right thought. A globalist, rootless, parasitic, financial capitalism (imagined now as colonial) is separated from a racial, national, industrial capitalism (imagined as self-determining, or even decolonial). It goes without saying that such a separation is illusory: global systems of capital accumulation, with their entwined processes of immaterial speculation and earthly extraction, cannot be decoupled in this way. But separating the inseparable does not seem to pose a problem for reactionary thought. Indeed, it may be crucial to it. For once an imaginary antinomy has been constructed, one can disavow the hated side of it, and in this way seem to gain mastery over one’s own riven interior.

Read on: Jacob Collins, ‘An Anthropological Turn?’, NLR 78.

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In Pieces

The fictions of the Croatian novelist Daša Drndić are catalogues of a shattered humanity. Families, communities, countries. Broken social orders beget broken lives. In her greatest work – among them, Trieste (2007), Belladonna (2012) and EEG (2016) ­­­­– fragmentation is everywhere. Personal episodes convolve with historical interpolations and primary documents – lists, epitaphs, inventories, recipes, instructions, ledgers, receipts; syntactic fragments are presented as standalone sentences; lines begin in the lower-case, as if severed from larger notions. Layout, as well, is wrenched to the theme: the splintered stories of young Printz in Doppelgänger are divided by the cutting lines found on paper worksheets, or the body awaiting the scalpel. In EEG, the final novel Drndić published before she died in 2018, a character describes the human body as no longer having borders: ‘it is dismembered, scattered, wild, but again, preserved in pieces’.

Is this state of fragmentation a hallmark of existence, or product of a particular social order? Drndić believed that the ‘boring linear construction’ of bourgeois literature merely sustained an illusion that lives are ‘coherent, seamless, with the stitching not showing and everything appearing to be smooth and logically constructed’, as a character in Belladonna (2012) puts it. Yet, Drndić’s work is at the same time inseparable from the Balkans and its history. In her most recently translated novel, Battle Songs, originally published in 1998, the protagonist, Tea Radan, flees Yugoslavia during the internecine wars of the 1990s, along with her precocious young daughter Sara, to find refuge in Toronto. Differing circumstances might allow them to mend what was broken elsewhere – if nothing else, Battle Songs disabuses the reader of this expectation.

Tea’s hardships in Toronto are sadly predictable. Western bigotry misses its target: mandated to visit a tuberculosis clinic, Tea reads ‘ARABS GO BACK TO BOSNIA!’ tagged on its walls. She spends her days working bad, temporary jobs while worrying about the welfare of her daughter. Tea joins the ranks of other disillusioned refugees underwhelmed by the offerings of liberal capitalism: a Bosnian, formerly a professional violinist, solicits business door-to-door with a sack of cheap toys; an ‘economist by training’ who once allocated social security payments in Yugoslavia, now collects them; a Croatian professional in ‘marketing and tourism’ abandons his search for work, bitterly concluding that the reason Canada accepts so many immigrants is that ‘they need cheap manpower’.

The deeper inadequacy of Tea’s new existence is spiritual. It’s a theme common to the literature of the refugee, where gaps in present experience are filled by the miseries and banalities of the past. Working at an illegal envelope-stuffing operation on the wintry fringes of the city, Tea, overwhelmed by unbidden memories, asks her boss for a distraction:

Couldn’t we have a bit of music? I asked at half past three, hoping that would help drive out the thoughts that were thumping in heavy, leaden lumps into the depths of my skull in crazy succession and at speed. I felt an unpleasant, almost painfully rhythmic drumming in my temples. For a long time, there was a rumour that Hitler was a vegetarian, because he was sometimes overcome by an insatiable desire for vegetarian dishes.

The reader learns to interpret these non sequiturs as reflexive masochism. Tea’s frequent flights into Croato-Serbian history similarly demonstrate that she can escape her present only through delving into the past.

The Serbian statesman Mihailo Crnobrnja once described Yugoslavia as a country of ‘seven neighbours, six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two scripts, and one goal: to live in brotherhood and unity’. Tea’s recollections of her time in Yugoslavia present a confounding social portrait. By landmarks and language alone, the reader might locate her in a different country entirely. As a child in Rovinj, Croatia, she noticed that the main street was called ‘Belgrade Street’, its only cinema ‘Belgrade Cinema’. Eventually they move to Belgrade, where Sara’s school workbooks used ‘Serbian terms for chemistry and history, the seal was half in the Latin script, half in Cyrillic, and the language being learned was called Serbo-Croato-Slovene’. Tea reports that the experience of returning from Belgrade to Croatia ‘did not differ fundamentally’ from their later journey to Toronto. In some respects, the culture shock was harder to weather. Tea was warned to ‘tone down that Serbian accent’ and found it necessary to relearn ‘a language that would make my presence in my own country legitimate’.

Whereas Tea describes Sara and herself as ‘adaptable’ to such social volatility, her father is not. A passionate communist in his youth, when Tea would return from Belgrade to visit she found him ‘reduced’, rendered passive and nostalgic:

Before every parting, my father lays out on the kitchen table old letters, photos, newspaper clippings, political tracts. He brings them out and shows me what I have seen innumerable times, what I remember clearly, because what my father lays out in front are in fact mementos of a past life that has marked our whole family…Photographs of my mother. My letters to him. Printed articles, reviews, stories…

A sorrowful image that ritually emerges in Drndić’s writing. The word ‘reduced’ is translated from the Croat smanjen (literally, diminished) which Tea also uses to describe her cremated mother, held in a ‘small, cheap black urn made of tin’. Whether a citizen of a failing socialist federation, or a stranger in a capitalist state, Tea finds that death is not always an immediate affair, that our finer traits can perish long before the body does, reducing us to an animal existence. Hence the characteristic analogy to animals in Drndić’s fiction: the rats of Belladonna; the rhinos of Doppelgänger; and, in Battle Songs, the Vietnamese potbellied pig, whose cultivation as a ‘Western family pet’ is juxtaposed with the experience of the novel’s refugees.

Drndić finds nimbler symbols in the figurines, dolls and game pieces her characters encounter. Waiting for the subway one day, Tea meets a woman selling miniatures: ‘little violins, little guitars, little newspapers, little books, little people, little teapots, little trumpets, little houses, little railways, little tables, little plates, little pianos’. Rather than prompting lamentation for the tragic diminishment of her life, she instead imagines ‘how nice it would be if we all got together and in a shrunken state lived on that woman’s shelf’.

The longing to live in a ‘shrunken state’ finds an affinity with Drndić’s treatment of ultranationalism and fascism. More than once, Tea declares confidence in the ‘purity of my Croatian blood’, which benefited her during the craze for ‘counting blood cells’ in the Balkans. Tea seems both bemused and faintly proud of this asset. Still, Tea has no serious affinities for the far right. The history of her Partisan family was marred by the violence of the Ustasha, the militia of the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), the Croatian puppet state of the Axis powers. Drndić frames their ‘call for blood and soil’ as a petulant appeal for narrowing social concerns. Tea recalls an instructive example in a student magazine published in Zagreb, 1942.

Croats may only be Croatophiles. Any other allegiance that crosses the boundaries of our shared commitments, is not only completely nonsensical but also absolutely harmful. So all contradictions can be manifested only within the borders of our national and state benefits. It is better that those borders should be narrower rather than wider, it is better that in establishing those borders we should be narrow-minded, rather than allow ourselves greater liberties.

The fascist’s demands for ethnic purity and national fealty betray his vulnerability. Tea’s passing daydream of life in miniature – to live simply amongst the ‘little people’ and ‘little houses’ – becomes the fascist’s consuming political ambition: to produce an uncomplicated, uncontaminated society by externalizing the forces of reduction he feels within himself. The emotional antecedents of fascism are widely felt in Drndić’s characters, and her presentation of them is often seeded with acknowledgements of their humanity. Battle Songs reminds its reader that the Ustasha, too, had parents and lovers and sang ‘ditties’ to their children. Monsters are made, not born, she insists; the structure that Drndić implicates in their making is the turmoil of the Balkan nation-states.

Nationalism, likewise, is the subject of Drndić’s most direct parodies. Battle Songs shares a late-90s fracas within the Balkans over ‘Grandfather Frost’. National factions insist on their own version of the childhood legend, or, in the case of Bosnia & Herzegovina, reject it altogether as something ‘imposed from the outside’. The episode is amusing – and, to Americans, familiar – until a radio host who maintains that ‘Grandfather Frost is one of the rare things that unites people’ is assaulted for his opinion. Similarly, in EEG, the narrator reports that Latvians despise the widespread perception of Rothko as an American artist; they insist that Markuss Rotkovičs ‘is in fact ours, he’s not yours, but in fact ours’.

Of course, this is how nations function, by guarding distinctions between their constituents and foreign nationals, while neglecting divisions within their borders. Nurturing the illusion of nationality, these tendencies can only preserve or expand social fragmentation. Drndić is a pessimist, yet her will to fragmentation cannot help but accentuate, through sheer contrast, the human bonds that remain untroubled by it. In an illustrative paragraph towards the end of Battle Songs, Tea reflects on her daughter’s childhood:

Little keys for tightening the tooth braces which kept getting lost, glasses, doctors’ checkups, orthopedists – ugly high shoes, diaries (allergic to Pentrexyl, sleeps well, sleeps badly, high temperature, low temperature, likes pureed squash, likes apples, doesn’t like sour things, can take cherries, not oranges, will eat spinach, dumplings, dresses herself, ties her shoelaces, right-handed – left-handed, draws circles, distinguishes colours, doesn’t distinguish colours, has grown 2 centimeters, gained 300 grams, doesn’t like the story ‘Hansel and Gretel’, does like ‘The Ugly Duckling’: When I grow up I’ll be a white swan, hard stool, soft stool, throat swab sterile, new words: I can’t get down!)

Like everything else in Drndić, Sara’s life is ‘preserved in pieces’. But this collage is somehow free from the contortions of identity or manias of self-maintenance; rather its parts are suspended in the resin of a mother’s love, boundless, transparent, selfless. What is civilization but the hope that this local, instinctive love can be extended? Drndić spent her career anatomizing how this remains a fantasy within nation-states that must feed fraternity and acrimony at the same trough. In Toronto, Tea sometimes overhears Sara in the shower, singing to herself: ‘What can we do to make things better, what can we do to make things better. La-la-la-la.’ Another daydream: the prospect of people cooperating toward their mutual flourishing is something children sing to themselves when they think no one is listening.

Read on: Robin Blackburn ‘The Break-Up of Yugoslavia and the Fate of Bosnia’, NLR I/199.

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Unabated

Heather Lewis’s Notice – recently republished after decades out of print – is a blistering and disturbing work. Rigorously deviant, technically merciless, to read it is almost an act of physical exertion, the effect viscerally stunning like a gut-punch. The resignation implied by its title – in the sense of ‘giving’ notice, abandoning a task – impels you to encounter it as an agonizingly extended suicide note. Lewis’s final novel was first published two years after she took her own life in 2002 at the age of forty, having relapsed following a long period of sobriety; she had also suffered an addiction to OxyContin, and ‘knew her way around heroin’ from her early years. Notice’s unanimous rejection – publishers recoiled from its relentless catalogue of cruelties, as well as an assumed proximity to its author’s life – coupled with the hostile reception that met The Second Suspect (1998), were widely perceived as precipitating Lewis’s decline. She had ‘gone too far’, though experimenting with limits – and with seeing how much both writer and reader could stomach – was also key to Lewis’s triumph.

The Second Suspect was an attempted compromise. A portrait of a female detective struggling to prove the guilt of a corporate male sadist who has raped and murdered legions of young women, this was Notice repackaged as a commercial thriller. Yet the novel still attracted epithets of rote ‘transgression’ and jejune ‘shock tactics’. Such criticism must have stung. Educated at Sarah Lawrence College and mentored by the writer-teacher Allan Gurganus, Lewis’s youth had been scarred by sexual abuse and parental neglect. House Rules (1994) was Lewis’s first – devastating, jarringly controlled – attempt to transmute her experience into a novel. In high school, she had made a foray into the world of show-horse jumping: the novel tells the story of a teenage runaway, victim of a sexually abusive father, who finds work as a trick rider. Existential squalor follows. Trick riding refers to the act of performing stunts on horseback. The sentence which begins Notice is ‘For the longest time I didn’t call it turning tricks.’

Notice follows a young woman, Nina, as she becomes ‘mixed up’ in brutalizing sex work, drugs, violence and prison. It begins with an ‘ordinary’ commute home, except home is an empty house from which the narrator’s parents have been absent for months. This isolation perhaps makes Nina more prone to the seductions of ‘Ingrid’s husband’ (also never given a full name) who picks her up by the side of the road: ‘Right there he’d flipped the game, right from the start’. Her subsequent account melds stark description with a cavernous lyricism:

I did wake up. Woke up sore and feeling drugged, and wishing I really was, but having no inclination to even find my liquor. I wanted to go back to that blackness where nothing had ever happened or ever had. Wanted this the way a child wants death, or the way I had as a child. A want simply to stop it.

In her former writing mentor’s words, Lewis’s ‘truest subject’ was ‘the void’ between the half-truths we tell ourselves, and the more complex, unflattering impulses behind what we do. Here the premise of turning tricks for money is punctured by the narrator – ‘because it just couldn’t be as simple as money’. Lewis instead sketches an alternative economy where the currency is suffering. As she puts it in House Rules, the narrator is interested in ‘the kind of pain that kills pain.’

The situation that unfolds could be portrayed as tragic, yet the novel resists any trace of pathos. Lewis’s tone has often been described as ‘chilling’, but a more diagnostic term would be dissociative. The writing is glazed and flattened by torment. Yet it carries the weight of something profoundly lived (if not fully resolved). Nina ultimately fluctuates between wanting to feel nothing – ‘it would make me feel something, which naturally is about the last thing you want’ – and wanting to feel everything. Between wanting to endure – ‘to prove I could take anything’ – and ‘a tremendous pull to give in, to give up.’ She knows she must escape Ingrid and her sadist husband, but also that – for ultimately enigmatic reasons – she cannot.

The carnal scenes in Notice are frequently harrowing: those in which Nina is made to dress in the clothes of the couple’s deceased teenage daughter are particularly gruesome. Eventually she is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she meets Beth, a therapist with whom she pursues a romantic relationship and who eventually ‘gets her out’, but not before Nina has to undergo nightly ‘visitations’ from the patrolling guards. It does not get any better. As the novel raced towards its climax, I waited, almost squinting through my fingers, for some pay-off catharsis, a release from the unabating build-up of traumatic incident, but one never came. 

It is hard to resist a ‘reverse-image-search’ kind of psychoanalysis, reading Notice as the culmination of a lifetime’s effort to deal with the trauma she suffered at the hands of her father (Lewis’s long-term partner, the writer Ann Rower, called Hobart Lewis ‘the grand villain’ of everything she wrote). It is also tempting to read the relationships that Nina has with women as possessing a more sustaining, nurturing dynamic. Yet these attachments sour and turn savage too. The French title of the novel – Attention, translated and published in 2007 – might better encompass the book’s ambivalence, the tightrope walked between vigilance and exhibitionism. Throughout, we are made aware of the narrator’s fear of ‘never holding anyone’s notice for very long’. Perhaps the nightmare Notice dramatizes is not that violence and abuse will lead to further escalation or even loss of life. The nightmare is that such violence will simply continue, without being registered at all. 

Read on: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, ‘Notes for a Feminist Manifesto’, NLR 114.

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On the Threshold

The American language, like the American landscape, is a trash heap. On top of the hundreds of thousands of loan words from over three hundred languages handed down from its British forebear, American English is strewn with the numerous subcultural slangs and professional jargons of a diverse, technocratically administered society, as well as the acronyms and neologisms born to designate two industrial revolutions’ worth of concepts, companies and consumer products (the most phonetically bizarre are undoubtedly those coined by the brand consultants in today’s tech and pharmaceutical sectors). From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and A.R. Ammons’ Garbage (1993), the sheer ontological profusion of a nation born and raised in capitalist modernity has fascinated its poets, many of whom have taken up the task of sifting through this detritus in their work, navigating the strange coagulations and dialectical reversals of ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’ that have ensued from the often violent, sometimes salutary contact between the cultures and economies of Europe and the dimensions of North American space.

Today, the American tradition of the literary gleaner is upheld by the poet, critic and visual artist Wayne Koestenbaum. Following in the footsteps of the New York School of poets and French transgressive writing, Kostenbaum, in his poetry and his critical prose, turns waste into a matter not just of aesthetic, but also ethical and political import. Like his father before him – a Berlin Jew who fled the Nazis as a youth, first for Caracas, then for northern California – Koestenbaum is a living representative of a lost culture: the gay scene that flourished in downtown Manhattan between the mid-60s and the late-80s, which produced a hyper-sophisticated connoisseurship for experiments in literature, dance, music and the visual arts before being decimated by AIDS. Koestenbaum left his home in suburban San Jose to go east for school, arriving in New York as a Princeton doctoral student in 1984, coming of age against the darkening horizon of the scene’s sunset years. The ensuing decades saw the razed terrain of downtown bohemia salted by conservative mayors, finance capital and real estate developers, who turned it into a space as culturally square as it is expensive. Now 65, Koestenbaum teaches Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and lives in his old apartment on West 23rd Street, on the same block as the luxury condominium that was once the Chelsea Hotel.

Stubble Archipelago, Koestenbaum’s new collection, discards the short, Creeleyesque stanzas of his 1200-page Trance Trilogy (The Pink Trance Notebooks, Camp Marmalade, Ultramarine) with their full-stop-free, left-justified lines, visually cordoned off from each other by horizontal bars floating in the stanza breaks, for ones that retain the norms of punctuation, but vary long lines with short, indented lines and has more frequent recourse to enjambment. (In an elegant variation on the sonnet, each poem has a total of fourteen of these longer lines, spread across four stanzas.) Along with the clipped, implied-subject sentences that appear to owe their provenance to the notebooks Koestenbaum has kept for four decades – in the solitude of a diary one can begin with the verb rather than the first-person pronoun – the poems of Stubble Archipelago have the taut, angular dynamism of a vehicle making hairpin turns at speed, rather than the stop-and-go-traffic-tempo of the earlier collections. Not surprisingly, they provide the scene for fascinating collisions between contemporary linguistic ephemera (‘STEM’, ‘bromace’, ‘community standards’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘sub bottom’), high theoretical jargon (‘Anthropocene’, ‘subject position’, ‘heterotopia’), and scraps of French, Italian and German. These are fused together under the heat of witty changes in parts of speech – such as the verbifications of the proper nouns in the line ‘Thousand sex partners giggle to Sontag it / Mercutio her’ – and outré personifications – as when Koestenbaum ‘woofed the zeitgeist’ but ‘Temps perdu didn’t woof back’. This is ‘diction as drag, diction as ecstasy-catalyst, diction / as hairpin, dic- / tion as transitional object’, whose irreverent juxtapositions of tonal register, speaking of Sontag, are one of the hallmarks of camp sensibility in literature.

The overall effect is reminiscent of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, where ‘this’ is often ‘cruising’, and ‘that’ is often ‘dreaming’. The thirty-six lyrics form a complex spiral of conceptual oppositions between erotic mobility and oneiric immobility, flow and friction, fantasy and materiality, announced in the striated and smooth textures of Koestenbaum’s cheeky title. ‘Desirability’, as he observes in www.mypornessay.com, ‘rearranges space’. Thus the ‘ferocious stubble’ of a passerby ‘undoes wan / pedestrian’s equanimity’ as does the ‘flat-assed beanie-and-wedding- / ring wearing man reading / Financial Times on C train’, who alas is ‘fruitlessly cruised’. Koestenbaum conceives of space – whether it is the physical space of downtown Manhattan or the virtual spaces of the unconscious mind, social media apps, or the page – as a kind of Platonic khora, a murky atmosphere or surreptitious aura he sometimes calls ‘nuance’ and other times ‘fag limbo’, the latter being a zone where ‘all territorial claims, all hygienes between philosophy and poetry’ are thrown into question. Apropos Hart Crane: ‘the point of queer poetry’ is to ‘make murky, to distort’ the reader’s experience through unusual syntactical choices and stylistic mannerisms. Elsewhere, in an essay on his friend, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, he expands the definition of queer-affirmative writing to include ‘any . . . project buoyed by excess’.

Excess, as Koestenbaum employs it, is a synonym of waste, a conceptual filiation which owes a great deal to the theory of expenditure advanced by Georges Bataille in such texts as ‘The Solar Anus’ and The Accursed Share. Bataille rejected the Malthusian assumption of resource scarcity that underpinned classical economic theory in favour of what he called économie générale; far from being subsistence economies, pre-capitalist societies in Europe and elsewhere were based on the assumption of abundance, symbolized in the unlimited thermodynamic productivity of the sun. These societies were organized not around utility and cost-benefit analysis, but around displays of luxury, which took the form of useless expenditures of wealth, that is, around the deliberate waste of surplus production in highly aestheticized rituals of gift-giving and sacrifice.

For Koestenbaum, waste has a somewhat more ambivalent significance, depending on what kind of entity is producing it. On the one hand, there is the equation of ‘Garbage / fecundity’ and ‘ecocide’, which proceeds not only from ‘Anthropocene / bad vibes’ and ‘capitalism’s thrum’ but also waste’s ‘embeddedness within linguistic inattentiveness’ of a rotting ‘cultural system’ that forbids ‘slow discernment’ in order to produce apps, etch-a-sketches, Benadryl, craft beer, Stevia, chewing gum, shower curtains, GI Joe denim and the other assorted junk that is sifted through in Stubble Archipelago. On the other hand, the excreta produced by the body – urine, shit, pre-cum, tears, sweat – as well as its unruly overgrowths – Whitmanesque armpit hair, ‘memento mori pubes’, ‘hennaed Frühlingsnacht hospice hair’, hairy shoulders, eyebrows, mustaches, and of course, stubble – are lovingly attended to, along with their atmospheric odours. (In a medium that has historically prioritized auditory and visual effects, Koestenbaum does not neglect olfactory and tactile sensory experiences.) Although writing – an at-present overproduced and undervalued consumer good – might seem to fall into the former category of waste, Koestenbaum reclaims it for the latter. Because interpretation focuses on signification, it tends to treat the concepts that result as immaterial, and thus we often forget that language is something that is produced and consumed by bodies. Sex and digestion provide more apt metaphors for communication than any vocabulary that relies on mental states: ‘writing / is a waste product / and therefore disgusts us, / and we choose, / as ethical and lunatic / stance, to form literature in waste’s image’. To what end, this ethical and lunatic stance? Koestenbaum’s answer: ‘to stretch threshold / experiences’.

‘We have grown poor in threshold experiences’, Bataille’s friend Walter Benjamin noted in the Konvolut on gambling and prostitution in The Arcades Project, referring to those moments of transition between states of being pre-capitalist societies marked with ceremonial rites. Koestenbaum uses this as the epigraph for his essay ‘Heidegger’s Mistress’, and Benjamin’s ghost – along with the ghosts of Brecht and Adorno – haunts Stubble Archipelago. Watching a film set in Berlin, for example, Koestenbaum imagines the ‘rickety red house facades / my father or Walter / Benjamin might once / have passed’; he discovers ‘messianic time’s momentary / emissary’ – a reference to Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history – in the ‘meat’ of a men’s room tryst. Thanks to the disenchantment and rationalization of everyday life in market societies, one of the few threshold experiences that remains to capitalist subjects, according to Benjamin, is dreaming. Less than a century later, even that, as Jonathan Crary argues in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is under threat from developments in digital media, targeted advertising and the other insomniac technologies designed to ceaselessly extract profit from our attention, draining and impoverishing it. That is no doubt why such counter-strategies as unprofitable indolence and aimless wandering receive praise in Koestenbaum’s criticism, and why dreams appear so frequently in the Trance Trilogy and Stubble Archipelago. The twenty-nine dreams recorded in the latter – whose subjects range from visions of a ‘bombed, burning’ New York City to a performance of Montemezzi by his beloved soprano Anna Moffo – each constitute a small refutation of Henry James’s chestnut, ‘tell a dream, lose a reader’. No less than writing, dreams are the waste products of consciousness; to cross the threshold between waking and sleep is to enter a hazy land of excess experience; the experience of reading, whatever its subject, has much in common with hallucinatory and hypnogogic states.

Poetry has a distinctive formal tool at its disposal for simulating and stimulating threshold experience. Originally a layout convention for transcribing the metrical units of oral poetry onto parchment by scribes and later paper by typesetters, the line break is a visual demarcation of a boundary. Enjambment – from the French enjamber, ‘to stride over’ – is poetry’s means of allowing a reader to cross, after a momentary pause, the visual and sonic threshold of the line as she follows the semantic trail of the sentence; the commas, semi-colons, em-dashes, or ellipses that conclude lines are, on this analogy, not merely ways of organizing sentences, but are also like the stone horoi that were used as boundary markers in ancient Greece. For Koestenbaum, who describes his own poetic style in Whitmanian terms, as a ‘recklessly utopian vers libre approximating thought’s freedom’ and as a ‘democracy . . . of solitudes assembled in taboo congregation’, the ‘line-making impulse’ is a kind of ‘art activism’ and prefigurative politics, ‘a communitarian enthroning’ of a ‘heaven’ that can be ‘occupied today’, instead of deferred to the just political and economic order that may or may not lie in the future. And heaven, not unlike the dreams which are said to anticipate it, is a space of excess or surplus being usually only thought to lie beyond the ‘death-life interstice’, the ultimate threshold. If ‘fag limbo’ is a threshold space where the genres of poetry and philosophy meet, it is thanks to the ‘profound formalism’ of poetry’s ‘rear ends’ that it achieves philosophy’s stated goal: the preparation for death. Of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’, Koestenbaum writes: ‘he breaks the line because he wants to slay me, and I want to be slain: we participate together in this funerary rite’. It is a truth that holds for the writing and reading of all lineated verse, including his own.

This is no doubt why in his criticism – whether he is writing about Thoreau, Sontag, Schulyer or Bolaño – Koestenbaum takes such an interest in closural effects. (In By Night in Chile, for instance, he admires the way the ‘horror’ alluded to in the final sentence ‘remains offstage, as in a Greek tragedy’.) Stubble Archipelago concludes with a memory of himself as a fresh-cheeked, thirteen-year-old boy biking home, with his ‘Jacob’s- / ladder tail tongue hanging’ out of his mouth, open to a future where experiences will climb like angels into the heaven of what he characterizes in an essay on punctuation as his ‘suggestible’, ‘spellbindable’ brain. The image is an instance of the ‘stillness-in-motion’ Koestenbaum claims as the modernist ideal. It also recalls an observation he makes about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel – another famous instance of the aestheticization of trash – in his commentary on Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Called Back’. ‘Even a spiral or wheel consists of lines’, he writes. ‘The line’s odd secrets involve circularity, cycling and recycling, an ecology of perpetual replenishment, perpetual relineation’. For those who know the odd secrets of the line, as Koestenbaum does, thresholds – and threshold experiences – are everywhere.

Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘By the Fireside’, NLR 96.

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Without Heroes

Cinema arrives in Turkey by way of a French clown named Bertrand. In 1896, Bertrand is tasked with entertaining the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who is at this time carrying out a series of massacres against the Armenians that will later bear his name. In the memoirs of the Sultan’s daughter, we learn about the clown: how Bertrand hung a damp curtain from the wall of the Yıldız Palace in Istanbul and projected images upon it using a machine fuelled by gasoline. (No electricity yet in the Ottoman Empire.) It made an awful noise and stunk up the room, but the images produced a keen sense of hayret, or wonder – a term of high praise for poetry and shadow plays in Ottoman culture – and the night was deemed a success. Though we aren’t told which films the Sultan was shown, we know that the first public screening took place only a short while later at a beer hall in Galatasaray, with the now-famous L’Arrivée du train en gare de la Ciotat and Cortège du Tsar Nicolas II à Paris on display. Audiences reportedly jumped from their seats when the train arrived; for the Tsar, they stood to applaud.

Cinema remained an itinerant European marvel for the next few years, with Pathé opening its first theatre in Istanbul in 1908. Turkey developed its own film industry thanks to the First World War: İsmail Enver Pasha founded the Military Office of Cinema in 1915 and began training soldiers to use filmmaking equipment, chiefly in service of propaganda, with the 1914 Censorship Act controlling what can be shown on Ottoman soil. (The earliest surviving Turkish film features a declaration of war against the Russian Empire; Enver Pasha was killed fighting the Red Army in 1922.) It was not until after the Second World War that cinema emerged as a form of popular entertainment. In the 1960s, ‘Yeşilçam’ films dominated – melodramas with mass appeal named after the location of their production companies (think Hollywood). By 1966, Turkey was the fourth largest film producer in the world, behind Egypt, India and the United States. A few people got rich, but the money was never invested in any coherent infrastructure, and with the various coups and constitutional crises over the next few decades, the industry soon collapsed – from producing two-hundred films per year to about ten by 1990.

You can trace the rise and fall of the Yeşilçam years through the career of Yılmaz Güney. Sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 1958 for ‘Communist propaganda’, Güney appealed the case and, thanks to the disruption of the 1960 coup d’état, spent only a year in jail (using his time to write an explicitly communist novel). Soon after his release, Güney became a star in the Yeşilçam system, dubbed its ‘Ugly King’ (think Belmondo), and later moved to directing in 1965. His films are often compared to Italian neorealism for their simple moral narratives, on-location shooting, and non-professional actors. Though the Turkish state had no interest in funding filmmaking at the time, it maintained the Central Film Control Commission as an ideological censorship apparatus, and films like Güney’s Umut (1970) were banned for ‘subversive’ content, making him a cause célèbre on the left. He was arrested in 1972 for harbouring Mahir Çayan and other members of the People’s Liberation Party-Front, and again in 1974 for shooting a judge. (His family lawyers are currently trying to relitigate the latter case.) Imprisoned for much of the decade, Güney nevertheless managed to produce some of his finest work, with the films directed by proxy – shot lists and scripts smuggled out, rushes smuggled in. Güney was so well-regarded at this time that he was often allowed to edit from his cell, the films projected on prison walls.

‘Read and write without rest,’ urges Nâzım Hikmet in Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison. ‘I also advise weaving / and making mirrors.’ All that time behind bars inspired Güney’s next film, Yol (1980), set during the military putsch of 1980, which follows five prisoners on a week of home leave. The yolk: it’s all a prison, with walls ‘not made of stone, but paved with stuck traditions and hypocritical morality’. The iron bars are evenly weighted – economic, social, religious, political – though Güney pays particular attention to the Kurdish plight, daring to title one location ‘Kurdistan’. (This scene was cut from subsequent state-approved releases in 1993 and 2017.) Güney escaped from prison in 1981 and fled to Paris, editing Yol in exile and announcing his support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982, with some four-hundred demonstrators on the Croisette calling for a free Kurdistan; Turkey meanwhile stripped Güney of his citizenship and demanded his extradition. He was sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment should he return – which he hoped to one day, we learn from interviews, but Güney died of cancer in 1984.

Only one other Turkish filmmaker has won the Palme d’Or: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. At a glance, his films appear less radical, and his personal life certainly so. Yet Güney said that revolutionary cinema should function not as a blueprint for action, but a ‘guide to thinking’. Ceylan’s winning film, Winter Sleep (2014) is all thinking, no action. A bourgeois hotelier and former actor, Aydın, lives an idyllic life in Cappadocia with his younger wife, Nihal. The plot is set in motion when İlyas, son of one of Aydın’s tenants, throws a rock through his car window. İlyas’s father, İsmail, had failed to pay rent, and Aydın inadvertently has him beaten by police. Nihal takes pity, stealing a large sum of money from Aydın – enough to buy a house – and offering it to İsmail. He throws it in the fire. Drawing inspiration and sometimes dialogue from Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Winter Sleep presents a simple enough parable. Güney would have told it from the son’s point of view, but the message remains the same. Yet the film is over three hours long. What else is there in the ether – in the dark hollows of those Cappadocian caves, in that seemingly infinite winter? Aydın is a would-be historian who keeps delaying his work. Might there be some kind of blockage?

Ceylan’s career began with the ‘Provincial’ trilogy: the 1997 debut feature Small Town, Clouds of May (1999), and Distant (2002). Each was made for less than $100,000, with Ceylan eschewing public funds. The director and his family act in the films, which take an autobiographical approach – all centre on the agony of abandoning home. Ceylan grew up in Yenice, a small town in Çanakkale Province just southeast of Gallipoli, where he would be labelled taşralı (think hick) by the bourgeoise metropolis. He studied engineering at Boğaziçi University, later moving to London to pursue filmmaking, and considers himself as something of a transfuge de classe. ‘His trajectory embodies the tradition of the Turkish intellectual with the contradictions and impasses in which he finds himself today’, writes Ferhat Kentel. ‘He belongs to a sort of middle-class in the process of gentrification, keen to “enlighten” society while remaining cut off from it.’

This also describes many of Ceylan’s protagonists: well-educated men who think to know better than everyone else, who are never necessarily wrong, never totally irredeemable, but who nevertheless remain outside of history. Given Ceylan’s love of Russian literature, you might call them superfluous men: bastard sons of East and West, intelligent yet politically impotent, bearing a false dignity undermined by contact with reality – which only leads to alienation, neuroticism and self-destruction. ‘That so many Russian literary heroes should be “superfluous men” seems almost inevitable’, argued Irving Howe. In nineteenth-century Russia, ‘no other kind of hero is possible’. Do Ceylan’s films make the same case for Turkey today? Lifted by the hopes of the large and militant Turkish left before it was vanquished, Güney’s films believed in revolution, and envisaged a heroism of the masses. Ceylan’s instead offer what Howe calls ‘heroes of estrangement’ – self-exiled individuals ‘unable to act heroically’.

In The Wild Pear Tree (2018), the protagonist is another would-be historian, who can only get public funding for his novel if he engages with local myth. Sinan refuses, preferring something more ‘meta’; should his career fail, he will simply join the riot police with his friend who brags about beating protesters. The film concludes what some have called Ceylan’s ‘Land of Ghosts’ trilogy, following Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). All are about the impossibility of a present that ignores the past. Set in Çanakkale, it avoids the tourist view of Gallipoli, which has become one of Turkey’s major marketing tools – a kind of founding myth for the modern state that allows secular and Islamic histories to live concomitantly.

The Turkish title, Ahlat Ağacı, bears a significance missed by the English translation, pointing to the Turkified name of the region in East Anatolia, Khlat, the pre-Manzikert Armenian homeland. The wild pear tree is endemic to the region – described by Ceylan as ‘quite ugly’ and bearing ‘very bitter fruit’. It seems to represent the twisted outgrowth of Turkey’s sullied soil. ‘When they find one near a village’, Ceylan said in an interview, ‘the locals will graft it to make it into a normal pear tree’. The mythmaking of state officials functions in the same way: on 25 April, 1915, the Allies made landfall in Gallipoli and Atatürk fought them off; the day prior, the Armenian Genocide began. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – a slow-burning crime drama set over the course of a single night in the desert – is a film that asks where the bodies are buried. Nobody seems to know.

Ceylan’s latest film, About Dry Grasses, centres on the superfluous Samet, a schoolteacher from Istanbul begrudgingly assigned to a small town in Eastern Anatolia. For much of the film his politics are difficult to ascertain: he plays FIFA with a friend in the army; he drinks with dissidents; he loathes the locals yet takes pity on stray dogs. At first, we think he might even be a paedophile – Samet pays too much attention to one of his students, a young girl named Sevim, who openly courts his affection. When Samet is reported for inappropriate behaviour, presumably by Sevim, he lashes out, publicly shaming her and the other (predominantly Kurdish) students. ‘None of you will become artists’, he tells the class. ‘You’ll plant potatoes and sugar beets so the rich can live comfortably’. From here, Samet sours on everything but fellow schoolteacher Nuray, a recently crippled Socialist. He competes for her affection with his roommate, Kenan, who has similarly been accused of inappropriate behaviour (though seems the nicer guy). The two are invited to Nuray’s house one evening, and Samet, conniving and self-centred, fails to pass this on, arriving alone with a bottle of wine. He does his best to seduce Nuray, but before she or Ceylan can gratify this seemingly irredeemable figure, he must first be unmasked.

‘I don’t feel the need to define myself as anything’, he says, responding to Nuray’s question of what ‘ism’ he belongs to. She calls him lumpen, a coward, says he talks ‘like a liberal’ and should get involved, take action. ‘Should I get beaten by the cops?’ Nuray rolls her eyes. They discuss order and chaos, the limits of collectivism; the conversation turns apocalyptic. ‘For me’, Samet says, ‘history recalls the weariness of hope’. Nuray begins to cry. ‘I’m weary, too’, she says. ‘Like I’ve lived a really long time’. He kisses her tears, and they head for the bedroom, with Samet making a quick exit – out onto a film set – to take Viagra, his impotence apparently extra-filmic.

‘Turgenev’s heroes define their humiliation as a function of their hope’, writes Howe. Is the same true of Ceylan? Later in the film, Samet confesses that what he saw in Sevim was a vision of the future – an energy or transcendence of which he was personally incapable. ‘I just wanted to make her a means for a dream world I had built beyond her’. One thinks of Marx writing to Arnold Ruge: ‘The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality’. Or of Herzen on the superfluous man: that ‘Decembrist’ ‘trembling with indignation and visionary feeling’ who ‘strives to discern, at least on the horizon, the promised land he will never see’.

Ceylan said in a 2004 interview that ‘winning the Palme d’Or could be a tragedy for me’, and since accomplishing this feat his stand-ins have only become more self-effacing. There is a sense, in Samet’s relationships with Nuray and Sevim, of Ceylan confronting Güney’s ghost. He can only squirm and apologise. Güney’s Palme served to celebrate the revolutionary spirit. Does Ceylan’s effectively represent capitulation to the Bertrand school of cinema, where French aesthetics satiate genocidal sultans? Samet is an emblem of guilt, a mode of apology – his role in the effective colonization of the Kurdish southeast mimicking Ceylan’s identity as leading mythmaker of a would-be Westernized state. (One character in Anatolia asks: ‘Is this how we’ll get into the European Union?’)

Ceylan has downplayed his political responsibilities in the past, arguing that a filmmaker is not a journalist and ‘should be more interested in the soul of the spectator’ – yet Ceylan’s tortured bourgeois soul seems the lonely subject of these later films. (A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy, Tolstoy said. What of spiritual agony?) Samet ends the film with a kind of soliloquy, delivered from the historical ruins of Mount Nemrut, with some advice intended for Sevim: ‘Time will pass, and if you survive in this land of unending setbacks, you will still dry up and turn yellow in the end. You will find yourself at the midpoint of your life and see you’ve gained nothing but the desert inside of you’. One hopes she would reply: speak for yourself.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads’, NLR 127.

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Undoing Oslo

Five months into Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people – a compendium of colonial violence, from the bombing of maternity wards to what Raphael Lemkin once called ‘racial discrimination in feeding’ – there has been no shortage of critical commentary. Diaspora intellectuals have worked tirelessly to counter Zionist hasbara; yet when Palestinians are called upon, it is usually to bear witness to brutality and dispossession, not to give their political prescriptions. Haidar Eid’s Decolonising the Palestinian Mind, published late last year, is a vital intervention in this regard. The book sets out to revive the politics of Palestinian liberation by articulating a transformative anti-colonial praxis that would break with sundry ‘peace initiatives’ while redrawing ‘the (cognitive) political map of post-Oslo Palestine’. 

Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.

Though informed by Eid’s experience of living between bombing and blockade, the book is not a testimonial. It is an attempt to carry forward the intellectual project of the late Edward Said, taking cues from his intransigent criticisms of the Oslo ‘peace process’ along with his warnings about a statehood bereft of sovereignty and delinked from decolonization. Oslo, writes Eid, has become a seemingly untranscendable horizon for Palestinian politics, both in spite of and because of its manifest failure. Its framework has segmented the Palestinian population – the refugee diaspora, those living under distinct occupation regimes in Gaza and the West Bank, and the second-class Palestinian citizens of Israel – and created a fractured ‘Bantustan endorsed by the international community’. Gaza, Eid writes, is now ‘the mirror image of Oslo’: both the enabling condition of the current disaster and the true face of a peace process that promised coexistence but never countenanced justice or repair. As Eid reminds us, ‘75-80 percent of Gazans are refugees whose right to return is guaranteed under international law, a right that has been totally ignored by Oslo’. In his account, the ‘invasion and siege of Gaza was a product of Oslo. Before the Oslo Accords were signed, Israel never used its full arsenal of F-16s, phosphorous bombs, and DIME weapons to attack refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.’

‘Oslo’ names a form of false consciousness that afflicts Palestine’s ‘assimilated intelligentsia’ and political elites, who have been defanged, coopted, NGOised and corrupted by the apparatus bequeathed by the Accords. Neither the residual left nor the Islamist resistance has managed to break out of this iron cage. Even Hamas, with its proposal for a ‘long-term truce’ (hudna) based on 1967 borders, has succumbed to it. For Eid, this two-statism – ‘the opium of the Palestinian people’ – cannot challenge the logic of Israeli apartheid, since it implies the reduction of ‘Palestine’ to the current inhabitants of territories occupied and besieged by Israel. It effectively endorses ‘racist ideas about the separation of peoples’, when the sine qua non of liberation should be to reunify the Palestinian people that Zionism has divided by design.

Said’s legacy looms large in this effort to extricate Palestinian politics from the Oslo Accords. Eid reviews the great critic’s dissection of the so-called peace process, from 1993 until his death in 2003, and seconds his conclusion that ‘no negotiations are better than the endless concessions that simply prolong the Israeli occupation’. Looking back on the Accords, Eid asks whether

we have been forced to endure horrible massacres, a genocidal siege, the unstoppable annexation of our land, the building of an apartheid wall, detention of entire families and children, demolition of hundreds of homes, and many other abuses only because a comprador class saw ‘independence’ at the end of a closed tunnel!?

A return to the anti-colonial tradition of Said, Césaire, Fanon and Biko is necessary to counter a Palestinian ‘neo-nationalism’ which ‘beautifies occupation, endorses normalisation, and defends the racist two-state solution’, regardless of the fact that it ‘denies the rights of two-thirds of the Palestinian people, namely refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel’. By tacitly accepting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and coordinating with its repressive apparatuses, writes Eid, this neo-nationalist ideology has become a partner of the Zionist project. Its only ‘solution’ is to give a circumscribed political class the trappings of statehood (flag, anthem, police force) and delegated power over a fragmented population. This means denying the existence of the Palestinian people as a people, and reducing Palestine to the status of a governable or ungovernable enclave. Statehood, thus conceived, is tantamount to surrender. At most, such a state would grant the Palestinians notional ‘autonomy’ on 22% of their land, with no control over their borders or water reserves, no right of return, and no defence against Israel’s military juggernaut.

Eid also engages with Said to diagnose the impasse of the political class in the West Bank and Gaza. He denounces the decision to build a representative structure under Bantustan conditions in the 1996 Legislative Council elections, and describes the 2006 elections both as a repudiation of the political logic of Bantustanisation and an implantation of the ‘Oslo Virus’ – even among a victorious Hamas. After 2006, Eid claims, Hamas played the role of ‘prison sergeant’ in Gaza: applying illegitimate religious laws while appealing to the US on the basis of a sui generis two-statism. Eid does not address how this détente of sorts was destroyed on 7 October, nor the gestation of this operation during the years of apparent containment. Yet his assessment of Hamas’s government prior to that date is bleak:

Day by day, we have seen this authority shift from the stage of resistance to the siege, to coexisting with it and finally reaching a stage of taking advantage of it. It has created a new, unproductive, rentier class whose capital is based on trade in the tunnels (before their destruction by the Egyptian authorities), land trading, a monopoly on the marketing of building materials, etc. This went hand in hand with a monopoly on the definition of resistance, excluding the possibility of reconciliation with those who do not follow its ideology.

Eid dwells in particular on Hamas’s inability to capitalize on the Palestinian unity and international solidarity in the wake of the 2008-9 war (Operation Cast Lead for Israel; the Battle of al-Furqan for Hamas). Like its predecessors and sequels, the Israeli assault was intended to create a sense among Palestinians ‘that they are confronted with a metaphysical power that can never be defeated’. Yet Israel failed to break the spirit or the substance of resistance, declaring a unilateral ceasefire after killing 1,400 Palestinians and destroying swathes of Gaza. What followed was, in Eid’s view, an ‘abortion of victory’, marked by futile efforts to broker a national unity government between Hamas and Fatah and fruitless engagement with the US, fuelled by false hopes in the Obama administration. This demonstrated that Hamas had embraced the statehood fetish, reinventing the broken wheel of ‘independence’ rather than leading a popular emancipation struggle. 

Eid stresses the need for a different path to liberation – one ‘that makes the de-Osloization of Palestine its first priority’ and ‘divorces itself from the fiction of the two-state or two-prison solution’. His proposal is to disengage from the political structures of Palestinian governance, breaking with both the religious right (Hamas) and the secular right (Fatah), whose main priority, he argues, is their own political existence. Eid’s programme involves dismantling the PA along with the ‘classical national programme’ of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, and working towards the formation of ‘a United Front on a platform of resistance and reforms’ through the reconstitution of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). Eid draws on Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘untested feasibility’ (inédito viável), which claims that the oppressed can use ‘limit situations’ to develop critical practices with the potential to transform ‘hostile conditions into a space for creative experimentation of freedom, equality, and justice’. This may sound utopian given the intense hostility of conditions in Gaza today. But as imperial powers begin to rehearse ‘solutions’ for the day after the genocide, alternatives may amount to a permanent denial of Palestinian freedom.

What of the Palestinian left? Much of it is materially integrated into the subaltern economy of Palestinian political representation: ‘Most members of the political bureaus of the major left parties are either directly employed by the PA/PLO or get paid monthly salaries without being directly employed.’ Eid claims that the PFLP, DFLP and People’s Party have failed to mount an effective challenge to the authoritarian drift of the PLO and PA. He therefore argues that the left must be rebuilt outside the existing Palestinian political system, drawing on the grassroots mobilizations against the ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin, the Unity Intifada and the resistance to the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. The principles of this movement must include a firm repudiation of two-statism; support for international solidarity and boycott campaigns; unity among Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora; a rejection of neoliberalism and revitalization of the PNC; and a willingness to learn lessons from both the Latin American left and the South African anti-apartheid struggle. All this would require not just a different politics, but a new cognitive mapping that ‘challenges the space newly drawn by the US, Israel, and their Arab allies – the so-called new Middle East’, and instead posits a ‘secular-democratic Palestine in the heart of a democratic Arab world’. In other words, it would require an abandonment of the fatal conceit that one can repair the legacy of partition by repeating its foundational premises.  

Eid’s intervention is valuable for its urgency of purpose and openness of outlook. Its proposals are especially resonant as the spectre of statehood hovers over the rubble of Gaza. Yet it is worth recalling that international law, invoked by Eid to underscore the injustice and criminality of apartheid, operates with statehood as its frame. A two-state vision sets the terms of juridical affirmations of Palestinian freedom, as seen in the ICJ cases challenging the legality of Israel’s occupation and seeking to apply the Genocide Convention to the current war. One of the key challenges for any alternative Palestinian political programme will be to navigate an international legal order which provides one of the only arenas for the legitimized assertion of rights while also leaving such claims prone to capture and domestication by hostile powers, above all the United States.  

As for Eid’s view of ‘one democratic state’ as the lodestar for Palestinian liberation, it goes without saying that this will come up against the imposing obstacles of the imperial system. It will also be confronted by the overwhelming commitment of Israeli Jews to the Zionist logic of elimination and domination, which has only been hardened by recent events. Eid echoes Césaire’s universalist refrain, ‘there’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory’; but what rendezvous, or even tolerable coexistence, can be imagined with those who have rallied en masse to a war promoted and prosecuted in explicitly exterminist terms? Even if we keep faith in the most utopian of visions, it is hard to avoid the sense that transitional arrangements will be required: perhaps some variant of the blueprint laid out by the Moroccan Jewish Marxist Abraham Serfaty in his prison writings on Palestine, where he argued for the establishment of two states, a ‘de-Zionised’ secular Israel under ‘one person one vote’ principles, and an ‘Arab’ Palestinian nation, as an interim solution.  

Who is capable of pursuing such a vision – one that, to quote Eid’s final line, could ‘turn the whole hegemonic picture upside down’? While Eid is forceful in criticizing the organized formations on both the left and right, and in centering grassroots cadres and the BDS movement, he is less clear on the role of armed resistance. There is little discussion of the armed wings of the various parties and factions (which have not always cleaved to the positions of their political leaderships), or of the popular resistance fronts that emerged in the First and Second Intifadas and which continue to operate in various defensive guises, most prominently in Jenin. Eid formulated his view of Hamas as ‘prison sergeant’ before 7 October, but it is not easy to square with Tufan Al-Aqsa – an attack which seemed like a deliberately irrevocable undoing of the status quo ante. It is also worth registering, contra Eid’s critique of left-wing collaboration with the PA, that the PFLP has recently joined forces with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian National Initiative to denounce Abbas’s appointment of a new ‘technocratic’ PM, Muhammad Mustafa. Still, it is to Eid’s credit that at perhaps the bleakest and certainly the most murderous moment in Palestinian history, he has had the intellectual courage not just to break with conceptions of peace pregnant with the disasters of war, but to affirm an expansive anti-colonial vision of liberation.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Clandestinity

In December 1973, a version of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton secretly returned to his homeland. A member of the Salvadoran Communist Party since the 1950s, he had recently broken with it to join the guerrilla People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). He was well known to the country’s military dictatorship and had been jailed several times, so some subterfuge was needed to smuggle him back in. Before leaving Havana, where he had spent the previous six years, he adopted not only a new alias, but also a new face, getting his features altered (allegedly by the same surgeon who had worked on Che Guevara prior to his departure for Bolivia). The ruse worked well enough on the Salvadoran border guards, but within a little over a year Dalton had been betrayed by those who knew his true identity best: his own comrades in the ERP accused him of being a CIA agent and summarily executed him in May 1975.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, reissued last year by Seven Stories Press, are the only writings Dalton produced during this clandestine period, in which poetry and armed struggle converged. It occupies a curious place in his oeuvre, both a tragic coda and a new departure. In a formal sense, the poems are by versions of Dalton: whether due to the needs of clandestinity or as creative choice, he adopted five heteronyms, trying out different poetic personae complete with fictional biographies and contrasting worldviews. Thematically, while these poems have much in common with his previous work, they are more closely focused on Salvadoran politics and on questions of revolutionary commitment. They constitute a kind of oblique testament to Dalton’s own journey from CP orthodoxy to his embrace of guerrilla warfare. They also dramatize a critical juncture in the life of the Latin American left, when the triumphal upswing inspired by the Cuban Revolution had given way to the leaden years of dictatorship and repression, and when for many, optimistic visions of social transformation had been forced to yield to the harsh practicalities of resistance.

Born in 1935, Dalton came to prominence in El Salvador at the turn of the 1960s, as part of the generación comprometida – the ‘committed generation’ of writers born in and around the 1930s who took up social and political themes in their work. On a trip to Chile in 1953, he met Pablo Neruda, whose work powerfully influenced the earthy lyricism of Dalton’s earlier verse. He also met Diego Rivera, who helpfully informed the eighteen-year-old Dalton that he was ‘still an idiot’ because he had not yet encountered Marxism. It soon became central to Dalton’s politics and poetics, and four years later, after returning from a trip to the USSR for the World Festival of Youth, he joined the Salvadoran Communist Party.

Active in the Party and in San Salvador’s literary circles while studying to be a lawyer, Dalton was arrested in 1959 and again in 1960 amid government crackdowns on student protests. A police report from the time labelled him ‘an extremely dangerous element for national tranquility’. Dalton himself thought the description exaggerated, but it galvanized him into deeper political commitment; as he later put it, ‘from that moment on, I dedicated myself to providing the judges with evidence against me.’ In 1961, he abandoned his studies and left for Mexico and then Cuba. Though he returned clandestinely to El Salvador in 1963, he was soon imprisoned again. He escaped the following year and was able to flee into exile once more, but the murky circumstances of his jailbreak later struck his ERP comrades as suspicious. In a tragic twist, the good fortune that enabled him to reach safety – first in Prague, from 1965–67, and then in Cuba till 1973 – contributed to his downfall.

Almost all of Dalton’s literary output was first published in Cuba, starting with his 1962 debut poetry collection, La ventana en el rostro (The Window in the Face). Over the next decade, a stream of books followed in quick succession. These included further poetry collections in which Neruda’s influence was joined by that of César Vallejo, and where political and historical themes gradually became more prominent; Taberna y otros lugares (Tavern and Other Places) won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize in 1969. There were also two historical monographs on El Salvador and a book-length interview with veteran Salvadoran communist Miguel Mármol, whom Dalton had met in Prague. Titled after its eponymous subject, the book became one of the foundational works in the testimonio genre on its publication in 1972. It was also a pioneering attempt to recover the popular memory of the 1932 government massacre of peasants and leftists, a searing wound in Salvadoran history to this day known simply as La Matanza, ‘the Slaughter’. ‘All of us were born half dead in 1932’, Dalton later wrote in a poem titled ‘All of Us’, adding: that ‘To be Salvadoran is to be half dead / that thing that moves / is the half of life they left us with.’

Before departing from Cuba in 1973, Dalton put his literary affairs in order. Critic and novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya has meticulously analysed Dalton’s late correspondence and found him working hard to arrange the speedy publication of several more manuscripts, including an autobiographical novel, Pobrecito poeta que era yo (Poor Little Poet That I Was) and two works of poetry, Un libro levemente odioso (A Slightly Odious Book) and Un libro rojo para Lenin (A Red Book for Lenin). Though these only appeared posthumously – in some cases more than a decade after the author’s death – they are nonetheless works Dalton himself felt were complete, and consciously wanted to be part of his literary legacy.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle has a more ambivalent status. Written after the rest of his body of work, these poems feel like an experiment in process rather than a finished product. Mimeographed versions circulated in El Salvador at the time they were written, but the poems weren’t published until 1977, when comrades of Dalton’s who had left the ERP over his murder put them out under the title Poemas clandestinos (Clandestine Poems). In 1984, at the height of the US Central American solidarity movement, they were translated into English by the late California Beat poet and communist Jack Hirschman, and published alongside the Spanish originals. This dual edition is the text Seven Stories Press has reissued, with new prefaces by Salvadoran writers Jaime Barba, Tatiana Marroquín and Christopher Soto.

The heteronyms Dalton adopted in these fifty-seven poems certainly have different voices, but at the same time there are plenty of common themes and concerns. In that respect they are not like the famous heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa: rather than presenting parallel and distinct bodies of work, Dalton’s poetic personae converge around a shared political struggle, their different fictive backgrounds representing various sociological and ideological strands within El Salvador’s revolutionary movement. Two of the heteronyms supposedly studied law, like Dalton (Vilma Flores and Timoteo Lúe); two are sociologists by training (Juan Zapata and Luis Luna); and one is an activist in the Catholic worker movement (Jorge Cruz). All except Flores are men; all except Cruz are around ten years younger than Dalton – not so much alternate selves, perhaps, as personifications of younger comrades.

The Vilma Flores poems that open the collection in many ways set the tone, combining political militancy and a spare lyricism. ‘Don’t be mistaken’, a poem titled ‘On Our Poetic Moral’ begins: ‘we’re poets who write / from the clandestinity in which we live’, adding that ‘we confront the enemy directly’. The Flores poems also introduce a feminist perspective. ‘Towards a Better Love’ observes that, while ‘No one disputes that sex is a domestic condition’ or an economic one, ‘Where the hassles begin / is when a woman says / sex is a political condition’. (Kate Millet’s famous statement appears as the poem’s epigraph.) But this perspective remains at best underdeveloped, its implications rarely stretching beyond the recognition, for example, that the ‘the magic deodorant with a hint of lemon / and the soap that voluptuously caresses her skin / are made by the same manufacturer that makes napalm’.

Timoteo Lúe’s verses are more sentimental and sincere in their lyricism: ‘Like You’, for example, begins ‘Like you I / love love, life, the sweet smell / of things, the sky-blue / landscape of January days.’ Those by Jorge Cruz, meanwhile, are clearly intended to embody the strong Liberation Theology current within the Salvadoran revolutionary movement (though perhaps they also offer an implicit dialogue with Dalton’s younger Jesuit-educated self). In ‘Credo of Che’, Guevara merges with Christ in a confluence of religion and revolutionary politics: ‘they put a crown of thorns / and a madman’s smock on Christ Guevara / and amid jeers, hung a sign from his neck – / INRI: Instigator of the Natural Rebellion of the Impoverished.’

The poems by the last two heteronyms, Juan Zapata and Luis Luna, have much more of a satirical edge. The Zapata poems are mostly driven by a negative impulse to criticize the Salvadoran CP, and they come across as a barely veiled legitimation of Dalton’s break with the organization. But their mordancy makes for entertaining send-ups of the CP’s orthodox line. In ‘Parable Beginning with Revisionist Vulcanology’, Dalton’s heteronym in turn ventriloquizes a party apparatchik to declare that ‘The volcano of Izalco / as a volcano / was ultra-left’. Having previous spewed lava and ash, however, it had now learned its lesson and become ‘a fine civilized volcano’, a ‘volcano for executives’. Another poem titled ‘Ultraleftists’ similarly runs through El Salvador’s long insurgent tradition and sarcastically labels each instance a case of ‘ultra-leftism’, from the indigenous Pipiles resisting the Spanish conquest to communist leader Farabundo Martí, a victim of the 1932 Matanza. As an attack on the CP’s political timidity, it was rhetorically effective, but as a record of the serial outcomes of armed struggle, it hardly offered encouraging precedents for Dalton’s own embrace of armed struggle.

It’s in the Luis Luna poems that Dalton arrives at perhaps the most consistent voice. This is no accident, since Luna accounts for almost half the poems in total. These have a terse, Brechtian energy, combining the sardonic tone of Juan Zapata with Vilma Flores’s class-based militancy. A poem on ‘The Petite Bourgeoisie’ characterizes its subjects dismissively as ‘Those who / in the best of cases / want to make the Revolution / for History for Logic / for Science and nature’, rather than ‘to eliminate the hunger / of those who are hungry’. Often these poems rely on wordplay or extended metaphors. ‘Violence will not only be the midwife of History in El Salvador’, Luna observes in one poem, adding that it will also have to be ‘the laundress of History / the ironess of History / who goes looking for our bread every day / of History’. Elsewhere he argues that ‘private property, in effect, / more than private / is property that deprives.’ (The pun – propiedad privada vs propiedad privadora – admittedly works better in Spanish, but here as elsewhere, Hirschman’s translation hews quite closely to what Dalton intended.)

At times the Luna poems weave back and forth across the boundary between cautionary tale and bleak reality, between abstract parables and the horrors of the armed struggle. In one prose poem, two cops offer a prisoner a chance to escape torture if he can guess which of them has a glass eye. The prisoner guesses correctly, to the cops’ astonishment, by identifying ‘the only eye that looked at me without hatred’. ‘Of course,’ the narrator adds, ‘they continued torturing him’. Where others of the Luna poems offer encouragement in the struggle, moments like these cater to a different impulse, as if to record for posterity and thereby vindicate the guerrillas’ suffering.

There are some jarring moments when violence matter-of-factly intrudes into the Brechtian satire and play of ironies. In one of the Zapata poems, for example, the poet asserts that ‘everywhere the revolution needs people / not only willing to die / but also willing to kill for it.’ Across the collection, indeed, it’s the intrinsic connection to the armed struggle that separates the poems most from the contemporary context. Dalton’s heteronyms repeatedly and readily make the leap from politicized critique to direct military action, and this places them firmly in their historical moment, and by the same token distances them from our own.

In the intervening years, the vast majority of the Latin American left set aside the armed struggle, often in the wake of enormous losses. In El Salvador itself, the ERP eventually merged with other guerrilla groups to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which from 1979 to 1992 waged a bitter struggle against a string of US-backed authoritarian regimes. A peace settlement allowed the former guerrilla alliance to become a legal political party, and it even won the presidency in 2009, holding power for a decade before losing to Nayib Bukele. Recently re-elected to an unconstitutional second term amid widespread rigging, Bukele presents himself as a new kind of elected autocrat. But even though his brutal crackdown on so-called gang violence – in effect a vicious and indiscriminate assault against the popular classes – has been waged under the banner of the ‘New Ideas’ party, his methods would seem grimly familiar to anyone from Dalton’s time.

It’s the persistence of authoritarianism, in fact, that brings Dalton closer to us again – the vast and enduring edifice of repression confronting any attempts at progressive social change in El Salvador, and the repeated impotence of electoral means for implementing it. The final poem in the collection captures well the lethal impasse facing the Salvadoran left in the 1970s, and perhaps in the present, too. It opens by sunnily predicting that ‘El Salvador will be a pretty / and (without exaggeration) serious country / when working class and peasantry / . . . cure the historical hangover / clean it up reconstruct it / and get it going.’ The difficulty, however, is that the country is still beset by a range of problems, figured here as obstacles, ailments or disfigurements: ‘today El Salvador / has a thousand rough edges and a hundred thousand pitfalls / about five hundred thousand calluses and some blisters / cancers rashes dandruff filthiness / ulcers fractures fevers bad odors.’ The solution he proffers is an unstable combination of care and cleansing violence: ‘You have to round it off with a little machete / sandpaper lathe turpentine penicillin / sitz bath kisses and gunpowder.’ For Dalton’s heteronym, there was seemingly no contradiction between these remedies. The poet himself staked his life on the same powerful conviction, meeting his senseless end with an enviable certainty.

Read on: Régis Debray, ‘Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America’, NLR I/45.

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Political Instincts?

Two men flank each other in shabby paramilitary attire, their MAGA caps hovering above the swirling tide of flags and megaphones. ‘We can take that place!’, exclaims the first. ‘And then do what?’, his companion asks. ‘Heads on pikes!’ Three years later, these rocambolesque scenes from the Capitol riot on January 6th – now firmly encrusted on liberalism’s political unconscious – have become a revealing historical hieroglyph. Above all, they epitomize a culture in which politics has been decoupled from policy. The protest galvanized thousands of Americans to invade the headquarters of the world hegemon. Yet this action had no tangible institutional consequences. America’s Winter Palace was stormed, but the result was not a revolutionary coup or a dual power stand-off. Instead, most of the insurgents – infantrymen for the American lumpenbourgeoisie, from New York cosmetics salesmen to Floridian real estate agents – were swiftly arrested en route home, incriminated by their livestreams and social media posts. Today little remains of their Trumpian fronde, even as the mountain king prepares for his next crusade. A copycat putsch in Brazil also came to naught.

The same disarticulation afflicts campaigns across the political spectrum, from the BLM protests in summer 2020, which saw nearly twenty million Americans rail against police violence and racial inequity, to France’s gilets jaunes and the current Palestinian solidarity movement. Compared to the long period of relative demobilization and apathy during the 1990s and 2000s, in which citizens protested, petitioned and voted less, the events that followed the 2008 financial crash signalled a clear shift in Western political culture. The Economist informed its readers in the early summer of 2020 that ‘political protests have become more widespread and more frequent’, and that ‘the rising trend in global unrest is likely to continue.’ Yet these eruptions had little effect on the spectacularly skewed class structure of Western societies; BLM has failed to defund the police or curb their brutality; and the regular marches against Western sponsorship of Israel’s punishment campaign have not stopped the unrestrained bloodshed in Gaza. As James Butler recently remarked in the London Review of Books, ‘Protest, what is it good for?’ 

This is partly an effect of state repression. Yet we can further delineate the present situation by examining a different, downward rather than upward-sloping curve. Throughout the recent ‘decade of protest’, the secular decline in mass membership organizations, which began in the 1970s and was first anatomised by Peter Mair in the pages of this journal, only accelerated. Unions, political parties, and churches continued to bleed members, exacerbated by the rise of a new digital media circuit and tightening labour laws, and compounded by the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that metastasized out of the actual one of 2020. The result is a curiously K-shaped recovery: while the erosion of organized civic life proceeds apace, the Western public sphere is increasingly subject to spasmodic instances of agitation and controversy. Post-politics has ended, but what has taken its place is hardly recognizable from twentieth-century mass political templates.

Contemporary political philosophy seems ill-equipped to explain the situation. As Chantal Mouffe points out, we still live in an age of ‘apolitical’ philosophy, where academics are reduced to pondering why certain people decide to become activists or join political organizations given the prohibitive costs of ideological commitment. By contrast, Aristotle once dared to suggest that humans displayed an inborn instinct for socialisation: a feature shared with other herd animals, such as bees or ants, which also exhibit strong cooperative traits. As exceptionally gregarious creatures, he contended, men also had a spontaneous urge to unite within a πολις, a term only meagrely translated by the Germanic compound ‘city state’ – the highest form of community. Anyone surviving outside such a community was ‘either a beast or a god’.

The classical Aristotelian assumption of man as a zoön politikon was called into question by modern political philosophy, starting with Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume (the latter two idiosyncratic Hobbesians). It was fiercely contested in Leviathan, where man appears as an instinctively antisocial animal who must be coerced into association and commitment. Yet even Hobbes’s pessimistic anthropology hoped to re-establish political association on a higher plane. For him, man’s antisocial instincts opened a vista onto even sturdier collective structures. This was an implicit appeal to Europe’s republican nobility: they should no longer get involved in murderous civil wars and, out of self-interest, submit to a peace-abiding sovereign. Similarly for Rousseau, antisocial amour propre offered the prospect of a higher political association – this time in the democratic republic, where the lost freedom of the state of nature could be regained. For Kant, too, ‘unsociable sociability’ functioned as a dialectical harbinger of perpetual peace. In each case, the apolitical postulate implied a potentially political conclusion: a lack of strong sociability served to temper political passions, guaranteeing the stability of state and society.

The nineteenth century saw a more pressing need to assure generalized political passivity. As Moses Finley has noted, to be a citizen in Aristotle’s Athens was de facto to be active, with little distinction between civil and political rights, and with rigid lines between slaves and non-slaves. In the 1830s and 40s, the suffrage movement made such demarcations impossible. Proletarians sought to transform themselves into active citizens, threatening the propertied order built up after 1789. To neutralize this prospect, it was necessary to construct a new cité censitaire, in which the masses would be shut out of decision-making while elites could continue to enact the so-called democratic will. The plebiscitary regime of Louis Bonaparte III, famously characterized as ‘potato sack politics’ in The Eighteenth Brumaire, offered an exemplar. This ‘creative anti-revolution’, as Hans Rosenberg called it, was an attempt to redeem general suffrage by placing it within authoritarian constraints that would enable capitalist modernization.

Walter Bagehot – luminary of The Economist, central bank theorist and eulogist of the English Constitution – defended Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état as the only means to reconcile democratization with capital accumulation. ‘We have no slaves to keep down by special terrors and independent legislation’, he wrote. ‘But we have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution, unable to feel the least attachment to impersonal laws.’ Bonapartism was a natural solution. ‘The issue was put to the French people . . . “Will you be governed by Louis Napoleon, or will you be governed by an assembly?” The French people said, “We will be governed by the one man we can imagine, and not by the many people we cannot imagine.”’

Bagehot asserted that socialists and liberals who complained about Bonaparte’s authoritarianism were themselves guilty of betraying democracy. Commenting on the result of an 1870 plebiscite which ratified some of Bonaparte’s reforms, he argued that such critics ‘ought to learn . . . that if they are true democrats, they should not again attempt to disturb the existing order at least during the Emperor’s Life’. To them, he wrote, ‘democracy seems to consist as often as not in the free use of the people’s name against the vast majority of the people’. Here was the proper capitalist response to mass politics: the forcible atomization of the people – nullifying organized labour to secure capital’s interests, with semi-sovereign support from a demobilized society.   

Richard Tuck has described the further modulations of this tradition in the twentieth century, visible in the work of Vilfredo Pareto, Kenneth Arrow and Mancur Olson among others. For these figures, collective action and interest-pooling were demanding and unattractive; voting in elections was usually carried out with reluctance rather than conviction; trade unions were equally beneficial to members and non-members; and the terms of the social contract often had to be forcibly imposed. In the 1950s, Arrow recycled an insight originally proffered by the Marquis de Condorcet, stating that it was theoretically impossible for three voters to ensure perfect harmony between their preferences (if voter one preferred A over B and C, voter two B over C and A, and three C over A and B, the formation of a majority preference was impossible without dictatorial intervention). Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ was seized upon as evidence that collective action itself was bursting with contradictions; Olson radicalized it to advance his claim that free riding was the rule rather than the exception in large organizations. The conclusion that man was not naturally inclined to politics thus came to dominate this field of sceptical post-war literature.  

Towards the end of the twentieth century, with the drastic decline in voter turnout, the plunge in strike days and the wider process of withdrawal from organized political life, human apoliticism seemed to mutate from an academic discourse into an empirical reality. Whereas Kant spoke of ‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’, one could now speak of ‘gesellige Ungeselligkeit’: a social unsociability which reinforces rather than sublates atomization.

As the decade of protests made clear, however, Bagehot’s formula no longer holds. Passive support for the ruling order cannot be assured; citizens are willing to revolt in significant numbers. Yet fledgling social movements remain crippled by the neoliberal offensive against civil society. How best to conceptualize this new conjuncture? Here the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’ – a form of politicization without clear political consequences – may be useful. Post-politics was finished off by the 2010s. The public sphere has been repoliticized and re-enchanted, but on terms which are more individualistic and short-termist, evoking the fluidity and ephemerality of the online world. This is an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics – low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value. It is distinct both from the post-politics of the 1990s, in which public and private were radically separated, and from the traditional mass politics of the twentieth century. What we are left with is a grin without a cat: a politics without policy influence or institutional ties.

If the hyperpolitical present appears to reflect the online world – with its curious mix of activism and atomization – it can also be compared to another amorphous entity: the market. As Hayek noted, the psychology of planning and mass politics were closely related: politicians would bide their time over decades; Soviet planners read human needs across five-years plans; Mao, keenly aware of the longue durée, hibernated in rural exile for more than twenty years; the Nazis measured their time in millennia. The horizon of the market, however, is much nearer: the oscillations of the business cycle offer instant rewards. Today, politicians wonder whether they can launch their campaigns in a matter of weeks, citizens turn out to demonstrate for a day, influencers petition or protest with a monosyllabic tweet.

The result is a preponderance of ‘wars of movement’ over ‘wars of position’, with the primary forms of political engagement as fleeting as market transactions. This is more a matter of necessity than of choice: the legislative environment for durable institution-building remains hostile, and activists must contend with a vitiated social landscape and an unprecedentedly expansive Kulturindustrie. Beneath such structural constraints lie questions of strategy. While the internet has radically lowered the costs of political expression, it has also pulverized the terrain of radical politics, blurring the borders between party and society and spawning a chaos of online actors. As Eric Hobsbawm observed, collective bargaining ‘by riot’ remains preferable to post-political apathy. The jacquerie of European farmers in the last months clearly indicates the (right-wing) potential of such wars of movement. Yet without formalized membership models, contemporary protest politics is unlikely to return us to the ‘superpolitical’ 1930s. Instead, it may usher in postmodern renditions of ancien régime peasant uprisings: an oscillation between passivity and activity, yet one that rarely reduces the overall power differential within society. Hence the K-shaped recovery of the 2020s: a trajectory that would please neither Bagehot nor Marx.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘After Populism?’, NLR 144.

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Bonapartist Solutions

There is a strong case to be made that the Eighteenth Brumaire still holds the key to understanding contemporary French politics. For Marx grasped that the secret of bourgeois power in France lay in the division between urban and rural popular forces; their mutual fear and loathing benefited a highly concentrated ruling class claiming a universal civilizational mission while establishing an impressively lavish welfare regime catering mostly to those who needed it the least. This model originated in the Directorate, was developed under the first Bonaparte and came to full fruition in 1848.

As Cagé and Piketty point out in Une histoire du conflit politique (2023), a book that sometimes reads like a rerelease of Marx’s classic bolstered by reams of quantitative data, the Bonapartist structure was only really challenged in the early twentieth century by a militant working class led by a Communist Party that forced the political system into a left/right alternation. Since the early 1990s, however, Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the bourgeois bloc anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as Mosca would have put it.

This raises an important question. Why can the American capitalist class, certainly the most powerful in history, not reproduce it? The paradox here is that this class has become hamstrung by a party structure that served it well for many decades. Historically, the two-party system split the working class between Democrats and Republicans, with the resulting vertical blocs cemented by a combination of promised concessions and personalist demagogy. Once in power, though, the parties would typically jettison their electoral programmes and tack toward the centre. But what has occurred in the most recent period – a phenomenon related to the rise of what I call political capitalism – are intra-party revolts on both the right and the left, the former significantly more powerful than the later. This turbulence within both parties reflects the wider problem of a capitalist system decreasingly able to deliver material gains to the working class.

This creates a dangerous situation for the rulers in which they cannot easily find a vehicle to re-establish equilibrium. Thus, a set of curious political symptoms have appeared: quixotic third party projects with no chance of success, former Republican operatives trying to recruit upscale conservatives for Biden, retreads from the Bush administration appearing on MSNBC and so on. These are all people who would like to establish an American version of Macronism, but cannot. Why? Because in a political system where the duopoly forces a choice, and where the parties seem paradoxically to be strengthening (one of the strange ways in which the US is Europeanizing just as Europe is Americanizing), it is difficult to reshuffle voter loyalites to allow for a Bonapartist solution. Deprived of this option, the American bourgeoisie is doomed to work within the confines of a party system that has now become a dysfunctional relic.  

Read on: Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, NLR 138.

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Intractable Crisis

As the world is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, the wars in the eastern DRC are entering their fourth and perhaps most dangerous decade, with a risk of major regional escalation. The conflict, which currently involves about a hundred different armed groups, has killed and displaced millions over the years. Since 2021 it has entered a new phase, marked by the reemergence of a rebel organization known as the March 23 movement. Private security companies and neighbouring states have joined the fray, and the diffuse range of belligerents has galvanized along two clear fronts: one aligned with the Congolese government, the other with the M23. The situation is now deteriorating by the day, and the prospects of peace are distant.

The violence began in earnest around 1993, when Zaire – the state that preceded the DRC – lost the capacity to contain the identity politics that it had cultivated over the previous three decades. Mobutu, a staunch ally of the West during his 32-year reign, had aimed to divide and rule by exploiting long-standing communal tensions. Forced migration, arbitrary border-lines and ethnic pogroms in the colonial era provided fertile ground for this strategy, which often targeted eastern DRC’s Kinyarwanda-speaking population. In 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda caused millions of Hutu – both civilians and perpetrators – to cross into Zaire. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, the group that would soon capture the central government of Rwanda, pursued the genocidaires into DRC’s North Kivu province, and conflict spread rapidly across the country’s east.

Between 1996 and 2003, two devastating wars unfolded under the watch of an international community which had stood by during the Rwandan genocide and was now consumed by post-Cold War conflicts from Somalia to Yugoslavia. In the 1996-7 ‘Liberation War’, the veteran insurgent Laurent-Désiré Kabila toppled Mobutu and took power through a rebellion supported by Rwanda and Uganda. The ‘Second Congo War’ then erupted in 1998 after Kabila split with his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, who in turn supported another rebel campaign against his government. This time, the formerly genocidal Rwandan forces, which soon became known as the FDLR, lent armed support to Kabila. Numerous African countries threw their weight behind one or the other side.

Joseph Kabila became president after his father’s assassination in 2001, and three years later he officially ended the war, signing peace accords with domestic rebel forces and with the Rwandan government. Yet in 2005, the renegade army general Laurent Nkunda mounted a new rebellion against the Kinshasa administration. This concluded with another deal between DRC and Rwanda, who agreed to quash Nkunda and launch joint operations against the FDLR. The rebel leader was detained and his forces were integrated into the Congolese army along with various other armed groups. But the regional entente did not last long.

Following DRC’s 2011 elections, where the younger Kabila was re-elected in a contested poll, a group of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese officers and former partisans of the Rwanda-backed rebellion deserted the army and created the M23. Aided by Rwanda and Uganda, the group briefly conquered the city of Goma in late 2012. A year later, the Congolese army forced the M23 into exile with the help of the UN. But subsequent peace negotiations failed, and the remnants of the group returned to eastern DRC in early 2017, hiding out between volcanoes near the eastern border. During those years, other armed groups fragmented and multiplied. Though they proved deadly for the civilian population, they remained too scattered and peripheral to provoke much international concern.

Despite evidence of large-scale fraud, the December 2018 general elections effected the first peaceful transfer of power in Congolese post-independence history. Kabila, who was widely believed to be eyeing an unconstitutional third term before finally agreeing to hold the ballot, was succeeded by Felix Tshisekedi – the son of a historic opposition leader, and the first president since the 1960s without ties to the military or the rebellion. Diplomats and journalists predicted lasting political change. Yet over the past five years, most of the government’s democratic and economic reforms have stalled, and Tshisekedi’s pledge to ‘humanize’ the security forces remains unfulfilled, amid continuing abuses against human rights advocates and journalists.

Initially, Tshisekedi oversaw a period of détente with Rwanda, with highly symbolic moments such as a widely publicised handshake between Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame in December 2019, and a solemn meeting at the border after an eruption of Nyiragongo volcano in May 2021. Under Tshisekedi, the Congolese government began working on various political, economic and military deals with its eastern neighbours and joined the East African Community. The DRC established military deals with Bujumbura, formalising years of unofficial presence of Burundi’s army on its soil, and with Kampala, leading to the deployment of the Ugandan army in the Beni region – where the ADF, an ISIS-linked insurgent group of Ugandan origin, had been at the centre of large-scale violence since 2014.

The DRC also secured mutually promising agreements with Rwanda, but tense relations with Burundi and Uganda – whose military operations in DRC seemed to involve strategic and sensitive areas for Kigali – complicated the regional equation. An informal military alliance between Kigali and Kinshasa that had targeted FDLR hideouts between 2015 and 2020 was discontinued for reasons that remain opaque. At the same time, negotiations between Kinshasa and M23 broke down. The DRC established martial rule in North Kivu and Ituri, and announced a new demobilization programme targeting the rebels.

This, along with an abrupt end to the informal ties that had underpinned the brief honeymoon between Kigali and Kinshasa, helped patch up the relationship between Rwanda and the M23 (which had been uneasy since Nkunda’s arrest). In late 2021, Rwanda rebooted its support for the M23, which began attacking Congolese army positions. The DRC resorted to the tried-and-tested formula of sub-contracting other armed groups, notably the FDLR. Fighting escalated in early 2022 as the M23 landed a series of battlefield victories and expanded its territorial control in the areas north of the city of Goma.

Both the DRC and Rwanda decided to pursue military escalation rather than diplomacy. As Kigali sent troops to fight alongside the M23, Kinshasa rallied an array of armed groups known as wazalendo and contracted private military companies to fight the rebels. All sides of the conflict are now investing in sophisticated weaponry – including drones, Rwandan surface-to-air missiles fired from M23-controlled territory, and high-end assault rifles which the DRC delivers to its proxy forces. The Congolese army has begun to integrate Burundian soldiers into its ranks, while Uganda – despite conducting joint operations with the DRC against the ADF – has been accused of facilitating support for the M23 along the Congolese border.

For Kinshasa, the M23’s return was proof that Rwanda had never been serious about peace. The DRC frames the conflict as a result of Rwanda’s intervention, denouncing the M23 as a foreign puppet given its predominantly Kinyarwanda-speaking leadership. For Rwanda, however, the DRC’s renewed cooperation with the FDLR suggested that it was uninterested in improving regional security. Rwanda has denounced what it considers the ethnic cleansing of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, presenting the violence as a result of the government’s discrimination against its Banyamulenge, Tutsi and Hema populations. Both sides thus buy into different hierarchies of suffering, privileging either the victims of M23 violence or the Kinyarwanda-speaking population.

This political polarization has created an increasingly hostile discursive environment, reflected in the war of words conducted across both traditional and new media. During the first M23 war, it was possible for humanitarians, journalists and researchers to cross the frontlines and work on different sides of the conflict. Since the 1990s, there have always been moderate voices among the DRC population, who feel that they suffer from Kinshasa’s poor governance and divisive ethnic politics and from Rwanda’s ambitions to claim North Kivu as its backyard. They have consistently tried to resist the ethnic polarisation of conflict (with varying degrees of success). Today, though, online spin doctors, trolls and agitators on both ends of the spectrum smear their critics as either allies of the FDLR genocidaires or puppets of Rwanda, reducing the space for non-partisan discussion. Attempts to maintain a modicum of social cohesion are under serious threat.

Meanwhile, the conflict’s underlying structures – including the legacies of racist colonial rule, the divide-and-rule politics of the post-colonial era, and the wounds of the 1990s wars – remain intact. Local conflicts over access to land and resources, as well as political power, are being complicated by the activities of foreign mining companies lusting after export minerals. Over the decades, mass displacement has not only devastated eastern DRC’s agriculture; it has also created a growing workforce for informal mining and recruitment into armed groups, which has altered the social and economic fabric of the region. The conflict has now acquired its own self-perpetuating logic, as militarization and violence have become the dominant modes of socio-economic life. International intervention was complicit with this transformation. During the rebellion of 2005 to 2009, the phrase ‘no Nkunda, no job’ became commonplace, suggesting that UN workers and humanitarians were instrumentalizing the war to secure lucrative contracts and mineral rents rather than pushing for a peace settlement.

Time and again, external actors have failed to contain the escalation. The UN peacekeeping mission, deployed in 1999, has gradually been reduced to a politically marginal ally of the Congolese army. It has recently begun to retreat in the face of popular discontent and accusations of being in cahoots with the FDLR, to which it is indirectly linked because of its support to Kinshasa. The peacekeepers of the East African Community, on the other hand, spent nearly a year overseeing a shaky ceasefire in 2023 before being dismissed by Kinshasa for not fighting the M23. Now, an incoming regional force, under the auspices of the South African Development Community, is viewed as hostile and partisan by both the M23 and Rwanda. It is unlikely to fare better than its predecessors.

Two major African peace initiatives – the Nairobi peace process, which brought together the Congolese armed groups except the M23; and the African Union-sponsored Luanda roadmap, aimed at mediating between Kigali and Kinshasa – have so far had little impact. The Nairobi talks were little more than a pathway to reorganizing the armed groups as government proxies, while the Luanda roadmap became a forum for Rwanda and DRC to accuse each other of violating past commitments.

Although various countries have condemned Rwanda’s support for the M23 and its military deployments into the DRC, as well as Kinshasa’s use of armed proxies, international engagement with the crisis has been sparse and erratic. Global powers still see it as a marginal issue. This has fuelled accusations of partiality – whether it is pro-Rwanda voices emphasising Western complicity in the genocide, or pro-DRC ones stressing Anglo-Saxon support for Rwanda-backed rebellions. The result is a legitimate and deep-seated resentment towards the West, which has been exacerbated by constant diplomatic mishaps. In February 2024, the EU signed a memorandum of understanding on sustainable mineral trade with Rwanda, which has long been accused of benefitting from illegal mineral exports from eastern DRC. After vociferous protests, the Europeans backpaddled and issued a statement in which they tried to strike a balance between condemnation of Rwanda and the DRC.

Much ink has been spilled on identifying the prime mover of the conflict. Millions have been spent on ambitious peace programmes, often focusing on tropes about ‘ethnic violence’ or ‘greed for resources’, and assuming that that the various parties act according to what Westerners presume to be their ‘rational interests’. Across diplomacy, academia and activism, there are competing theories of where to place the blame: Rwandan interference, DRC’s governance problems, international intervention, transnational trade networks, the multiplicity of armed groups. Attempts to strike a balance in apportioning responsibility, meanwhile, are often met with accusations of moral equivalence. Supporters of Rwanda claim that, given its roots in the genocide, the FDLR cannot be equated with any of the conflict’s other actors; it is in a moral league of its own. Supporters of Kinshasa argue that singling out the FDLR is a veiled justification for Rwanda’s incursions into the eastern DRC.

This creates a cascade of moral problems. To survivors of the Rwandan genocide, the FDLR still has the same extremist anti-Tutsi ideology and therefore poses a continuing threat. Yet from a Congolese perspective, the FDLR is a shadow of its former self which no longer has the capacity for violence on the same scale, and its presence has now become a pretext for recurrent Rwandan aggression. Both these positions are understandable. The aim should be to create a dialogue between them, but in present conditions this seems almost impossible. It is difficult to find agreement on even the most basic facts of the conflict, since they are increasingly weaponized to suit the narratives of either side. The infamous UN mapping report – an inventory of crimes committed in eastern DRC between 1993 and 2003 – is a case in point. Over 500 pages, it compiles an extensive list of abuses committed by all warring parties; but is often selectively cited to assign sole responsibility to certain actors and exonerate others. This has compromised attempts to understand this intractable crisis along with efforts to resolve it.

The absence of honest peace efforts and the recent radicalisation of the conflict – both militarily and discursively – have damaged the social fabric of the eastern DRC. As many told me during a recent stay in North Kivu, the political polarisation has become so acute that any attempt to take an impartial stance is seen as giving ‘support to the enemy’. As of this month, Goma is now isolated from the rest of the country, with the M23 in control of large parts of North Kivu. The Congolese army is using its proxies to mount continual counter-offensives, resulting in additional displacement. Diplomatic efforts are stuck, as each side is entrenched in its maximalist positions. Kinshasa insists on an unconditional withdrawal of the M23 and Rwandan troops, while Kigali demands an immediate end to the collaboration with FDLR and warns against outside intervention. Against this backdrop, the current escalation seems increasingly reminiscent of the turmoil and regional conflagration of the 1990s.

Read on: Joe Trapido, ‘Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power’, NLR 98.