dreaming of one thing [subversive chronicle]

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

1961/62]

# in december 1960 the french poet danielle collobert joined a militant group collaborating with thealgerian resistance organisation fln in its struggle against colonial france. in her cahiers 1956-1978 she records her desire to leave, as soon as possible, before the resistance dies out, to flee from personal boredom + exhaustion. later the attempts during countless journeys, in which everything more + more resembles everything else, to lose herself. by all accounts, she smuggled weapons + money into algeria in support of the movement [porteurs de valises]. she does not reveal much about her involvement, keeping her experiences by and large to herself. imagination may be sufficient to picture what activities she was involved in. the mute screams. simply in order not to hear oneself. the blocked passageways to light. the boundless separation, the starting point no longer within view. who is speaking?

# collobert understands algeria as a real beginning to which she binds her hopes. but as early as february 1962 she declares her militant activism over + views it as having failed. she is forced to go into hiding for some time in italy [rome, then venice]. she goes, she departs, she cannot stop departing, to the point that departure, that disappearance, finds its fulfilment. a question of distance. her claustrophobia between the walls of the porte de vincennes, just as between those of a gallery where she worked for a while [and which hardly any visitors ever entered]. unable to take any more she observed events from the distance. while from the outset she was concerned with endings. the end of writing, of language, of life. in this not unlike the naysayers beckett or rimbaud. sensation, the access to routine things, was lost to her. life without a centre. isolated from the cries of others, the infection of self-inflicted wounds. erosion of time. places + travels becoming interchangeable, a kind of nomadism that she lives, a restlessness or disorientation in which the one is as good as the other [the hostility of things]. she misses the direct influence of political events. direct action, she writes, immediately justifies itself in its entirety. political struggle yields to inner struggle. the events in algeria have only intensified her feeling of disillusionment.

# at around the same time in paris, on the evening of 17 october 1961, while nearly 40,000 people march [following the call of the fln to protest a curfew that forbade algerians to leave their homes after 8.30pm], the security forces of the police + crs open fire on peacefully demonstrating men and women. throughout the city there are confrontations in which people are physically abused or killed [more than 50 algerians alone are driven into the inner courtyard of the prefecture + shot]. many of the victims are later thrown into the seine [dead, unconscious, or chained], paulette péju, ratonnades à paris, 1961/2000. the events were concealed + censored for decades. jacques panijel’s film, octobre à paris (fln, guerre d’algérie), 1962, work on which begins a day following the massacre, presents in documentary footage + interviews with demonstrators the victims of the police violence. this film, too, was subject to censorship for a long time. at least 14,000 people were then forcefully detained by the police for days in two sports stadiums.

[. . .]

"PORNO-THEO-COLOSSAL" [[AFTER PASOLINI]]

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Peter Bouscheljong for PMF 2021

My review of Galina Rymbu's "Life in Space" in Tripwire 18

Coming soon: "A Small Poetics of Insurrection"

Interview with Pierre Guyotat [Pierre Testard / Gwénaël Pouliquen, April 2020]

Katerina Gogou | AND THAT'S HOW I'LL GO AWAY

 riots and/or poetics [5/2021]

Thus ’77 saw a flaring up, a quotidian generalization of a political and cultural conflict with ramifications for every part of society, exemplifying a conflict that had taken place throughout the 1970s, a fierce conflict both between classes and within the class, perhaps the fiercest seen since the Unification of Italy. Forty thousand criminal charges, 15,000 arrests, 4,000 people sentenced to a thousand years of prison—and then there were the deaths and the hundreds of wounded on both sides. There is no doubt that these figures cannot be considered merely the result of some risky, crazy plan dreamt up by evil minds bent on triggering nihilistic tensions within uncultured, marginalized social strata. Rather, the conflict was a necessary moment, the consequence of social contradictions between classes that, within a generalized crisis, pushed forward into a head-on conflict for the redefinition of new rules of power.

— Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni | The Golden Horde (Translated by Richard Braude)

Patrizia Vicinelli | Ce poète menteur a fait le point. Si j’aime...

Ce poète menteur a fait le point. Si j’aime l’aube* enfin et au bistrot dis-moi, homme véritable, est-ce que l’épouse est enceinte ? ... je sais ! Ne m’en parle pas je connais la jalousie. Occupe-toi bien de lui il est quand même de ta femme. Tu fais le peintre et tu aimes, non ? Avec l’ami : nous ferons la Troisième république ... le poète menteur a fait le point... – Si je te dis que je comprends que je communique... – Toi tu te fous du bon homme*, cher. JE ME FOUS MOI DU PROLÉTAIRE ET DE MARX AUSSI. IL ÉTAIT LE PREMIER. LUI LE HÉROS. Aujourd’hui j’ai envie de parler. Même si je souffre un certain mal. – Eh, toi, bon homme* ! (s’approche) Je vous parle monsieur : je sais que vous rendrez puissant le parti. Mais.. Maisdîtesmoi : qu’est-ce que l’art ? – L’art est l’essence de l’amour. – mai 1962 ** À la table d’une femme qui possédait l’auberge et un capital dans la cave c’est – telle quelle – l’équivoque. Mon ami, sais-tu comment refuser ? RIMBAUD N’EST PAS VENU CHEZ NOUS Et là naît ce doute de dire – mais enfin c’est vrai – mes mots des affirmations et le prolétaire. Qui est-ce ? On ne peut pas le choper comme si c’était x – y = z « j’ai approché la femme ivre sans tentations. Et la vieille – FERMEZ LE PORTAIL ! – Qui n’a pas une ardoise de plus de cent lires ». On se réconciliera dans les Trade Unions et parmi nous il y aura un Rimbaud. juin 1962 ** C’est l’heure maintenant d’arrêter cette combustion rouge méprisante qui ne bâtit pas les maisons et pénètre les milieux et corrode les petites boules de craie des cerveaux les lobes couillés tournés comme un rectangle tandis que la communion des boules est dans l’équivalence la partie dans les parties la partie dans la Part La langue que tu parles est une langue fourchue et on va découper la tienne en bandelettes ainsi que le langage de tout le monde souviens-toi que le point va cogner trembler au contact du point qui est autre et il voudra le nier et ce sera une puanteur de boules serrées et notre mouvement sera celui d’un atome, universel viens avec moi ami, et toi aussi mon ami, et vous tous messieurs : on va essayer d’être une nuée de moucherons. octobre 1962 Patrizia Vicinelli rejoint le en 1966 et, entre 1967 et 1988, elle publie donc plusieurs livres de poésie. Mais aucun n’est traduit en français. Avec Fabiana Bartuccelli, nous traduisons deux livres pour commencer : Ils ne se souviennent pas toujours (1985) et à, a, A, (1967). Les trois poèmes que nous avons traduits pour Remue.net étaient restés inédits de son vivant . Luc Bénazet (Photo : Patrizia Vicinelli, extrait du film Errore di gruppo, réalisé par Mario Gianni, Elio Rumma, Patrizia Vicinelli)

Keston Sutherland | The poetics of Capital

Raoul Vaneigem | Isidore Ducasse and the Count of Lautréamont in the "Poésies"

Carla Lonzi | Let's Spit on Hegel

Nathalie Wourm | Poetic Sabotage and the Control Society: Christophe Hanna, Nathalie Quintane, Jean-Marie Gleize

Announcing Tripwire Pamphlet #8: The Processes, a factographical proem, by Peter Bouscheljong, translated by David Vichnar, Louis Armand & Tim König. A dialectical poetics of radical history that asks what kind of resistance and poetry is possible under conditions of capitalist repression, if we do not simply want to return to everyday life? Synthesizing documentary poetics (the lives of George Jackson, Luxemburg, Verlaine, Pasolini, Anna Mendelssohn, Dalton, Vallejo, and others) with the capitalist alchemy of surveillance and repression, the long “proem” tracks the processes with which those in power react to the social struggles of political movements and the works of revolutionary poets, who strike back into a corner and contribute to our understanding of social upheavals, illuminated by the solar flares of Marx & Rimbaud.

TRIPWIRE