Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
The History of Sexuality – Michel Foucault
34 | In both theory and practice, the modern State came into being in order to put an end to civil war, then called “wars of religion.” Therefore, both historically and by its own admission, it is secondary vis-à-vis civil war.
38 | The modern State, which purports to put an end to civil war, is instead its continuation by other means.
Gloss A: Is it necessary to read Leviathan to know that “because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereign, he that dissented must now consent with the rest, that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest. [...] And whether he be of the ongregation or not, and whether his consent be asked or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be left in the condition of war he was in before, wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.” The fate of the communards, of the Action Directe prisoners or the June 1848 insurgents tells us plenty about the bloody origins of republics. Herein lies the specific character of and obstacle to the modern State: it only persists through the practice of the very thing it wants to ard off, through the actualization of the very thing it claims to be absent. Cops know something about this, paradoxically having to apply a “state of law,” which in fact depends on them alone. Thus was the destiny of the modern State: to arise first as the apparent victor of civil war, only then to be vanquished by it; to have been in the end only a parenthesis, only one party among others in the steady course of civil war.
39 | Gloss A: The modern State means, among other things, a progressively increasing monopoly on legitimate violence, a process whereby all other forms of violence are delegitimized. The modern State serves the general process of pacification which, since the end of the Middle Ages, only persists through its continuous intensification. (..) In order to become a political subject in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will make it such: it must begin by casting aside its passions (now inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to become a political subject each body must first carry out its own autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject will thus be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice.
40 | The founding act of the modern State—that is, not the first act but the one it repeats over and over—is the institution of the fictitious split between public and private, between political and moral. This is how it manages to crack bodies open, how it grinds up forms-of-life. The move to divide internal freedom and external submission, moral interiority and political conduct, corresponds to the institution as such of bare life.
60 | The jurisdiction of the imperial police, of Biopower is limitless, since what it must circumscribe and put a stop to does not exist at the level of the actual but at the level of the possible. The discretionary power here is called prevention and the risk factor is this possible, existing everywhere in actuality as possible, which is the basis for Empire’s universal right to intervene.
Gloss A: The enemy of Empire is within. The enemy is the event. It is everything that might happen, everything that might disturb the mesh of norms and apparatuses. Logically therefore the enemy, in the form of risk, is omnipresent. And concern is the only acknowledged reason for the brutal imperial interventions against the Imaginary Party: “Look how ready we are to protect you, since as soon as something exceptional happens—obviously without taking into account quaint customs like law or jurisprudence—we are going to intervene using any means necessary” (Foucault).
Introduction to Civil War – Tiqqun
Thesis 5 | When the biopolitical strike, sabotage and blocking converge the presuppositions for metropolitan revolt are created between them. Metropolitan insurrection becomes possible when the chaining together of specific struggles and the accumulation of revolts make a comprehensive strategy that hits (or overtakes) territories, existences, machines and devices.
Thesis 6 | Social centers, liberated spaces, houses and communized territories, should be to the political critique of the multitudes and transformed into new Mutual Aid Societies. Just as between the 18th and 19th centuries, these territorial aggregations could provide not only solidarity between individuals, mutuality between formsof-life and organization for both specific and general struggles, but also to the singularity’s and the community’s texture of conscience in that they are both oppressed and exploited. The Common, as a political act, is therefore born as a process in which the friendship and mutuality between those who are deprived transforms itself into a resistance commune.
20 theses on the subversion of the metropolis – Plan B Bureau
