Resistance or revolution : At first glance, this general pair of terms produces a stigma. It implies confessional positioning. Such “big” words often lead to the kind of non-commital statements that appear on the opinion market of the feuilleton. This is something I don’t want to take part in.

Resistance is the politics of baby steps: being on location concretely, getting up again and again, forming continuities and competences, clamping down your teeth with no intention of letting go – yet tending to lose yourself in details, becoming reformist, making yourself comfortable in your little niche. In contrast, revolution is the grand gesture, the distant goal, the actual, whose details you can easily ignore. There is, however, also a great danger of losing the ground beneath your feet and finding yourself face down on the carpet of the salon.

• Negation is a call for becoming. But becoming, as experience, becomes habitable territory. This creates power. The activity of this power disturbs and provokes reactions, which – in turn – are also negative.
  • In other words, there are two forms of negativity. One of them operates by deconstructing as well as prohibiting all complete identities – we will call this resistant negation – while the other – reactive negation – is motivated by resentiment . “Resistant negation” presses toward heterogeneity. Its resistance is an expression of work, language, pleasure, and creation. Its temporality is primary. “Reactive negation” is secondary; it charts reality through the centralizing hierarchies of power; it lays claim to the conservation and blocking of all possible becomings.

Dislocated somewhere between 9/11 and Iraq , the Argentine insurrection of 2001-2002 seems to lie in the already-distant history, even though its events took place in the very recent past. During the mid-1990s, Argentina was lauded as an economic miracle. In order to promote the privatization of the Argentine economy following years of military dictatorship and a stagnant, nationalized economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other multilateral organizations had been supporting the dollarization of the peso by flooding Argentina with huge loans. But by December 2001, the IMF’s stabilization-recipe had soured. Currency values caved in completely. Unemployment and wage-withholding grew rampant. Fearing a run on the banks, the government froze accounts. The cash-machines ran out of money. The stores refused to sell their goods. The president resigned. Within a month, Argentina defaulted on 132 billion dollars of foreign debt. Millions took to the streets throughout the country shouting “Que se vayan todos!” (“throw the bums out!”), banging pots (= caserolas ) in protest. The power vacuum left by both governmental crisis and investor withdrawal created a need for radical-democratic grassroots “self help”: neighbours formed constituent assemblies, barter points, and public eateries; factory-workers took to forms of self-organized production, once the owners had been driven away by the default. The heterogeneity of a insurrective multitude, bound together not only by negative (destructive, violent) criticism, but also by the existential need to build something new as an alternative to the system’s hopelessness.