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Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms—women who had been both politically and sexually active—became radical in new terms: they became feminists. They were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. They had fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights, and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a 1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:

Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of what passes for common practice in many places. A man can bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up, or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent with her. If a macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant.

Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous.” Acknowledging the forced sex so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped.” These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers—they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually exploited women within the movement. “But surely,” wrote Robin Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’—supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks—he’s talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical?”

-Andrea Dworkin, http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/RightWingWomenAbortion.html

we spent the day on the mediterrenean, reading “limits of experience: nihilism” by blanchot. and swimming, and eating turkish ice cream with my dad. where were you? why weren’t you there? i miss you, and can imagine sharing a life like this with you. love,
H

As soon as, through the movement of those forces tending towards rupture, revolution appears as something possible, with a possibility that is not abstract, but historically and concretely determined, then in those moments revolution has taken place. The only mode in which revolution is present is that of its real possibility. At that moment, there is a stop, a suspension. In this stop, society falls apart completely. The law collapses: for an instant there is innocence; history is interrupted.

Walter Benjamin:

The conscious desire to break the continuity of history belongs to
the revolutionary classes in the moment of action. It is just such a
consciousness that expresses itself in the July revolution. During the
evening of the first day of the struggle, simultaneously but as a
result of separate initiatives, in several places people fired on the
clocks in the towers of Paris.

—Maurice Blanchot

Art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.

—francis picabia

There is no class “purity,” not even in shop floor organizations. The struggle by workers against organizations they formed there and in the society generally-trade unions, Labour parties, etc.-is the class struggle.

—Selma James- Sex, Race and Class

Edition from Madrid, 1930.

Edition from Madrid, 1930.

You’re such a black hole ___. You need to make something out of the black hole.

—From a friend, over the phone. 

And here I am no doubt going to shock you by speaking of positive technologies, inventions that have often been very “feminine.” Every new bomb bore a woman’s name, every airplane, every ship. Canning, for example, was one of the first objects of industrialization that brought about real change. For the first time, a whole population of women was no longer confined to the kitchen, no longer had to do the canning or cooking herself, and the new situation constituted a threat to traditional patriarchal society. This is why, with the invention of every positive technology, an antifeminist discourse sprang up, as a warning.

-Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory

In my own philosophical work, I urge awareness of a class struggle, and the “prole” that slumbers in me considers that the Heideggerian oblivion remains terribly elitist, the ruse of a false peasant.

-Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory