_caspar_ wrote
"the permanent calculated revolt against transcendent forms, an orientation in the present that opens up unforeseen possibilities and un-forecloses the future. "
agreed. which is why I think Stirner was invaluable to anarchists for emphasizing this disassociation from abstract externalities or ideals. I also agree with your emphasis on the body, not from a strictly materialist sense, but something closer to an immanent one in the Deleuzian sense: bodies being both mind and matter.
Im not attached to prefiguration, in that it seems to imply a determinacy that conflicts with mutability, and predicated upon a progression of linear or causal view of time (but I could be wrong). and especially since those who seem to use that term often in their jargon are so embedded in the spectacle of politics, that I want nothing to do with their programmatic strategies, performances, and outcomes.
the way you describe prefiguration seems close to what Nietzsche would call self-mastery through resisting drives, or becoming a sovereign individual (chapter 5 of Nietzsche and Anarchy). I still dont fully understand the role of determinacy in their concept, but maybe you know more about it than I.
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
prefiguration, in that it seems to imply a determinacy that conflicts with mutability,
I'm surprised that this was how I came across. Prefiguration is movement, it is becoming, and multiplicity, by all of my understandings.
(It's even transversal relations to times, where unexpected combinations of usually closed-out times are set into creative becoming with another)
I don't think I've read that chapter in Nietzsche and Anarchy, and sadly won't be able to any time soon - I'm curious about it though!
_caspar_ wrote
I'm surprised that this was how I came across.
no, its not how your definition came across, as I think you use the term much differently than "what anarchists call prefiguration. And that is what anarchism is," which has always been prefigurative politics in my experience.
"It's even transversal relations to times, where unexpected combinations of usually closed-out times are set into creative becoming with another"
which writings/perspectives use the term prefiguration defined in this way? Id like to read into it more.
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote
no, its not how your definition came across, as I think you use the term much differently than "what anarchists call prefiguration. And that is what anarchism is," which has always been prefigurative politics in my experience.
Did you ever read my other f/CritiqueThis post around prefiguration? (all of my posts kinda are because like I said I think anarchism is prefiguration, but this post and my follow-up comment are just about rejecting what I understand to be the other major conception of prefiguration, a rejection that is super easy if you think about it for a sec). Here.
which writings/perspectives use the term prefiguration defined in this way?
Just me and my friends, so far as I know, drawing from transversals and transversal relations to time that are large part of Deleuze's praxis (probably the main text from Deleuze with transversals of time is the Proust book), Mbembe's ideas of divination, Ronald Bogue's stuff re Deleuze, Guattari's psychoanalysis stuff on transversals, and other people who deal with transversals from an anti-authoritarian framework.
For me so far as positive praxis rather than negation, transversals are one of the best tools in the anti-authoritarian toolbox.
_caspar_ wrote
ooo,, super interesting,, thank you!! been meaning to read Mbembe's necropolitics essay, and divination sounds intriguing. their book will have to wait..
An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote (edited )
I haven't read necropolitics in a while, the tldr of it is basically that foucault's biopolitics are first-world / coloniser problems. It's worth a read for sure I think, but the next step is to destroy the dichotomy of bio and necro.
I was talking about Critique Of Black Reason.
(linked in w/decolonial)
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