Sunday — 10.18.20 — Twenty Fifth Testing Assembling
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CONTENTS:
0. An Invitation
1. War Against Life – Nagorno-Karabakh Learn-In
2. Two Statements Then/Now
3. Two Videos Then/Now
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0. An Invitation
Dear Friends,
We would like to invite you to our twenty fifth test at assembling.
For those interested in joining, please write to mai [AT] 16beavergroup.org
We will meet on Sunday at 11AM (New York Time)
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1. War Against Life – Nagorno-Karabakh Learn-In
War, conflict, whatever words we can conjure are difficult to really address the three weeks of relentless assaults being waged by the governments of Azerbaijan, Turkey and their brigades of mercenaries drawn from Syria against the people of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. In a way it is a war of our time, yet it is also a war which weaves through time and troubles our relation to history as something settled.
We call together a gathering this week to try and share a certain impasse of communicability, but maybe the only possibility for sharing anything. How to overcome words which can only but fail to describe or give an account of a condition we are living? How can war instruct us about those conditions? Can we overcome the language of war? In which way can we act against the immense forces of violence which gather like storms, perpetually unleashing their arms against the unarmed? When these violent processes unfold against so many of the forms of life on earth today, how can we think through and beyond the terms of solidarity?
We began these assemblies through various interstices and questions pertaining not only to the potentialities this time, epoch, or strike of the virus opened, but also the violent processes and ‘pre-existing conditions’ which have been made more manifest in its wake. These conditions are strung together in fields of tensions that run through social, economic, political, colonial, imperial, geological processes which more and more call our attention and require a language (and more holistic ways of approach) which the existing vocabularies of struggle seem for the most part incapable of holding. Hence our feeling and the exigency to initiate these assemblies.
This week, we will use the space of assembly for precisely this exigency to find words, a language to express, share what for nearly three weeks, watching a genocidal campaign unfolding over the existential territories of inhabitants of Karabakh and implicating friends in Armenia and throughout the region.
In this moment of extreme vulnerability and fragility of a life-world, so near and urgent to some of us, and yet, from the vantage point of the centers of concentrated wealth/power, they are filtered to appear irrelevant or worse, portrayed as wars of age old enmity waged between the not yet civilized peoples of ‘the world’.
From the vantage point of averting genocidal violence (being perpetrated by armies and mercenaries of Azerbaijan and Turkey), which this moment certainly invokes for those more familiar with the situation, there is nothing more urgent to talk about and understand how we may act in relation to. In that light, everything else political, aired or framed through the filters and channels of white noise seems, appears even more theatrical, populated by extreme forms of self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, self-engendering, self-exploitive, self-valorizing, self-involved and enclosed. And it is in this self-enclosure of politics produced in the centers of life of the so-called developed world that the most extreme exclusions and forms of violence are allowed to continue and rendered irrelevant, distant.
That we live in this perpetual state of war making and destruction of life is something few could disagree on. But what is ‘prosperity’ that the centers and beneficiaries of colonial and imperial accumulation and extraction offer their ‘citizens’, if not this ability to be sheltered, removed from, distanced from the most violent effects of those perpetual and perpetuating states of war?
We will try this week to situate a space of thinking together the impossibility of this moment for some us and our friends, of an absolute and total assault on life. And to see what thought can allow, which words may emerge, in such a time, such a space, such a condition; and possibly, to see what may come in this space that we can create together, that could also act as a force to counter the prevailing winds of the dominant orderings and borderings of earth, which appear, more apparently than ever, only to carry with them, further death.
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2. Two Statements
1990
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/an-open-letter-on-anti-armenian-pogroms-in-the-sov/?fbclid=IwAR1kZjmahElKebBF6hamdCHBHVkM7nMCB-z-xgFlZPeYKspD9ZQ-ou7o5Dc
2020
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/lasting-peace-nagorno-karabakh
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3. Two Videos
Recorded with Gilles Deleuze sometimes between December 15, 1988 and June 3, 1989
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2r-HjICFJM&vl=en
(apologies in advance for the linking to YouTube and their garbage ads)
2020
Lastly, we include the link to a series of films contributed for the Society of the Friends of the Virus, Supplement Vol. 4
The entire cycle is a way of thinking through the question of violence as it pertains to the virus, to life on earth and through some specific sites where the question posed itself in a novel manner. Though the films were made in late April, Karabakh, Beirut, and Black Life are each central sites of the thinking. As they have been shared in the context of texts, they may have been missed, we share them again here. The first in the series contains the fragment on Karabakh.
http://centreparrhesia.org/nyc/