Prior to now, and within the burning current – the 2 typically colliding – long-term resistance has taken form by ranging from erasure. By refusing erasure, by exposing it, by opposing it with different tales. Counter-memories unravel not solely myths of origin, but additionally the silences on which energy builds its legitimacy and fictions.
This wrestle occurs in every single place: in universities, in cinemas, in live performance halls and eating places, in ‘folks’s tribunals’ that stage trials outdoors the courts, exactly to reveal their limits. It really works to erode the monopolies of nationwide narratives, bringing to the floor armies of minor histories that inform and present one thing else. And it has realized to take action by enjoying inside in the present day’s aesthetic, inventive, and mental arenas. Not simply within the fields of information or justice, however by being extra interesting, extra convincing, extra progressive. A Palestinian rapper as soon as informed me, very merely: ‘We’ve got to out-cool our oppressor.’
In response, colonial energy additionally shifts floor. The state now not denies its violence. It places it on show, utilizing it as an instrument of management and sovereignty. That is what Nazan Ustündag exhibits in her long-term work on the Kurdish liberation motion in Turkey. Taking a look at Erdogan’s therapy of the Kurdish query by way of ideas from Black liberation thought in the USA, she identifies a shift – and we see its examples multiplying in the present day.
The methods of domination evolve. It’s now not nearly producing discourses and representations, casting populations as criminals or enemies. It’s about producing corpses. About staging the second when a human turns into a dull physique. Governing, in different phrases, by way of the spectacle of becoming-corpse – or ‘corpsification’. A course of that turns others into pure issues: undifferentiated, with out need.
The strategy is shock. Not solely paralysis within the face of horror, however one thing extra complicated. It mobilizes and immobilizes us directly, by way of much less avowable emotions of fascination with the potential thing-ness of each human being. The goal of this spectacle is to show an viewers right into a inhabitants, on the scale of countries, even the globe. A inhabitants pushed into powerlessness, into seeing itself solely as mute spectators, caught at their most fragile level: their sensitivity to the obscene, with its mix of horror and fascination. Then, their gradual desensitization to that exact same spectacle. The 2 processes are tied collectively.
That is what Israel’s genocidal battle in Gaza makes us dwell by way of. Whether or not we wish it or not, the scene is performed by three: killers, killed, and spectators. This ‘trauma of illustration’ seeks to destroy creativeness itself. To entice subjectivity in abjection, lowering those that can at all times be changed into stays – fragmentable our bodies.
Politics of cruelty
The politics of cruelty goal our bonds, our capability to connect. They goal to create a world the place the vulnerability of others is laid naked by way of their struggling, and the place political belonging is negotiated by way of acquiescence to that struggling – even when acquiescence comes within the type of silence.
There are numerous methods to extract that acquiescence. In apply, they mix into shades of gray: institutional establishment (as we see in German public area within the context of the genocide in Gaza), justification, uncooked terror, disgust produced by the abjection imposed on victims of cruelty, confusion and blurred accountability (who’s doing what, and why?), cognitive fog – which Russian propaganda masters so effectively (does it even matter if it’s true or not?).
This isn’t about making struggling invisible. What’s assigned to invisibility this time is our response to the struggling of others. That struggling will not be erased as a lived phenomenon, quite the opposite; however its radically intersubjective essence is denied – the truth that it’s shared, felt, understood by those that witness it.
The citizen formed by the politics of cruelty is a brand new being. Spectacle is central, even when it’s made from secrecy with solely a glimpse proven. On this, a pact of presidency takes kind. Responding to it requires a political principle of cruelty – one thing that feminist theorists within the Center East and South America have been engaged on.
In Latin America, marked by mass femicides, disappearances, unpunished rapes, mass graves, Argentine anthropologist Rita Laura Segato describes cruelty as a social pedagogy. She says: ‘It’s a lesson. A lesson of energy, realized, repeated, socialized.’
That lesson is commonly inscribed on the our bodies of girls, of the poor, of these excluded from citizenship. Their our bodies change into the territory of a message. They aren’t solely subjected to brute violence on the finish of the chain of domination. They’re uncovered to an exemplary destruction that goals to construct consent by way of a gradual habituation to the spectacle of struggling. Instance and horror on one aspect; behavior and denial on the opposite. That’s the technique.
Cruelty turns into background noise. An surroundings that reshapes human relations: suspicion, atomization, worry changed into a type of order. What may as soon as provoke shock or indignation slips into the routine of the seen. That is the traditional mechanism of denial, which is a part of each socialization. We see it, as an example, within the presence of the homeless in our streets, and within the reactions of kids: first shock and incomprehension, then gradual acceptance.
Via the spectacle of cruelty, this mechanism of denial is put to work to shatter our thresholds of tolerance to violence. It turns into a ‘know-how of desensitization’. It’s not solely about intimidation and terror (this might additionally occur to me). It’s about shaping a type of lively indifference, a capability to see with out being affected (this has nothing to do with me, and that factor, that lifeless physique or fragment of a physique, has nothing to do with a human being).
For Segato, one of the putting factors is that this: cruelty is realized. It’s not summary. It’s transmitted and absorbed in gestures, phrases, occasions. It’s also handed on by way of establishments – faculties, police, administrations – which educate obedience to hierarchies primarily based on humiliation.
This pedagogy can also be gendered. One in all its key automobiles is the transmission of an authoritative, conquering mannequin of masculinity. What issues in such a society is the triumph of energy, staged by way of the virile physique – not negotiated types of coexistence. On this mild, the ‘female’ that militarized powers goal to destroy will not be an essence however a operate: the weaving of ties, the material of connection, one thing it’s helpful to dismantle to be able to govern a weakened social physique.
This violence will not be restricted to armed battle or state repression. It seeps into on a regular basis social relations – at work, in training, in well being. Within the methods we converse and title. It’s systemic. It doesn’t rely solely on malicious intentions, however on types of group that make sure acts, or sure omissions, nearly computerized.
Trendy cruelty, as Segato exhibits, will not be an exception, not a slip. It’s embedded within the abnormal administration of lives. This continuum – that hyperlinks the abnormal to probably the most insufferable atrocity, weaving atrocity discreetly into every day life – doesn’t put cruelty behind a barrier, the barrier of ‘remoted crimes’ or the insanity of tyrants. It thinks cruelty as diffuse, but anchored in a logic of energy: the state as a machine of cruelty. A state not at all times merciless, however one which works to take care of order by recoding patriarchal domination into modern, typically privatized types – safety, prisons, economics.
One of many main penalties of this pedagogy is that it isolates people. It breaks filiations, blocks solidarity, and casts suspicion on any motion of empathy or dissent. It turns impacts into dangers. To really feel is, doubtlessly, to disobey.
Consequently, the very capability to really feel turns into a threatened political useful resource, in a social world the place indifference and distrust are strategic refuges. They form the methods of life allowed to us, and people to which we have now been educated. For this reason the central activity is unlearning. This counter-pedagogy – of telling, of connecting, of feeling – doesn’t attempt to escape into magnificence or positivity by denying cruelty. It really works as a substitute to forestall cruelty from turning into the one doable grammar of the social.
Egyptian anthropologist Salwa Ismail research the politics of cruelty in Assad’s Syria. There, violence will not be on the margins of order – it’s at its very core. It doesn’t solely goal to eradicate opponents, however to form a kind of citizen who can survive in a world of uncertainty, surveillance, and humiliation – a every day administration of worry.
Terror turns into a political financial system. It distributes locations, permissions to talk or stay silent, to remain or to go away, to recollect or to overlook. It organizes the psychic and ethical area of citizenship. Energy inhabits our bodies and minds by way of nervousness, confusion, and the fixed anticipation of looming repression.
That repression is hidden, but additionally displayed, unfold by way of rumors, fragmented tales, and the gestures of survivors – gestures that say, with out saying: that is what awaits you. However these indicators are by no means steady. Anybody may be taken, at any time. Orchestrated uncertainty is on the coronary heart of presidency by impacts. It blocks projection, technique, relaxation. It forces everlasting adaptation, suspicion, self-censorship. Violence turns into a regime of notion – even of hallucination. The political is inseparable from the sensory, as I’ll return to later.
These approaches to cruelty, every grounded in deep examine of concrete conditions, present how cruelty works politically to dis-attach the residing from each other. It doesn’t solely goal to kill. It goals to paralyze impacts, to disable the need for relation.
To take action, it settles within the infinite distance that separates a residing human physique from a lifeless one. This infinite – the infinite of torture – is sort of a fraction in arithmetic: dividing by half, then half once more, then once more, with out ever reaching zero.
‘To maintain somebody imprisoned and tortured for thirty years, one thing infinite have to be occurring within the work of destruction and resistance of our bodies.’ That is how thinker Françoise Proust reads Spinoza’s well-known phrase: ‘Nobody has but decided what a physique can do.’
If governing by way of destruction is infinite work, then resistance, by the exact same logic, is infinite as effectively.
Nazan Üstündağ, writing within the context of armed violence, militarization of Kurdish territories, and suppression of dissenting voices in Turkey, describes state cruelty as a type of management by way of exhaustion. It’s diversified in its helps: infrastructures, authorized and administrative procedures, media, prisons, torture chambers.
It takes the type of excessive precarity (bombing after bombing), of grief denied, of armed repression (army, paramilitary). Its staging – for instance by way of movies that dwell on the loud, insistent regime of becoming-corpse – will not be an extra. This register is used massively elsewhere, too: as an example by Sudanese armed forces and mercenaries for the reason that battle of 2023, particularly in opposition to ladies.
It permits energy to check its limits, to strengthen itself by way of repetition, steadily neutralizing the potential of organized resistance.
The query then turns into: in a horizon structured by this regulatory cruelty, how can a political creativeness come up that’s able to contesting it? That is the query guiding Üstündağ’s evaluation. It shifts the centre of gravity of politics: now not energy as command, not solely as illustration, discourse, or group – however because the capability to endure, to maintain connection, to withstand imposed destruction.
Palestinian anthropologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has spent a long time finding out the safety and army insurance policies of Israeli occupation on the Heart of Criminology on the Hebrew College of Jerusalem. She additionally works as a medical psychologist in East Jerusalem, holding on-line remedy periods with sufferers residing underneath siege in Gaza.
It’s a unusual time we dwell in: Ukrainian troopers within the trenches, and ravenous households in Gaza, uncovered each second to physique fragmentation, to terror, to dying – and but on the similar time participating in remedy by videoconference.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian additionally insists on this shift within the heart of gravity of politics: to take care of ties and to reassemble is on the core of every day resistance to genocide. That is how Palestinians tear themselves away from inhumanization – not solely by way of starvation, but additionally by way of the becoming-corpse staged within the real-time broadcast of their very own bloodbath.
In Gaza, resisting the politics of cruelty – resisting their work of dis-attachment – means, fairly concretely, reassembling the our bodies of the lifeless, figuring out fragments, piecing collectively dismembered stays, and burying them.
It’s from this gesture, and all of the expertise of the world it accommodates, that Shalhoub-Kevorkian thinks political resistance. This limit-effort re-establishes the hyperlink between the residing, the lifeless, and the land. It responds to a destruction that forces each inhabitant to see themselves, and their neighborhood, as our bodies that would at any second change into fragments, scattered.
Resisting this colonization of the creativeness additionally requires, for her as a psychologist, giving a reputation to the lived expertise. The title is ashlaa’ – fragments of a physique. A phrase that additionally refers to Palestinian land itself, fragmented into an archipelago of territories by the politics of occupation, the place as soon as there was the continuity of a rustic.
Believing within the Chilly Season
The hyperlink between burial and resistance runs by way of many responses to the politics of cruelty. Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad traced one such path within the final lengthy poem she wrote earlier than her unintentional dying in 1972. The poem is named Let Us Imagine within the Starting of the Chilly Season.
Howdy, estranged solitude
I entrust you with my room
For darkish clouds
At all times announce freshly purified verses
And within the martyrdom of a candle
There’s a luminous secret well-known
To the final, most persistent flameAllow us to consider
Allow us to consider at first of the chilly season
Allow us to consider within the ruins of the gardens of creativeness
Within the deserted sickles
And within the imprisoned seeds.Allow us to consider at first of the chilly season.
The chilly season is coming, and on the similar time, Forough asks us: ‘allow us to consider’. The place the 12 months begins on January 1st, winter comes firstly. In Iran, the calendar is completely different: the 12 months begins with the spring equinox, March twentieth. The chilly season, then, closes the 12 months. Afterward comes spring, and a brand new 12 months begins.
On this cyclical perspective, the seeds are prisoners for now. Captive as a result of they’re frozen, however we all know they’ll develop when situations change into beneficial once more. This attracts on a Persian imaginary of germination, one which brings us again to the female – the imaginary round which the New 12 months ritual is constructed. For about ten days, in each family, lentil or wheat seeds are watched as they sprout and change into crops.
The poet invitations us to not let go of this imaginary of potential. To stay lucid, and brave in that lucidity, but additionally to let ourselves be labored upon by the considered germination. In dry lands, when the rain lastly falls, seeds lengthy imprisoned by drought typically make a sudden, collective push. After only one rainfall, inside three hours, a inexperienced fuzz can cowl the naked floor.
This resistance of seeds echoes different, extra well-known traces: verses written in 1978 by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos:
What didn’t you do to bury me
However you forgot I used to be a seed.
Christianopoulos, marginalized for his homosexuality in a Greece nonetheless marked by authoritarianism, expressed right here a type of intimate persistence, on the fringe of erasure. However the verse discovered a second life, collective and transnational. It was translated, tailored. Its use expanded by way of feminist mobilizations in Latin America, particularly the Ni Una Menos motion – which frequently grounds its politics in poetry. From there, it was reappropriated in Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia.
We learn it on partitions, within the slogans of evening marches, on the painted our bodies of protesters: nos quisieron enterrar, pero no sabían que éramos semillas. One can see it, as an example, on a mural in Madrid’s Cascorro sq., devoted to the Worldwide Day for the Elimination of Violence in opposition to Ladies, November twenty fourth.
A lady, drawn in pop artwork fashion, appears to be like out towards the road. Massive yellow, white, and violet flowers kind a crown round her hair. Her head is held excessive, recalling socialist propaganda posters, turned towards the long run. But her eyes – long-lashed – are usually not agency, nor offended, nor stuffed with ethical dedication. They’re large open, stunned. Nonetheless, they don’t look away, nor slim. She appears to be like, and retains trying, regardless of a sure worry. On this fastened, unadorned gaze is an effort to not yield to shock. It exhibits the problem of the duty, its stress – its resistance.
The slogan doesn’t deny burial. It inscribes mourning right into a turning into. It’s a affected person reply, politically highly effective in its inversion of the logic of disappearance. In spreading by way of transnational feminist struggles, the phrase modified in nature. From poetic assertion, it turned affective disposition.
The earth will not be solely a spot of burial. It’s also a medium of delivery and progress – the soil tilled by practices of gathering, sharing, organizing, the types of unlearning.
The oppressors’ mistake, what they ‘forgot’ or ‘didn’t know’, issues the character of what’s erased. One thing is there in potential. And the promise that runs by way of Forough’s poem (‘darkish clouds / at all times announce freshly purified verses’) will not be about ready for what’s going to come from outdoors. It belongs to what resists: it’s its potential turning into.
To domesticate the buried, to refuse burial, will not be sorrowful, grave, or melancholic. This pressure in potential has as its language, its signal, pleasure. An affective expertise that rises from intimacy with dying – dying as actual occasion, a part of life, not symbolized or wrapped in discourse.
Those that have paid consideration to the final moments of a candle’s burning know this effectively: simply earlier than it goes out, the flame breathes, flares up, glows extra strongly.
And within the martyrdom of a candle
There’s a luminous secret well-known
To the final, most persistent flame.
Martyrdom
The data that Forough’s poetry offers us brings us again to the Girl, Life, Freedom motion – and particularly to the truth that between the phrases Ladies and Freedom lies Life. It’s a paradoxical slogan, as a result of it isn’t actually a slogan. Because the hyperlinks are usually not spelled out, it may be heard in many various methods. It’s nearly like a haiku.
This non-slogan displays one thing in regards to the rebellion it impressed: it was a motion of opening, a motion that hesitated over itself. It couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be fastened – for higher and for worse.
Tales of rebellion and resistance throughout the Girl Life Freedom motion in Iran tells us about methods of presence in an asymmetrical face-off.
These experiences resonate with these of the Iranian revolution of 1979 – a revolution that, in opposition to the desire of lots of its revolutionaries, ended with the institution of the Islamic Republic, the very regime that in the present day’s youth rises in opposition to.
I traced this expertise by way of the just about miraculous preservation of household archives: letters written to an aunt finding out in Paris, despatched by her sisters who remained in Iran because the revolutionary unrest of 1978 and 1979 started to swell.
The correspondence continued till the sisters have been arrested: the primary, my mom, Fatemeh Zarei, in June 1981; the second, my aunt, Fataneh Zarei, in March 1982.
Letters posted in envelopes the place an unpracticed hand fastidiously fashioned Latin letters to jot down ‘rue des Pyrénées, 75019 Paris’. Letters stamped with photographs of girls fighters, their eyes stuffed with revolutionary rage, their our bodies wrapped in black chadors from which solely the guidelines of their Kalashnikovs protruded.
Fifteen years later, within the 2000s, their addressee learn these letters to me, and allowed me to publish a few of them.
My aunt Fataneh was a fervent revolutionary, earlier than placing the identical fervor into attempting to ‘save’ her revolution from the Islamist and fascist venture carried by Khomeini. To her father, who asks her to guard herself in opposition to repression by Hezbollah militias, she replies:
We’ve got endured so many difficulties, made so many sacrifices, persevered so lengthy and seen so many martyrs; can we simply magnanimously supply the fruit of our eff orts to a gang of stateless individuals who glean the stays others have left, who set ire to our harvest and mercilessly shredded thelowers on this backyard of our hopes? We staked every little thing we had and even what we didn’t have, for our concepts. There are solely two paths open to us now: martyrdom or victory – nothing else.
However then her voice modifications within the final letter we have now from her. It’s a will, written earlier than her execution.
In March 1982, Fataneh – who had joined the underground resistance a 12 months earlier – was arrested and sentenced to dying by a revolutionary tribunal for ‘enmity in opposition to God’. The letter we have now is dated July 1982, so it should have been written earlier than a mock execution. Fataneh was killed a couple of months later, in October.
One of many tortures she endured was exactly these false executions. A number of hours earlier than what she believed can be her dying, she wrote to her household. And but I’ve by no means been in a position to translate the start of that letter.
At one level she writes: ‘Life is good. My God, give me the braveness to go away it.’ However earlier than these phrases – for greater than a web page – it is just jargon, a string of slogans particular to the Folks’s Mojahedin, the Marxist-Islamist opposition get together to which she belonged.
This group had entered armed wrestle in the summertime of 1981. From then on, its members – or folks suspected of sympathizing with them – have been persecuted and, in lots of circumstances, systematically eradicated. My aunt and my mom have been each candidates for this get together within the legislative elections of winter 1981. Quickly after, my mom was arrested, in June, simply earlier than the Mojahedin launched their armed wrestle and their marketing campaign of terrorist assaults in opposition to the clergy.
Fataneh, then again, escaped arrest in 1981 and went into hiding along with her husband. She was arrested a 12 months later and instantly sentenced to dying.
Once I learn the final letter written by my aunt – a long time after her dying – I couldn’t perceive it. I keep in mind the chilly, immense anger I felt once I realized that this girl, this fighter, a couple of hours earlier than what she thought was her dying, had a language colonized by political jargon. A language dried out, like sap leaving wooden because it turns into lifeless.
I believe the latest rebellion has needed to confront this paradoxical legacy of ideological violence. To simply accept it, and to reject it, by way of struggles that intentionally escape slogans, that refuse this drying out, this de-subjectivation – this energy of ideology to hole out the residing voice.
The query of life takes us again to the query of martyrdom. After the 1979 revolution, one worth was shared by all members – victims and executioners alike: a sure ideally suited of martyrdom, in several types, secular and non secular.
I need to recollect it briefly, as a result of the query has a brand new urgency after we take a look at the battle in Gaza, the place the phrase shahid – martyr – is used to talk of the lifeless. All of the lifeless of the battle, not solely those that selected to combat or to sacrifice themselves.
In Iran in 1979, the revolutionary ideally suited of martyrdom meant being prepared to offer one’s life to fulfil a political need – a dying that was euphoric, a bodily explosion merging with the world. There was a mystical dimension to martyrdom, infused with a will for social justice.
In a short time, the ideology of the Islamic Republic took all of it up, reconfiguring martyrdom across the query of jihad understood as holy battle, particularly throughout the battle with Iraq. It reinvested this bodily, political, wanting grammar of martyrdom right into a strictly spiritual body.
Round this ideally suited the Islamic Republic was constructed: martyrdom turned the engine of the battle machine in opposition to Iraq, and political opponents turned anti-martyrs. Martyrs have been proper to die; opponents have been flawed. Their execution, and the spectacle of their struggling – their ‘anti-martyrdom’ – was meant not solely to eradicate the bravest militants, but additionally to talk to society as an entire, reshaping its values.
This affected person propaganda work, saturated with the politics of cruelty, achieved a double goal. First, it reworked conventional values to impose Islamic Republican ideology. Second, it reworked the notion of particular person accountability, making political prisoners co-responsible for his or her repression – by way of their stubbornness, their refusal to collaborate – and, by extension, co-responsible for the extent of repressive violence in society at massive.
Because the finish of the Iran-Iraq battle – a bloodbath of tons of of hundreds – a widespread counterculture has grown in Iran, quickly turning into a majority tradition, constructed on rejecting the lethal ideology of martyrdom. However the query of sacrificial dying has not disappeared.
The query of preventing to the dying remains to be current within the accounts of the Girl, Life, Freedom uprisings. The ideology of sacrificial dying has been dismantled. However the stress stays. The distinction is that in the present day, it’s attachment to life that enables one to say: I’m able to die.
This implies reconfiguring the wrestle in concrete phrases, to be able to face the asymmetry of energy, and the chance of dying that comes with protest – the chance you face the second you are taking your first step into the road.
Affective resistances
What’s putting, on this regard, is that resistance didn’t take up arms in Iran in 2022. The beating coronary heart of the Girl, Life, Freedom rebellion was in Kurdistan and Baluchistan – two peripheral and traditionally marginalized provinces.
In these border areas – with Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan on one aspect, and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the opposite – the presence of armed teams is nothing new. In Kurdistan, opposition events in exile have army branches primarily based throughout the Iraqi border. In Baluchistan, armed Sunni teams recurrently launch violent actions in opposition to the safety forces of the Islamic Republic. These territories are additionally crossed by smuggling routes, by transnational networks, and by a residing reminiscence of repression. The circulation of weapons is a truth. Buildings of fight exist. The choice of armed wrestle was accessible.
This makes it all of the extra exceptional that, regardless of intense repression, the uprisings didn’t take this path. That refusal will not be self-evident. It displays a technique each discreet and highly effective, assumed regionally and sustained over time. Greater than two-thirds of these killed have been from these two areas. But the types of resistance remained civil, even after they confronted the armed violence of the state head-on.
This, too, required coordination and self-discipline, given the circulation of weapons. The usage of Molotov cocktails – the weapon of the weaponless – didn’t goal to militarize the battle, however to mark a refusal: the refusal to fall into the state of affairs the regime actively sought to create.
The state’s aim was clear: to isolate these facilities of protest, detach them from the nationwide motion, and model them as websites of regional insurgency. By lowering the confrontation to a peripheral battle in opposition to ‘separatist components’, it may have justified an enormous crushing and defused the unifying momentum of the rebellion.
On this context, the restraint noticed in these provinces was a type of political lucidity. It allowed the motion to take care of a typical entrance, to outmaneuver divisions, and to stay throughout the body of a citizen declare – in unity, in rhythmic synchrony with the middle. It contained, with out eradicating, the regime’s obsession with remodeling the rebellion into an inside army menace to be crushed within the title of raison d’État. A script whose final result was already identified, given the intense imbalance of energy, and provided that the area – from Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, and Iraq – was underneath the affect of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
So, when resistance doesn’t arm itself, what’s left? There was, after all, a retreat. However this retreat was towards politics of attachment. It was a reversal of values, of impacts, of modes of collective identification – a reversal that was itself a political counter-proposal.
Greater than 5 hundred folks have been killed within the streets or underneath torture in 2022, and tons of disappeared. However the execution of some protesters from modest backgrounds had a deterrent impact far higher than their quantity. It was not solely about eliminating opponents, however about displaying that it could possibly be carried out – and that nobody may cease it.
This politics of cruelty, by staging and prolonging the suspense of regulated, arbitrary executions, aimed to reactivate one of the efficient instruments of terror regimes: indifference. The Islamic Republic has patiently constructed itself upon an engineering of affective silence, surrounding threatened our bodies – prisoners, the condemned, the grieving – with a halo of isolation, worry, and suspicion.
What was focused was not solely boldness as open opposition, however the ties that may kind round safety from repression – inside households, neighborhoods, crowds. The executions of December 2022 reactivated this technique. They sought to disaffiliate the residing, to dam the formation of a ‘we’ round susceptible lives.
The executions have been made public, documented with compelled ‘confessions’, timed based on a judicial calendar. They have been meant to supply deterrence by way of shock. In one other historic sequence – as an example, the 2009 protests for democratic change – such operations had silenced the motion.
However this time the response was completely different. The faces of the condemned circulated on social media. Their final phrases have been shared. Their names have been repeated and celebrated. Their households have been supported – emotionally and materially. Public mourning was tried, regardless of the chance of additional repression.
These gestures – persevering with to care, refusing to look away – have been themselves refusals. They belonged to a type of affective resistance. They started to sketch a counter-politics of empathy, participating the steadiness of energy with the state’s violence on the terrain of the wise. They saved open the situations of shared expertise, even when in muted kind.
Mohammad Rasoulof’s movie The Seed of the Sacred Fig evokes the Girl, Life, Freedom rebellion by way of the household lifetime of a bureaucrat of repression – plunging into the labyrinth, the entrails of Iranian energy. It opens with the weird life cycle of the ficus religiosa:
Its seeds fall onto different timber within the droppings of birds.
Aerial roots sprout and develop towards the bottom.
Then its branches entwine the trunk of the host tree till they strangle it.
Lastly, the wild fig stands upright, freed from its base.
To the buried seed that waits for its season, right here is added the picture of the aerial seed, conquering the bottom from above. It grows in reverse order – not promised to a future, however already in movement, feeding on its host to be able to free itself.
The picture evokes a political life that doesn’t topple the established order, however clings to it in its interstices, bypasses it, empties it out. It rises out of what was meant to carry it down. The rebellion of 2022–2023 says this: liberation doesn’t solely imply overthrow. Because the picture of inverted rooting suggests, revolution may be conceived not as promise, however as a sluggish, residing pressure.
The Iranian case will not be remoted. It helps us take into consideration how affective reversals themselves can change into types of resistance, even when recognition and group are tough. This work takes completely different types, which have to be recognized within the strategic thickness of every scenario.
Allow us to return, for instance, to shock – so central in regimes of cruelty. Shock blurs notion, blocks motion, suspends time. That is what we noticed in the USA, with the ‘sadistic’ saturation of public area by way of violent gestures throughout the first months of Donald Trump’s new mandate in 2025.
And but one thing can resist this. Indignation, in such moments, is not only rejection – which frequently feels worn out, inadequate. It permits a shift, a redirection of notion. It units off a momentum that always brings higher readability in regards to the mechanisms and stakes – the place shock alone would paralyze thought.
It turns cruelty’s level of leverage again on itself: violence now not paralyzes, however illuminates the system that made it doable. It additionally retains motion doable, in opposition to the need to freeze that lies on the coronary heart of the politics of cruelty.
In Iran, the have an effect on to be overturned is indifference – indifference as a means of atomizing communities. In France, what we want to consider and confront appears nearer to fatigue. Not simply occasional or particular person tiredness, however political fatigue.
We’ve got grown used to talking of collective, summary fatigues: the fatigue of public opinion, the donor fatigue that emerges in humanitarian crises. Extra exactly, the sensation of fatigue has been extensively theorized in its political dimension. The ‘society of fatigue’ marks a brand new age of capitalism constructed on efficiency and self-exploitation. Over-indebtedness, as a widespread expertise, inscribes nervousness and social exhaustion into the very construction of monetary capitalism. The ‘psychological load’ of moms can also be framed as a query of fatigue.
British researcher Hannah Proctor turns to one more dimension: she asks what turns into of revolutionary power after failure, or after the exhaustion of wrestle. Her start line is straightforward: what stays of our political impacts when enthusiasm, anger, or religion in change crash in opposition to immobility, defeat, or silence?
The fatigue she describes is not only depletion of power. It touches the very springs of dedication. It exhibits up as discouragement, withdrawal, typically cynicism. It takes the type of an internalized weariness, of doubt in regards to the usefulness of motion, of a progressive disinvestment from collective areas.
This fatigue may be the results of steady affective labor: the labor of holding on in conditions that now not maintain. Hannah Proctor attracts on the testimonies of activists, caregivers, survivors of battle – all confronting the identical stress: the necessity to go on, however with out the conviction of shifting ahead.
What she calls ‘political burnout’ doesn’t solely imply collapse. It additionally means the sluggish exhaustion of fireside for lack of oxygen. On this sense, fatigue is a product of the political surroundings, of the manufactured helplessness wherein every little thing appears already to have been tried.
This sense is acquainted to many people. It doesn’t say, ‘I don’t need to combat anymore.’ It says, ‘I now not know find out how to.’ On this fatigue lies the worry of struggling in useless, but additionally the implicit stress of a world that would really like resistance to cease.
As Ukrainian mental Tatyana Ogarkova noticed about resistance to the Russian invasion: ‘Once I’m requested, “are you drained?”, what I hear behind it’s: “When will you lastly cease?’”
The identical difficulty seems within the testimonies of activists from latest uprisings: the bodily fatigue of regularly having to supply a picture of oneself, of 1’s wrestle, of 1’s ache. Time stolen from the wrestle itself, to show that there’s certainly a wrestle.
Hannah Proctor doesn’t suggest overcoming fatigue by way of sheer willpower or a self-discipline of hope. She invitations us as a substitute to acknowledge fatigue as a political have an effect on in its personal proper, and to make it a floor for reflection.
How one can stay politically alive with out being consistently on the frontline? How one can maintain on with out illusions?
Her reflection shifts the main focus towards temporality, which underlies the very expertise of exhaustion. If holding on is the duty, one doable path lies past urgency – urgency so typically tied to necessity – by inscribing motion in an extended time, much less pressed by the need to achieve an finish.
On this case, the query will not be a lot about opposing a counter-affect to fatigue, however about opening a temporality wherein the stakes of exhaustion diminish – now not polarized by the endpoint of ‘after’.
This text relies on the creator’s essay: ‘Résistances affectives. Les politiques de l’attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté’ (La Découverte, 2025). The textual content was delivered as a lecture on 11 September 2025 throughout Planetary Peasants, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle, Germany.
