Hello again – another working week is done and here we are for your dose of restorative freedom from documenta 14. Today you can sit back and listen to philosopher Antonio Negri speak to you in French about ideas of struggle, freedom and enlightenment (from the supermarket to Trump). Don’t worry if you can’t understand French, neither can I, so I just wrote down some directions that came to me as I was listening to Tony and letting all the pressures of the week ebb away. (Accompanying this exercise are some images by the artist Miltos Manetas from his website http://www.antonionegri.com and his concept of the ‘Middle South’ (MedioSud)).
- Consider the general conditions of class struggle
- There is another struggle, another exercise of freedom, on the table
- An Italian journey of freedom and risk
- Something is given, the church of authority, the family
- Education of the Enlightenment and resistance against Fascism
- Feel the passion of freedom
- The rights for the whole world – liberty, equality etc
- Der Geist der Aufklärung
- Others and their capacity to offer another discourse of freedom
- Something so right, the work, the abstract
- An experience of freedom and the construction of freedom
- Between the Communist Party and its crisis and the freedom of the heart and a capacity for life
- Recognize the impossibility of living and surviving; the struggle
- Find a regime of freedom in the city, in the struggle against property, at the supermarket
- This is our capacity for struggle, for revolution, to transform the institution
- Construct things together
- This is important
- Sure, it is a sad history – of Socialism in France or Italy or England, the school, the teacher, work
- But, hold onto your capacity for work towards freedom, your resistance, your friends, 30,000 militants, in prison, with dignity
- People ask me, why Spinoza? I say, because of the Multitude, Democracy, Singularity and all of the grand culture of the West, of Man, the Mixture, Freedom, the Fundamental and the Philosopher
- These processes of freedom demand imagination, among other natural capacities, like desire, to create a collective, through another’s heart, through love (I know it is a little comic, but philosophers are a little comic!)
- For me in the resistance, we needed to reconstruct, amid the crisis, everyday life was freedom, beyond Democracy or the Republic, and the need to name something
- In freedom is the multitude, beyond egoism or the singularity of men or women, is the capacity to rediscover the other, as an identity, this is democracy
- Against the product, is the collective, as thought and suffering create a new struggle that forms after the impression of a blockage
- It is exactly this freedom, this reality, that creates a new world of possibility for us to reconstruct democracy, in economic terms, but also in a world where we search for a meaning to stand up to power
- Another world is possible, a socialist world, which will reconstruct another condition for work and the worker, who is completely transformed beyond a specific role in productivity
- Only we need a different form to understand today, for democracy is not a word, but a form of life
- This is what documenta 14 is about
- The everyday, in this place, it is the Occupy movement after the occupation
- It is the space for a democracy of the future after Occupy
- A place in all its materiality to reconstruct democracy
- Today we need freedom, we need courage
- We need a radical witnessing, at Standing Rock, at the Trump catastrophe
- I am an optimist
- That is all; thank you
