The Erotics of Revolution, Part I

Not a Manifesto - seduction, subterfuge & the role of art in birthing the new world

The title riffs on the excellent Erotics of Liberation, which riffs on another Erotics of Revolution (unable to find, alas), which riffs on Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, and everything is a riff on Freud…except not.

This is draft with ongoing revisions .

“We want bread, freedom, love, and science for everybody.” Errico Malatesta

“An intriguing entomological experiment shows that a male butterfly will ignore a living female butterfly of his own species in favor of a painted cardboard one, if the cardboard one is big. If the cardboard one is bigger than he is, bigger than any female butterfly ever could be. He jumps the piece of cardboard over and over again, he jumps the piece of cardboard. Nearby, the real, living female butterfly opens and closes her wings in vain.” Annie Dillard

Urgent Manhunt, Bravado #1

“This urgent manhunt has entered its third day,” the anchor says, dark blazer and red tie floating against a studio newsroom’s beige curves. “Police have the clearest image yet of the suspect and the reason they have it,” he pauses, “is because he was flirting with a girl.”

Then a much longer pause. We switch to two squares, side by side. The left image is a man in a hoodie, seen from the front and above. There are heavy shadows and the hoodie cuts above downcast eyes.

The image on the right is better lit, though we are still looking down from a mounted place. The same face is rotated 30 degrees to his right. The first face is unlooking, preoccupied; this second face is looking, though not at us. We see thick eyelashes, a hint of dark eyebrows, maybe a tuft of hair. The nose is sloped in profile, there is symmetry, and surprising gender-fuzziness. Astonishingly, the man is smiling. The teeth seem dazzling white, even in murky security footage. This is an American smile, confident, blazing, from someone with a dentist, perhaps orthodontics.

The face is young and beautiful. The image exudes warmth, a flirtation, a break in the evening grind. The man’s preoccupation briefly lifted, as he smiled for a young woman, who asked him to smile.

It is a moving, charming counterpoint to the huffing of the cartoonish news anchor. The criminal emerges rakish.

Thirsty internet memes came fast and hard: the man is rendered hero, for an alleged strike against a predatory industry. He cracked a glimmer of broad class consciousness.

(Allegedly) hot and audacious, three fatal bullet casings were carved with sigils (“deny,” “delay,” “depose”) –a decoy backpack filled with monopoly money—a stop to flirt—we are startled by this violence, beauty, humor, poetics.

The Revolutionary #1

Brandon Taylor reviewed a novel, about a sexy spy who infiltrated an anarchist cell of bourgeois Parisian youth. He wrote:

“It’s not easy to write a realist novel about a revolutionary…someone who actively and violently changes the world in pursuit of revolutionary principles. The world of the revolutionary is both dream and nightmare, filled with shadows, feints and dodges. Doublespeak and betrayals. Authorities evaded in the nick of time. Orders given through trusted comrades. Encoded maps and plans for blowing up the bridge. Setting the police car on fire. Filling the square. Demanding change. Halting the engines of state power. The eyes of the revolutionary reflect the glow of the funeral pyre of the old world, over whose ashes the new world will be built. The parallels between the life of the revolutionary and that of the spy only emphasise the distinctions: the spy, agent of power, views the revolutionary with the cold cynicism that stems from conceiving of the world as a totalised, finished product.”

Taylor flipped the archetype of the spy (remnant of the Cold War) to its mirror self, (and likely origin): Guy Fawkes, Robin Hood, Toussaint Louverture. This archetype is both trickster and warrior. Taylor contrasts the revolutionary (who remembers what was and envisions what can be) with the spy, who conceives “the world as a totalised, finished product.”

via IG @danielascrima

Desire #1

“I want to sit on the clouds,” my 6-year-old says. We are in the YMCA soccer field, faces tilted up to puffy Midwestern clouds billowing in dramatic piles. His round cheeks are as soft as those billows, pink still, from running. Is he speaking figuratively? His eyes scan for an entryway, to all this that is soft and light.

I have looked to the sky like this too, back when the desert was not so bright with strip malls, at the night sky and thick ropes of Milky Way. It was unbearable how seductive the sky had been. I wanted to be out there, on the Enterprise bridge say, greedy for strange new worlds.

To desire like this is foolish. What is it but unrequited love? Is it even love? No, no it is an illusion: a cloud promises solid, when it is air. There is no star light to grasp, just a cold vast dark of time and space. This distance (of physics, I mean, but say, of intimations too), is an asymmetry of desire. For all I know, maybe even disdain—why not? These stars, why not be as beautiful and cruel as the ancient gods, for whom they are named?

Desire: “a wish to obtain, or to long for”

Latin, desiderare, to ‘await what the stars will bring,’

or de sidere ‘from the stars,’

Mous Lamrabat, Moroccan-Belgian photographer and visual artist, via prazzlearts

An impossibility that plays at being possible. A phantasm so real, I salivate, so close, lips already part, for a decadent feast that never arrives. How could something so enticing be unreachable? Why could I not touch (for a moment!), why not reach back to me, even a little, a little more, I mean.

Under that sky, my mother had not picked me again. I was reaching from empty parking lots, by the harsh bare cones of streetlight, recklessly casting shapeless want into the air.

But now I’m grown. Now I’m the mother. What good is this endless yearning, for the impossible? My son yearns for clouds, I am desperate for rest, for him to hurry along so we can make dinner, so we can put him in bed, so I can drift, weightless, blank, dissolve into the numbness of finally not-wanting.

I take his hand to pull him along. He does not mind. So I stop. I cannot always count on this. His baby hands are rough these days, callused and caked with all the things that he did grasp – ink, mud, applesauce, dog hair. We look up together. I have often reached for him these days, and he was unreachable, off again, running.

(I will need to tell him, should he reach for me and think that I am gone, to look down, in the dirt, he can grasp me always.)

Shadow

Sigmund Freud: our deepest desires are for “oceanic feeling.” His friend, in a letter, described this as “a sense of eternity.” The friend thought that this yearning was the sentimental root of all religion. Freud thought its origin in infancy—before we recognized we were a separated body and ego.

The paths to dissolution are infinite. Trances are induced by repetitive prayer, ritual, meditation. One ascends in ecstatic fervor, from bacchanals, dancing, the Holy Ghost. One can behold the sublime in the Milky Way, forests, the ocean itself. Sometimes, its a glitch, like temporal lobe epilepsy, or from drugs, and the rapture of making art. It is deeply in communion and touch: nursing an infant, sharing food, singing together, and of course, sex. We find oneness in extreme exertion (fasting, fighting, pilgrimage), and extreme pain.

Prasenjit Das Rishabh, visal artist/creative director/stylist and Ran Jay, film director/photographer, unknown dancer

The paths are many, observes Freud, but not all are tolerable to society. Many types of sex, violence, spiritualities, disturb the peace too much. It is these desires that society punishes and shames. Shame is threatening and deeply painful—it is a threat of expulsion from the collective, a risk to survival.

To cope, the individual drives these desires into the subconscious—the desires continue to exist, but are disavowed. The greater the shame, the deeper it is driven into the darkness. This requires a great deal of energy, to hold these at a great distance, like a stretched coil, or squashed tight, contained.

At best, offers Freud, society can redirect these frustrated desires through organized religion. This is the price, for the security that the collective offers the individual.

Jung called these disavowed shames the shadow self—a self cleaved from the rest. The shadow desires forbidden sex, violence, spirituality. This imprisoned self still leaks and thrashes against its containment, yearning to be reunited to the whole. The separation is always at risk of collapse.

Medicine #1

I left the desert, the stars led me North. In college, I thought my life would begin. I scrambled up steep Oakland hills at midnight, intoxicated with whatever the proto-chemists had concocted. There, far from the empty parking lots, I saw the great glittering cities at my feet, the vast black Pacific far beyond, the horizon already fuzzed with the coming fog of dawn. But not yet. Now—then—stars were falling, in decadent showers. The Perseids meteors. I had howled to the stars to fall on me, ecstatic.

Over time, I relinquished holy days, the sun, the moon, midnight revelry under stars. I traded it all, gladly, for medical school.

Of course, medicine is also mysticism, rituals, and holy books. Like astrology and the harvest, it has its own time scape. In July, new interns arrive, in September, flu vaccines. October through March we traversed the dark valley of respiratory viruses, when everyone dies (per beloved mentor Roger Baxter). By March the interns are hardened. April began vector-borne infections: hikers and hunters went into the woods, returned with fevers and rash. Other lands had other rhythms (shark bites, gun fights, monsoon parasites).

These things were also shaped by the tilt of the earth, the sun, the tides. But I went to work in the dark and returned home in the dark; I could only behold what came through the doors, and the books that could make sense of that. Like other monastics, I offered devotion through ferocious bodily deprivation, of sleep, hydration, loved ones, and through relentless self-laceration. Snow tires and seasonal clothing cycled in the periphery, but very little crossed the threshold of the hospital, this temperature-controlled, eternally-lit temple.

The Erotic #1

Sex is neither necessary nor sufficient for the erotic, pop-therapist Esther Perel says – sex acts can be completely devoid of erotic feeling; while a shared glance can electrify.

Perel is interested in the fundamental tension in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, between individual desire and collective security. We yearn to feel whole, (“oceanic feeling”), what Perel calls aliveness. Perel maps this existential struggle as between adventure and safety: dynamism vs. structure, the erotic vs the domestic, the libertine vs the authoritarian. We are always negotiating the balance.

For Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Audre Lorde, Perel, the erotic stands not only for sexual desire, but all wanting, imagination, yearning, desire, beauty, pleasure, excitement. This mystical life force brings us together, reveals God, makes babies.

via IG, @artipoppe

But the sheer potency of desire can override repression, inviting transgression, and thus destabilization. How to deal with this unruly force?

Freud advised channeling it into religion. Perel is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, each the sole survivors of their families. They married each other and built a life, of work, children, and good dinners. She observed that some refugees survived, but some, like her parents, lived. Perel dedicates her work to understanding why. Though she acknowledges the unprecedented isolation of the nuclear family, the pressure of putting demanding one relationship serve as an entire village, Perel still advises channeling it back in to the couple.

(Marcuse and Lorde would have other ideas).

This conception of Eros seems unnecessarily reductive. In common language and Greek roots, eros is sexual desire. Why jam into this all the bodily pleasure, human relationships, hungers, joys, intimacy, energies, with their own flavors and nuances? Friendship, familial, religious, artistic, activist, community love might overlap with sexual feeling; but these are not all reducible. Why make sloppy the meaning of a decently precise word?

Cutting things in two can be illustrative. But in mapping binaries on top of each other, why does this go with that? Eros forges connection, but so do other things. Eros also divides: cruelty, aggression, jealousy, despair, obsession, cowardice. Eros is neither necessary nor sufficient for life force.

Pedantic, yes, but look, schemas remap individual and collective reality.

Freud, like other European intellectuals then, was influenced by Asian religion and philosophy. His friend describing “oceanic feeling,” specified Hindu mystic Ramakrishna. The salons fizzed with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and others, including Tantra

“Tantra” in Sanskrit, is a generic term (organized knowledge) and also a specific (obscure) lineage of thought. “Tantrism,” is a construction of Europeans 19^th century scholars, that really honed in on sex, like, just a little more enthusiastically, than anything in the source texts. Tantrism is an Orientalist mishmash, with minimal internal coherence. It only makes sense within primarily Western metaphysics and concerns.

Tantrism is what seems to suffuses Freud’s Eros – dualities and what Teun Goudriaan called, “systematic quest for salvation or spiritual excellence,” which, in this language, sounds kinda Christian! Orientalism is of course, exhausting. Victorian scholars projecting their own repressed sexuality onto the racialized Oriental Other? Ugh, per Edward Said.

BUT, here me out. Setting aside the racist colonialism, the perv and poet in me also appreciates exactly this messiness of the term “erotic.” Imprecision in meaning is where double entendres, evocation, jokes, flirtation, subterfuge, seduction, suggestion--plausible deniability--reside. In this gap, one perceives (not usually consciously) both the trap of social rules and how to slyly subvert them.

Insisting that all life force is effused with the erotic is its own enchantment, a sleight of hand. It shakes us up a little, when we have become too inured to words like “love” and “good” and “justice” and “grief.”

The erotic is neither moral nor sentimental; it lurks on the edges, half-buried in shadow. It’s a little freaky! The erotic invites transgression; transgression itself, is also erotic. Was Freud, with all this titillating insistence on sex and violence, artfully deliberate in this provocation?

Is it feasible to seduce each other into revolution?

Is this a horny essay or a polemic?

(Which keeps you reading?)

The Revolutionary #3

Taylor’s description of the Revolutionary draws on character Étienne, from Emile Zola’s novel Germinal. Étienne works in a mining village and becomes a strike leader, coaxing the miners to join the worldwide coalition of workers, to overthrow their dangerous and grinding conditions. The revolutionary is a guerilla (a warrior, who relies on seduction and subterfuge). To seduce others, it is most effective to seduce oneself first, as a true believer. Taylor:

“Étienne doesn’t just want this particular village to join the cause, but is fighting to save the world. For him, the material and the spiritual are connected. Germinal shows how he arrives at this belief, by means of a series of dialogues, arguments and hardships. His politics come to be inseparable from his life, for good and bad. He isn’t play-acting. He’s at the coalface every day. When the villages starve, he starves.”

Here is a thing about how Taylor and Zola characterizes the revolutionary: he is alluring, he is erotic.

Kathleen Neal Cleaver, of the Black Panther Parthy

The Charismatic may recruit you to God, State, Crypto, Marx. It is the Charismatic’s certainty, their strength of vision, that sears our desire. Che Guevara or Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur or Jesus, the young Stalin or Obama—the Charismatic is often beautiful, perceptive, and eloquent. But not necessarily, there are many keys to many hearts: the demigogue perceives desire too, offers juicy morsels of scape goat, on which an audience unleash, its own projected shame and contempt.

The Charismatic’s confidence offers irresistible solidity, especially in frightening, uncertain times. Charismatic authority, says Max Weber, bypasses rational-legal authority (law, bureaucratic rules) and traditional authority (patriarchy, church, feudal lords). The Charismatic is pied piper, hypnotist, sorcerer.

Of course the Charismatic is dangerous. All seduction is dangerous. The English word charm is from Latin carmen – a song meant to cast spells. Enchantment renders one vulnerable to another’s powers, softening boundaries, opening to possibility.

But look, one can only seduce the seducible: the desire (for belonging and freedom and pleasure and violence) already exists. Something frustrated, held in the shadows, has already been brewing, waiting for this.

Étienne though, is recruiting also through love. “At the coalface,” Etienne toils, eats, starves alongside the comrades he rallies—he builds trust. The sustained intimacy of material and bodily entanglement, in work and survival, this is love.

Eros and Civilization

Herbert Marcuse challenges Freud. Freud made an accurate observation, says Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, but misdiagnosed the cause. Freud’s description of civilization, left out all the extremely violent colonization, urbanizing land displacement, murder, and coerced wage labor. Freud overlooked the specific material historical conditions of this particular civilization.

Marcuse identifies a central paradox of 20^th century colonial-capitalist western societies: they are built around a model of ceaseless expansion. The technological fruits of such a society creates massive wealth, that could produce enough material security, science, medicine, leisure for everyone, multiple times over—but it doesn’t do that.

This is because infinite growth requires infinitely-expanding demand for workers, to extract and transform the resources. If everyone had everything they need, they would only do the work required to sustain themselves (as our ancestors have done for hundreds of thousands of years). That work includes other shit to do besides production, work that is invisible to our economic model of GDP: care work, repairing things, sharing things, building social bonds, making art, dicking around, staring at clouds. The value produced by that kind of work, is literally not measured, except as the way it is supports production.

But if we had all that, there is no incentive to do extra work to create excess value to be used for profit and further expansion.

A small group of people coerced everyone into doing all this excess work (even to the point of hitting an ecological upper limit), because it makes them very rich. This small group “owns” the entire system, aka, the means of production. They get to what we produce, what is valuable, and how that value is distributed.

Marcuse points us, our patriarchal society does not repress us to protect us from ourselves—we are repressed by our exploitation. Desires that conflict with working—these are the desires that are repressed with punishment and shame.

A non-repressed society is possible, says Marcuse and also Lorde, by reconnecting to Eros. Both Marcuse and Lorde were also attuned to the way a binary gendered hierarchy manipulates our Eros also. Women are alienated by having their love leveraged into excess care labor and are denied their sexuality. Men are in turn denied the love they could experience through more care provision, and forgotten how to wield the many powers beside violent domination.

Reintegrating our whole ourselves, they advise, and reconnecting to each other, would wake us up. We would recognize how much we already care and protect each other. Then we would look around and realize who the real fuckers are.

Rufai Ismaila, via @kingsvillevisualsgallery

The threat of unrepressed Eros is not, as per Freud, to our own safety; it is a threat to the ruling class that exploits us. To cultivate Eros is a political project.

Revolution

Eric Olin describes in the four types of anticapitalism, the logic of a leftist revolution ( “smashing capitalism”):

“The argument goes something like this: the system is rotten. All efforts to make life tolerable within it will eventually fail. From time to time small reforms that improve the lives of people may be possible when popular forces are strong, but such improvements will always be fragile, vulnerable to attack and reversible.

“The idea that capitalism can be rendered a benign social order in which ordinary people can live flourishing, meaningful lives is ultimately an illusion because, at its core, capitalism is unreformable. The only hope is to destroy it, sweep away the rubble, and then build an alternative. As the closing words of the labor tune “Solidarity Forever” proclaim, ‘We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.’”

In an otherwise deeply insightful essay, Olin gives a bizarre counterargument to this logic. He asks how come the communist revolutions of the 20^th century did not result in “robust, sustainable human emancipation?” Whatever he means by that (those emancipated states and parties still exist), he seems to have left out, you know, the 20^th century Cold War. The one where American empire used its massive wealth to wage an explicit crusade against communism, through devastating proxy wars, forced trade liberation, and installation of fascist puppet governments that overthrew democratically elected socialist leadership, then killed and tortured tens of millions of people. Sooooo, maybe that’s why there was less emancipation than planned.

Despite disengenuous historical bullshit, he does provide a concise summary of the argument:

“How is it possible for anticapitalist forces to amass enough power to destroy capitalism and replace it with a better alternative? This is indeed a daunting task, for the power of dominant classes that makes reform an illusion also blocks the revolutionary goal of a rupture in the system. Anticapitalist revolutionary theory, informed by the writings of Marx and extended by Lenin, Gramsci, and others, offered an attractive argument about how this could take place.

“While it is true that much of the time capitalism seems unassailable, it is also a deeply contradictory system, prone to disruptions and crises. Sometimes those crises reach an intensity which makes the system as a whole fragile, vulnerable to challenge…in the long-term capitalism becomes unsustainable; it destroys its own conditions of existence.”

Revolution, like seduction, is an opportunist: the desire, the opening, is already there—what will we invite to fill this hole?

Sublimation #1

Herbert Marcuse, forged in the Frankfurt School amid the death machine of World War II and Nazis, recognized that the state does not even require punishment/fascism or diffusion/organized religion. Liberal societies control frustrated desires while spinning an illusion of choice, through labor and consumerism.

Day-to-day life in the imperial center can be such a grind! We work so much! We work 40-60 hours a week (hunter-gatherers worked 20hr/wk; medieval peasants 9-hr days, but for less than half the year). We go home and work more, cooking, cleaning, minding children, spending hours on the phone in hellish phone circles with health insurance bureaucrats

We are meant to be grateful, for our salary and access to healthcare, instead of living in the street or in prison (for now). We accept these are the only options and “choose.”

Eros, this deep well of mystical connection that we would have given to each other—is harvested into labor and consumption.

Look, if we work in some proximity to power, we don’t usually face the direct, brutal, violent domination applied to people at the margins. Workers near vital infrastructure say, or central bureaucracies, or weapons, say, need to buy into the system, or they are a liability. They need a good story, so they keep working, instead of fucking with the vulnerable levers of power that they are tasked with maintaining. Their shadows and questions must be kept at bay, they must be kept satisfied, precarious, or distracted.

Look work sucks. The whole point aspiring to wealth was once to not work. Now rich people insist they wake up at 5 am and grind. The seduction must convince you to pour your precious life force and ignore your loved ones into some boring ass marketing job. It must transmute it into money and security yes, but also status, ambition, spiritual purpose. Richly compensated professions became the civilized man/Girl Boss’s desirable peacock plumes. Or it might transform our natural compulsion to connect and care, say, into customer service. Or a passion for justice could be diffused by the nonprofit industrial complex or academic committees.

(Mostly, though, we are under material coercion—we just want housing, food, healthcare)

The desire and pleasure we get from the land, art, adornment, is siphoned into the material sensuality of cars, purses, and other consumer goods. We pad our surroundings with softness and color, in proportion to the softness and color drained from our inner life.

Liberal western societies, observed Marcuse, had no qualms of blatantly manipulating sexuality for advertisement to sell some shit. You want to pause to enjoy a dandelion? NO LOOK HERE: lusty bodies, 20 feet tall, enticing us to purchase cotton briefs, lipstick, beer.

For the enchantment to persist, it is critical that we stay focused, believe that this world is a totalized, finished product; we cannot imagine it otherwise. Our imagination is constantly re-routed back into surviving inside the given parameters of endless toil: with color-coded scheduling or Crossfit—whatever creativity makes this tolerable. We are coaxed to whip up self-hypnosis from a depleting reserve of the culture’s anemic spells: Girl Boss, Wine Mom, That Girl, Gratitude Journal.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) via @slavicarts

Exhausted, bored, isolated, horrified but helpless in the face of the nightmare brutalities of colonial-capitalism (its genocide and prisons created by our taxes and labor), we feel too much and too little. We reach for something, anything. Is it oceanic feeling or desperation for sleep? We love, eat and fuck quickly, trade our art-making for entertainment, numb ourselves with weed and amazon orders. Some still have religion or art; the rest of us, astrology and self-help tiktok. Pop culture offers brittle substitutes for the gods, but we make do: Carrie, Miranda, Gryffindor. Celebrities. We yearn so much, for the stars to caress us back.

Bravado #2

A young man is at sea, his soft brown curls falling into his eyes. He has a light mustache, stubble, and subtle pout. He squints into the middle distance. Behind him another young man sits casually at the end of their boat, one leg swung over its edge. Beyond is the clear sky and beautiful waters, from which rises the prow of a much larger, bold blue ship. If you pause and zoom in you can read in mirror writing: Galaxy Leader.

Rashid al-Haddad is a 19-year old from central Yemen, a pirate of the Red Sea, of the Houthis. They had seized The Galaxy Leader, in their campaign against Israel-linked ships, to disrupt the supplies to the Israeli (and US funded) genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The campaign shut down this major trade corridor (10-15% of all global shipping traffic), forcing ships to travel (very expensively) all around the entire continent of Africa to reach their destination. Rashid’s videos went viral, as the “hot Yemeni pirate.” He was dubbed “Tim-Houthi Chalamet.”

Yemen has been under constant war since 2014. Like many other “civil wars,” it is actually a proxy war, in which several outsiders (UAE, Saudi Arabia, USA, UK, Iran) fund and arm local groups to further their own fluctuating geopolitical goals. Outsiders bear little cost of violence to themselves, while large-scale humanitarian devastation befalls the civilian population. After a decade of this proxy war, Yemen’s median age is only 21.6.

In response to becoming a global teen heartthrob, Rashid wrote, translated, “I did not talk about beauty or anything else, but our issue is Palestine, and this is not the time to talk about beauty."

The US and its ally Saudi Arabia would launch an aggressive anti-pirate and bombing campaign in Yemen shortly after. In a translated interview on Twitch, Rashid response to this was that it was, “nothing new for Yemenis,” and “They’re almost honored to be targeted by the US because they are confronting the US head on and directly.”

Love #3: How to build a movement

You have to build the vision to take up the space, left by what you are about to take down, to get to the other side. The joy of destruction is not enough.

Don’t get me wrong; we love our friends, the ones who gleefully throw a punch, manage inflammables, can carve rallying cries (deny, delay, depose) onto projectiles, who channel rupture into justice. Their artful transgressions crack open the imagination: it can be otherwise.

In revolution, someone will also have to brew the coffee, clear the roads, mind the children. There will be the sometimes tedious work of building, repairing, caring. (Dorothy Day: “Everyone wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.”)

Our Holy Mother, Ursula K Le Guin has said: “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

To keep going, you will have to fall in love, not only with the vision, but also with your comrades, enough to remake it every day. You are building something together and it is a little bit dangerous. Falling in love is also dangerous, though usually less dangerous than tanks and prisons. Unless you fall in love with a spy and are betrayed. Then you will be turned over to the tanks and prisons, but what a way to go!

The 18^th century French military learned that a soldier will fight for their family, for their lover, for their land. Most people will not fight for their nation. What the fuck is a nation? When the heat of battle arrives, as the men and horses in front of you get disemboweled, it is not the nation you think of. You think of your mother, your girl, your dog. You run.

You won’t fight for a nation, but you will fight for your friend. Training the soldier is also to forge relationships. You must engineer a process in which people who may not even like each other, rely on each other for life. Because that is what we all already know how to do. This is not the passion of eros. This is the steady drum beat of working together, negotiating shared presence, caring about each other. You will make them family. When the heat of battle arrives, they will not run. They are not fighting for the nation, they are fighting to protect their friends. They are fighting for love.

Do you see how that works?

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, last kiss. They would be executed June 19th, 1953

Notes

- As Ellie Eberlee has tweeted, if you haven’t read every single thing Mary Turfah has written, you should

- Christa Lai is doing fascinating work on the role of eros and networks in material support

- Zoe Tuck on trans spirituality and Kit Carlson, both on divinity and writing

-I am so excited for the forthcoming Hierarchies of Solidarity by Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal

-someday i would like to edit this all down to half, if u have tips 😩

Next Time Soon: Erotics of Revolution, Part 2