Ese futuro que es catástrofe arde en Chile. Vitrina Dystópica y Bifo en Berlín.

Franco Bifo Berardi, compañero, militante, pensador del posperaismo italiano, nos invitó a realizar una intervención en el marco de un evento al que se encontraba invitado llamado “Burning Futures”, realizado en Berlín, Alemania (http://tiny.cc/ye70fz). Su invitación es otro gesto concreto de la solidaridad y compromiso político que expresa Bifo con la insurrección chilena. Este compromiso no es exterior, no es una solidaridad humanitaria, es también – como él ha mencionado – su propia posibilidad de imaginar una futurabilidad diferente; la apertura de otra época en la historia de la lucha de los pueblos contra el delirio de acumulación infinita de los capitalistas de todo el planeta. Ahora que el propio neoliberalismo se desplaza a su fase senil y busca desesperadamente sostenerse por los medios del totalitarismo que siempre le constituyó; es, justamente ahora pues, que el levantamiento en Chile parece indicar el modo de elaborar un después. Porque, como lo dicen las calles y lo acoge Bifo, si la barbarie neoliberal ha comenzado en este territorio, este territorio será su tumba. Y si los futuros arden, no será más en el fuego de la avaricia que derrite los polos, sino en aquel despertar radical que Piñera y su infame gobierno buscan sistemáticamente destruir. En insurrecta y tierna memoria de todas y todos quienes sufren la tiranía del abominable empresariado, de todas y todos quienes ya no están, compartimos este texto que fue leído para un público en su mayoría alemán, que ha sabido sin embargo confraternizar con una lucha que será la de los pueblos del mundo entero.

PD: Fue leído con una polera negra que decía “Spread the uprising” en solidaridad con esta iniciativa de internacionalismo molecular: https://lundi.am/Je-suis-Cleone.

VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

First of all, thanks to the organizers and specials thanks to Bifo for giving us this opportunity. I’m speaking today on behalf of the Chilean collective Vitrina Dystópica, and it is exactly from this place where I want to begin. I come from a dystopia. And not because Chile was particularly violent or chaotic but exactly because of the opposite: because this territory was supposed to be a clean and healthy “democracy”, a quiet and obedient neoliberal student, and a laboratory.

We all know here that Pinochet’s dictatorship applied the first –and perhaps one of the most developed– neoliberal social transformations. What is maybe not so well-known, is that all the following so-called democratic governments deepened, without hesitation, all the traits of the model that keep inequalities in place. At the very beginning of the post-dictatorial era, they gave a more representative name to it: the extent of the possible. Thus, at the beginning of the ’90s, they summed up everything: “the only thing we can do – the entire political class, that is – it is to administrate the ruin that the dictator bequeathed to us”. And this is exactly what we see in all the recent stories about climate catastrophe and the end of the world. And here, we’re not denying the capitalistic devastation but saying instead that it is part of their administration, and then this suddenly-dramatic-awareness about the consequences of this nonsensical way of production is their last attempt to make us save them with our lives. And we’re not here to consent to it.

I say Dystopia and not Apocalypse, because “the world” as a project was already destroyed by their greed and brutality when, since the mid-70s, they attacked in all places every desire of justice and replaced it with programmed destruction. In Chile, it took many lives and continues to do so. Dystopia, because this supposedly healthy, clean democracy reveals the violence that maintains it, immediately and doubtlessly. In two weeks of struggle we have more than 1,000 injured people; 30 or more killed by the police and the military; hundreds tortured; women and men raped; once again we see selective incarceration, people disappeared, families which never will be the same, friends that will not come back again, people who will not be able to witness the victory against all this tyranny. This is the normality that they are trying to impose upon us. All over again.

However, this insane situation – where even current scientific discourse appears to recover the temporality of the myth as prophets of doom, while we were just spectators of the destruction of our territories – IS OVER.  Now that the Chilean October 18th has come, we’re no longer in any position to consent. The spray-painted walls of Chile say many things these days, but to conclude this short intervention I want to share two of them with you.

They say: “Neoliberalism started in Chile and in Chile it will die” and “We’ll stay in the streets until life is worth living”. Reading these two messages together, we can see it calls out to an affect we can all experience: that life under neoliberalism is not worth living. And beyond that, that until now neoliberalism seems to threaten all way of life for those who benefit from destruction.  And at the same time, it means that now, finally now, it is possible to glimpse a life worth living. In a former dialogue with Bifo, he said something that we continue to think about with the collective, and also with other young people we engage with. He said: “We will not create a proper technical platform but forms of shared pleasure at both the territorial and the global level”. And we think this is one of the most beautiful and powerful attributes of the Chilean insurrection.

We were forced to believe in a future that shows to us only a catastrophe, then we were forced to create an after to this future anterieur. Former future in both senses, as a powerful image and also in its psychoanalytic meaning. This catastrophe is our big scansion which implies the defiance to elaborate an after. And this, we believe, is happening in Chile now. Exactly because this after is not simply a linear future, and more precisely because this after that is being woven is not Progress in its masculine, virile meaning. That is progress as a straight line that breaks all cycle, driving it, even against its will, to where he wants: forcing, raping, colonizing it.

Hence, the revolutionary power of this uprising is as directly connected to the rage of 40 years of structural injustices as well as the lessons of the feminist movement of the last years. It is also the possibility to connect with more than 500 years of resistance from the Mapuche and other indigenous peoples. One of the most remarkable signs of this uprising is the total reversal of the symbols of the colonist in the ancestral territory named wallmapu.

If this moment in Chile seems to be so revolutionary it’s because, as Benjamin said, it recovers the whole history of the oppressed, setting up another temporality, another use of the space and the bodies, even when the institutionalized political forces of all tendencies never cease to try to put an end to this so-called inorganic politized discomfort. But they are wrong once again. This is not inorganic, this is the indomitable, the untamed taking part. Therefore, it is also so ambiguous, a space where so many things seem to be merged, and of course, they are. Nonetheless, the care, the affect, the pleasure, the joy, i.e. a life worth of living, is in the background and on the surface of all our well-justified rage.

This is what allows us to glimpse an after. One that doesn’t fit in any linear time. One which is pure discontinuity, interruption, endless mediality. In a deep register, there isn’t one specific petition or claim. We’re witnessing a radical attempt of openness to the possibility of another way of living, as our only chance to shut up the apocalyptic trumpets. It is not the world that is gonna end, instead, it is their world which must cease to exist. Finally, if Chile may show something to all of us, to every little spot besieged by the neoliberal machinery, it is that it is up to us, now, to destitute the world that they administered as a ruin.