“here we are, the dead of all times, dying once again, but now in order to live.”
From a very brief essay written in January of 1994– an essay which may also be read as a sort of memorandum or a preface towards a manifesto that would be unfold in the writings collected in Our Word Is Our Weapon– Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the revolutionary Zapatistas group explicated the dire conditions of life of indigenous people in southeast Mexico. Marcos talks of 150,000 dead indigenous persons; dead from curable diseases. He talks of government at every level leaving indigenous persons out of all consideration of solutions, until elections roll around. He tells us that charity resolves nothing but for the moment, and when those moments have come and gone, death again visits the homes of the indigenous. In this brief essay, Marcos wrote clearly the resolve he and the Zapatistas had come to: no longer would they look to the government; now, they look to their ancestors.
This resolve the Zapatistas had reached would focus on one profound effect, which would come to make this revolutionary movement recognized across borders and oceans, fashioning for itself a network of international solidarity, with their word as their weapon. Their resolve was distilled into this aim: “…so that our people awaken from this dream of deceit that hold us hostage.” For this, Marcos states “We are ready to die…”
This post could go in a number of directions, but I’m very interested in this particular essay, so I’m choosing to focus on it and its relation to other essays we’ve read. For instance, I’m interested in what it means to look at extremely precarious (even torturous) conditions of life and fight against it by reorienting the process and performance of one’s death? What would Boal think of this theater of the oppressed? Would he have been able to see this readiness to die as antithetical to liberation, or would he have seen it as a decision to celebrate the lives of ancestors who had sustained something worth dying for under several hundred years of murderous oppression? How does this readiness to die change how we think about Balibar’s three concepts of politics? Does this fit neatly into emancipation, transformation or civility? Do these concepts rest on an assumption of the preservation of an individual’s life over the life of a people? Does Butler’s performative theory of assembly account for actors with this resolve? Are they spect-actors or something more?
The Zapatistas understood “percepticide,” “the body of the condemned,” “intolerable images”; and they understood it in a way that I think makes us confront some of the discussions we have had before regarding the agentic capacity of a spect-actor and the limits of political engagement. As Diana Taylor says in her essay titled “The Politics of Passion”: “…it seems political decisions in the past decade have been increasingly forged through affective and embodied struggle.” This is a question of the “role of physical bodies in movements” that tremendously complicates how we think of our (dis)identifications with political structures and movements. It is a profound decentering of subjecthood, a death of a political “I” (Taylor), in which one’s orientation towards a different future does not include oneself in its eventual concretion. It is interesting to think now how we must adopt such a visionary practice if we are to save our planet. I don’t know what such a politics on such a scale looks like, but I think it’s something we have to think about.