Hello friends. Merry Christmas. Last weekend, I spent a few days in Toronto eating Caribbean and Chinese food and playing SHITMAS for the third time. Greg wrote about the history of SHITMAS here. This time we played with SHIT, Iron Lung, K.O.S., and a few others. I lost my water bottle in an Uber, hit my head on the ground pretty hard, saw some friends I hadn’t seen in too long, and went to a march for Palestinian solidarity.
I also read a few books since then, saw Poor Things, Monster, and got to rewatch Yi Yi in my favorite theater.
The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar
The Right to Maim issues a challenge to liberal, rights-based frames of disability that merely view disability as an individual affliction to be accommodated and healed, empowered and destigmatized. What Puar puts forth, with many others, is a move away from a medical-understanding of disability and into the social production of disability. This is all to labor in the service of a free Palestine.
80% of the world’s disabled people live in developing nations, especially in the global south. The production of so much of this disability happens through colonial violence, war, occupation, and neglect. This had never occurred to me. The Right to Maim focuses on the production of disability in occupied Palestine, uncovering the ways that Israel masks a war of intentional debilitation under the guise of minimizing civilian deaths.
In many ways, the book already feels dated, only 6 years since its initial publication. Much of the book is based around the way that, in the very recent past, Israel’s strategy was to shoot to maim, not to kill. This manifested in soldiers spraying bullets at peoples legs, using bullets that burst open upon impact to totally destroy entire limbs. Israel was able to bomb hospitals but claim that it was minimizing civilian deaths, although in reality it was just producing a slow death for the recently disabled. Instead of killing them now, they are killing them later, drastically reducing their lifespans and capacities. Puar dives deep into the way that slow death is produced in Palestine, including the destruction of medical infrastructure, the limiting of calories past the checkpoints, the creation of reliance upon humanitarian aid, and, of course, the production of disability through violence.
Israel no longer seems to have any intention of minimizing civilian deaths, seeing that the 2014 war in Gaza saw 2,000 dead Gazans and the war in 2008 saw about 1,400. As of October 7, 20,000 Gazans have been murdered and 50,000 wounded. However, while Israel is more hellbent on total annihilation than debilitation in this iteration of its perpetual violence, Puar’s book still holds value in the way it allows us to deconstruct the liberal rhetoric of Israel and disrupt its claims of a war in the name of your human rights.
Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin
A few years ago, I decided I would finally start rereading my books, even if it was just one book a year. Typically, I do it on my birthday, but this year I was knee-deep in Öcalan. With the year coming to an end, I decided to reread Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion.
Friedrich Hölderlin was a key poet of the German Romanticism largely ignored until the early 20th century, though he was a favorite of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s and a close friend of Hegel and Schelling. He spent the last 35 years of his life isolated in a tower after a mental breakdown. When I first read this in August of 2020, I wrote that it was “radical and anarchic!,” which I would be happy to reiterate. In Hyperion is a pure pursuit of transcendence by a reintegration with nature. It seems clear to me, for some reason, that it’s not necessarily a desire to go back to nature, but to simply unite with it once again. Not regression, but progression. It’s a beautiful call to remember to live life authentically and to pursue freedom.
Some quotes:
“The state has always been made into hell because man wanted to make it into his heaven. The coarse husk around the kernel of life and nothing more — that is the state. It is the wall around the garden of human fruits and flowers.”
“Men fall like rotten fruit from you, O let them perish, for thus they return to your root, and so shall I, O tree of life, so that I may again grow green with you, and breathe amidst your crown with all your budding branches! peacefully and profoundly, for we all sprouted up from the golden seed!”
Privilegios y Anarquismo por Dilar Dirik y Peter Stanchev
This little book is a pair of essays against dogmatism in anarchist movements. The essays respond to academic critiques of the Zapatistas and the Kurds which claim that they are not actual anarchist societies because of this or that reason. Stanchev and Dirik respond by discussing lived realities and actual anarchist practices in the EZLN and PKK. Anti-dogmatism forever. This is the first book I’ve read in Spanish.
Yi Yi is one of the greatest movies ever made. I’m not sure anyone has made a movie so pleasant to look at while completely fragmenting everything. Life is messy, complicated, hard, and full of regrets but connecting with people can make it worth it.
If somebody told me that Monster was the best film of 2023 I wouldn’t argue. I had to finish crying in my car before I could drive home. Trauma in narrative media is complicated to portray and I feel manipulated when I engage with it (i.e. A Little Life). However, Monster is not about trauma, it’s about the impossibility of restorative justice through bureaucratic means. It’s about bureaucracy’s hindrance of reconciliation, hindrance of creating a harmonious coexistence and making different stories consistent with each other.
Rest In Peace, Ryuichi Sakamoto.
I also thought Poor Things was fun, funny, and good.
I’m going to watch Yi Yi! (Always wanted to, this is a good reminder).
Btw, have you seen Boy and the Heron, and if so what are your thoughts?