whatever! poem

From the postanarchism lists, a rather lengthy "poem" inspired by Agamben:

The coming politics. Politics of local insurrection
against global management. Of presence regained over
the absence to oneself. Over the citizen, the imperial
estrangedness.
Regained through theft, fraud, crime, friendship,
enmity, conspiracy.
Through the elaboration of ways of living that are
also
ways of fighting.
Politics of the event.
Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. It
administrates absence by waving the palpable threat of
police intervention in any place.
Who regards Empire as an opponent to confront will
find preventive annihilation.
To be perceived, now, means to be defeated.

Learning how to become imperceptible. To merge. To
regain the taste
for anonymity
for promiscuity.
To renounce distinction,
To elude the clampdown:
setting the most favorable conditions for
confrontation.
Becoming sly. Becoming merciless. And for that purpose
becoming whatever.
[...]
Critique has become vain. Critique has become vain
because it amounts to an absence. As for the ruling
order, everyone knows where it stands. We no longer
need critical theory. We no longer need teachers.
Henceforth, critique runs for domination. Even the
critique of domination.
It reproduces absence. It speaks to us from where we
are not. It propels us elsewhere. It consumes us. It
is craven. And stays cautiously sheltered
when it sends us to the slaughter.
Secretly in love with its object, it continually lies
to us.
Hence the short romances between proletarians and
engagé intellectuals.
Those rational marriages in which one does not have
neither the same idea of pleasure nor of freedom.
Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographies
that we need.
Not cartographies of Empire, but of the lines of
flight out of it.
How to? We need maps. Not maps of what is off the map.
But navigating maps. Maritime maps. Orientation tools.
That do not try to explain or represent what lies
inside of the different archipelagos of desertion, but
indicate how to join them.
Portulans.

the remainder