Unbearable Life by Arthur Bradley;

Unbearable Life by Arthur Bradley;

Author:Arthur Bradley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)


In a 1994 communiqué issued to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata, the mythical collective subject named Subcomandante Marcos declares: “Everything for everyone, nothing for us. We the nameless, the always dead. We, the Zapatista National Liberation Army.”66 It might be possible to argue that the massively overdetermined proper name “Maximilien Robespierre” marks something close to the beginning of the process that leads to the creation of the empty signifier “Subcomandante Marcos.” As Žižek argues, the revolutionary army of “we, the dead” inaugurated by Robespierre stretches from Mao Zedong through Che Guevara up to the Iranian Revolution.67 To add to this (ever-growing) list, Howard Caygill’s recent study of modern resistance groups like the Black Panthers, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Zapatista National Liberation Army goes so far as to propose that “resistant subjectivity is in a sense already dead, a posthumous subjectivity.”68 For Caygill, the ZNLA and other movements regard themselves as already dead not only because they have no choice but to resist—they have no life worth living in the first place—but because this becoming-posthumous also gives them the dignity to resist without fear: “By affirming death, by saying ‘enough’, the resistant is no longer hostage to the useless death in life and assumes the dignity of a resistant life without fear of death.”69 If the bullet that kills a Zapatista kills no one, in other words, it is because they have turned their very weakness into a new locus of political strength: they become unkillable, indestructible, incorruptible precisely because they have nothing to live for, because they have already lost everything, because they are already dead. In the struggle of the nonexistent Subcomandante Marcos, Robespierre’s politics of the already dead still live—and die.



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