Spite, a bitter herb cultivated in the unseen gardens of the soul, rarely finds its use as the catalyst for translation. Yet, there are moments, hidden in the seams of difference, where one becomes entangled in the shadowy dance of the sentiment, translating not in harmony but in defiance – each word a step, a movement against the original author’s drift. What stirs this rebellion? Perhaps a glimpse of misconduct, some shaking variance, or a yearning to illuminate alternate viewpoints hidden in the prose.
Here, translation metamorphoses; it is no longer a vessel of preservation but a medium to unveil distortions and misconceptions embedded in the original narrative. Satire and caricature become the translator’s brush, painting to reveal the folly embedded in the source. Transcreation, a delicate mixture of translation with creation, forms a canvas for political commentary, a mirror reflecting accountability, and a testament to linguistic transcendence. It’s an intimate embrace of the original’s heartbeat, ensuring its pulse remains, sounding in the intricacies of another cultural landscape. Like a memory recollected in a dream, it feels familiar but is painted with the hues of a different world, speaking softly to its new audience.
Yet, caution buzzes in the shadows. Text birthed from spite can ignite unseen fires on the paths of comprehension. Pursuing common ground, an openness of spirit, and interplay of respect are the melodies that invite dialogue rather than dissent. And as we stand at the crossroads of interpretation, we are reminded of the intricate play of ethics and responsibility. The movements may be trying, the theme involved, but we might still try with an open heart. That said, we will not participate in the offbeat rhythm of authority.
A grip of French appellisme reaches out from the labyrinth of reports to address its sordid past and intertwine its story with queerness via BashBack! – a connection as elusive and indistinct as ships passing in the twilight. Queerness is a facet beyond identity and emotion. Once laden with contempt, queer transcends the narrow lanes of cis and hetero thought, offering a universe rich in desires and self-expression reverberating ethics, political and cultural convictions. While appellisme, unduly composed of straight white academic men, remains rooted in rigid heteronormative ideology. “Appellist” men touch the pages of the journal “Tiqqun” and finger its kin writing with “Appel” (Call).
In the delicate dance of societal critique, appellisme and queerness move to their own rhythms, each with a unique cadence. While both whisper challenges to the established order, they tread different terrains, touching the intimate corners of human existence and the vast expanses of societal architecture in disparate melodies. And this belated addendum reproduces like an out-of-place note in a symphony’s crescendo, a paradox of its own. Approximating queerness to appellisme trivializes each multifaceted concept and almost immediately reveals the endeavor as naive or dishonest. An easy tell lies in the word “queer” itself as it resonates differently (more academic, more straight) in the French landscape, where the song of TPG (those forms of life: TransPédéGouine or TransFagDyke) echoes the struggles against oppressive forces more vividly for those who can hear it.
The call rings across the ocean, but the coda’s ears are plugged. Gazing into the depths through hue-altered lenses. How could they speak of queerness and its complexities? Is it not intellectual circles where a nuanced approach to discourse is paramount? Acknowledging differences, the histories that shaped them, and their implications is vital to maintaining academic choreography. When words take center stage, they should be chosen thoughtfully, bearing weight and purpose. Every piece should dance gracefully. Yet, in the dimly lit lounges of reflection, hushed voices spill tea on appellisme’s shadier chapters – stories that would ruffle the most hardened feathers of our anarchist galaxy. The ambiance is thick with sketchy landlord vibes, assault, and kidnapping – darkness that shapes the score and defines the discourse’s contours. Stories, like notes, each have their distinct sound. Arranging them haphazardly, without understanding their essence, might risk obscuring their individual tone. And still, no mention here of those affected and pushed to the edges, their voices becoming mere whispers, repeatedly unheard until they jump ship.
Once cradled by appellisme, one writer (how many quietly went this way?) calls out the encroaching despair in the annals of straight white men, the poignant absence of black voices, the whispered departures of those marginalized, and the hushed sobs of victims being overshadowed. Deepened by the community’s coldness towards a queer gathering, their disillusionment blends with an acknowledgment of personal complicity. As they teeter on the edge of retreat, they send out a fervent plea: for the community to introspect, embrace broader discussions, and evolve beyond their insular cabal, yearning for rejuvenation even amidst their heart’s melancholy. Oh, if only they dared to call us earlier. They could’ve danced with us, but they waited for the song to end. Next time, for sure!
And what timing! As appellisme sings its swan song, it moves to interweave melodies and join in the queer chorus. The following text went out on the first day of the BB23 convergence, crying, “Appellisme is dead! Long live Bash Back!” It’s a bold gesture, but whatever fusion sought is its own cacophony. The passionate tapestry of queerness carries its own rips and imperfections, of course, but to suddenly juxtapose these images is to disregard or erase them. They may even be wise to isolate their raucous. This performance, perhaps well-meaning, suggests the importance of listening before merging the ensemble. One must approach with reverence and understanding to integrate stories, voices, or melodies. Only with genuine appreciation can narratives come together to harmonize.
Still, in spite, they should hold their dissonance within their walls. And you should venture into the text yourself. It’s no shimmering literary gem but strut through it, love. We spared you some tedious sections, partly to make it less of a slog to get to the part about BashBack! We also omitted the worn-out arguments commonly deployed to quickly dismiss critique. These have already been formulated in English, first as a bad joke, and don’t bear repeating (see: “10 Theses on Anti-(((Tiqqunism)))” with its ever-growing body of refutations.) It isn’t funnier in French, we promise. Throwaway accusations of anti-semitism and policing read extra flimsy in a genre marred by feigned third positions and state liaisons. One need not retread the tired discourse to note its geopolitical dimensions or reverberations across ocean and language. No use for operations made to shut everyone up.
We know the hour grows late on this chatter. We’re over it too. With what remains, we’d like to push specific conversations further and even put some things to bed. The text’s strawman, antiappellisme, surely enacts an analogous exorcism to the other side’s lingering anti-anarchism (and now anti-nihilism). For the most generative read, replace it throughout with your ideological-other of choice! Among worthwhile concessions for the historical record and some flippant apologies for heinous deeds, some pearls of wisdom, too. The young probably should wrestle what’s salvageable from the 40-somethings with their baggage and expiring camaraderie. Conspiracism already schismed The Party, and the purges over memes have begun. The real conspiracy: breathe together. If appellisme is truly dead, let’s banish the ghost! Let down your guard, friends. Nothing here to militate for or against. Unhaunted, we can play with the knots, all that remains bound to the specter. Exciting new perversions are already flagging. Read critically, but try to have fun with it. We recommend erasure poetry.
You’ll also clock right away that Appellisme is not translated. Partly to avoid slipping into the equivalent neologism commonly used to designate the uniquely troubling (and allegedly long excommunicated) American permutation of invisible party politics: ‘Tiqqunism.’ A cringe-worthy term has just become so memeable, tainting the sparkle of the movement. This unfortunate designation makes a pejorative out of the decaying secular tendency’s most vital and needed currents. The Jewish anarchist and mystical traditions ran deep at BB23: we’re talking holy days of rest, stateless wandering, strategizing in the city’s oldest Jewish cemetery, ritual as resistance, exegesis of the Leviathan, and the divine-androgyne Adam Kadmon of the Tiqqunei haZohar. BashBack! spent the better part of two decades in the underworld. Those who made a home there find each other again. Tiqqun means making whole. As the Party joins the party below, we pray for healing and fecundity. From Appellisme’s grave, may a true Tiqqunism bloom!
SadoMasochist Transcreation Cell
Solar Eclipse in Libra
October, 2023
Appellisme & Antiappellisme
Published September 2023
Some Francophone Blog
“It is not by reading a text from 2005, ‘Appel,’ that one will understand the use of the term ‘appelliste’ in 2020. Besides, I have never read ‘Appel,’ like many people who use the term’ appellistes.’”
Anonymous
The publication of ‘Appel’ by Divergences again brings to the surface the debates surrounding “appellisme,” a topic widely discussed in radical circles. Although appellisme is the subject of numerous rumors and brochures [zines], and antiappellisme shapes debates and arbitrates several conflicts here and there, the matter remains somewhat taboo. People still talk about it in hushed tones, feigning detachment or mystery.
This text is the result of collective reflection to shed light on the matter because all of this appears to us to have the contours of a myth: on one side, we have heard plenty of bizarre things about the appellistes, and on the other, antiappellistes discourses seem inconsistent and contradictory.
The Worst Stories Heard About the Appellistes
Terrifying and unbelievable stories circulate about the appellistes, much like in the past about wandering Jews or sea monsters. There is never any time for political discussion.
The “CMDO” and the appellistes are an elite that controls the struggles from within. From the ZAD (Zone to Defend) to Earth uprisings [Les Soulèvements de la Terre], from social movements to the black bloc, wherever political action goes beyond the horizon of affinity groups, the appellistes are accused of making secret decisions.
CMDO, the “Committee for the Maintenance of Occupations,” is the name a group of ZAD activists in Notre-Dame-des-Landes gave themselves in reference to the occupiers of the Sorbonne in ’68. Although the activities of the CMDO were never really secret, the disagreements between this group and other inhabitants of the ZAD in 2018 gave rise to an absolute myth.
It must be said that this period of evictions at the ZAD is very confusing. We don’t know all the stories that took place there, and we don’t seek to establish any truth (which we wouldn’t believe).
Nevertheless, the myth of CMDO—a minority of strategists who would have influenced the ZAD negatively—seems false. It contradicts all the analyses of what led to a victory: the diversity of tactics, a broad political composition, and rootedness in a territory.
The myth of the CMDO is suspicious because it is the symptom of a fantasy of omnipotence: a secret group, a minority of strategists, would be capable of influencing a whole movement? By mirror effect, it betrays the lingering Leninist belief still rampant in radical circles in the anachronistic strength of a revolutionary vanguard.
Contemporary struggles are spontaneously horizontal, without leaders, without demands, and without centralizing organizations. This is what those in power worry about? But it would seem that this “anarchizing” dimension of struggles is as frightening to the State as to radical circles. One is left to wonder: could it be that, when embodied in actual movements (Yellow Vests, ecology, suburbs, etc.), this anarchizing dimension questions the political motivations of anarchist circles?
With lundimatin and the Invisible Committee, the appellistes manipulate people. Because of their ideas, books, and media, the appellistes are perceived as intellectuals disconnected from action who have mastery over language.
The Invisible Committee is a group of anonymous writers whose books became known to the general public thanks to media coverage during the Tarnac case and the relentless efforts of the French anti-terrorist prosecutor to criminalize its authors. Lundimatin is an online journal that gained some notoriety thanks to its participatory and vibrant editorial during social movements.
These accusations of manipulation are rooted in a superstitious and naive perception of knowledge. Everything we read, experience, and hear affects and determines us. There is no reason for a text, even if it is manipulative, to have more influence on us than the thousands of other things we absorb in our society—except for the conscious or unconscious importance we attribute to it. As another text says, “One is manipulated if they want to be.”
The idea that theoretical ideas are necessarily divorced from practice aligns with a stale view of knowledge. This theory/practice or thought/action distinction is an old device of the bourgeois economic and philosophical order. The strength of a theory lies precisely in its practical origin; thinking, writing, and speaking are still actions.
In the context of these different hierarchies, and despite the rare editorial successes of Éditions La Fabrique, make no mistake: what is hegemonic in the cultural field is, unfortunately, BFMTV, not Lundimatin; Houellebecq, not the Invisible Committee.
Finally, making the success of a media outlet, a concept, or a practice a marker of betrayal is very dangerous for the revolutionary camp. We don’t want to minimize the risk of co-optation—a relentless machinery that knows no ideological limits (let’s remember Paul B. Preciado’s participation in Gucci’s advertising campaign). Yet, if we systematically put down the successful things, we risk remaining definitely locked in the neurotic microenvironments of the far left, endlessly ruminating over defeats.
The appellistes put a person in a trunk after breaking their knees and negotiated with the State at the ZAD (Zone to Defend). According to some accounts, the appellistes are ultra-violent, willing to use force to steer decisions in their favor; others are pacifists and legalists, ready to make any concessions to save their skin.
The internal contradictions in such narratives—here, the appellistes are ultra-violent, there too pacifist—are enough to sniff out the scam: there is such a thing as a pure way of being in the world, with some people always making the right choices. There’s no room for errors or conflicts, only betrayed ideals.
Purity does not exist; every individual or collective choice has consequences. The experiences mentioned in these narratives result from situational positions: was it necessary to go that far? Why choose to negotiate or not to? How to resolve a conflict without the State? These are the questions that moral narratives obstruct, establishing an overarching and soothing interpretation of facts.
The experiences at the ZAD, regardless of the positions taken (for or against the trunk!), are of interest to all revolutionaries because they are extreme experiences of a revolution that seeks to do without the State (how do we administer justice?) and finds itself confronted to [by?] it (when and why negotiate?). These facts call for benevolent discussions about the choices made at the moment by everyone involved in each specific context.
Here, the term “appellistes” obviously designates an “evil camp” that would oppose a hypothetical “good camp,” which is obviously non-existent and doesn’t correspond to any sociological reality. The experiences in question, such as negotiation during the evictions at the ZAD in 2018, concern many people of diverse origins who do not identify as “appellistes.”
The accusation of hidden control is the fundamental motive for all these different ways of doing evil, violently or peacefully, which would characterize the appellistes. Yet, power and the desire for control are structural; they can be found in all groups, and we end up fighting them everywhere, and they cannot be the characteristic of any particular group. Assigning the desire for control to one group, in particular, is dangerous because it would invisibilize the fact that such dynamics are at play in every group at all times and prevent people from intervening to change them.
In an appellisme space, an appelliste guy has raped many girls. We shouldn’t associate with appellistes because they are rapists. They have a reputation for being wealthy anti-feminists who scoff at structures of domination.
Sexist and sexual violence is systemic. Some rape stories in appelliste circles have been explained, made public, or collectively discussed, which may be why they are so widely known. Making these issues politically visible seems desirable to break free from mechanisms of silence. Speaking about sexual violence isn’t enough, but it is necessary for justice to be made. Where stories remain silent, violence intensifies.
Structures of domination are challenging to overthrow, present everywhere, and overwhelming in many respects; every milieu has to confront them. Should we then morally condemn all political circles: squatters, anarchists, autonomists…? And be surprised when, in the end, violence occurs in the group that we thought was safe. The question is not to label a perpetrator’s political affiliation. Framing the problem this way turns it into an ideological issue instead of addressing the mechanisms of domination head-on.
Externalizing sexism (or any other form of domination) from oneself, one’s groups, and practices is tempting. But the process is perverse: if it is the appellistes who are sexist, racist, and classist, then it’s not us. Removing these systems in this way exposes us and makes us blind to their emergence. On the other hand, acknowledging their reach is an opportunity for transformation.
But in the end, who are the appellistes that are talked about so much? Is an appelliste simply a reader of “Appel”? In that case, there are many more appellistes than expected, and the book’s publication will likely increase the number of appellistes worldwide even more.
Moreover, how can reading (or even the agreement that these texts may provoke) lead to wrongdoing? That’s the question that the most daring antiappelliste seriously asks. The question is dishonest in itself: there is no connection between reading or agreeing with “appelliste” texts and being an “appelliste” in a sense understood by antiappellistes.
For them, appellisme is “a set of practices against which we must organize,” the movement of what is terrible. But this perspective is a dead end: we are always someone else’s appelliste. And there is a strong likelihood that, by appreciating the history of Italian autonomy, believing that feminism is not about rights, liking the philosophy of Agamben or Deleuze, rejecting political identities, and loving poetry and riots, we may be appellistes without knowing it.
Appellisme could be something else: a network of people involved, to varying degrees, in writing these texts, who have carried them, nourished them with their experiences, and who have relied on this political genealogy. Appellisme would then be a kind of camaraderie. Not to mention all those who arrived too late, all those who cling to a fantasized camaraderie, and all the poor imitators. The experience of camaraderie around a text from the 2000s is old enough for those concerned to be around 45 years old today.
Without minimizing the strength and beauty of such an experience, this camaraderie must have run its course. In this case, if appellisme is a group of fallen forty-somethings, why does its ghost continue to structure debates in all radical circles in France?
Why do we, young people who intend to disrupt society, gender, and the world’s economic order, concern ourselves with the squabbles of old anarchists living in the countryside? Perhaps this camaraderie experience, combined with theoretical reflection, has given rise to something that surpasses and intrigues us? That the texts do not belong to their authors and that we can take hold of them?
We have indeed read some of them. In these texts, many things align with a critique of political identity: “There is no ‘revolutionary identity.’ Under the Empire, it is, on the contrary, non-identity, the constant betrayal of the predicates imposed on us, which is revolutionary. ‘Revolutionary subjects’ have not existed for a long time, except for power. To become anyone, imperceptible, to conspire means distinguishing between our presence and what we are for representation, to play it.”
Because of this, it seems absurd that appellistes—in the sense of people who claim the philosophical tradition of “Appel”—consider themselves “appellistes” because that would, against the intellectual tradition itself, make appellisme a political identity. So, in a way, appellistes are the first antiappellistes.
We, the young generations, must wrestle appellisme from the appellistes. All the 20-year-old comrades building themselves against appellisme, perceived as a group of people, live with a myth. They are caught up in the troubles and regrets of frustrated forty-year-olds. Let’s live our own communal, political, and theoretical experiences. The political work left to us is immense, and we don’t have the time.
What is antiappellisme? What is the purpose of antiappellisme?
Antiappellisme absorbs genuine critiques, contradictions, theoretical knots, and valid reasons for conflicts, turning them into dogmatic positions that freeze reality, the movement of thought, and possible transcendence. It serves as a “political” cover for interpersonal, territorial, and career-based disputes, among others.
Above all, antiappellisme creates a cathartic and exorcising monster that allows everyone to take a moral stance without engaging in real struggles or ethical positions related to reality. It acts as a relay for the media-police discourse of the State, warding off the possibility of revolution while constructing politically harmless and comfortable environments.
By condemning “intelligence,” antiappellisme maintains the hierarchies of knowledge it claims to want to destroy. The antiappelliste ends up defending the intellectual mediocrity of radical circles as a mark of quality.
Appellisme is dead, long live appellisme!
After discussing and pondering these ideas among ourselves, it became evident that the question of appellisme is a neurosis within the revolutionary camp. The publication of “Appel” may be an opportunity to dissolve this sterile opposition. We reject appellisme as an absurd identity that contradicts appellisme itself and reject antiappelliste as unbearable conformism.
If there is an appellisme we claim, it is that of a sensitive reading of texts, their strength, and the theoretical heritage of a tradition—a form of organic appellisme that cannot be an identity. In the same way, some of us recognize themselves in “queerness.” “Queer” originates from re-appropriating a definition imposed by normality on something that escaped it. Today, through identity logic, it tends to establish itself as a possibility within the norm (even Netflix has an LGBTQ category). For us, queerness remains a constant estrangement from the language of dogma and norm, and it is precisely this inability to be wholly captured that makes queerness a subversive force.
The Bash Back! movement—an insurrectionary queer network in the United States, which also had to deal with many myths—dissolved itself to avoid co-optation and capture by empty narratives. Problematizing these fantasies and interpretations, it concluded its history with “Bash Back is dead! Long live Bash Back!”
This publication of “Appel” offers several possibilities: either appellisme or antiappellisme will strengthen as polarized identity positions—either you are with them or against them—ending in a bitter soup where revolutionary potential turns into a battle of postures. Or, appellisme will dissolve, leaving its myths without resonance and allowing the power of its ideas to persist.
Moral and ideological positions may drown with antiappellisme, and we may discuss the fundamental questions that move us with all the instability they entail. Because appellisme, like queerness, “are not stable zones of occupation.”
“The practice of communism, as we experience it, we call it the Party […] The Party is not an organization—where everything is inconsistent due to transparency […] The Party is a set of places, infrastructures, communized means, and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate between these places.”
Call
“Throughout its existence, there were always a plethora of interpretations of what Bash Back! was. A network of queer anarchists, a gang, a tendency, a gay terrorist organization, a form-of-life, a theory group: the answer differs depending on who one asks. Perhaps the correct answer is that Bash Back!, true to queer form, problematizes each of these categories. Any analysis of Bash Back! fails if it doesn’t recognize the need to understand each of these possibilities independently and yet all at once.”
Queer Ultra Violence
Appellisme
(2005-2023)
We Knew Thee Well
A translator’s note:
Contrary to the generous views expressed in the introduction, some who helped with this text translated it only out of spite. This translator, in particular, doesn’t seek to “pursue common ground” with appellisme and appellistes, nor do they believe in only “whispering” to the established order and in salvaging threads that they don’t find “vital or exciting” in texts from that political tendency.
My queerness does not have affinity with appellisme. I don’t think there is something to save from a political tendency that doesn’t center anti-authoritarian discourse and practice and refuses criticism, as the text we translated evidences. I care about the criticism of appellisme when it is a criticism of authority and when it throws light on the intellectual reversals, sleight of hands, and gaslighting operations that appellistes often perform to deflect criticism and/or shapeshift because they sadly are not the only ones to embrace such dishonest behavior.
Why translate this text, then? What about the Tiqqunists? To be clear, I have no interest in the future transformations of whatever community exists around that nebulous term in the US. I refuse and snarl at the recuperation of queer insurrectionary politics by appellisme, which the French text attempts to perform. Let’s keep the BB!23 convergence separate from the paperback republication of L’Appel (Call, The Call, or whatever you want to call that esoteric writing) in France. This micro-event led some confused ‘appellistes-who-refuse-to-call-themselves-appellistes-but-not-really’ to write the piece we’ve translated. It’s not enough to declare affinity with BB!, (as if it was a unified whole) or with any political tendency, for that matter. Take this text at your own risk. It’s stale but informative. And to those «jumping ship»: let’s talk.