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Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation

Q. Libet | 31.01.2009 16:17 | University Occupations for Gaza | Free Spaces | Social Struggles

Someone stands on a table and yells, “This is now occupied.” And that’s how it begins.

Days and nights of conspiracies beforehand, materials in waiting, meetings folded within meetings, tension dripping like sweat from the palms of individuals who a week earlier never believed they’d be at the front of the barricades in their very own school. A panopticon of consumption and labor turned into a zone of offensive opacity. Identities that clouded our communication evaporate before our eyes and we see each for the first time as not who we are but how we exist. Adverbs replace both nouns and adjectives in the grammar of this human strike, where language is made to speak for the very first time without fear of atrophy.

An occupation is not a dinner party, writing an essay, or holding a meeting; it’s a car bomb. The university is our automobile, that vehicular modem of pure alienation, transporting us not outwards across space but inwards through time. If our goal is the explosion of time, then occupation is our dynamite. We use our spaces and bodies as bombs and shields in this conflict with no name. Indiscernible, we sever the addiction to visibility that only guarantees our defeat. Thought has no image, and neither shall we. Shards of words bounce off inoperative objects and reverberate through the occupied halls, telling a story of accomplished impossibilities and undecidable victories.

[ . . . ]

Q. Libet

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31.01.2009 16:38

Q. Libet


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  1. Bit pretentious — @