In the Name of the People. Liaisons

       INTRODUCTION

      In Liaisons, an old dream reemerges from the depths. After years of elaborations, debates, connections, and political artifacts, our transoceanic endeavor takes form. We have found friends with whom we share a sensibility and a similar way of asking questions: How can we construct alliances without compromising what we hold close? How can we make room for different sensibilities without succumbing to moralism? How can we hold together urban struggles and rural autonomy? Certain subterranean affinities demanded a common place, a sounding board, a planetary reverberation.

      The very hour the world returns to us as a dramatic unity through its own dissolution, the horizon of a humble international takes form. This is recognizable by way of a series of familiar developments: the multiplication of riots against the police, the generalized desertion of institutions, the blockade of nuclear and gas infrastructures, the proliferation of zones to defend, and the commoning of the means of life and resistance. Everywhere an awakening of political vitality and strategic perception, everywhere wanting to have it out once and for all—no longer with the world, but with its end.

      We came of age in an age of separations, prisoners of an end-nearing time. Our political heritage is preceded by no testament, and this is all the more true of a world being devastated “to the last gram.” In the sixteenth century, one spoke of disaster to designate the loss of a connection with the stars, as both points of reference and of influence. A few centuries later, D.H. Lawrence would make of this the cause of his and his contemporaries’ solitude. They had, he wrote, “lost the cosmos. We lack neither humanity nor personality; what we lack is cosmic life, the life of the sun in us and the moon in us.” The stars, by all appearances, have only dimmed since then. We find ourselves today thoroughly de-starred, dés-astrés.

      In this context, the last of possible disasters is to believe they could all somehow be overcome. Such is the mirage of the populist, who comes to bring the situation under control, and just in time. Everyone was surprised by the victory of Trump, while Putin, Berlusconi, Erdogan, Modi, and Netanyahu have reigned for years in the same register. Whether they hail from “popular” roots or have just acquired the style, this group exhumes that so-called alliance between the sovereign and his “People.” They create the appearance of a gap on the other side of which the elites take refuge, huddled together under the obscure light of the “deep state.” These new populists won hearts with the promise to safeguard all that, in the People, is identical to itself, in order to raise it, in unison, against the menace of the ethnic, sexual, or political minority—a gesture which often seems to extend to the point of including, at one moment or another, almost everyone. From the entrails of these masses long wandering in the neoliberal desert, they resurrect a new People of resentment.

      We seem to have passed from a regime of war through pacification to one of war itself, almost without knowing it. Such a situation threatens to remove us from the agenda of things to come, of what counts or not, of what polarizes or evokes indifference. The enemy, no longer confined to capitalist dispossession, set foot at our door, threatening to pull the rug out from under our feet. The enemy sought to capture the very energies of opposition to the liberal order, to put them at the service of a governmental machine uninhibited of any sense of social acceptability. Far from bringing the refined techniques