Month: October 2019

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‘Let. Me. Die. (Pandas, Technology, and the End of the World’

[UPDATED]

When one ‘lives’ eternally in a cage, when the possibility of mortality is piece by piece stolen and the terrifying reality of an ‘immortal humanity’
comes closer every day, when being kept barely alive by this world is the cost of existing at all, and when all possibility of realizing the tiniest freedoms, the possibility of actually living, is stolen on the premise of keeping you safe, there can be only one demand to make of this nightmarish reality…. LET. ME. DIE.

Let. Me. Die (Pandas Technology and the End of the World) is a new original text in our distro from Bellatrix Black- the text takes the imaginary character of the Panda and it’s fight against enforced reproductive futurority at the hands of humans as a theoretical base-point for understanding the totality of the horror we are all trapped inside of. With limited actual reference to pandas, it addresses questions of death vs “Immortality”, the impositions of technology and the brutal world it imposes, the war between those claiming to provide safety and those hoping to live dangerous, as well as a critique of the potential rise of Eco-Fascism or Techno-Fascism incubating inside the collapse of the current epoch.

Quotes From the Text:

“The maintenance of ‘life’ at the cost of living. Safe and protected from the dangers of the outside, is building tighter and tighter confinements as to what living means, the whole civilization becomes a ‘life support machine’ and in exchange we except to exist entirely comatose.”

“Individuals of this epoch must face the fact that nowhere is ‘safe’, and that anyone promising to provide safety is in fact only (re)producing captivity.”

“The technophiles and modern day prophets of climate change denial dream of emergent colonies on mars, humanist expansion with technological aid, new life born off planet but inside the same civilization[10]; whilst a haphazard brigade of similarly dreamy ideologues on the so called left[11] fight an increasingly meaningless discursive battle against extinction- preaching moderation and ‘ecology’ in the name of continuing the species.”

“To allow oneself to dream of a self after society is almost as dangerous as dreaming of a society after society- No Future is not merely an expectation or an understanding of the current reality; but also a direct threat towards it.”

PDF HERE: letmedie

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New Bootleg- ‘The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors’

The latest title to be added to our bootlegs series ‘The Belly of the World: A Note On Black Women’s Labors’ by Saidiya Hartman. Cited in the Afro-Pessimist trajectory, this text analyses the implications of chattel and racial slavery on the lives of Black Women historically and presently and the specificities of the experience of Black Womanhood (in the United States and beyond). Concerned particularly with  the difficulties of inscribing Black Women a place in the insurrectional and revolutionary histories/narratives of black people in the United States and beyond and in understanding their position as compared to the Black populous more generally; the text attempts to follow the traces of the lives and practices of struggle of Black Women through the centuries including and proceeding slavery.

Quotes from the text:

It has proven difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate black women’s domestic labors and reproductive capacities within narratives of the black worker, slave rebellion, maroonage, or black radicalism, even as this labor was critical to the creation of value, the realization of profit and the accumulation of capital. It has been no less complicated to imagine the future produced by such labors as anything other than monstrous. Certainly we know that enslaved women fled the plantation, albeit not in as great numbers as men; poisoned slaveholders; plotted resistance; dreamed of destroying the master and his house; utilized abortifacients rather than reproduce slaves; practiced infanticide rather than sentence their children to social death, the auction block, and the master’s bed; exercised autonomy in suicidal acts; gave birth to children as testament to an abiding knowledge of freedom contrary to every empirical index of the plantation; and yearned for radically different ways of being in the world.”

‘The sexuality and reproductive capacities of enslaved women were central to understanding the expanding legal conception of slavery and its inheritability. Slavery conscripted the womb, deciding the fate of the unborn and reproducing slave property by making the mark of the mother a death sentence for her child.”

PDF HERE: Bellyof