“‘To Be Free, You Have to Be a Little Crazy’: Alter-Being as Creative-Destructive Imperative”

• In Event: The politics of anti-carceral rebellion

Abstract

Drawing from the closing chapter of the forthcoming book Counterinsurgency Machine (AK Press), i will consider how the shared responsibility of confronting counterinsurgency is a permanent struggle for new relationships—with human and non-human life, with liberationist and abolitionist notions of power, with autonomous and self-determined ways of being, and with land. The plastic invincibility of liberal humanism (Wynter’s Civilizational “Man”), is a morphing enclosure—it is constantly changing to assimilate and engulf or otherwise neutralize insurrectionist cultural and political forms of all kinds; this creeping carcerality is both a mobilized logic and a self-aware intelligence, identifying insurgencies from which it somehow creates relations of extraction, appropriation, and expropriation. Make no mistake: that which is to be neutralized is the “wildness,” the insurgency, the destructiveness animated by the activities—in significant part, the destruction imperatives—of abolition, Black liberation, anti-coloniality, and decolonization that may or not carry the promise of an agenda, a plan, an “alternative.” Within the creative work of anti-carceral destructivity and insurrection, there are already plans for being-beyond-Man. This presentation dwells in the tributaries of Alter-Being, embracing Ashanti Alston’s Black anarchist invitation to permanent rebellion as cited in the title.

Author

• Dylan Rodriguez, University of California-Riverside