[D66] Tiqqun/Invisible Committee

[Antid Oto]

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=962&fulltext=1&media

Adam Morris on Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, the Young-Girl and the Imperialism of the Trivial
September 30th, 2012 RESET - +
Claire Fontaine, The Weeping Wall Inside Us All, 2009 Neon


"TIQQUN" IS A WORD that references the Jewish messianic tradition. It 
derives from “tikkun olam,” a Hebrew phrase that has been interpreted to 
mean “reparation,” “restitution,” “healing of the world” and “social 
justice.” The term was taken up as the name of an anonymous collective 
of political activists in France in the late 1990s; it is also the name 
of the otherwise unrelated magazine Tikkun. The French collective 
published two issues of their eponymous journal Tiqqun before disbanding 
in 2001. While their writings have been available for free on the 
Internet for some time, in the original French as well as in English 
(thanks to the labor of an anonymous translator), some of the pieces 
collected in the journal are now being individually published in English 
translation by Semiotext(e), a publisher whose long and colorful history 
of importing rambunctious French theorists into the United States lends 
just the right air of notoriety to the new translations of Tiqqun. 
Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is the third of 
Tiqqun’s texts to be translated into English; already available from 
Semiotext(e) are Introduction to Civil War (2010) and This Is Not a 
Program (2011).

The Tiqqun collective regarded itself as the successor to the 
Situationist International, a group of avant-garde European critics of 
commodity capitalism who sought to redefine urban space with their 
utopian-minded radicalism. The SI produced a number of influential texts 
throughout the 1950s and ‘60s; the group’s undeclared leader, Guy 
Debord, would go on to achieve fame as an intellectual catalyst in the 
student movement of 1968. Much of Tiqqun’s writing either quotes or pays 
implicit homage to Debord’s classic Society of the Spectacle (1967). The 
group also adopted Debord’s stylistic posture: a beguilingly hip but 
self-aware prose that is by turns incisive and poetic. Tiqqun is a 
lazier and messier bunch of revolutionaries, slouching into their 
analysis with the same ennui they purport, at times, to criticize. But 
this performativity is deliberate, productive, and rather entertaining — 
Preliminary Materials is an acid social critique composed as a 
constellation of observations and quotations, resulting in a rollicking 
mash-up that cites Marx and Debord alongside women’s magazines, Georg 
Simmel, Pierre Klossowski, Franz Kafka, and the Polish-Argentine writer 
Witold Gombrowicz, among others.

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