Hostis Journal
PDF, For Printing & For Reading Helge Peters and Johannes Büttner’s “Peak Panik” afford one an encounter, through a collection of works of performance art, with the question of subjective life in the context of ongoing crises – whether economic, political, existential, or environmental. Through the intersection between aesthetics and politics; and their mutual production […]
AN INFERNAL COUPLE: PRIVILEGE THEORY & INSURRECTIONALISM My title adapts a formulation from Miriame Kaba’s recent photo exhibition in Chicago, No Selves to Defend, which documents the legal disqualification in the US of Black women’s bodies from the right of self-defense, from case of Celia the slave in the mid-19th century to Marissa Alexander in […]
There are rules, conventions, pieces of paper, technological innovations that organise the existent according to the needs of production and social management developed by the ruling Power. There are moments when all this is too suffocating for those who want to blow up this huge prison. Then you need other spaces, abilities and a different […]
The images in this volume are a collaboration with people who, like myself, have had the experience of being surveilled by the police or the state. Strangers and accomplices were invited to “take a photo that reveals absolutely nothing about you” and contribute that image to a growing archive. This prompt is intentionally useless – […]
Gone are the days when they could cynically joke, in the Anti-Terrorist Sub-Directorate: “There are more people making a living from terrorism than there are dying from it.” Gone, too, the days when anti-terrorism à la française, or rather, à la Bruguière,* dripped with self-satisfaction in the pages of the magazines. Didn’t its prize formula, […]
“What we have undertaken must not be confused with anything else and cannot be limited to the expression of certain ideas or even less to what is rightly considered art. It is necessary to produce and to eat: many things are necessary that are still nothing, and so it is with political agitation. Who imagines, […]
Mary and Friends, We were delighted to receive your reply. Vengeance is at the top of our list. We want nothing short of complete revenge against the patriarchs who brought us into the terrible world, full retribution for all of the humiliating rituals of society, and the total satisfaction of seeing our enemies defeated. You inspire […]
Hostis, We read your cruel little journal in a single sitting, deriving a great deal of enjoyment from the sandpaper-bound pages. While the journal generated much discussion in our private reading of it, we’d like to decrypt a few points to share with you at this time. In particular, we’d like to address your engagement […]
1. The politics that seduces us is not ethical, it is cruel. We contrast the politics of cruelty to the politics of ethics. Ethics goes all the way back to the Greeks, whose ethics was the study of ‘the good life.’ Our interests do not lie in being better than our enemies. There is only […]