The Invisible Committee

Pre­sen­tation by MIT Press

A call to arms by a group of French intel­lec­tuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance.

Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unem­ployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy… We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it. The Coming Insur­rection is an elo­quent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social con­tes­tation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Com­mittee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with com­pa­rable elegance—it has been pro­claimed a manual for ter­rorism by the French gov­ernment (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more ade­quately described the group as “the name given to a col­lective voice bent on denouncing con­tem­porary cyn­icism and reality.” The Coming Insur­rection is a strategic pre­scription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live com­munism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and pre­saging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insur­rection artic­u­lates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resis­tance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immi­gration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of ’77 in Italy, its pre­ferred his­torical ref­erence point, The Coming Insur­rection for­mu­lates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sab­otage, the refusal to work, and the elab­o­ration of col­lective, self-organized life forms. It is a philo­sophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, pol­itics, and life are sep­arate realms.