"Freezing the Movement:
Posthumous Notes on Nuclear War" (1983)
George Caffentzis
Preface (2003)
I found the following set of “posthumous notes” recently while I was cleaning up a closet. They were written, on the basis of memory and textual evidence, in the spring of 1983, right before I left the US to live and teach in Nigeria. Some of the material in these notes went into a couple of articles that were published then. One was in the "Posthumous Notes" (1983) issue of Midnight Notes and the other was in a piece entitled “The Marxist Theory of War” in the Radical Science Journal issue on the anti-nuclear war movement (1983). But they have since been unread and untroubled. My rediscovery of these notes puts them and me in a tight logical spot. I was supposed to have been dead (and reborn) according to these notes…but I clearly am neither. So their circulation now immediately falsifies them. Self-negating or not, I am hoping that these notes from the dead might be of use to the living at a time when nuclear war is again on the agenda. Anyway, please receive these notes as a gift on the Day of the Dead. -- November 2, 2003
A Lamentation
Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people and go from here! for they be all adulterers, and assembly of treacherous men. -- Jeremiah, Lamentations 9:2
"The existence of the bomb paralyzes us. Our only motion a gigantic leap backward in what we take to be the minimal conditions of our existence whereby all desires, demands, struggles vanish; only our biological existence appears a valid cause. Don't kill us, exterminate us, burn us alive, make us witness the more most horrid spectacle the mind can imagine (?????), lived thousands of times in our fears watching the 7:00 News, reading the "scientific medical reports." Please let us live, that's all we ask, forget what this life will be like, forget about our now seemingly utopian dreams..."
But isn't this declaring we're already dead? Isn't this admitting the explosion has already worked, that we've already been blown to pieces hundreds of times when, of all our needs and struggles, only the will to survive remains? Worse yet. Isn't this declaration a most dangerous path? For when only people on their knees confront the powers that be, these powers feel godlike and justified, not restrained by the fear that should they dare so much, whoever of us will be left will make life impossible for them as well.