Land and Freedom, Degree Zero

Le comité de soutien aux ivraies respecte les herbes sauvages, les herbes de la steppe immense sous le ciel, les herbes de la prairie immmense, les herbes des hauts plateaux immenses sous le ciel, les herbes de la toundra.—Communiqué du comité de soutien aux ivraies, “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples.” 

Some of the shaggås in Manuela Draeger’s collection of shaggås, Herbes et golems, liberate the steppe by naming the wild grasses of the steppe and the tundra and the prairie in a non-hierarchical, non-Linneaen way, “dans une langue accessible et populaire qui sans concession s’oppose au latin de l’ennemi, au latin des églises de l’ennemi, des dictionnaries agricoles de l’ennemi.” A fictive polemical commentary on the “Shaggå de la révolte des humbles simples” points out that the the poetic list of wild grasses opposes not only settlers and their attendant agricultural-civilizational transformations of the earth, not only the agronomic and scientific knowledge of grasses that will lead to their increasingly efficient despoliation, but the committee’s poetry is even opposed, if more mildly, to the nomad’s minimal cultivation, and finally to the entire ungulate-and-human system that first dominated the Earth. The committee is thus against both the nomos of the Earth (in Carl Schmitt’s sense: enclosure, partition, rule) and against Deleuzo-Guttarian nomadic distribution (of featherless bipeds, anyway).

Land and freedom without possession; land and freedom beyond anthropic interests.