On DB’s post re: difficulties, I want to say right out that I really like the move here: lacks become difficulties, and are given–even if they are lent–a certain kind of positive, practical existence. I could not agree more, though perhaps more importantly, I think that it is precisely via the concept of difficulty that we have to come to terms with the realities of just what we are talking about: to speak of commmunism today walks a fine line of falling into the worst–which is to say, debilitating, if not downright deluding–kind of transendence. To say that communism already exists seems so ridiculous–shouldn’t we know better!? Look around us! Even the most banal observations can disprove such a claim: existence, most of the time and in so many ways, simply tells us otherwise. This is not the world we want, and it is profoundly not ours.

Adorno said: impossible to live rightly in a wrong world. I say (with thanks to DB): not impossible, but difficult, fucking dificult. Profoundly so. I think this is what excites me–and certainly challenges me–in the imbrication between communism and ethics. In other words, not how to simply begin, but to (re)ask Lenin’s question: what is to be done? To DB’s Blanchot I would add, or maybe even counter, a quote from one of his most important readers, Jean-Luc Nancy. As Nancy says, to ask Lenin’s question today simply and urgently means: “how to make a world to make a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor still entirely to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” Put differently, the stakes are alway purely and importantly practical. I think I have an affinity with DB’s habit–or maybe, to be more fair to his posts, at least the proclivity–to separate the empirical or practical from the conceptual. Of course, conceptualization is a practice, and already so. Additionallly, it is different than what we usually think and categorize as the empirical or practical, and that’s not a bad thing. Creating concepts and creating a world have overlaps, but aren’t always the same. This isn’t a bad thing. (I would refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s _What is Philosophy_ in this regard, a very moving communist text written in the face of the “first” Gulf War). To say otherwise ends up recycling that most reprehensible–though also, by now, most tiring and boring–bourgeois dictum “communism was great in theory, but in practice….” Of course,this notion is true–but for all the wrong reasons that people ever utter such a statement–usually as a profoundly counter-revolutionary justification of representative democracy, multinational capitalism, and the present in its most general (that is to say, violent, constricting, and banally evil) terms. Obviously, the primacy of the State-form in such statements reveals a not-so-secret submission to its overdeterming logic: communism thought by virtue of the State is no communism of ours. To these people,we say “If nothing else, read Marx on the Jewish Question and leave us alone!” (Here, I promise more on this issue, esp. apropos of Mark Grief’s recent article in n+1 magazine, which should be supported and can be found at nplusonemag.com).

With all this said, does this relegate communism to an experience, an epxerience which is all too fleeting and transitory? Much has been written on communist time–but can we cite (or at least imagine, which is to say, image) communism’s being-in-extension? Do we have examples? Do we even need or want them? I’d invite suggestions of all types–I think is a worthy project to try to not just assert a communism of the everyday, existent world which we create, but to name, cite and compile those instances, moments, and settings when and in which communism unfolds–think of it as both a reminder and inspiration, but also a way in which the experiences of communism become commmunicable. The citation of Blancot on writing, then, has already started this project.