I owe you a word

»Revolution starts with reading and writing. Revolution starts with theater and public talks. With debating and sharing. Revolution starts with friendship«. 

Xenia — from the Greek ξενία, the ancient concept of guest-friendship, of ritualized hospitality, the moral and political obligation to welcome the stranger. Every time someone calls my name, they are, without knowing it, invoking an ethics and reciprocity. A gift economy older than the nation-state.

In the autumn of 2024, I arrived in Athens after a series of life-changing events. The city smelled of exhaust. I had moved there alone, partly for reasons I could explain and partly for the older, less articulable reason that one sometimes needs to become a stranger in order to stop being one in the wrong place. But what I hadn't anticipated was that loneliness is not a geography. You carry it with you and moving cities does not dissolve the unwanted; at best, it makes the loneliness more honest — strips it of the camouflage that familiarity provides.

This was not my first time in Athens. I was here already in 2017, during the documenta 14, when the Parliament of Bodies convened not in a parliamentary chamber but in a former military police headquarters at Parko Eleftherias. The building had been the site of detention and torture during the military junta between 1967 and 1974. But in 2017 it was a space for "exercises of freedom" — for artists, activists, migrants, workers, theorists to come together and invent new forms of public life. The Parliament had no ministers. It had no agenda in the bureaucratic sense. It had instead a set of Open Form Societies constituted by unrepresented bodies.

I keep returning to that phrase: unrepresented bodies. Bodies that had arrived, as the curator Paul B. Preciado wrote, from "the long summer of migration in Europe, which revealed the simultaneous failure not only of modern representative democratic institutions but also of ethical practices of hospitality." The Parliament was a response not only to austerity but to a deeper bankruptcy — the bankruptcy of xenia itself, of the ancient obligation to receive the stranger. 

What does it mean that the word for hospitality became a proper name? That I carry it as an identity, that I am, in some sense, named after a moral demand?

*

In 1787, eleven friends founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London. They wrote pamphlets, organized lectures, commissioned prints. They were organized as societies of friends — the form itself was a statement, since friendship, in the Aristotelian tradition, was understood as a relationship between equals who chose each other freely. To extend friendship across the legal boundary between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised was already a political act. La Société des Amis des Noirs followed in France the following year. Both societies understood that revolution begins with forms of relation, with the invention of new bonds between those who are not supposed to share the same space.

I think about this when I think about loneliness. Not the loneliness of being without company — that is simply solitude, and solitude can be rich — but the loneliness of the Apatride, the stateless. Hannah Arendt, who personally knew something about this, understood friendship not as a private comfort but as a political practice — what she called die Anerkennung der Andersartigkeit des oder der Anderen. Not tolerance (which is still a form of condescension), but recognition. The friend as someone whose difference you hold as irreducible, whose perspective on the shared world you need precisely because it is not your own. For Arendt, the political realm only becomes possible when distinct people agree to share it without erasing what distinguishes them. The crisis she diagnosed was not merely that of totalitarianism but of superfluousness — the condition of the person whom no one has thought to include in the human covenant.

Simone Weil, on the other hand, wrote of friendship as a balancing act between nearness and distance — the capacity to be genuinely present to another without absorbing them, or erasing the precious space between. The true friend, for her, is the one who says: I do not need you to become me in order to love you. This is harder than it sounds because it requires the ability to live with ambiguity, with the person who remains finally unknowable even as you know them well. Weil was suspicious of the warmth of collectives, the pull of shared belonging — what she considered a kind of enracinement gone wrong, a rootedness that becomes enclosure. 

In this sense, Jacques Derrida offered what he called the friendliest of love declarations: Je te laisse, je le veux ainsi. I let you go; I want it this way. Friendship as the willingness to let the other be, to resist the temptation to fix them in place. To hold without grasping. It is possible that the Greek concept of xenia understood something close to this — hospitality not as possession of the guest but as their temporary unconditional sheltering, after which both host and traveler depart changed, and neither owes the other continuation.

What I did not know, arriving in Athens for the second time was whether this kind of friendship — demanding, asymmetric, politically serious — was something I was still capable of offering, or receiving.

Athens taught me something I am still processing.

The city in 2017 was full of informal solidarities — kitchens that fed people who had arrived from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, not as charity but as something more like the xenia of antiquity, the mutual recognition of need. I saw it operating in squares and on sidewalks. None of it was organized by the state. Some of it was organized by neighbors who did not share a language. The recognition was prior to the word: a body offers food to another body, and the transaction is complete, and complete without paperwork.

In 2024, I found those kitchens mostly gone. The squares I remembered had been cleared, redirected, beautified in the neoliberal idiom of the refurbished. The murals in Exarcheia were partially painted over; new ones had appeared in their place, bolder and more desperate. The city had been through another cycle of what the economists called recovery, which had recovered nothing for the people I was looking for. The tourist infrastructure had expanded magnificently. 

Jean-Luc Godard once observed, with his characteristic combination of wit and fury, that the Greek debt crisis could be resolved in days if Europe simply paid Greece for every word it had borrowed. Democracy. Politics. Philosophy. Economy. The entire vocabulary of the European project is Greek. The continent had spent centuries drawing on Athens' conceptual inheritance while, in the decade after 2008, dismantling the living city in the name of austerity. The Parthenon sculptures sit in London without asking to be there. The interest on that particular debt has never been calculated.

And xenia? Who owes whom for that?

I have paid my name forward into every country I have lived in. I have been the stranger who required hospitality, and I have tried to offer it in return, though I know that the obligation runs deeper than individual gesture. What the Code d'Athènes — that curious 1965 ethics code for public relations professionals, ratified in this same city — proposed as a set of professional obligations now reads to me less like professional ethics and more like a description of what friendship would have to be if it were serious: the obligation to promote genuine dialogue, to ensure both sides can speak and be heard, to act in ways that preserve the dignity of the other person. Not to use communication to bypass judgment. Not to treat the other as a means.

The gap between that codified ideal and any actual conversation, any actual morning in a city that smells of exhaust and centuries of borrowed vocabulary, is a city I left again, but can't stop thinking about. What interests me now is whether friendship, in its most demanding form, is still a revolutionary act. Whether the societies of friends who gathered in converted junta headquarters, who published pamphlets and offered food without documentation required, were doing something more than surviving. Whether they were genuinely inventing new forms of subjectivity. New ways of being a body in the world that do not require to be categorized, supervised in order to be received.

Revolution starts with friendship. 

I am still learning what this means. I suspect it begins with the willingness to be, for someone, a place of arrival — not a home, not a fixed address, but a temporary shelter in which the other remains entirely themselves. 

Zimmerreisen um 1945

The rooms were small and close and furnished as if in a newly purchased suburban house. In the kitchen were many aluminum utensils, and in the hallway hung gymnastic rings for exercise. The bed was covered in ice-blue satin, and in the nearly empty wardrobes were stacked padded boxes that had probably once held stockings and veils. Crockery and paper lay scattered across the floor, as in all houses that have been looted. Those who had been there had no idea whose house they had searched for food and wine. Yet the portraits of Hitler with tender dedications to Eva were plainly visible, and the stationery was printed with full name and address: at Wasserburgerstraße 12 stood Eva Braun's stucco villa, one of many in that modern quarter of Munich.

What Lee Miller found there was not the lair of power but its underside: the private rooms of a woman who had spent twelve years waiting in them. The aluminum utensils, the gymnastic rings, the ice-blue satin — these are the furnishings of a life arranged around the interior, around the cultivation of the body in the absence of the person for whom it was cultivated. The Damenzimmer in its most extreme form. Padded boxes for stockings and veils — garments of occasion, garments of ceremony, garments waiting to be worn. 

What a looted room records is not only the violence of looting but the strangeness of the life interrupted: the evidence that someone had organized things here, had lived inside a set of assumptions about the future that the future then refused.

Like all German writing desks, Eva Braun's was fully equipped with paper clips, pens, blotting paper, rulers, new pencils, and stacks of letter-paper (cf. ibid. 2015: 244). The full desk is its own kind of document. It speaks of an intention to correspond, to produce, to leave a mark — and the almost total absence of what such a desk is meant to generate. What has survived are not letters but merely a few diary entries, held today in the National Archives in Washington. Braun began writing on February 6, 1935, her twenty-third birthday, and continued sporadically until May 28, 1935, when the last entry breaks off in the middle of a page.

A diary that breaks off in the middle of a sentence is an archive of incompletion. It does not conclude; it simply stops. And what stops with it is the attempt to make the waiting legible — to herself, perhaps, or to some imagined future reader who would understand what it had cost. The handwritten pages that remain are disturbingly narrow in their preoccupations: a lovesick teenager with a tendency toward narcissism, melodrama, and an ever-deepening obsession with Hitler. "I am so endlessly happy that he loves me so, and I pray it will always remain so" (February 18, 1935) — a few weeks later, he broke a promised meeting, and she was again utterly wretched. She began to wish she were gravely ill, for then perhaps he would pay her some attention.

The obscenity of this juxtaposition requires no commentary, and yet it demands one. While Eva Braun wished herself ill in order to be noticed, Hitler was building Germany's Luftwaffe and a submarine fleet, both violations of the Versailles Treaty. He was also promulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship rights. These preoccupations Eva Braun found tiresome and incomprehensible, unable to understand why they demanded so much of his time. For three months Hitler had barely spoken a word to her, and she did nothing but wait in desperation:

"Is this the mad love he has assured me of so many times, when he gives me not a kind word for 3 months. Granted he has had his head full of political problems in this time, but isn't there a relaxation now?"

The political problems she names and dismisses in the same breath — the machinery of genocide referred to as a scheduling inconvenience. This is not naivety in any simple sense. It is something more disturbing: the absolute enclosure of subjectivity within the private, within the waiting room of the self, such that the systematic murder of millions remains, in the diary, a matter of competing for attention. The room with its aluminum utensils and padded boxes is also this: a space in which the political has been successfully expelled, or rather never admitted. A space designed for waiting, and for nothing else.

The long-desired wish to "rise" through marriage would fulfill itself for Eva Braun only after a long season of longing. By then the Third Reich had already collapsed and stood on the verge of capitulation, and on April 30, 1945, the day after the wedding, she went into death alongside Adolf Hitler. The marriage lasted less than forty hours. The waiting lasted twelve years.

“Well then, Hitler was dead. For me he had never really been alive until now. All these years he had been an evil machine-monster — until I saw the places he had made famous, talked to people who had known him, tracked down the backstairs gossip, and ate and slept in his house. He became less grand there and therefore all the more horrible; there were also a few hints that he had some almost human habits, almost like an ape that embarrasses you with its gestures, yes, shames you, because it holds up a distorted mirror. You think: it could have caught you too” (Miller 2015: 229).

For a long time the war correspondent and photographic artist Lee Miller, who wrote these lines, had speculated about where she would be when the time came to celebrate the end of the war. On the first of May 1945, when Hitler's death was announced, she found herself in his Munich apartment, washing the dust of the concentration camps from her body in his bathtub — camps she had moved through with her Rolleiflex to document the incomprehensible as completely as possible.

The photograph Miller's colleague David Scherman took of her in that bathtub has become iconic in ways that still sit uneasily. Miller, naked, composed, washing herself clean, while on the floor beside the tub sits a muddy boot that has walked through Dachau, and on the ledge above the taps, propped against the wall, a small portrait of Hitler watches. The image has been read as transgression, as desecration, as dark humor, as testimony. It is all of these, and it is also something harder to name: a document of the impossibility of cleaning oneself of what one has seen. The water is running but the boot stays dirty. She is in the room of the monster and the monster is still there, watching. The body that moves through history cannot step out of it simply by stepping into a bath.

The concentration camp at Dachau had everything one would ever hear about a camp, or refuse to hear. The great dusty expanses, for instance, trampled by a thousand damned feet: "feet that ached and shuffled and stamped away cold and moved to relieve the pain and finally only served to lead them to the death chamber" (Miller 2015: 230). As with almost every camp system, no complete count of victims exists. In total, the Holocaust resulted in the murder of up to six million Jews, seven million Soviet civilians, nearly two million non-Jewish Poles, two hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, and more.

The numbers accumulate and resist accumulation. They are the opposite of the diary entries: where Braun's pages narrow and narrow toward a single point of private feeling, the statistics of the Holocaust expand beyond what any single consciousness can hold. Miller's photographs attempt something between these two failures of language — neither the enclosure of the diary nor the abstraction of the statistic, but the specific, unignorable face of the singular case. The foot in the mud. 

"After the liberation, the corpses were cleared away and those who looked as if they might fall dead at any moment were in hospitals. All had already had one or two meals and felt ill in accordance with their shrunken stomachs and their feelings" (cf. ibid. 2015: 202f.).

The body as archive. Shrunken stomachs, hair fallen out, skin over bone — the body that has been made to record what was done to it, whether or not words are ever found. Miller photographed these bodies too, and Vogue published the photographs, to the editors' visible discomfort. The images did not fit the magazine's logic of consumption and desire. They exceeded it. They were meant to.

The more Lee Miller saw of what the Nazis had done, the more outraged she became at a people that denied all guilt and shared responsibility for the catastrophe. Many contemporaries — accomplices and fellow-travelers, opportunists and the indifferent — simply had difficulty accepting that the war was over; the proportion of those who regarded National Socialism as a good idea badly implemented stood at 50 percent at the end of 1945 and at 55 percent by 1947, reaching 68 percent among those under thirty-six (cf. Bittermann 2015: 263). Hitler's Reich, with its hypertrophied national pride and its racist delusion, had been crushed:

“Yet nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and terror less felt, and nowhere is less said about it, than in Germany. One notices everywhere that there is no reaction to what has happened, but it is difficult to say whether this is some deliberate refusal to mourn or the expression of a genuine incapacity for feeling. Among the ruins the Germans are sending one another postcards of the churches and market squares, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they move through the rubble finds its exact correspondence in the fact that no one mourns the dead; it is mirrored in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst. This general lack of feeling — or at any rate the evident heartlessness, which is sometimes masked by cheap sentimentality — is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and occasionally brutal refusal to face and come to terms with what actually happened” (ibid. 2015: 266f., cited after Arendt, A Visit to Germany, 1950).

Hannah Arendt and Lee Miller arrived at the same observation by different routes — Arendt through the systematic thinking of the political philosopher, Miller through the camera's enforced proximity to the thing itself. What Arendt calls the refusal to mourn, Miller experienced as a kind of violence directed against her own seeing: she had looked, and the looking had cost her something, and then she was surrounded by people who had not looked, would not look, and expected her to accept their not-looking as normal. The Verdrängung — the repression, the displacement — was not passive. It was organized. It had a social architecture as deliberate as the Damenzimmer with its padded boxes.

This hypocritical peace was for Lee Miller like a shock. She could not bear that the Nazis were soon again respectable citizens, and she could not bear that her articles accomplished so little — as if they had been written in invisible ink and thrown to the wind. Her photographs Lee Miller stored in nothing more than shoeboxes in the attic of an English country house, where they outlasted the years until her death in 1977 — hardly waiting, one might say, but without any doubt ripening: they belong today to the most significant photographic works of the twentieth century.

The shoeboxes on the attic floor. The stacked padded boxes in Eva Braun's wardrobe. The diary that breaks off mid-sentence. The photographs that were not published, or published once and then forgotten, or published and disbelieved. The archive of the twentieth century is full of things that had to wait — not patiently, not willingly, but simply because the world was not yet ready to receive them. Whether it is ready now is a question the shoeboxes do not answer. They only establish that the images survived. What we do with that survival is, as always, still open.

 

What the hand knows: Über Trance, Zeichnen und die Kunst des Überschreitens

There is a drawing by Horst Janssen — Die alte Siemers, 1962 — in which a face seems to arrive and then dissolve in the same moment. The lines do not outline; they accumulate. They flicker. You look for the portrait and find instead a vibrating web, a nervous surface that keeps collapsing back into itself. It is as if the hand refused to fix what the eye perceived — as if the drawing enacted a condition of in-between rather than a moment of capture. I have been thinking about this image for weeks now, alongside a question that does not resolve easily: what does it mean to think through the hand? And what does the hand know that the mind, in its ordinary waking state, cannot?

The word trance comes from the Latin transire — to cross over, to pass beyond. A threshold word. It designates what happens when ordinary waking consciousness — that self-monitoring, self-narrating apparatus — temporarily recedes, and something else takes its place. Not irrationality. Not absence. Something more like intensified presence: a state in which perception, action, and thought collapse into one another, and the boundaries of the self become permeable.

This is, neurologically speaking, what happens when the so-called Default Mode Network — the neural system responsible for self-referential thinking, for the constant murmur of inner narration — powers down. The French composer and researcher Corine Sombrun, who spent fifteen years learning Mongolian-shamanic trance and studying it in collaboration with neuroscientists, describes what she calls an inner technology of the body: the capacity, which she argues is latent in every human being, to induce such states without chemical assistance. During trance, she reports, time recedes, pain recedes, the senses sharpen, and the self undergoes transformation. 

What strikes me in Sombrun's account is the phrase inner technology. It resists the exoticization that usually accompanies talk of trance — the shamanic drum, the substance, the faraway ritual. It insists on something structural, something trainable, something already present in the body, waiting for the right conditions.

Janssen's drawing, I want to argue, creates those conditions on paper.

*

I came to the connection between trance and artistic practice through a different route — through film, and through Maya Deren.

Deren is a figure who appears at several of the crossings I seem to keep encountering: between ethnography and art, between the body and the camera, between documentation and enactment. In the 1940s, she made experimental films — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), At Land (1944), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) — that were concerned, above all, with the perception of time and the permeable boundary of the self. They do not tell stories; they perform states. A woman walks through a landscape that keeps folding back on itself. The cut is not narrative; it is psychological.

In 1947, Deren traveled to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She studied Vodou over several years, participated in ceremonies, filmed rituals, and reflected theoretically on the relationship between art, the body, and ecstasy. Her planned film on Haitian trance — Divine Horsemen — was published only posthumously, in 1985. She did not finish it. Perhaps because the thing she was filming refused to be finished, refused to be fixed.

Deren understood trance not as an exotic religious phenomenon but as an aesthetic practice: a threshold between movement, spiritual permeability, and cinematic form. The body, in her thinking, is a medium for an energy that both exceeds and permeates the individual. The loa — the Vodou spirits — do not inhabit the believer from outside; they arise from within, through the rhythm of the drum, the movement of the dance, the repetition that takes the self out of itself. The body becomes a cheval, a horse. The rider is not quite oneself, and not quite other.

This is, I think, structurally cognate with what happens when Janssen draws. Not because Janssen is invoking spirits — but because the mechanism of surrender is similar: the relinquishing of the planning, narrating, self-monitoring mind, and the allowing of another kind of intelligence to move the hand.

*

The surrealists had their own version of this. André Masson drew with his eyes closed, attempting to silence the mind through literal blindness — not metaphorical darkness but the real deprivation of the visual as regulator. Joan Miró and Roberto Matta developed practices of automatic mark-making in which the line was understood as the trace of the unconscious rather than the inscription of conscious intention. Their aim: to get the critical, reflective apparatus out of the way, and to discover what the body already knew.

Earlier were Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz — artists whose spiritual drawing methods treated the hand not as a tool of will but as a channel. Kunz drew in meditative states with a pendulum that functioned, she believed, as a translator of invisible forces. The geometry she produced is uncanny: enormous sheets of paper covered in colored webs, spiraling structures, grids that seem to pulse. The question of whether the pendulum works — whether it accesses something real or is merely a device for inducing the right internal state — may be less important than the recognition that the device is necessary. Something has to trick the mind into stepping back.

Cy Twombly called it letting the hand think. This formulation interests me because of its grammatical peculiarity: not thinking with the hand, which would place the mind still in charge, but letting the hand think, which is a gesture of abdication. The artist as the one who gets out of the way.

And what remains when the artist gets out of the way? The line. The trace. The evidence of a body that was present, moving, in a state of heightened absorption — what psychologists call flow, what artists call trance, what neuroscientists describe as a temporary deactivation of self-referential processing. These are not the same thing, and I do not want to flatten the differences. But they share a structure: the temporary dissolution of the boundary between the one who makes and the thing being made.

In Art Brut — in Augustin Lesage, in Adolf Wölfli — trance-drawing becomes something still more extreme. These are artists who did not experience themselves as creators at all, but as instruments. Lesage, a coalminer who began drawing in his forties after voices told him to, produced enormous, meticulous canvases covered in symmetrical, jewel-like structures. He could not have planned them; they accumulated, session by session, under a direction he attributed to the spirit world. Wölfli, from his room in the Waldau psychiatric clinic in Bern, produced thousands of pages of densely interwoven drawing and text, described by Jean Dubuffet as one of the most extraordinary works of art he had ever encountered. The obsessive repetition, the refusal of the white margin, the structures that recall both mandala and musical score — these are characteristics not of a planning mind but of a mind that has found its rhythm and will not stop.

Sombrun's research suggests that what Lesage and Wölfli experienced as external direction may have been something neurologically specific: the DMN offline, the censoring self absent, and the hand following a logic that belongs to deeper or other layers of processing. This does not reduce the experience. It locates it.

*

Janssen's drawings arise from what he himself described as states of intense absorption: obsessive, serial, driven. His portraits and self-portraits in particular — those nervous accretions of line, those faces that keep dissolving and reconstituting — carry a quality that I can only call psychic density. They are not representations of a person but topographies of an encounter: between the hand and the surface, between the conscious mind and whatever moves beneath it.

Die alte Siemers is this encounter made visible. The face is there and not there. The lines search, tangle, overlap. They do not arrive at a definitive outline because the process they enact — the process of seeing, remembering, inscribing — is never definitively complete. The drawing is a record of a state, not a record of a face. A Stimmungsbild in the most precise sense: a mood-image, an image of inner weather.

Deren wanted to do something similar with film — to place the medium itself in a state of trance, to transform the cut and the frame into a rhythmic organism that makes experience palpable rather than legible. She did not quite succeed, or perhaps she succeeded in ways she could not recognize. Divine Horsemen was finished only after her death, from the footage she left behind. The film exists as an assemblage of materials that outlived the intention that produced them — which is itself a kind of trance logic, a logic in which what is made exceeds what is planned.

*

I keep returning to the question of what the hand knows. Not in a mystical sense — or not only in a mystical sense — but in the sense that Sombrun means when she speaks of inner technology: an intelligence that is distributed through the body, that processes in parallel with the narrating mind, that sometimes knows before the mind does.

Rancière writes about the partage du sensible — the distribution of the sensible, the division of what can be seen, heard, said, felt, within a given order of experience. What drawing in a trance-adjacent state might do is temporarily reorganize this distribution: making the hand more sensitive, the eye less controlling, the mark more responsive to what is actually there rather than to what the mind expected to find. A redistribution of perception.

Whether this is what happens when Janssen draws, I cannot know. But the drawings propose it. They are, in the fullest sense, evidence of a practice — not of representation, but of encounter. Each line a flicker. Each session a crossing.

What would it mean to look at drawing this way — not as the record of what was seen, but as the trace of a particular state of being in the world? And what would it mean to practice drawing as Sombrun practices trance: as a trainable, bodily technology for reaching a different quality of attention?

These are questions I am still inside. The paper remains vibrating.

 

Siberian experiences: Historiography from the steppe

The combination of inner readiness and inaction is exhausting and difficult to bear. "Waiting is perceived as inner tension, meaningless idleness, formless boredom, an exercise of power, and a loss of precious time — rarely as a welcome postponement or a productive pause." Yet we are not powerless in the passivity of waiting.

I keep returning to a photograph I never took. It exists only as a residue of memory: a summer afternoon in the apartment my family shared in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, before we migrated. I stepped outside for a moment and looked into the steppe. It was one of those views that offers no horizon in the usual sense — the land simply continued, flat and unhurried, until it became sky. The steppe does not invite you to move through it; it invites you to remain. To be still inside your own looking. I was too young then to have a name for what that stillness produced in me, but I know now that it was something like waiting — not for anything in particular, but as a condition, a posture of the body and the mind that the landscape seemed to require.

That posture is what I think of now when I read about Siberia. About the waiting that happens at the edges of history — at its deliberate margins, where the light is oblique and the clocks may not be running.

Typologically speaking, there are many forms of waiting: forced waiting, vegetative waiting, impatient waiting, enduring and dulled waiting, and, finally, peripheral waiting — the waiting that accumulates in marginalized regions subject to deliberate erasure. This last form interests me most, because it is the kind that historiography has consistently refused to record. It is the waiting that leaves no archive.

This can also be seen in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1840), where he briefly mentions Siberia — only to explain why he will not say another word about it. Immediately beforehand, he had discussed the exclusion of Africa in exhaustive detail, revealing how historiography since Hegel has been tied to exclusion, division, fragmentation, and repression. The logic is almost too clean: reason admits only what it has already decided to see. Everything else is silence, and the silence is the argument.

One can imagine Dostoevsky's astonishment when, in Siberian exile, he came across Hegel's lines — and his despair upon realizing that his suffering carried no significance in Europe. After four years of forced labor, Dostoevsky was sent in the spring of 1854 to Semipalatinsk in Siberia, into a world that exiled him into non-being. Not death. Something more difficult: irrelevance. The historiographical violence of being placed outside time, outside the movement of Weltgeist, is perhaps more corrosive than physical punishment, because it denies even the grammar of protest. You cannot resist erasure from within a category that does not exist.

In contrast to Hegel's appeal to pure reason, the protagonist in Notes from Underground (1864) responds that reason satisfies only reasonable faculties, whereas life itself possesses dimensions that cannot be captured within historiography. The underground man is not irrational — he is excessively rational, rational to the point of self-destruction, precisely because he knows the rules of the system that has excluded him and cannot stop replaying them. What Dostoevsky found in Siberia was the limit of that system. Having stepped out of European historical time — or rather, having been pushed — he transformed his Siberian experiences into Notes from a Dead House (1860), in which he replaced the dead with the exiled. A substitution that is also a theory: the exiled are the living dead of historiography, present but unrecorded, enduring but not progressing.

In this novel, he depicted Siberia as a hell with all its horrors, yet the European repression seemed just as infernal to him — the repression of mysticism, sanctity, suffering, and death itself, all displaced by the ordinary and the average. Bourgeois time, that smooth and uninterrupted forward motion toward improvement, toward the accumulation of reasonable outcomes: this is what exiles the mystical, the transgressive, the suffering body. Siberia became, paradoxically, a space of surplus interiority — a place where the inner life, denied external form, had to become its own architecture.

Ultimately, Dostoevsky was grateful to fate for his exile. He suffered from it, yet at the same time experienced it as redemption:

What happened to my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart during these four years — I will not say. It would take too long. But the constant turning inward, to which I fled from the bitter reality, bore fruit. Now I have many wishes and hopes of which I had previously known nothing.

This is the paradox that waiting, at its most radical, opens: the self that had been organized around outward motion, productivity, historical significance — stripped of all that, discovers it was also organized around something else. Something that does not require the authorization of Hegel, or Europe, or progress.To make waiting one's own in this way allows for radical encounters with oneself and a withdrawal from permanently goal-oriented activity. Waiting, as a moment of pause, of in-between time and as an empty space, is neither pure passive endurance nor manifest progress: "Rather, it gives rise to a paradoxical situation, to a phenomenon of stillness and development at the same time."

*

I think again of that afternoon in Karaganda — itself a city born from a labor camp, the Karlag, where hundreds of thousands were held in conditions not unlike the Siberian exile Dostoevsky described, except without the eventual literary redemption. My family arrived there not as exiles but as deportees, Germans expelled from Ukraine during the Stalin years, deposited in the steppe and told to wait. For permission to leave. For history to turn back around and notice them. They waited decades. The steppe I looked into that summer afternoon was the same steppe that had received them, indifferently, and held them.

What does it mean that I write from that residue — that I carry within me not Hegel's historical subject but the steppe's flat horizon, that particular quality of a landscape that simply continues? Perhaps the peripheral waiting he dismissed and that Dostoevsky survived is not merely the underside of European modernity but its most honest mirror: showing it what it excludes in order to maintain the fiction of its own forward motion.

Or perhaps the waiting itself — the kind that bears fruit without intending to, that turns inward when outward motion is denied — is not a marginal condition at all. Perhaps it is the form that thinking takes when it refuses to be organized by the timelines of power.

What would a historiography look like that began from the steppe, not the archive? From the posture of remaining, not the document of arrival?

 

Archives of Thought

The Austrian-American literary scholar and writer Ruth Klüger, who, as a young girl, was deported with her mother to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau, recounts in her autobiography »Weiter leben. Eine Jugend« (1992) her coming of age as a Jew in Austria and Germany during the time of National Socialism, as well as the conditions of her survival and continued existence. Before she could think about her own weakness during the hours-long roll calls, she spent the seemingly endless time silently reciting poems, thereby creating a poetic counterbalance to the senseless and destructive chaos of her tormentors. Her accumulated wealth of literacy also proved life-saving as a measure of reassurance, for it can be understood as a strategy to maintain a respectful self-concept in a place of dehumanization. To keep her own thinking machine running, Ruth Klüger thus developed thought figures that she preserved in her archive of thoughts, imperceptibly arranging them for outsiders.

Physical archives, too, which store knowledge and documents, initially present themselves as places of locked doors, endless corridors, and anonymous boxes, where the voices of the past merge with the future and only reveal themselves after a certain time. Insights then come forth and coalesce, often through the search process that demands endurance and finesse to bring seemingly unrelated things together and create correspondences. In essence, the researcher also operates according to a similar principle: that of serendipity – a principle of searching and finding where chance comes to aid and surprising discoveries arise because documents suddenly lie next to each other as if on a set table. Aby Warburg speaks in reference to his library of a system of good neighborhood, whereby it is not necessarily the book one was looking for that provides crucial insights, but rather the one that happened to be "accidentally" nearby. However, this accident only occurs when the mind is prepared for it. For this reason, it requires knowledge of the organizing logic of common classifications and a willingness to develop the resulting reference system of the collected and sought after.

Mediating ›Foreign‹ Histories

»Otherwise, of course you can despair.
Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, 
and look around you. What you've got to 
remember is what you're looking at is also you.
Everyone you're looking at is also you.
You could be that person. You could be that 
monster, you could be that cop.
And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be«. 

James Baldwin 

As a writer, essayist, and advocate for overcoming racial barriers, James Baldwin (1924-1987) critically and passionately accompanied the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, dissecting the relationship between the black population and the white majority with passion and sharpness. In his very personal and provocative text The Fire Next Time (1963), which he dedicates to his 15-year-old nephew in the form of a letter and in the style of tender urging, Baldwin invokes a powerful evocation of his past life and explains why one must carry on the legacy of the past. Only someone who knows where they come from, Baldwin says, has no limitations and can go anywhere. Harlem, police violence, and the criminalization of blacks—these are areas where I am a stranger. And despite his inspiring voice, James Baldwin is also a stranger to me. As a friend of murdered African American figures and activists Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin experienced important social and cultural movements of the 20th century, migrated into European exile, and died when I was young and unfamiliar with his work. Although my life is in a different context, I am drawn to Baldwin's style of thought. He always works out the distances between seemingly exclusive positions, seeks differentiations, and does not aim for generalizations. I, too, do not want to attempt to homogenize different historical contexts in my exploration of specific perspectives but rather consider the gaps between them as necessary elements that provide a tool for a thinking that tests the validity of what is believed to be known. 

In an analysis of the concept of foreignness, one must first refer to a paradox, which consists of the fact that foreignness can always only be defined in relation to the ›own‹. While the ›own‹ represents the known and familiar, the ›foreign‹ forms its complementary counterpart. Simplified, the ›foreign‹ then appears as the unknown and excluded, which does not belong to the ›own‹ and also does not correspond to one's own imagination. But who are ›we‹, and what are ›our‹ ideas? The so-called Others serve as reference points and form the necessary contrast foil. They could be socially and economically weak, non-Catholic, or female. They could deviate from heteronormative sexual orientation or come from afar. They could be intellectuals, have different political ideas, and appear either individually or in groups – this list could go on for a long time. Their exclusion ranges from exoticization, stigmatization to exploitation, deportation, and even murder. There are countless documented examples, but I would like to start with my own family history: Marked as ›foreign‹ by Stalinist terror and deported from Ukraine in the interwar period, my German maternal family and my Ukrainian paternal family lived in Kazakhstan and migrated with me to Germany when the Soviet Union collapsed. Another migration led me independently of my family to Austria, where I became a ›stranger‹ again but also learned to draw from my fluid identities. 

Female migrant, German, with the more specific designation Kazakhstan- and Ukraine-German – living in Austria. When I look at Austria, I am just one of many with intertwined cultural backgrounds and references. Therefore, I would like to confirm: I live in a country of migration. What sets Austria apart from classic immigration countries is merely a self-image based very strongly on a perceived stability and homogeneity of the population, which has never existed in this form. Paradoxically, the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (1867-1918) and the associated influx to Vienna are perceived as identity-defining, while the more recent history of immigration in the 1960s through labor migration from Turkey or former Yugoslavia is ignored. In official historiography, issues such as immigration and migration, therefore, have only a low priority, which is also favored by the fact that many members of the majority society still do not expect a differentiated engagement with (national) history but only a confirmation of familiar narratives that do not endanger their national identity. In other words: »The demand for immigrant history among a larger national audience is probably limited as an effect of fairly fixed national identities in Europe. The reader seeks confirmation and reaffirmation of the already known«. How, then, can the history of Austrian society, which is changing through migration, be adequately represented?

A strategy for making migration-specific content visible in collective memory could be to include migration history/histories in the already existing national »master narrative« to create a strong integrative element. Now the memory of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust is an elemental part of Austrian and German state doctrine and contributes to the democratization of society. In this context, I am particularly interested in how this memory can address not only the autochthonous Austrian society but also migrants and their descendants, who have different references to the past of the majority society. How is it possible to uncover the myths brought along and include them in the history-generating space of a memorial site? In order not to fall into clichéd ascriptions and to be able to interpret certain experiences of migrants respectfully, an understanding of the respective individual experiences as well as knowledge of the official narratives of their countries of origin is needed. This approach carries great political weight. Since certain narratives from the present are related to the past, they also reach into a future and establish expectations of how the present should develop. Thus, there is no neutral way to make history because every narrative about the past privileges certain experiences over others. Selections and highlights, therefore, have an elemental significance for the present in which they are made. What does the past, echoing in the present, mean, especially for the mediation of monstrous historical events from the Nazi era in a heterogeneous society where people from various cultures live together and draw from different contexts? Sometimes speaking about violence is violent in itself, and the process of inscription into (national) history always brings with it the danger of essentialization. What sensitivity is therefore needed for language, and how can I, a familiar stranger, act in this context? What relevance would there be, furthermore, in formulating a European memory in which nationality no longer functions as the predominant logic for segregation and discrimination? The quality that could unfold from a post-national memory would, not least, also make it possible to shape new narratives...

Aesthetics of Endurance

»Save all forces for martyrdom«, Marguerite Duras wrote in her diaries and prose notes from the years 1945 and 1946, collected in the book La douleur (1985). The first eighty pages describe the agonizing wait for a sign of survival from her husband, Robert L. — his return as a skeleton from the concentration camp of Dachau, and his slow, tormented recovery. Duras' notes are merciless. They describe the disgust with the repulsively disfigured man. But she also writes that she would have rather died than hear of his death. Ultimately, she admits that it is impossible for her to continue to accept and love the last-minute survivor. And so she ends her notes with another wait — waiting for him to be strong enough to divorce him.

The book was published in 1985. It belongs to the series of literary testimonies of the twentieth century that describe the experiences of the Holocaust from a female perspective, about a time when romantic love became impossible. But what interests me is not only what Duras survived. It is the form that her endurance took — the specific texture of a waiting. 

Duras had forgotten the existence of her diary notebooks. Forgotten the memory of having written these words at all. But she knew that she had written them — this is the strange epistemological condition of the text. Not amnesia exactly, but a dissociation so complete that the writing had become a foreign object, returning from an archive she had not consciously maintained. She knows the passages exist. She does not know how to read them as hers.

There is something here about the nature of writing under extreme endurance that differs from ordinary autobiographical recollection. The body, under conditions of sustained and unresolvable tension, generates its own secretions — and sometimes what flows onto the page is less an act of narration than a form of survival metabolism. The pathos and fear, the worries and doubts that had accumulated simply flowed. As if writing were a form of hemorrhage. As if the body had run out of other vessels.

One wonders where such secretions would go now. Onto a hard drive, surely. But hard drives do not breathe. They do not yellow at the edges or smell of the year they were sealed. The digital archive is promiscuous with everything except degradation — which is to say, it withholds the very evidence of having endured.

*

During the pandemic, he brought the voice of Marguerite Duras into my library. I think she fits well with the voices already present there — Hannah Arendt, Maya Deren, Simone Weil in a corner she barely occupies. In Library Love (2019), Paul Beatriz Preciado writes that every love affair, every one-night stand, leaves a book behind. A trace, a legacy. Something the lover brought to the other that could not be taken back when the leaving happened. Each relationship, even if only utopian, possesses its book. Some relationships leave behind only waiting books — books one is condemned to begin again each time, never arriving at the last page, because the last page would mean the end of waiting, which would mean something had been decided.

The virus left by books changes the aggregate state of thinking itself. The words become more intimate. They may even mutate into a secret language — a code legible only to those who have been inside the same endurance, who have learned that patience is not a virtue but an ecology.

If endless waiting changes the parameters of the social even for the rest of our current lives — if we can engage in excessive forms of digital consumption but must do without physical contact — then what results is a dematerialization of desire. A phenomenal disorder of thinking and feeling. In a culture where the incomprehensibility of visual stimuli, their abundance and acceleration, leads to an indistinguishability of appearance and reality, of the remembered and memory itself, something in identity begins to dissolve. Not catastrophically. More like forgetting a word one has always known — the absence arriving before one notices the loss. And those without love, as Duras understood, are condemned to wait for the rest of their lives.

They say: Whatever happens, one must be able to read. Marguerite Duras and I, we tried to read — but the connection between the sentences could no longer be established. We only suspected that it existed, somewhere, in the architecture of the paragraph, the way one suspects a room behind a wall. The unread lines had degenerated into mere black blocks, kindly protecting us from written parallel worlds and ultimately filling the white paper with a devoid of meaning that was, in its own way, complete.

»If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn't be worth it anymore. [...] But every book, like every writer, has a difficult, unavoidable passage. And one must consciously decide to leave this mistake in the book for it to remain a true book, not a lie.«

I return to this passage not as conclusion but as contradiction. Because Duras also forgot — and yet the book remained. Whatever she had decided at the moment of writing had been made by a self she subsequently could not locate. The decision to leave the mistake, the decision to endure, the decision to wait — these were not made by a unified subject in command of its materials. They were made in the way that waiting is made: in the absence of any alternative, and with the whole body.

This is perhaps what distinguishes an aesthetics of endurance from an aesthetics of mastery. It cannot be designed in advance. It can only be recognized afterward, in the residue — in what the waiting left behind, visible now that it is over, or not yet over, or not yet known to be over.

What would it mean to build a practice from this? Not from what one wants to make, but from what the endurance has already made, whether one intended it or not?

Maps that were never published

Somewhere in Potosí, in the seventeenth century, a man descended into a mountain that would kill him. He carried a candle. The silver he extracted from the Cerro Rico would travel further than he ever would — to Habsburg coffers, to Spanish creditors, to slave traders along the African coast — circulating through a world whose total geography he could not have imagined, financing wars in which he had no stake, enabling purchases of people he would never meet. And yet the mountain kept records of him. The rock strata remembered the labor. What the maps of the time did not show was where he entered, where he fell. I think about this when I look at maps. Not the elegant ones — Humboldt's careful measurements in the Physical Atlas, the clean vectors of contemporary GPS — but the ones that are missing. The gaps. The routes drawn by bodies that cartographers had no interest in tracing.

Humboldt left for Latin America in 1799 in a state of euphoria. He wrote to his brother Wilhelm that he and Bonpland were "running around like fools," overwhelmed by wonders. The semantics of discovery pervade his early letters — that particular European joy of standing before a world apparently not yet organized, not yet legible, awaiting the grid. He was, as Ottmar Ette writes, "at the beginning of a new discourse about the New World," one he would spend decades elaborating into something called knowledge. What Humboldt could not quite see — or chose not to — is that the world he arrived in was already fully mapped by those who lived in it. The Mita laborers of Potosí had their own cartographies of suffering, of descent, of which tunnels collapsed and which held. These maps were never published.

There is a distinction worth dwelling on, between a map that fails to represent and a map that actively works against representation. Humboldt's Physical Atlas was not merely incomplete. It was organized around a gaze — one that converted the plurality of the world into a legible surface for European consumption, arranging mountains, rivers, and peoples into a coherent system in which the observer stood outside and above. The atlas did not simply describe; it produced a world in which some things counted as data and others did not. The labor in the Cerro Rico. The knowledge of the indigenous populations whose routes Humboldt followed. The names already given to the places he named again.

*

We live now in a fully mapped era. Our gestures are recorded: in traffic systems, in the metadata of messages, in the coordinates logged when a boat crosses a sea border that a satellite watches from above. The question is not whether mapping happens but who does it, to whom, and for what purpose. Maps are power — not because they distort reality (though they do, always; no projection is neutral) but because they produce reality, settling into the landscape as if they had always been there. 

What would it mean to make a counter-map? Not simply a corrective — a more accurate representation of what is already there — but a map that changes the question itself, that reveals the mechanisms of the maps it contests. This is different from adding marginalized voices to an existing framework. It means asking who draws, who is drawn, and what kind of world becomes imaginable depending on the answer.

In Buenaventura, on Colombia's Pacific coast, the community of Comuna 6 faced this question not as a theoretical proposition but as a condition of survival. A motorway completed in 2005 cut directly through their neighborhood, fragmenting decades of accumulated social geography — the invisible lines by which a community knows itself, which corners belong to which memory, where the mourning happens and where the celebrations do. In response, they took the archive of Don Temis, a murdered activist who had spent years documenting the life and struggles of his people, and returned it to the streets it described. Lugares de las luchas comunitarias — places of community struggle — appeared on signs throughout the neighborhood, marking sites of conflict, of loss, of continued presence. A mural of Don Temis now lives beneath a footbridge connecting the two halves of what the motorway tried to sever. The map became a bridge became a memory.

What this community understood is something that academic counter-cartography sometimes forgets: that a counter-map derives its force not from its formal ingenuity but from its rootedness in inhabitation. It is made by people who live in what they are mapping. It does not claim objectivity. It claims presence. And presence, in a place structured by erasure, is already an argument.

Which is perhaps why I find myself returning, again and again, to the image of the man in the mountain. Not as a symbol — he was a person, with a name history did not consider worth preserving — but as a reminder of what the grid cannot hold. The rock strata remembered him even when the map did not. There are forms of inscription that precede and survive official cartography. Counter-designs, I want to say, are not only for those who have been cartographically erased. They are for anyone who has learned to look at a map and notice what it is working to conceal — the labor in the mountain, the route through the tunnel, the name given before the renaming.

The question is not whether new maps are possible. It is whether we are willing to let them change what we think we already know.