Summoning the Red Specter presumes an awareness that hope is our principal enemy, and that becoming conscious of a certain affective and social mobilization is much more salient than offering any tactical notes.  "This hopeless resignation is the final word of the great revolution."  So Benjamin reads Blanqui's words in Eternity through the stars, opening the possibility that disenchantment might be the weak, messianic force that filters in through the fissures left after collapse.

This installment of des-bordes reprises the productive urgency that accompanied the journal's launch.  There is an obvious reason for which this edition should have an unpleasant Mexican touch: the zone of disturbance that occupies this country fills disgrace with a certain exuberance.  The conjunction of economic crisis, political confusion, criminal effervescence, historical indecision and modernist conceit has marked 2009 as another symbolic year.  Indeed, in Mexico as in many other countries we have bad years, and then we have worse years.  To an already clumsy iconography of "the Mexican," we now have to add the spectacle of decapitated heads transported in coolers and left in the street; a ghost town where kissing was abolished by law; and the ubiquitous image of faces stoppered up with surgical masks.  From the aggravation of criminal violence to the crisis provoked by the swine flu epidemic, to the imposition of social paralysis in the name of public hygienic, to economic crisis and unemployment, to whatever is left to come...

Sovereignty's most recent transformation into the force of biopower resulted in the contamination of our bodies: by means of fear, and through a discursive construction of sickness that imposes itself on life, attempting to contain any trace of outbreak, excess, chaos.  Under the virological state of exception, fear of the invisible prevails.  If such testimony is worth anything, being in Mexico in the spring of 2009 meant regarding others as if they were rabid dogs, or treading the streets as if they were filled with corpses.  We have all been pestilent, at least for a few weeks.  Rather than accept the logic of fear, we shall assume here the task of thinking through contagion.

Contagion (from the Latin contagio, contingere: com- "with" and targo "touch") is transmission by way of direct or indirect contact.  We dedicate this edition of des-bordes to precisely this activation of invisible threats and to the pandemic of a laughing machine directed at ideas and sensations.  The materials we have gathered here are distinguished by their intrinsic impossibility, by their incommensurability – distinguished, that is, for marking a profound, occluded structure that manifests itself as repetition, as compulsion, as the indelible trace of a libidinal economy that, in a double movement, both limits and overflows the social and the political.  This double structure obeys a chain of discursive displacements that we would like to make evident, without obscuring the fact that their emergence entails acts of violence in the epistemological field: the movement between biopower and necropower would thus mark the transition (both as conceptual breach and as material abyss) between homogeneity and heterogeneity.

If the function of science is precisely to establish the homogeneity of the phenomenal field, we are interested in the antidote (or pharmakon) provided by a counter-methodology.  We are interested in the description of an inexplicable difference.  Radically, we assume that those who uphold the barricade here are ghosts: "Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses" (Victor Hugo, Les miserables).  As George Bataille signaled, the implications of such a project are, despite their variety, all clearly recognizable as opposed to the "psychic structure of fascism;" that is, to a purist idealism.  If we refer to the effervescence of the social as a kind of revolt, it is out of a desire to exercise an insurgency that is wary of a humanity intoxicated with illusions of grandeur and enslaved to the myth of progress.  Confronted with a vanishing future, what intrigues us is the possibility of dissociating the notion of revolution from any concept of progress.  What unifies (and overflows) the constellation we offer here is the impurity of excess, non-business, consumption, unproductive expenditure; and the recognition that history is entropic.

Here we expose the uneasiness that primitive machines of war – sacrificial, criminal, anxious and baroque – provoke in us, insofar as they are the expression of an inexplicable difference that confronts the binary pair of instrumentality and accumulation.  Thus, if we call on examples and interventions from contemporary art, it is because, contrary to the usual reservations and qualifications, we believe that many of its expressions are sensitive to the category of the in-cur(at)able.  On the one hand, the practices of contemporary art treat the illness that has no cure.  On the other, they overflow the curatorial structure of control, even though they may well require the curator's touch to ascertain that they do not deal in bureaucratic mechanisms of control.

Beneath the rotation of signs, reality eternalized as ruin, as labyrinth.