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Autism for two

By the Invisible Committee, from The Coming Insurrection, published in August by Semiotext(e). The book, which has been described by French authorities as a “manual for terrorism,” was introduced as evidence in the arrest last year of nine men and women, including its putative author, in Tarnac, France, for “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity” relating to the sabotage of electrical lines on French railways. The so-called Tarnac Nine have since been released but remain under investigation. Translated from the French anonymously.

It would be a waste of time to detail all that is moribund in existing social relations. They say the family is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the family that’s coming back is not the same one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the prevailing separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the doses of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings: the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to give it up. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where “becoming self-sufficient” is a euphemism for “finding a boss.” They want to use the “familiarity” of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, -under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

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SEE ALSO: Families; Handbooks, manuals, etc.; Language; Terrorism; Terrorists; Trials (Terrorism)

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