Month: June 2019

Contr'un

Anarchist History: Maps and Overland Guides

June 8, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
RELATED: “Our Lost Continent” (April, 2015) “Looking Forward—Mapping Our Lost Continent” (April, 2018) “Our Lost Continent: Episodes from an Alternate History of the Anarchist Idea, 1840–1934” (May, 2019) However cautious I might be about some common metaphors, I have to acknowledge that I have shown much less restraint in talking about mapping and in treating the terrain of anarchist history just a bit literally from time to time. The Libertarian Labyrinth name referred very explicitly to the experience of finding myself dropped—really of dropping myself—into the midst of a history, specifically that of the early anarchists in the United States, […]
Bakunin Library

Mikhail Bakunin, “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie” (1878)

June 7, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
The texts presented here are two different French translations of portions of Bakunin’s 1873 work, Государственность и анархия or Statism and Anarchy. Between March 10 and October 21, 1878, a partial translation appeared in L’Avant-garde (Chaux-de Fonds, Switzerland) under the title “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie.” The parallel text includes the corresponding section from the Archives Bakounine edition. The differences in the translations raise a number of interesting questions, particularly regarding the notion of statism (étatisme), which was a relatively new concept in 1878 and may have appeared only once or twice in Bakunin’s French writings. It also seems useful to […]
Contr'un

Anarchist History: The Metaphor of the Main Stream

June 6, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
As tools for historical and cultural understanding, metaphors are obviously in the “use with great care” category and, as often as not, reveal more about our interpretive preconceptions than they do about the material we seek to interpret. But sometimes that’s just what is called for, as what needs to be more closely examined is at least as much the lens through which we are looking as it is the object of our scrutiny.

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Working Translations

E. Armand, “Challenge” (1941)

June 3, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur
Défi Je sais que vous tournez en dérision ceux à qui leurs cheveux blancs n’interdisent pas d’aimer, car je vous connais bien, vous qui prétendez que l’amour n’a qu’un temps, et qui, persiflant, accommoderiez ainsi l’alexandrin du fabuliste : « Passe encor de bâtir, mais aimer à cet âge » s’il était toutefois présent à votre mémoire. Je vous connais bien, mais je ne crains pas de relever le défi ; sournois ou exprimés, vos sarcasmes me laissent indifférent et je ne les redoute pas, car je me sens de la race de ceux qui ont chéri la vie jusqu’à […]