Animus, animut, animul, animis, amirus…
PDF
Reading Imposed PDF
Printing Imposed PDF (Letter, optional color on imposed pages 167 & 171 – we did b&w this edition)
Covers & Spine for Printing (8.5×12”, color)
Inner Cover Blurb for Printing
Paperback, ~ 5.5″ x 8.5″ x 1.15″, 446 pages
Limited amount of physical copies available, email reekingthickets@proton.me to check availability and get yours – $5 (just to cover part of the cost of materials) plus shipping if not local (book weighs ~2lb). Intended for spreading learning and as reappraisal/theoretical collage, not profit. If you’re a reading group or bookstore, infoshop, author, think you can get it into a prison, etc., inquire about possibly reduced cost or free books! A first foray into small-scale bookmaking, this initial edition is unfortunately quite rough, with some edges trimmed on a slant, too-small margins (they’ve since been increased in the printing PDF), some occasional slightly faded text or misprints not significantly preventing legibility, a too stiff cover, and the possibility of some toner rubbing off over time.
Authorization for included authors’ work (credited, mainly excerpted, with some labeled editorial comments) not sought. Anti-copyright for editor’s contributions (including an introduction, compiled timeline of the anarchist propaganda of the deed era, a very brief overview of the Bonnot gang’s activities and international illegalist dispersions of that period, a historical outline of the origins of contemporary insurrectionary anarchism focusing on Italy and a timeline of some contemporary insurrectionary attacks, and a preface to two of the included sections on gender in historical Lenape/Delaware and colonial contexts) – if you want to print, bind, or distribute it yourself, I have no objection!
Despite the brief included section on an attack on a vaccination centre, this is not intended as a conspiracist ‘anti-vax’ or COVID-denialist collection or as support for those positions. The section itself does demonstrate a nuance and independence of thought and position too rare on this and other topics in our millieus, and contains important general reflections on the system’s scapegoating of responsibility and coerced dependence on its ‘solutions’ which are tied into the causes of the problems in the first place. That said, another primary reason for the piece’s inclusion is that in this attack and claim’s context it seems to the editor like a strong cautionary example of a counter-productive action locked into an over-symbolized, alienated frame of resistance and determined by a mechanical, quasi-moralist logic – an endemic kind of pitfall insightfully analyzed in the included ISIW and Tom Nomad sections among others.
This collection brings together mostly already-published, excerpted writings by other authors in anarchy (anti-civilization, queer, insurrectionary, illegalist, and nihilist) and anthropology of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, the North American Eastern Woodlands, Siberia, and Oceania (in the currents around ‘new animism’, Amerindian perspectivism, the so-called ontological turn, and on egalitarian ‘societies against the state’ and the relationships with these and with hierarchy/civilization of gender, magic, ontology, and violence – also as it concerns animals or spirits, predation, on ‘supernatural’ planes, or as a quality or possibility), some history, and a few studies of insurgent strategy. In addition, there are recurring focuses on the origins and concealed qualities of state-like forms, the paradoxes of semiosis as both civilized and anti-civilized, and the complication of relations between ‘opposites’ beyond a simplified dualism or nondualism. Animus is a chaotic, naive attempt at collection and distribution emerging from a historical and personal period spent both adrift and under torque. It’s intended as a broad and efficient introduction to the depths of some particularly incisive or relevant approaches in anarchy and anthropology (the specific varieties share some important influences and perspectives, yet differ on others and appear quite compartmentalized), catalyzing as much magico-insurrectionary rupture and insight as possible, for those both well-versed or unfamiliar. A compulsive, propulsive effort (neither the fruit of this book’s editor or, in its triangulated particularity, that of the authors either) to weave a fabric that might unravel a few of the threads making up our worlds; those instituted as well as those counter-posed.
Though queerness is a main focus throughout, only a relatively small portion of the material directly focuses on explicitly queer sexuality, gender, or experiences as conventionally understood. Instead, it’s queer in the sense that the collection is grounded in and meant to inform and sharpen our lived, mutual relation of hostility with the core structures of gender, sexuality, group and individual identity, morality, sociopolitical organization, semiosis, and indeed ontology/cosmology/metaphysics that underpin civilization’s power.
In engaging with the ‘anthropological’, we aim to use the means provisionally designated under this broadly understood, nebulous field against itself, as its best practitioners (opponents?) often seem to do. This indeed can characterize the approach of both its best from a redemptive reapplication of the practice of trying to better understand, complicate, perceive, relate to, or encounter people and the social and of those from its sinister colonial locus. In both – a differing of mentation and a mentation of the different. We find that two impulses of these kinds often impersonate or appropriate each other but genuinely have radically different, opposing trajectories. Many of the authors seem to imply that stratified institutions, civilized sexual, gender, and ethno-racial regimes, nationalism and oppressive xenophobia, the alienating order of language, and quasi-Cartesian humanism may have emerged or cloaked themselves under the necessarily possible inversion of forms created specifically for their prevention, and continue to be partly powered by these functions persisting in them as a residue, as well as potentially subverted by them. These egalitarian forms still extant in indigenous ‘societies against the state’ include the chiefs whose structural power (not properly their own) exists in them being prevented by everyone else from exercising hierarchy. Localized kinship bands whose version of unity exists to violently ensure broader dis-unity. The many indigenous origin myths of how all beings were once human, unlike the civilized myths of animal descent. Humanity as a bodily (yet agent-ed and not scientifically biological or materialist) way of creating one’s self common to all beings (but only through each kind of being’s view) and resting, always unstably, on the capacity to appropriate other kinds of beings’ hostile, animal otherness through a play of mimetic-empathic, mutually defining, metamorphic, violent contact, without getting lost and oneself becoming appropriated into the ‘humanity’ of the others. A threatening yet all-sustaining given of potential sociality and culture (one conflictual and egalitarian) common throughout the cosmos.
