In The Wild Beyond, their introduction to The Undercommons, writer Jack Halberstam sketches fugitivity as “not only escape, 'exit' […] or ‘exodus'," but also as "being that is being separate from settling." To be fugitive is to move to movement, feel to keep feeling. To be fugitive is to be in and with the unsettling, logically un-logistical movement that is being alive and changing against what determines, controls, sur-veils, ships and expects.

Less shapeful, however, is the role of insurgency within the fugue. What is the fugitive’s relationship to rise, maturity, or more generally, intensification and increase? Fugitivity needs no hope, wants no kingdom—and yet to be fugitive is also, always to be shaped and eventually kept by, held against rule and measure. A delicate dialectic of resistance is at play here: fugitivity’s unyoking nature is a condition shaped by the very systems it resists, never entirely free from the structures it evades. As Harney and Moten suggest, the greatest danger to this delicate balance may lie not in dispossession itself, but in the recourse to self-possession—the impulse to frame resistance as a form of political closure, always aimed at a regulatory and self-governing end. Under what conditions, then, can the fugitive also be insurgent?
Would these conditions be otherwise, were fugitive life to go entirely undetected?
And what is it, then, who are we?
Would/should we care to know?

A Bright Darkness is a seminar—an open and recurrent meeting space and time set to texts, sounds and images—where we may keep approaching these questions by thinking through a somewhat unorthodox view of intimacy. Spinning off the work of writer Liu Cixin, we may feel the world to be a ‘dark forest’ whose undetectable meadows are intimacy: the modular kernel of reality in which we meet one another again and again, each and any encounter ultimately raw. Is every such hidden and intimate place the inevitable seedbed of war, like the hotel room Sarah Kane presents us with in Blasted? Or, on the contrary, does the undetectability and modularity of our intimacy actually offer fugitivity a chance to take root? What other playfulness is here? What, then, may be of our more fugitive energy, if it could be shared and maintained undetected?

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​seminar reader (.pdf, 22MB)

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#1: Berlin, Wednesday 26th February 2025, 6pm

participants: Gabriela Acha, Luca Borkowsky, Clemente Ciarrocca, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief, Suzanne Quesney, Alan Smart, Nan Xi

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