<nettime> Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan: David Graeber

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/05/david-graeber-1961-2020

Isabelle Frémeaux and John Jordan

Dear David,

It’s midnight. Tears come and go like tides. Last night under the full
moon, you passed away suddenly and left this world that you have been so
much part of transforming for the better. In the library on the ZAD
(Zone à Défendre, Zone to Defend)—built where the French state wanted to
put an airport, in the shadow of an illegal lighthouse erected on the
site of a planned control tower—there are eight books on special
display. One of them is the French edition of your Bullshit Jobs.

The library is crammed with books about anarchism, occupation movements,
the Paris Commune, utopias, territorial and peasant struggles.
Strangely, next to the display copy of your book there was a half-empty
shelf: the only half-empty shelf in the library. That shelf seemed to be
the place to mark your senseless passing, with just enough space to make
a small shrine to your memory, your friendship, your brilliance and
quirkiness.

We adorned it with candles, flowers from the meadow where they wanted to
put the runway, a paving stone from an old barricade from the
forty-five-year-long struggle here, and a photo of you smiling and
looking up to your left into the air, as if calling the spirits of
joyful rebellion to your side. If we followed your gaze, up from the
photo across the books, it landed on the shelf marked ACAB (All Cops Are
Bastards). You would have laughed your trickster laugh.

Not many libraries have an ACAB shelf, or are built on an occupied
autonomous zone against an airport and its world, which worked with
self-organization without police for six years. You would have loved the
ZAD; it embodied your ideas where direct action became entangled with
everyday life. We had often spoken about you and Nika visiting us,
giving a talk here, spending time together walking through these farms
and wetlands saved from destruction. But life, like revolution, is
always unexpected. You were not to visit these four thousand acres which
politicians once called the territory lost to the republic. We still
can’t believe that we have lost you. Tonight we shot a firework toward
the moon for you.

One of the first anarchist thinkers, William Godwin, wrote that old
books are the bodies of ghosts. Your books are not old, yet already
ghosts’ bodies—bodies that will continue to inspire so many in these
dark times where we needed your radical imagination more than ever. In
2018, we were working on a book to support the ZAD after the evictions
following the victory against the airport. We asked you to write the
preface. Via telegram from the Rojava border you replied, saying you
could not write because you were smuggling drones into the Autonomous
region, which gave us all so much hope about living without the state.
“Ghostwrite the preface,” you wrote, which was a terrifying honor, and
which JJ did, trying desperately to channel you like a kind of distant
medium. It speaks volumes about how open and humble you were. You joked
afterward that you should get comrades to ghostwrite you more often to
give you time to learn the guitar.

The last time we hung out with you and Nika, we were running from
teargas in the streets of Paris on the biggest day of action of the
Yellow Vests uprising, when Macron was ready to evacuate the Elysée
Palace by helicopter (which, sadly, he never did). You were one of those
rare intellectuals whose acts and forms of life corresponded with your
ideas, who took risks in thought and deed, and whose words had such a
clarity about them that they opened doors to radicalism to so many. You
once wrote to Isa that one of your rules was to “be kind to your
reader.” We miss that kindness already much too much. We will always
love you, as a body and as a ghost. ■

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