Imaginary dialogues on anarchy and freedom

What is anarchy for you? Anarchy is not an end point, but it is the rushing wind that always pushes us ever forward, says Louise Michel. It is a flame, a fever that consumes you, adds Emma Goldman. It is the struggle against all forms of domination, certainly, but also against our submission, says Judith Malina. Anarchy is this and many other things. As evidenced by these nine imaginary - yet entirely reliable - dialogues that tie together different eras, reflections and sensibilities, all of which are united by “an exaggerated idea of freedom.”

If there is a black thread that gives coherence to the fruitful plurality of these testimonies, scattered in time and space, it is undoubtedly the conviction that anarchy is not so much an abstract idea as a concrete practice that is embodied in those who live it. Thought and action are thus one and the same, as precisely stated by these nine builders of utopia, each in his or her own way and nonetheless all participants in a choral narrative. A tale that draws its own particular geography: Mikhail Bakunin's internationalist Ischia and Pyotr Kropotkin's London of exiles; the rebellious France of Sébastien Faure and Louise Michel, and the Mitteleuropa of two refined intellectuals like German Gustav Landauer and Austrian Otto Gross, tempered by the unbridled irreverence of Zurich's Café DAda; and finally the New York of immigrants, often Jews, the city of Red Emma, but also of Paul Goodman and Judith Malina... A polyphony, now assonant now dissonant, whose voices come distinctly down to us to tell us - live - the many ways of embodying and living anarchy.