Languages and Peoples Launch with Dabartis
October 19 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm BST
Join members of Dabartis for a launch of their second publication Languages and Peoples—a collaboration with Nieczytelne—it features a multi-language (RU, PL, LT, EN) translation of an essay by philosopher Giorgio Agamben, accompanied by their collectively written response.
The publication evolved out of a conversation on nationalism with comrades across Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark and United Kingdom. It can be seen as an effort to cultivate strategies for our unbelonging to nation-states and the very grammars of modern politics through autonomous linguistic and social practices—practices that hold the potential to subvert and destabilize our vicious entanglement in ever developing configurations of the “People.”
As well as introducing the discussion that surrounds “Languages and Peoples”, the gathering will be an opportunity to introduce friends and comrades in London to the political-publishing initiatives that surround it and from which it has emerged. These are Dabartis in Vilnius and Nieczytelne in Wrocław. Dabartis is an effort to approach the politics of agitational circulation at the level of bodies, print, correspondence and video. It responds to regional histories of statelessness, diaspora, and vagrancy and attempts to make them relevant to the current conflictual, regional and global conjuncture.
The term Dabartis refers to a concept of ‘hereness’ (variously employed as: dabartis, tämänhetkisyys, doikayt, tuteishaść) that was historically employed by an ambiguously heterogeneous population as a practice of resistance to belonging to one or another political order—“we are simply from here”. There is also a tradition of autonomous political publication associated with this sense of Dabartis, through agitational pamphlets that were produced and distributed trans-nationally and trans-linguistically in the late 19th to early 20th century. The present-day Dabartis echoes this radical legacy.