Tiqqun
The journal came to wider attention following the Tarnac Nine arrests of 2008, a police operation which detained nine people on suspicion of having conspired on recent sabotage of French electrical train lines.
The arrested were accused of having written The Coming Insurrection, a political tract credited to The Invisible Committee, a distinct anonymous group named in the journal.
Individual articles present diagnoses of specific aspects of modern society, drawing on ideas from continental philosophy, anthropology, and history.
Due to their philosophical influences, political content and historical context, the Tiqqun articles have received some attention in humanities scholarship and anarchist reading circles.
According to the authors, the coordination of states and private businesses gives rise to modern capitalist society (Empire), which entails "commodity domination"[16] of social interactions, supplanting authentic human community.
[20] The philosophers Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes and Martin Heidegger are described respectively as "that moron",[21] "that piece of shit"[22] and "swine",[23] due to the authors' disagreements with their views.
The Italian sociologist Antonio Negri is also frequently the subject of harsh criticism, due to his involvement in activism which the authors feel is too conciliatory to existing capitalist society.
The frontispiece is a detail of Portrait Cover with Grotesques [it], an Italian Renaissance painting of uncertain origin, commonly attributed to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.
[28][29] According to the authors, critical metaphysics is an irrepressable, anti-capitalist way of perceiving reality, which consumer culture, modernity and analytic philosophy have failed to eliminate.
Beginning with a quotation from the James Joyce novel Ulysses,[38] Theory of Bloom[k] describes a phenomenon in which people become alienated from each other as a consequence of living in capitalist society.
[47][l] Phenomenology of Everyday Life is a brief piece in which the narrator describes an "absurd" interaction with a bakery clerk, where each is expected to play the economic roles of customer and vendor.
[51] Against these, "agents" of the Imaginary Party commit acts which are pathologized by the society as antisocial and irrational, including rioting and mass shootings.
The authors describe modern society as a series of control mechanisms, or apparatuses; examples include highways, store security, and turnstiles.
The authors describe the Man of the Old Regime as a specific type of Bloom whose critique of society is impotent; they also attribute several negative traits to the archetype, including false consciousness.
[95] In the original issue the article was followed by You're Never Too Old to Ditch Out, a small piece which encouraged older people to withdraw from mainstream society and instead seek authentic community with others, as opposed to isolation.
The established Left consisted of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), labor unions and worker's movements, while a more radical faction—the Autonomists—rejected organizational hierarchy and work itself.
In the context of anarchist movements, the authors describe the Imaginary Party as a "plane of consistency" where individuals who seek to subvert modern society can find each other and form alliances.
[100] Referring to the issue's subtitle, the authors seek to inhabit "zones of offensive opacity"—akin to no-go zones—as points from which to begin an assault on modern capitalist society.
Final Warning to the Imaginary Party is a sarcastic list of articles concerning the proper use of public space—for leisure and consumption as opposed to protest or "abnormal behavior"—written from the point of view of governments and businesses.
[113] In 2004, the postscript to an Italian edition of Theory of Bloom announced the forthcoming publication of Call (Appel), an anonymous tract which proposed secession from mainstream capitalist society.
[116] Tiqqun came to wider attention in the English-speaking world through its association with the Invisible Committee, whose book The Coming Insurrection was denounced (and thereby popularized) by the American conservative commentator Glenn Beck following the Tarnac Nine arrests.
[117] Due to its popularization following the arrests, the journal's articles have received attention in humanities scholarship and anarchist reading circles, generating a body of critical literature.
Jason E. Smith detailed the history of civil unrest in 1970s Italy, providing historical background for Tiqqun's subject matter in This is Not a Program.
[120][u] Andrew Culp discussed Michel Foucault's studies on war, politics and insurrection as precursors of Tiqqun's martial discourse; he also described the Invisible Committee as a group which splintered from the personnel involved with creating the journal.
According to Johanson, both collectives are suspicious of people suffering from serious illness or disabilities because their status renders them dependent on—and necessarily complicit with—the society sustaining their lives, which the authors seek to subvert.
[127][128] Catherine Driscoll noted that the device of the "Young-Girl" does not suggest the authors' dissatisfaction with society from a woman's point of view, but was instead chosen as one subordinate facet of a larger political philosophical project.
[131] Others instead focused on works by the Invisible Committee (though mentioning Tiqqun in passing), arguing that the former group marketed its books as fashionable consumer products following the Tarnac Nine arrests, contrary to their purported anti-capitalist views.
Pedro José Mariblanca Corrales treated Tiqqun's concept of Bloom by way of the journal's vocabulary (see the below glossary), elaborating the latter to explain the social causes giving rise to the former.
[134] Alden Wood wrote a series of academic articles collected in a single volume, exploring aspects of the two group's writings by reading them together with others.
[135] Wood compared the groups' use of musical metaphor with the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, their invocations of nihilism with George Bataille, and detailed the influence of Heidegger on Tiqqun's project, noted by others.
