
from Autonomies by Tomas Ibañez
BOAB Bologna Anarchist Bookfair September 5, 6, and 7, 2025
After many years of interruption of the major anarchist book fairs in Italy, such as the one that was periodically organized in Florence with its debates and book exhibitions, some comrades in Bologna, with the support of other cities, such as firstly Milan, took the risk of organising a new initiative whose results were uncertain. This initiative, which took shape on September 5, 6, and 7, exceeded expectations and was a success in many ways: the number of book and magazine stands (more than 30), the number of people who attended, the friendly atmosphere in a large semi-self-managed park, the large attendance at the outdoor debates (more than 200 people listening and some participating)… This event has also generated enthusiasm to repeat the experience…
The following text reflects Tomás Ibañez’s contribution to the debate with Francesco Codello and Salvo Vacacaro on “Changing the world here and now. Libertarian influence in the contemporary world.”
Unlike certain ideologies that boast of being robust and free of contradictions, anarchism does not hesitate to admit that it is contradictory, fragile, and imperfect. It is indeed the awareness of its imperfection that accounts for its lack of dogmatism and its capacity for self-criticism.
One of the main contradictions of anarchism lies, in my view, in the incompatibility between two elements that are essential to defining it, but whose necessary coexistence traps it in a situation that is literally dilemmatic.
On the one hand, there is the ethical demand to not generate effects of domination in its struggle against the latter, as this would then become the antithesis of what it claims to be.
To describe the fact of being devoid of effects of domination, I resort to the neologism indominant [indominante]; anarchism must be “indominant”.[1]
On the other hand, there is the fact that anarchism cannot abandon a series of characteristics that have historically constituted it as what it is. For example, it cannot renounce its utopian dimension, nor can it renounce pursuing emancipatory projects, undertaking pre-figurative actions, orienting struggles according to its principles, or building spaces in accordance with its own values. In short, it cannot renounce a whole series of elements that are consubstantial with it, but which nevertheless prevent it from being indominant.
There is no tertium quid, and we must recognize that anarchism is trapped in a kind of constitutive aporia: either it is indominant in order to be consistent with its own values, but then it must sacrifice much of what constitutes it. Or it renounces being indominant in order to preserve the essence of anarchism, but then it betrays what constitutes a sine qua non condition of its own existence.
This contradiction lies at the heart of anarchism, and if we eliminate it, anarchism disappears with it, since only one of its two facets remains, and it turns out that, taken separately, neither of them corresponds to anarchism as we know it.
Amedeo Bertolo wrote, long ago, that anarchism in its pure state was like a drink that was too alcoholic to be enjoyed without provoking a certain revulsion, so that, in order to make it easier to assimilate, its alcohol content had to be reduced a little. Similarly, in order to become pleasant, attractive, and even enthusiastic, indominant anarchism must accept not being completely so.
That said, while it is fairly easy to explain the ethical exigency of indomination. It is much more difficult to understand why a number of attributes characteristic of anarchism, which it could not abandon without denying itself, are often laden with effects of domination.
To narrow down these effects, we must take a brief historical look at the arche and anarche of Greek philosophy.
By translating arche as the presence and exercise of power, and its opposite anarche, or anarchy, as the absence of power, it was forgotten that arche was a combination of power and principles inducing effects of power, described as first or foundational principles. So its antonym, anarche, anarchy, was certainly the absence of power, but also the absence of foundational principles.
The rectification of this oversight outlines an anarchist thought that I think it appropriate to describe as “non-foundational anarchism”, which allows us to understand why the most common, and often most attractive, components of anarchism contradict the demand for indomination.
In fact, it turns out that the principles reside in the abstract sphere of theory and that it is from there, above practices, that they can guide and direct them.
Certainly, anarchism rejects the idea that theory should dictate the paths of practice, and questions whether the latter should meekly submit to its dictates. In fact, anarchism has always valorised practices, considering that the elements they produce feed into and modify the theoretical sphere and then reverberate from theory back into practices, modifying them in turn.
That said, non-foundational anarchism goes a step further by reinforcing the decisive importance of practices and, under the term “practical a priori”, emphasizes the primacy that anarchism must grant to practice in order to be truly indominant.
Why? Because when anarche, anarchy, is emptied of power, but also of the power-inducing principles that belong to arche, its practices are deprived of the light of theory to guide them and can be based on nothing but themselves.
Does this mean that anarchist struggles against domination must lack principles? No, not at all, but only those principles that are forged within the struggles themselves are recognised as legitimate, those that are inherent to specific situations and are not projected onto antagonistic practices from theories external to the situation.
But be careful, not obeying principles does not mean venturing blindly into life ignoring all principles; it only implies that the only principles that are assumed are those that emanate from what the practices themselves create and develop in each situation and each particular struggle.
Far from being transcendent, universal, immutable, and absolute, these principles can only be contingent and immanent to socially and historically situated practices.
It seems to me that the example of autonomy allows us to better understand the reasons why departing from the practical a priori necessarily induces effects of domination.
Indeed, respect for autonomy implies rejecting any attempt to inject, from outside the struggles, theoretical elements such as, for example, the principles that should guide them, the forms they should take, and the objectives they should pursue. All of this must arise from within the struggles themselves, without anything from outside guiding or directing them, since autonomy can only be achieved through its own exercise, which disqualifies from the outset any intervention external to the autonomous process, revealing, in passing, the inanity and freedom-destroying nature of all vanguardism.
That said, non-foundational anarchism not only implies the absence of guiding principles residing in the lofty sphere of theory, but also implies the absence of pre-established goals whose realization would guide practices.
In fact, it is a matter of proceeding without the authority of principles, but also in the absence of telos [ends]. That is, without subordinating practices to the requirement of achieving certain objectives defined from outside those practices.
When non-foundational anarchism considers that practices should not be guided by the desire to achieve certain objectives, it does not question the fact that they must be propositional, since they are actions motivated by intentions, which distinguishes them from simple behavioural automatisms.
It merely maintains that the pursuit of a pre-established goal should not be the driving force behind the development of a practice, but rather that the practice should elaborate its goal during its own development, depending on the ever-contingent circumstances that arise in each specific situation.
So, are their objectives to be achieved? Yes, of course, but they are not defined in general terms, outside of specific and unique situations, nor on a level other than that of the very practice itself in the course of its development.
To give an example of what the absence of telos means, we can consider anarchism as a tool for doing things; such things as, for example, deconstructing inherited evidence, attacking the mechanisms of domination, building spaces and relationships without hierarchies and, more generally, to anarchise the world as much as possible.
However, it is not a question of anarchising the world as a response to a project, formulating it as a goal to be achieved, but rather as an effect, as a consequence of the development of anarchist practices that are ends in themselves. These are not developed with the aim of anarchising the world, but rather they effectively anarchise it as a result of their own development in their confrontations with domination.
In short, it is a question of anarchising the world and not of ensuring the victory of anarchism; it is a question of putting into practice practices that are anarchising in themselves. For example, it is by building horizontal networks of free association that the world is changed, but these networks are not created to change the world, but because they carry within themselves the values of a new world, alien to the arche.
To anarchise the world, to change it in an anarchist sense, one must not seek to change it by establishing a roadmap to push it in that direction, but simply to do things that have as one of their effects to change it, but which, being provoked as a reaction against domination, find their own purpose and value in themselves, rather than being placed in the objective to be achieved.[2]
This undoubtedly evokes Max Stirner when he argued that we should not aspire to institute a new world through a revolutionary project and process, but rather to deploy permanent insurrection against the world as it exists, resisting domination and developing destituente practices in the face of institutions.
Instead of the revolution driven by the will, or by the project, to bring about a social transformation that overthrows the political institution and replaces it with another, permanent insurrection limits itself to not accepting it, rebelling against existing oppression, not in the name of a goal to be achieved, but simply because it considers it unacceptable.
In fact, developing practices of resistance is already to change the world, even if that is not the goal pursued. Resistance is immediately transformative in itself, without needing to be backed by a project of transformation.
Of course, for the moment, the constitutive aporia of anarchism cannot be dissolved; one can only continue to maintain the tension between the ethical demand for non-domination and the conditions for its effective insertion into the present reality.
However, this will remain stagnant until we decide to boldly explore the metaphorical equivalent of the dark side of the moon, that is, the side that remains in the shadow and is constituted by the radical demand for indomination. We will not be able to move forward until we decide to walk the path of the necessary, yet impossible, indomination within current anarchism.
Overcoming this aporia requires seeking new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting that break the seams of anarchism.
Provided that the new type of totalitarianism that is rapidly taking hold throughout the world does not prevent it, it is very possible, I would even say very probable, that in the not too distant future a tool will be created that is truly and completely indominant.
But it will no longer be anarchism, it will be something else. Something else that, like anarchism, will oppose all forms of domination and create spaces and relationships free from domination, but which, having overcome the internal contradiction of anarchism, that is, its constitutive aporia between, on the one hand, the inalienable demand for indominance and, on the other hand, the inevitable transgression of that demand in the course of its own process, will necessarily be different from it.
Notes
[1] Translator’s Note: We will follow the author in the use of this neologism out of respect for his own intentions, but also to avoid falling into the use of the word “indomitable”, which does not share the same meaning with the word “indominant”. Catherine Malabou, in two recent essays (Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy [2022], Polity, 2024 and Il n’y a pas eu de Révolution, Bibliothèque Rivages, 2024), has elaborated a distinction between “ingouvernable” and “non-gouvernable”, with the latter concept finding resonance in Ibáñez’s “indomitable”.
“The non-governable [non-gouvernable] is not the ungovernable [ingouvernable]. The ungovernable refers to something that is out of control, like a vehicle that cannot be driven. In terms of morals and politics, it evokes a lack of discipline and disobedience, insubordination. The ungovernable is, and remains, nothing but the opposite of the governable. It resists and opposes what it assumes, namely, the priority of government. By contrast, non-governability refers neither to a lack of discipline, nor to errancy. And it does not refer to disobedience; rather, it refers to that which remains radically foreign to commanding and obeying in both individuals and communities.
“The non-governable is neither the opposite, nor a contradiction, of the logic of government. It is other. The other to (not of) government. The mark of its impossibility. The anarchist critique of government is not, in fact, a bias. It is not based on the idea that governing is “bad” but rather that governing is not possible. This impossibility is inscribed differently in the real, as a network with connections that are at once ontological, psychical, practical, artistic, and biological. Its landscapes are not those of a state of nature, nor of a space of uncontrolled outbursts of passion. Nor can they be summarized as a cartography of resistance. They correspond to regions of being and psyche that governing can neither reach or manage.
“Faced with the ungovernable, with revolts, protests, and civil disobedience, there are two ways for a government to respond: either by negotiating and perhaps consenting to a change of politics, or with repression. In this sense, the ungovernable is that which can be either heard or dominated.
“By contrast, the non-governable can only be dominated. The only way to treat it is not to negotiate with it, either by actively ignoring it, or by oppressing it, crushing it, even putting it to death. But governing it is definitively impossible since, to repeat, it is the mark of the impossibility and failure of all government.”
Catherine Malabou, Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy, pp. 23-4.
[2] Translator’s Note: In reading Ibáñez here, we could not avoid making connections to an earlier essay by Giorgio Agamben entitled “Notes on Gesture” (Means without End; Notes on Politics [1996], University of Minnesota Press, 2000), an essay which takes us perhaps to a more radical ontological departure from the logic of means and ends.
“What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human. But in what way is an action endured and supported? In what way does a res become a res gesta, that is, in what way does a simple fact become an event? ‘The Varronian distinction between facere and agere is derived, in the end, from Aristotle. In a famous passage of the Nicomachean Ethics, he opposes the two terms as follows: “For production [poiesis] has an end other than .itself, but action [praxis] does not: good action is itself an end” (VI 1140b). ‘What is new in Varro is the identification of a third type of action alongside the other two: if producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.
“Nothing is more misleading for an understanding of gesture, therefore, than representing, on the one hand, a sphere of means as addressing a goal (for example, marching seen as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and, on the other hand, a separate and superior sphere of gesture as a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as an aesthetic dimension). Finality without means is just as alienating as mediality that has meaning only with respect to an end. If dance is gesture, it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. But, just as in a pornographic film, people caught in the act of performing a gesture that is simply a means addressed to the end of giving pleasure to others (or to themselves) are kept suspended in and by their own mediality – for the only reason of being shot and exhibited in their mediality – and can become the medium of a new pleasure for the audience (a pleasure that would otherwise be incomprehensible); or, just as in the case of the mime, when gestures addressed to the m.ost familiar ends are exhibited as such and are thus kept suspended “entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir” [between desire and fulfilment, perpetration and its recollection] -in what Mallarme calls a milieu pur, so what is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality.
“It is only in this way that the obscure Kantian expression “purposiveness without purpose” acquires a concrete meaning. Such a finality in the realm of means is that power of the gesture that interrupts the gesture in its very being-n1eans and only in this way can exhibit it, thereby transforming a res into a res gesta. In the same way, if we understand the “word” as the means of communication, then to show a word does not mean to have at one’s disposal a higher level (a metalanguage, itself incommunicable within the first level), starting from which we could make that word an object of communication; it means, rather, to expose the word in its own mediality, in its own being a means, without any transcendence. The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However, because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak. From this point derives not only the proximity between gesture and philosophy, but also the one between philosophy and cinema. Cinema’s essential “silence” (which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a sound track) is, just like the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of the mystic as the appearing of what cannot be said is literally a definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag exhibiting language itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic loss of memory, as an incurable speech defect. Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.
“… Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.”
Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in Means without End; Notes on Politics [1996], University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 56-59.
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