Body without Organs
Inspired by Frantz Fanon, Gustavo Guiteirrez, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Identity is authoritarian and imposed by powerful systems as a form of control. There can be no rednecks, Black women, trans men, or anything else. These identities only exist in the past because as soon as I say that I am a redneck, the redneck has already been crucified and resurrected. To say one is an identity is to impose the past onto the present and the future. This system must be destroyed.
Gender was invented to subjugate women, Blackness was invented to subjugate Africans, citizenship was invented to subjugate the masses. All borders are violent.
Liberation theology teaches us that the powerful must give up their power in order for reconcilitation to happen, but this is impossible since giving one’s power to another merely makes that person the powerful, who subjugate the powerless not because of moral failing, but because of the distorting nature of power itself. The instinct that power is unetical and immoral is correct, but the solution only reinforces systems of power because the solution is fundamentally individualistic and not systemic.
Both the oppressed and the oppressor must be crucified and resurrected as a new human being always in the process of discovering the present and future, without forgetting the past (because we will need to celebrate how far we’ve come.” Yet, this new death and resurrection happens every minute of every hour of every day. The most fundamental dialectic of the all life is the dialectic of life and death and every day in order to become this new human, more like Christ, we must die and live.
Practice death, practice life, practice resurrection.