In our time, death arrives aporetically. Mass death, systemic death, everyday death: these are all routinely shrugged off and disregarded, brushed aside as one of a thousand other insignificant details concerning the workings of the world, carelessly swept away as if the deceased were negligible dust or dirt. Genocides hum as background noise, and borders everywhere double as unmarked communal graves. And yet death is also raised as a weapon, held up as naked evidence of what can easily be done to anyone at any time, as an existential threat intended to terrify, to menace, to intimidate. Snuff videos are regularly uploaded by state-run social media accounts, and people gunned down on the street by masked paramilitaries are presented as illustrations of what can happen if you too fail to expeditiously obey or comply. We are asked to grasp death in general as insignificant, as that which can be enacted and sustained at any scale without so much as a thought, just as we are asked to remain pacified and paralyzed in fear of our own possible death, clinging to our lives only because we feel they can be easily taken away without consequence or justification. Resigning ourselves to this aporia involves nothing less than surrendering to a world where life and death have both been made meaningless, just as it involves living life as an unending submission to the fear that this meaninglessness can be freely brought down upon us too in the form of our own inconsequential and forgettable death.
Standing outside of and against this aporia is the martyr, a figure whose intelligibility arises only as a matter of their death. But a martyr’s death is differentiated from other deaths in our world, and is felt to be so potent and volatile, precisely because it is a form of death within which meaning is still found. When we find meaning in someone’s death—as we have in the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, Heather Heyer and Refaat Alareer, and Brad Will and Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, to insufficiently name only a few—we do so because we also found and continue to find meaning in their lives, and thus also take the end of their lives to be consequential and meaningful, in need of reflection and mourning, remembrance and grieving. This meaning of someone’s death also finds its place within the struggles they took part in, folding additional dimensions into the fight already under way, clarifying not only what was lost but also what remains to be defended and defeated. To find meaning in life and death in this way is to radically break with the meaninglessness which otherwise pervades our world, to depart from the emptiness of this world and to begin to compose the fullness of another.
It is only because we each live a finite life, as singular as it is fragile, that it is possible to find meaning in it. There is weight to everything we do in our lives because our actions cannot be taken back, because each activity we engage in involves not engaging in another, and because we know that we all only have a limited amount of time to live in this world and thus no second of our lives can ever be taken for granted. Each life in this sense always carries death with it, and meaning is what gives shape to how we decide to make use of this impermanent life we each inhabit so long as we continue to live. The way in which we attach ourselves to and struggle for other lives and things in the world, even as we know ourselves to be fragile and finite and know that what we commit ourselves to is equally so, forms the ethical foundation for how we then live. Against the abyss of meaninglessness which lies at the heart of the present world, a meaninglessness within which ever more of life and the Earth itself are rendered abandonable and disposable, there remains in life the infinite potential to find meaning in our finite existence and to live our lives on this basis. It is because each life possesses an ethical capacity to develop its own meaningful relation to itself, to others, and to the world, a capacity which cannot be taken away except in death, that the ethical remains as the unbreakable foundation of each and every struggle, giving shape not only to how we live but also to how we fight for and defend what we find meaningful in our lives, and in this way to help compose worlds that break apart from and break against the present world which everywhere weighs so heavily upon us.
When someone is killed in a struggle and is taken to be a martyr, this compels us to confront the reality that this struggle is a life and death struggle, a struggle which has proven to put those who participate in it at risk of death. But it is also a life and death struggle in a broader sense as it takes as its foundation the very forms of meaning that are found in living and dying. When we commit ourselves to a struggle, we do so only because we feel that something of meaning is under threat and thus requires a struggle to defend its existence. Each struggle thus unfolds as a conflict which aims to care and fight for what has meaning, knowing that if we don’t struggle for them in this way they may not endure nor remain in our lives. Even when we struggle to bring something that does not yet exist into existence, this struggle arises as a cultivation and defense of this possibility against whatever would otherwise extinguish it. Struggles thus can take shape as a struggle for dignity, autonomy, and commonality against a world which deprives our lives of them, just as they can take shape as a struggle for the material conditions which make it possible to not only survive but live meaningful lives which the world otherwise denies to us. The ethical in this way sets the very coordinates of struggle, drawing new battle lines and multiplying skirmishes across territories with each new eruption of meaning.
Just as struggles are founded on the meaning that we find in life, death too arises as meaningful in our lives not only in the sense that it marks the end of a life we found and find meaningful, but also because it clarifies precisely what brought this life to an end, and thus what we must struggle to dismantle and destroy if we remain committed to fighting for and sustaining what we have found to be meaningful. When agents of the state murder someone unapologetically in their car, or when bombs are casually dropped across apartment blocks filled with families, or when poverty causes some to die a premature death in an alley within the brutal cold of winter, we must mourn these losses and live our lives in light of what has been lost, but we must also take these deaths to be meaningful in the way that they expose what presently is organized to eradicate not only what we find meaningful but also the very possibility of having meaning in our lives, and thus expose what must be struggled against and what must ultimately be defeated and totally undone. The meaning found in life and death is thus nothing less than the very basis of our struggles, our way of sharpening our sense of what we must cling to and conflict with. When confronting the present order and all of the meaninglessness and death it spreads in the world, it is the ethical dimension of our lives which allows us to grasp the significance of risking our lives in struggle, to find the courage that is needed to confront what so freely wields death, and ultimately to commit ourselves to a life and death struggle against death.
The ethical is in this way not only the very form through which we dedicate ourselves to preserving and defending finite lives and things, whether that involves caring for the sick, tending to a garden, repairing a building, or freeing someone who has been grabbed by the police at a demonstration, but also is the form through which we struggle to bring an end to what threatens meaning as such, whether that takes shape as the blockading of a migrant detention facility, the sabotaging of a drone factory, the closure of a coal plant, or the pushing of fascist gangs out of a city. Because everything that exists can also cease to exist, meaning is what allows us to cling to parts of what composes our existence, and thus to determine what we want to commit ourselves to, defend, and care for, and alternatively to determine what has reached its end or has become intolerable, and thus what we must move to depart from, let wither, or struggle to destroy. A life which remains ethically capable of finding meaning is quite simply a life which remains capable of deciding for itself what it must fight for and fight against, and which more broadly conceives of life as something which is worth fighting for.
Living an ethical life thus necessitates “learning the art of forming ties and undoing them” such that we remain capable of dedicating ourselves to sustaining and protecting those parts of our existence which we find meaningful, just as we remain capable of dedicating ourselves to dismantling and bringing an end those parts of our existence which threaten what we find meaningful in our lives.1 These ethical ties are what give form to the way we inhabit the world, just as they are of the world, connecting and binding us to what is not simply ourselves, to other lives and to existence itself in all of its variety. As the Invisible Committee makes clear throughout their work, the ethical is precisely where life and struggle are cultivated and find their ground:
When we ethically cling to and fight for something in the world, or alternatively when we ethically refuse and rebel against something else, we thus take part in the composition of an ethical territory within which our lives then unfold, a territory which gives shape to the relation we have with our own lives and to other lives, a territory where we are able to develop both intimacies and hostilities, refuges and battlefields, friends and enemies. The ethical in this sense remains something deeply intimate and personal, unfolding as a capacity we each possess to develop our own relation to ourselves and to our own existence. But the ethical also extends to existence more broadly, allowing us to compose new worlds on the basis of what has meaning and thus what we draw near and struggle for, and what threatens meaning and thus what we push away and struggle against.
In Minneapolis in the present we can see the composition of an ethical territory taking place minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. As various neighbors develop new ties to the places they live, completely remaking their everyday lives so that they can push back against the terror sweeping across their streets, they also find one another, and build trust between one another, and establish new shared methods of inhabiting and defending this space and their lives together. It is in this sense that those who fight back against ICE do not find affinity with one another on the basis of some shared set of abstract values of principles, but rather because they’ve chosen to ethically cling to part of what they share their lives with and what in part composes their world, and in this clinging have begun to live life differently, to live a militant and dedicated life, on this basis. The ethical is thus a means of giving form to our own lives and to one another’s lives, but also of composing the very territory within which our lives unfold within. It is precisely this ethical territory which cannot be so easily repressed, dismantled, dispersed, nor seized, even by agents of the state armed with the most sophisticated weaponry of our time. An ethical territory is in this sense the very basis upon which this immense courage has been able to emerge, upon which this powerful struggle has been able to counter the violence and meaninglessness of the deportation machine.
When Fanon wrote of the Algerian anticolonial revolutionaries known as the fidaï, he was careful to note that they remained committed to life even as they risked their lives, setting them apart from the figure of the terrorist who was drawn principally towards death:
What Fanon makes clear in this distinction is that it is possible to participate in a life and death struggle and yet not succumb to the fear of death nor be seduced by the fantasy of dying, precisely because it is life which is grasped as that which is worth risking one’s own life for. In the context of a truly insurrectionary or revolutionary situation, or in the more sustained project of defending neighborhoods from the ethnic cleansing which is presently being attempted in Minneapolis, one’s own life is risked only as a necessary element of a struggle for the flourishing, dignity, and autonomy of many lives, a struggle which always unfolds to some degree in relation to the horizon of life as whole.
A life and death struggle thus is necessarily one which remains committed to life even as it knowingly risks it, and as a result it consciously tailors its strategic and tactical thought to minimize the risk of death as far as remains possible. To do otherwise would be only to further deprive life of meaning, to understand life as another offering to be burnt, as another resource to be spent, and as a result any attack upon the forces of death must take shape intimately in relation to the necessity of defending life. The reality we must confront is that in a world in which life has been made so thoroughly meaningless and superfluous and has been placed under such immense threat, a world in which simply being present at a demonstration has proven to involve being exposed to the state’s power over death, that the possibility of death is now inseparably part of the terrain of struggle. But in fully recognizing the reality of what presently threatens and looms over life, we also become astutely aware of precisely what we must strive to shelter and defend, as well as what must be abolished and destroyed.
Part of the struggle for life is thus a struggle to refuse the repression of or the romanticization of death. The generalized meaninglessness which pervades life and death is ultimately a means of diminishing and ultimately negating our ethical capacity to develop our own relation to our lives and deaths, and in this way to remain pacified and neutralized regardless of what becomes of them. Death is thus made into something largely unthinkable, as that with which we can have no substantive relation, as a repressed void that structures the present only through its conspicuous absence. Within these waves of meaninglessness, there will always be those who react in a wholly reflexive fashion not by holding onto meaning in life but by taking death itself to be the sole source of meaning, and thus to see death as the only thing of any significance or worth. This reflexive stance embraces death, taking as its foundation an understanding that martyrdom is a horizon that we have no choice but to commit ourselves to. From this vantage point, hurling ourselves towards a meaningful death is the only thing capable of countering a meaningless one. It is easy to understand why such a position arises in our time, that in a world where death has made meaningless people react in a symmetrical fashion by striving to find meaning in it as a weapon that can be picked up against this world. But such a position only contributes to a cult of death premised upon the denial of all of the meaning that can be found in life, a cult which already flourishes everywhere around and is wholly compatible with the present order of the world. A negation which perfectly mirrors an affirmation is, in the end, not a negation at all. We must instead remain committed to finding meaning in death as the end of a life which had meaning, and refuse any position that sees death as an end in itself.
Whenever we hear people proclaim that dying for a struggle is the most radical act, the most worthy gift one can give to a cause, we should always understand this only as another expression of the meaninglessness which has already been imposed upon life and death. In celebrating death as a sacrifice, as seeing life itself as something which must be given up for something greater than life, life itself finds itself without any worth except in its capacity to give itself up and be lost. Breaking with this romanticization of death, a life and death struggle against death instead bases itself on the incalculability of life’s worth, on the basis of an understanding that life has no meaning or value except what we ourselves are able to continuously search for and cling to within it. In this ethical embrace of life, death itself also emerges as an incalculable loss, as a loss we cannot hope to measure, as something which itself must also remain always open to ethical reflection and contemplation. Life and death have been so thoroughly deprived of meaning in our world in a large part on the basis of its calculability, on the basis of life and death being assigned set values within whatever economic or political register, and on this basis making life and death exchangeable and transactable, addable and subtractable. Such calculation is nothing less than a total impoverishment of the meaning of life and death, a way of making sense of their value only for a capitalist society which is premised upon the extinguishment of any other possible meaning. The ethical incalculability of life then, the opacity and singularity of life which preserves its meaning beyond all determination or summation, has the formal capacity to rupture the meaninglessness which otherwise orders our world precisely because it remains incommensurable with it. The ethical is in this way arises as a method of finding meaning in life and then living on that basis, of finding meaning in death as the end of a meaningful life, and ultimately of finding meaning in a life and death struggle in a world which is determined to infect each and every life and death with its meaninglessness.
There were many early Christians who were executed by the Romans for refusing to renounce their religious beliefs, and the etymology of the word ‘martyr’ is linked to the testimony of their faith which they would give in court and refuse to recant. These Christian martyrs possessed a radical commitment to meaning that allowed them to throw their lives against the order of their time, even with the knowledge that such commitments would certainly lead to their death. Saint Ignatius even goaded his Roman captors to not hesitate to feed him to the lions, as he sought martyrdom in the stomach of the “wild beasts, through whom I can reach God.”4 But as these early Christian martyrs held death to be the means of their sacrifice and salvation, they ultimately related to death itself as meaningless, as merely a step on the way towards eternal glory in the kingdom of heaven. The meaning that these martyrs clung to was not of this world, which is why they were so willing to surrender their worldly lives. Precisely as they raced to sacrifice their lives for God, the value of their sacrifice was vacated of all meaning, and life and death themselves were made null in relation to the ultimate and singular value of what was held to be divine. In pursuing the meaning only of an existence beyond finitude, life and death themselves were reduced to material only to be expended and tossed aside. The Christian martyrs thus sought forms of meaning which were premised upon the sacrifice of what makes meaning possible, a sacrifice of life which is where the very ethical capacity to find and cling to meaning in the world resides. Our own struggle for meaning thus must proceed on entirely different grounds, oriented not by something eternal and elsewhere but by what remains fragile and here, in our lives.
As we find ourselves in struggles for life in a world which grows as an ever more comprehensive and developed threat against it, we cannot take the deaths of those who participate in struggle as objects of celebration or worship, but rather should grasp them in their true meaning as immense and incalculable losses to be mourned. We should strive to grieve and feel the pain of these deaths, to each remain capable of experiencing these deaths in part, because this is the very basis upon which we find it necessary to continue engaging in struggle for those who remain living, even as difficult and dangerous as these struggles have proven to be. A life which remains capable of truly feeling the intolerability of this world is a life which remains capable of truly revolting against it, and of finding meaning in the destruction of what extinguishes everything we cling to. It is precisely because our lives remain fragile and can end, and that we nonetheless continue to search for and find meaning in this finite existence, that our lives remain as something worth fighting for. The true meaning of the martyr thus resides in the understanding that death does not destroy meaning, but rather that the radical inseparability of life and death is the very condition that makes it possible to find meaning in life. All of those who now defend their neighborhoods against the militarized thugs of the state, who block ICE vehicles and stand their ground against tear gas and pepper spray, are thus those who have chosen to live their fragile and finite lives in defense of the very ethical territory which gives shape to our lives and ties each of us together. What is meaningful if not all of the dirt and the dust of our lives, if not everything and everyone we cling to in the present even as we know that everything and everyone remains vulnerable and in the end transient? Against the meaninglessness of this world, there is the incalculable weight of what can be lost and what has already been lost, just as there is the fragile and finite singularity of this life and of all of what we share our lives with, the ethical foundation upon which we can compose new worlds and let this one burn.