While reading this week I kept thinking of the Andre Lorde line the masters’ tools will not bring down the master’s house. Defiantly working with a different set of tools, the poetic, Earth showed the strength and effectiveness of vulnerability in the face of sovereign power. As I was reading such hideous violence’s I kept feeling like the argument for constitutive power is going to be around the next corner. I was so glad it never came, that a profane poetic performance while vulnerable needed to be to open any hope of intersubjectivity.

The Poetic was waived through the whole text as a tool. From the start we were drawn into its ability to scale and hold the inequality in the image, as well as talk across time ‘time present and time past lead to eradication of the time future; genocide is the permanently present, in this scenario’. P107

The dance-drama Rabinal Achi fascinated me, as did the line that it was an early example of ‘active listening’. I went to see In the Court of the Conqueror by George Emilio Sanchez at Harlem Stage. At the end there was a Q and A and an audience member asked George why he was interested in using indigenous law as law was such a colonising force, aren’t we better without these humanist values at all. I didn’t fully get George’s answer, but the room applauded loudly. It was very interesting to see an example of indigenous law.

Two quotes stood out, Aristotle talking about the universal capacity of poetry on p.109 and Ricardo Dominguez’s observation on the difference between the artist and the activist ‘activists break the law, while artists change the conversation theoretically, by disturbing the law.’ P.125.

I enjoyed how the text performed its subjects. It was poetry itself as understood in the content of the argument shifting between scales.  It made me think of Jackie Wang and her position as a poet, who also analyses sovereign power. For her poetry is not a blueprint for the future but is import in part for being useless in a capitalist system and shifting the terms. It also made me think of the ‘plenum’ in Denise da Silva poethics.

Presents then is not inclusion but a defiant act.