Advanced Diploma Map of Wars: The Editorial Catalog as a Production of Political-Militant Knowledge

The challenge: to transform a catalog that has been evolving for almost two decades into a coherent journey woven together by a series of reading hypotheses. Not along a single line of thought, but along several: a populated map. To practice cartography and use texts, thought, and imagination to share experiences; to understand the world, to challenge it, to make room within it for new experiences. Specifically: a map for political intervention.

The publication of political essays makes this intervention explicit; not as promoters of fashionable discussions, but because we are interested in thinking about, and inviting collective reflection on, the wars in which we are all embroiled. Wars that permeate and transcend us; that surround us and explode in our hands—the ever-present every man for himself, now exacerbated by the multiplication of crises.

We are living through a violent offensive by neoliberal fascism. References to war, against diverse and mostly diffuse enemies, are incessantly repeated. Syria, but also Mexican drug cartels, the coup in Bolivia, the territorial control of mafias in Slavic countries, drone warfare in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorism, and the pervasive spread of bellicose gestures during the Trump administration.

In contexts of social upheaval, this intensifies. How can we not take seriously the issue of war and violence, which in recent decades has emerged as a model of social relations and a basis for legitimizing the global order? How can we not try to consider, in contrast, the impotence that these military offensives produce and against which, as a backdrop, we live and produce?

The overarching matrix of all power relations and techniques of domination, war is the continuation of politics and vice versa: means and ends blur their boundaries. War brings death, but above all, it must produce life: population control is indistinguishable from the reproduction of social life itself. A war, like capital, has indeterminate limits in time and space, and the enemy—the populations—is elusive, ungraspable. It blends in with the population and takes the form of civil resistance. This seminar is therefore a map of wars that also includes resistance. That is to say, a map of intensities, of points of condensation. A map that is always handcrafted, provisional. A catalog is a journey, and every worthwhile journey has detours and meandering paths, moments of anxiety and flat stretches. A map of multiplying wars requires a multiplication of maps (and weapons). War between imperialist powers around the world and war of ways of life in the neighborhoods: the city turned into a battlefield. War against the poor, against women, against Black people. War against insecurity, against inflation, against drugs, and against terrorism. War of pacification, for control of territories, the environment, and its natural resources. War of subjectivities and subjectivations, and for the regulation of behavior. War, in short, as the inevitable key to understanding the present of a world that is spiraling out of control and sweeping us away.

The Higher Diploma in War Maps: The Editorial Catalog as a Production of Political-Militant Knowledge is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students; teachers at all levels; activists and militants of trade union organizations, social movements and political parties; public officials; members and managers of non-governmental organizations and professionals interested in the subject.

• Diego Picotto (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Ezequiel Gatto (National University of San Martín, Argentina)
• Ignacio Gago (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Andrés Bracony (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Veronica Gago (National University of San Martín - CONICET, Argentina)
• Maurizio Lazzarato (University of Paris, France)
• Silvia Federici (Hofstra University of New York, United States)
• Rodrigo ruiz (University of Chile)
• Leandro Barttolotta (FLACSO, Argentina)
• Susana Draper (Princeton University, United States)
• Bruno Fornillo (CONICET, Argentina)
• Arturo Escobar (University of North Carolina, United States)
• Franco Bifo Berardi (University of Bologna, Italy)
• Suely Rolnik (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil)

The program consists of 5 modules with weekly classes, each taught consecutively and linked to the others.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are:

MODULE 1: War as a key: accumulation, subjectivity and assembly

• CLASS 1: War as a key to understanding: crisis, accumulation, and strategic knowledge
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  

• CLASS 2: Wars and Capital

  Teacher: Maurizio Lazzarato
  
  

• CLASS 3: Body, capitalism and reproduction of labor power

  Teacher: Silvia Federici

MODULE 2: The war against the poor (and the poor against war)

• CLASS 1: The war against the poor (and the poor against war)

  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  

• CLASS 2: From Locke to Piñera. Reflections from the Chilean rebellion

  Teacher: Rodrigo Ruiz
  
  

• CLASS 3: War and precarity

  Teacher: Leandro Barttolotta

MODULE 3: The War Against Women

• CLASS 1: The war against women and current feminist struggles
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  
  
• CLASS 2: Body, capitalism and reproduction of labor power
  
  Teachers: Verónica Gago and Silvia Federici
  
  
  
• CLASS 3: Capitalist accumulation and the war against women: key interpretations from the struggles
  
  Teacher: Susana Draper

 

MODULE 4: The war for territories and the struggle for the commons

• CLASS 1: The war for territories and the struggle for the commons
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink 
  
  
  
• CLASS 2: Occupation of territories, ontology and counter-narratives
  
  Teacher: Arturo Escobar
  
  
  
• CLASS 3: The war for territories: lithium and energy transition
  
  Teacher: Bruno Fornillo

MODULE 5: Sensitive warfare and political aesthetics

• CLASS 1: The Sensitive War
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  
  
• CLASS 2: From the micropolitics of discontent to the desire for insurrection
  
  Teacher: Suely Rolnik
  
  
  
• CLASS 3: Futurism and War
  
  Teacher: Franco Bifo Berardi