Becoming seeds

In the past, and in the burning present – the two often colliding – long-term resistance has taken shape by starting from erasure. By refusing erasure, by exposing it, by opposing it with other stories. Counter-memories unravel not only myths of origin, but also the silences on which power builds its legitimacy and fictions.

This struggle happens everywhere: in universities, in cinemas, in concert halls and restaurants, in ‘people’s tribunals’ that stage trials outside the courts, precisely to expose their limits. It works to erode the monopolies of national narratives, bringing to the surface armies of minor histories that tell and show something else. And it has learned to do so by playing within today’s aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual arenas. Not just in the fields of knowledge or justice, but by being more appealing, more convincing, more innovative. A Palestinian rapper once told me, very simply: ‘We have to out-cool our oppressor.’

In response, colonial power also shifts ground. The state no longer denies its violence. It puts it on display, using it as an instrument of control and sovereignty. This is what Nazan Ustündag shows in her long-term work on the Kurdish liberation movement in Turkey.1 Looking at Erdogan’s treatment of the Kurdish question through concepts from Black liberation thought in the United States, she identifies a shift – and we see its examples multiplying today.

The ways of domination evolve. It’s no longer just about producing discourses and representations, casting populations as criminals or enemies. It’s about producing corpses. About staging the moment when a human becomes a lifeless body. Governing, in other words, through the spectacle of becoming-corpse – or ‘corpsification’.2 A process that turns others into pure things: undifferentiated, without desire.

The method is shock. Not only paralysis in the face of horror, but something more complex. It mobilizes and immobilizes us at once, through less avowable feelings of fascination with the potential thing-ness of every human being. The aim of this spectacle is to turn an audience into a population, at the scale of nations, even the globe. A population pushed into powerlessness, into seeing itself only as mute spectators, caught at their most fragile point: their sensitivity to the obscene, with its blend of horror and fascination. Then, their gradual desensitization to that very same spectacle. The two processes are tied together.

This is what Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza makes us live through. Whether we want it or not, the scene is played by three: killers, killed, and spectators. This ‘trauma of representation’ seeks to destroy imagination itself. To trap subjectivity in abjection, reducing those who can always be turned into remains – fragmentable bodies.

Politics of cruelty

The politics of cruelty target our bonds, our capacity to attach. They aim to create a world where the vulnerability of others is laid bare through their suffering, and where political belonging is negotiated through acquiescence to that suffering – even if acquiescence comes in the form of silence.

There are many ways to extract that acquiescence. In practice, they combine into shades of grey: institutional status quo (as we see in German public space in the context of the genocide in Gaza), justification, raw terror, disgust produced by the abjection imposed on victims of cruelty, confusion and blurred responsibility (who is doing what, and why?), cognitive fog – which Russian propaganda masters so well (does it even matter if it’s true or not?).

This is not about making suffering invisible. What is assigned to invisibility this time is our reaction to the suffering of others. That suffering is not erased as a lived phenomenon, on the contrary; but its radically intersubjective essence is denied – the fact that it is shared, felt, understood by those who witness it.

The citizen shaped by the politics of cruelty is a new being. Spectacle is central, even when it is made of secrecy with only a glimpse shown. In this, a pact of government takes form. Responding to it requires a political theory of cruelty – something that feminist theorists in the Middle East and South America have been working on.

In Latin America, marked by mass femicides, disappearances, unpunished rapes, mass graves, Argentine anthropologist Rita Laura Segato describes cruelty as a social pedagogy. She says: ‘It is a lesson. A lesson of power, learned, repeated, socialized.’3

That lesson is often inscribed on the bodies of women, of the poor, of those excluded from citizenship. Their bodies become the territory of a message. They are not only subjected to brute violence at the end of the chain of domination. They are exposed to an exemplary destruction that aims to build consent through a gradual habituation to the spectacle of suffering. Example and horror on one side; habit and denial on the other. That is the method.

Cruelty becomes background noise. An environment that reshapes human relations: suspicion, atomization, fear turned into a form of order. What might once provoke shock or indignation slips into the routine of the visible. This is the normal mechanism of denial, which is part of every socialization. We see it, for instance, in the presence of the homeless in our streets, and in the reactions of children: first shock and incomprehension, then gradual acceptance.

Through the spectacle of cruelty, this mechanism of denial is put to work to shatter our thresholds of tolerance to violence. It becomes a ‘technology of desensitization’. It is not only about intimidation and terror (this could also happen to me). It is about shaping a kind of active indifference, a capacity to see without being affected (this has nothing to do with me, and that thing, that lifeless body or fragment of a body, has nothing to do with a human being).

For Segato, one of the most striking points is this: cruelty is learned. It is not abstract. It is transmitted and absorbed in gestures, words, events. It is also passed on through institutions – schools, police, administrations – which teach obedience to hierarchies based on humiliation.

This pedagogy is also gendered. One of its key vehicles is the transmission of an authoritative, conquering model of masculinity. What matters in such a society is the triumph of power, staged through the virile body – not negotiated forms of coexistence. In this light, the ‘feminine’ that militarized powers aim to destroy is not an essence but a function: the weaving of ties, the fabric of connection, something it is useful to dismantle in order to govern a weakened social body.

This violence is not limited to armed conflict or state repression. It seeps into everyday social relations – at work, in education, in health. In the ways we speak and name. It is systemic. It does not rely only on malicious intentions, but on forms of organization that make certain acts, or certain omissions, almost automatic.

Modern cruelty, as Segato shows, is not an exception, not a slip. It is embedded in the ordinary management of lives. This continuum – that links the ordinary to the most unbearable atrocity, weaving atrocity discreetly into daily life – does not put cruelty behind a barrier, the barrier of ‘isolated crimes’ or the madness of tyrants. It thinks cruelty as diffuse, yet anchored in a logic of power: the state as a machine of cruelty. A state not always cruel, but one that works to maintain order by recoding patriarchal domination into contemporary, often privatized forms – security, prisons, economics.

One of the major consequences of this pedagogy is that it isolates individuals. It breaks filiations, blocks solidarity, and casts suspicion on any movement of empathy or dissent. It turns affects into risks. To feel is, potentially, to disobey.

As a result, the very capacity to feel becomes a threatened political resource, in a social world where indifference and mistrust are strategic refuges. They shape the ways of life allowed to us, and those to which we have been trained. This is why the central task is unlearning. This counter-pedagogy – of telling, of connecting, of feeling – does not try to escape into beauty or positivity by denying cruelty. It works instead to prevent cruelty from becoming the only possible grammar of the social.

Egyptian anthropologist Salwa Ismail studies the politics of cruelty in Assad’s Syria.4 There, violence is not at the margins of order – it is at its very core. It does not only aim to eliminate opponents, but to shape a type of citizen who can survive in a world of uncertainty, surveillance, and humiliation – a daily administration of fear.

Terror becomes a political economy. It distributes places, permissions to speak or remain silent, to stay or to leave, to remember or to forget. It organizes the psychic and moral space of citizenship. Power inhabits bodies and minds through anxiety, confusion, and the constant anticipation of looming repression.

That repression is hidden, but also displayed, spread through rumors, fragmented stories, and the gestures of survivors – gestures that say, without saying: this is what awaits you. But these signs are never stable. Anyone can be taken, at any time. Orchestrated uncertainty is at the heart of government by affects. It blocks projection, strategy, rest. It forces permanent adaptation, suspicion, self-censorship. Violence becomes a regime of perception – even of hallucination. The political is inseparable from the sensory, as I will return to later.

These approaches to cruelty, each grounded in deep study of concrete situations, show how cruelty works politically to dis-attach the living from one another. It does not only aim to kill. It aims to paralyze affects, to disable the desire for relation.

To do so, it settles in the infinite distance that separates a living human body from a dead one. This infinite – the infinite of torture – is like a fraction in mathematics: dividing by half, then half again, then again, without ever reaching zero.

‘To keep someone imprisoned and tortured for thirty years, something infinite must be happening in the work of destruction and resistance of bodies.’ This is how philosopher Françoise Proust reads Spinoza’s famous phrase: ‘No one has yet determined what a body can do.’5

If governing through destruction is infinite work, then resistance, by the very same logic, is infinite as well.

Nazan Üstündağ, writing in the context of armed violence, militarization of Kurdish territories, and suppression of dissenting voices in Turkey, describes state cruelty as a form of control through exhaustion. It is varied in its supports: infrastructures, legal and administrative procedures, media, prisons, torture chambers.

It takes the form of extreme precarity (bombing after bombing), of grief denied, of armed repression (military, paramilitary). Its staging – for example through videos that dwell on the loud, insistent regime of becoming-corpse – is not an excess. This register is used massively elsewhere, too: for instance by Sudanese armed forces and mercenaries since the war of 2023, especially against women.

It allows power to test its limits, to strengthen itself through repetition, gradually neutralizing the possibility of organized resistance.

The question then becomes: in a horizon structured by this regulatory cruelty, how can a political imagination arise that is capable of contesting it? This is the question guiding Üstündağ’s analysis. It shifts the centre of gravity of politics: no longer power as command, not only as representation, discourse, or organization – but as the capacity to endure, to sustain connection, to resist imposed destruction.

Palestinian anthropologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has spent decades studying the security and military policies of Israeli occupation at the Center of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also works as a clinical psychologist in East Jerusalem, holding online therapy sessions with patients living under siege in Gaza.

It is a strange time we live in: Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches, and starving families in Gaza, exposed every second to body fragmentation, to terror, to death – and yet at the same time taking part in therapy by videoconference.6

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian also insists on this shift in the center of gravity of politics: to maintain ties and to reassemble is at the core of daily resistance to genocide.7 This is how Palestinians tear themselves away from inhumanization – not only through hunger, but also through the becoming-corpse staged in the real-time broadcast of their own massacre.

In Gaza, resisting the politics of cruelty – resisting their work of dis-attachment – means, quite concretely, reassembling the bodies of the dead, identifying fragments, piecing together dismembered remains, and burying them.

It is from this gesture, and all the experience of the world it contains, that Shalhoub-Kevorkian thinks political resistance. This limit-effort re-establishes the link between the living, the dead, and the land. It responds to a destruction that forces every inhabitant to see themselves, and their community, as bodies that could at any moment become fragments, scattered.

Resisting this colonization of the imagination also requires, for her as a psychologist, giving a name to the lived experience. The name is ashlaa’ – fragments of a body. A word that also refers to Palestinian land itself, fragmented into an archipelago of territories by the politics of occupation, where once there was the continuity of a country.

Believing in the Cold Season

The link between burial and resistance runs through many responses to the politics of cruelty. Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad traced one such path in the last long poem she wrote before her accidental death in 1972. The poem is called Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season.8

Hello, estranged solitude
I entrust you with my room
For dark clouds
Always announce freshly purified verses
And in the martyrdom of a candle
There is a luminous secret well known
To the last, most persistent flame

Let us believe
Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season
Let us believe in the ruins of the gardens of imagination
In the abandoned sickles
And in the imprisoned seeds.

Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season.

The cold season is coming, and at the same time, Forough asks us: ‘let us believe’. Where the year begins on January 1st, winter comes at the start. In Iran, the calendar is different: the year begins with the spring equinox, March 20th. The cold season, then, closes the year. Afterward comes spring, and a new year begins.

In this cyclical perspective, the seeds are prisoners for now. Captive because they are frozen, but we know they will grow when conditions become favourable again. This draws on a Persian imaginary of germination, one that brings us back to the feminine – the imaginary around which the New Year ritual is built. For about ten days, in every household, lentil or wheat seeds are watched as they sprout and become plants.

The poet invites us not to let go of this imaginary of potential. To remain lucid, and courageous in that lucidity, but also to let ourselves be worked upon by the thought of germination. In dry lands, when the rain finally falls, seeds long imprisoned by drought sometimes make a sudden, collective push. After just one rainfall, within three hours, a green fuzz can cover the bare ground.

This resistance of seeds echoes other, more famous lines: verses written in 1978 by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos:9

What didn’t you do to bury me
But you forgot I was a seed.

Christianopoulos, marginalized for his homosexuality in a Greece still marked by authoritarianism, expressed here a form of intimate persistence, at the edge of erasure. But the verse found a second life, collective and transnational. It was translated, adapted. Its use expanded through feminist mobilizations in Latin America, especially the Ni Una Menos movement – which often grounds its politics in poetry. From there, it was reappropriated in Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia.

We read it on walls, in the slogans of night marches, on the painted bodies of protesters: nos quisieron enterrar, pero no sabían que éramos semillas. One can see it, for instance, on a mural in Madrid’s Cascorro square, dedicated to the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, November 24th.

A woman, drawn in pop art style, looks out toward the street. Large yellow, white, and violet flowers form a crown around her hair. Her head is held high, recalling socialist propaganda posters, turned toward the future. Yet her eyes – long-lashed – are not firm, nor angry, nor filled with moral determination. They are wide open, surprised. Still, they do not look away, nor narrow. She looks, and keeps looking, despite a certain fear. In this fixed, unadorned gaze is an effort not to yield to shock. It shows the difficulty of the task, its tension – its resistance.

The slogan does not deny burial. It inscribes mourning into a becoming. It is a patient reply, politically powerful in its inversion of the logic of disappearance. In spreading through transnational feminist struggles, the phrase changed in nature. From poetic statement, it became affective disposition.

The earth is not only a place of burial. It is also a medium of birth and growth – the soil tilled by practices of gathering, sharing, organizing, the forms of unlearning.

The oppressors’ mistake, what they ‘forgot’ or ‘did not know’, concerns the nature of what is erased. Something is there in potential. And the promise that runs through Forough’s poem (‘dark clouds / always announce freshly purified verses’) is not about waiting for what will come from outside. It belongs to what resists: it is its potential becoming.

To cultivate the buried, to refuse burial, is not sorrowful, grave, or melancholic. This force in potential has as its language, its sign, joy. An affective experience that rises from intimacy with death – death as real event, part of life, not symbolized or wrapped in discourse.

Those who have paid attention to the last moments of a candle’s burning know this well: just before it goes out, the flame breathes, flares up, glows more strongly.

And in the martyrdom of a candle
There is a luminous secret well known
To the last, most persistent flame.

Martyrdom

The knowledge that Forough’s poetry gives us brings us back to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – and especially to the fact that between the words Women and Freedom lies Life. It is a paradoxical slogan, because it is not really a slogan. Since the links are not spelled out, it can be heard in many different ways. It is almost like a haiku.

This non-slogan reflects something about the uprising it inspired: it was a movement of opening, a movement that hesitated over itself. It could not, or would not, be fixed – for better and for worse.

Stories of uprising and resistance during the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran tells us about strategies of presence in an asymmetrical face-off.10

These experiences resonate with those of the Iranian revolution of 1979 – a revolution that, against the will of many of its revolutionaries, ended with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the very regime that today’s youth rises against.

I traced this experience through the almost miraculous preservation of family archives: letters written to an aunt studying in Paris, sent by her sisters who remained in Iran as the revolutionary unrest of 1978 and 1979 began to swell.

The correspondence continued until the sisters were arrested: the first, my mother, Fatemeh Zarei, in June 1981; the second, my aunt, Fataneh Zarei, in March 1982.

Letters posted in envelopes where an unpracticed hand carefully formed Latin letters to write ‘rue des Pyrénées, 75019 Paris’. Letters stamped with images of women fighters, their eyes full of revolutionary rage, their bodies wrapped in black chadors from which only the tips of their Kalashnikovs protruded.

Fifteen years later, in the 2000s, their addressee read those letters to me, and allowed me to publish some of them.

My aunt Fataneh was a fervent revolutionary, before putting the same fervor into trying to ‘save’ her revolution from the Islamist and fascist project carried by Khomeini. To her father, who asks her to protect herself against repression by Hezbollah militias, she replies:

We have endured so many difficulties, made so many sacrifices, persevered so long and seen so many martyrs; can we just magnanimously offer the fruit of our eff orts to a gang of stateless people who glean the remains others have left, who set  ire to our harvest and mercilessly shredded thelowers in this garden of our hopes? We staked everything we had and even what we did not have, for our ideas. There are only two paths open to us now: martyrdom or victory – nothing else.11

But then her voice changes in the last letter we have from her. It is a will, written before her execution.

In March 1982, Fataneh – who had joined the underground resistance a year earlier – was arrested and sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal for ‘enmity against God’. The letter we have is dated July 1982, so it must have been written before a mock execution. Fataneh was killed a few months later, in October.

One of the tortures she endured was precisely these false executions. A few hours before what she believed would be her death, she wrote to her family. And yet I have never been able to translate the beginning of that letter.

At one point she writes: ‘Life is sweet. My God, give me the courage to leave it.’12 But before those words – for more than a page – it is only jargon, a string of slogans specific to the People’s Mojahedin, the Marxist-Islamist opposition party to which she belonged.

This organization had entered armed struggle in the summer of 1981. From then on, its members – or people suspected of sympathizing with them – were persecuted and, in many cases, systematically eliminated. My aunt and my mother were both candidates for this party in the legislative elections of winter 1981. Soon after, my mother was arrested, in June, just before the Mojahedin launched their armed struggle and their campaign of terrorist attacks against the clergy.

Fataneh, on the other hand, escaped arrest in 1981 and went into hiding with her husband. She was arrested a year later and immediately sentenced to death.

When I read the last letter written by my aunt – decades after her death – I could not understand it. I remember the cold, immense anger I felt when I realized that this woman, this fighter, a few hours before what she thought was her death, had a language colonized by political jargon. A language dried out, like sap leaving wood as it becomes dead.

I think the recent uprising has had to confront this paradoxical legacy of ideological violence. To accept it, and to reject it, through struggles that deliberately escape slogans, that refuse this drying out, this de-subjectivation – this power of ideology to hollow out the living voice.

The question of life takes us back to the question of martyrdom. After the 1979 revolution, one value was shared by all participants – victims and executioners alike: a certain ideal of martyrdom, in different forms, secular and religious.

I want to recall it briefly, because the question has a new urgency when we look at the war in Gaza, where the word shahid – martyr – is used to speak of the dead. All the dead of the war, not only those who chose to fight or to sacrifice themselves.13

In Iran in 1979, the revolutionary ideal of martyrdom meant being ready to give one’s life to fulfil a political desire – a death that was euphoric, a bodily explosion merging with the world. There was a mystical dimension to martyrdom, infused with a will for social justice.

Very quickly, the ideology of the Islamic Republic took it all up, reconfiguring martyrdom around the question of jihad understood as holy war, especially during the war with Iraq. It reinvested this bodily, political, desiring grammar of martyrdom into a strictly religious frame.

Around this ideal the Islamic Republic was built:14 martyrdom became the engine of the war machine against Iraq, and political opponents became anti-martyrs. Martyrs were right to die; opponents were wrong. Their execution, and the spectacle of their suffering – their ‘anti-martyrdom’ – was meant not only to eliminate the bravest militants, but also to speak to society as a whole, reshaping its values.

This patient propaganda work, saturated with the politics of cruelty, achieved a double aim. First, it reworked traditional values to impose Islamic Republican ideology. Second, it reworked the notion of individual responsibility, making political prisoners co-responsible for their repression – through their stubbornness, their refusal to collaborate – and, by extension, co-responsible for the level of repressive violence in society at large.

Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war – a massacre of hundreds of thousands – a widespread counterculture has grown in Iran, soon becoming a majority culture, built on rejecting the deadly ideology of martyrdom. But the question of sacrificial death has not disappeared.

The question of fighting to the death is still present in the accounts of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings.15 The ideology of sacrificial death has been dismantled. But the tension remains. The difference is that today, it is attachment to life that allows one to say: I am ready to die.

This means reconfiguring the struggle in concrete terms, in order to face the asymmetry of power, and the risk of death that comes with protest – the risk you face the moment you take your first step into the street.

Affective resistances

What is striking, in this regard, is that resistance did not take up arms in Iran in 2022. The beating heart of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising was in Kurdistan and Baluchistan – two peripheral and historically marginalized provinces.

In these border regions – with Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan on one side, and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other – the presence of armed groups is nothing new. In Kurdistan, opposition parties in exile have military branches based across the Iraqi border. In Baluchistan, armed Sunni groups regularly launch violent actions against the security forces of the Islamic Republic. These territories are also crossed by smuggling routes, by transnational networks, and by a living memory of repression. The circulation of weapons is a fact. Structures of combat exist. The option of armed struggle was available.

This makes it all the more remarkable that, despite intense repression, the uprisings did not take this path. That refusal is not self-evident. It reflects a strategy both discreet and powerful, assumed locally and sustained over time. More than two-thirds of those killed were from these two regions. Yet the forms of resistance remained civil, even when they faced the armed violence of the state head-on.

This, too, required coordination and discipline, given the circulation of weapons. The use of Molotov cocktails – the weapon of the weaponless – did not aim to militarize the conflict, but to mark a refusal: the refusal to fall into the scenario the regime actively sought to create.

The state’s goal was clear: to isolate these centers of protest, detach them from the national movement, and brand them as sites of regional insurgency. By reducing the confrontation to a peripheral war against ‘separatist elements’, it could have justified a massive crushing and defused the unifying momentum of the uprising.

In this context, the restraint observed in these provinces was a form of political lucidity. It allowed the movement to maintain a common front, to outmaneuver divisions, and to remain within the frame of a citizen claim – in unity, in rhythmic synchrony with the center. It contained, without eradicating, the regime’s obsession with transforming the uprising into an internal military threat to be crushed in the name of raison d’État. A script whose outcome was already known, given the extreme imbalance of power, and given that the region – from Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, and Iraq – was under the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

So, when resistance does not arm itself, what is left? There was, of course, a retreat. But this retreat was toward politics of attachment. It was a reversal of values, of affects, of modes of collective identification – a reversal that was itself a political counter-proposal.16

More than five hundred people were killed in the streets or under torture in 2022, and hundreds disappeared.17 But the execution of a few protesters from modest backgrounds had a deterrent effect far greater than their number. It was not only about eliminating opponents, but about showing that it could be done – and that no one could stop it.

This politics of cruelty, by staging and prolonging the suspense of regulated, arbitrary executions, aimed to reactivate one of the most effective tools of terror regimes: indifference. The Islamic Republic has patiently built itself upon an engineering of affective silence, surrounding threatened bodies – prisoners, the condemned, the grieving – with a halo of isolation, fear, and suspicion.

What was targeted was not only boldness as open opposition, but the ties that can form around protection from repression – within families, neighborhoods, crowds. The executions of December 2022 reactivated this strategy. They sought to disaffiliate the living, to block the formation of a ‘we’ around vulnerable lives.

The executions were made public, documented with forced ‘confessions’, timed according to a judicial calendar. They were meant to produce deterrence through shock. In another historical sequence – for instance, the 2009 protests for democratic change – such operations had silenced the movement.

But this time the response was different. The faces of the condemned circulated on social media. Their last words were shared. Their names were repeated and celebrated. Their families were supported – emotionally and materially. Public mourning was attempted, despite the risk of further repression.

These gestures – continuing to care, refusing to look away – were themselves refusals. They belonged to a form of affective resistance. They began to sketch a counter-politics of empathy, engaging the balance of power with the state’s violence on the terrain of the sensible. They kept open the conditions of shared experience, even if in muted form.

Mohammad Rasoulof’s film The Seed of the Sacred Fig evokes the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising through the family life of a bureaucrat of repression – plunging into the labyrinth, the entrails of Iranian power. It opens with the unusual life cycle of the ficus religiosa:

Its seeds fall onto other trees in the droppings of birds.
Aerial roots sprout and grow toward the ground.
Then its branches entwine the trunk of the host tree until they strangle it.
Finally, the wild fig stands upright, free of its base.

To the buried seed that waits for its season, here is added the image of the aerial seed, conquering the ground from above. It grows in reverse order – not promised to a future, but already in motion, feeding on its host in order to free itself.

The image evokes a political life that does not topple the established order, but clings to it in its interstices, bypasses it, empties it out. It rises out of what was meant to hold it down. The uprising of 2022–2023 says this: liberation does not only mean overthrow. As the image of inverted rooting suggests, revolution can be conceived not as promise, but as a slow, living force.

The Iranian case is not isolated. It helps us think about how affective reversals themselves can become forms of resistance, even when recognition and organization are difficult. This work takes different forms, which must be identified in the strategic thickness of each situation.

Let us return, for example, to shock – so central in regimes of cruelty. Shock blurs perception, blocks action, suspends time. This is what we saw in the United States, with the ‘sadistic’ saturation of public space through violent gestures during the first months of Donald Trump’s new mandate in 2025.18

And yet something can resist this. Indignation, in such moments, is not just rejection – which often feels worn out, insufficient. It allows a shift, a redirection of perception. It sets off a momentum that often brings greater clarity about the mechanisms and stakes – where shock alone would paralyze thought.

It turns cruelty’s point of leverage back on itself: violence no longer paralyzes, but illuminates the system that made it possible. It also keeps movement possible, against the desire to freeze that lies at the heart of the politics of cruelty.

In Iran, the affect to be overturned is indifference – indifference as a way of atomizing communities. In France, what we need to think about and confront seems closer to fatigue. Not just occasional or individual tiredness, but political fatigue.

We have grown used to speaking of collective, abstract fatigues: the fatigue of public opinion, the donor fatigue that emerges in humanitarian crises. More precisely, the feeling of fatigue has been widely theorized in its political dimension. The ‘society of fatigue’ marks a new age of capitalism built on performance and self-exploitation.19 Over-indebtedness, as a widespread experience, inscribes anxiety and social exhaustion into the very structure of financial capitalism.20 The ‘mental load’ of mothers21 is also framed as a question of fatigue.

British researcher Hannah Proctor turns to yet another dimension: she asks what becomes of revolutionary energy after failure, or after the exhaustion of struggle.22 Her starting point is simple: what remains of our political affects when enthusiasm, anger, or faith in change crash against immobility, defeat, or silence?

The fatigue she describes is not just depletion of strength. It touches the very springs of commitment. It shows up as discouragement, withdrawal, sometimes cynicism. It takes the form of an internalized weariness, of doubt about the usefulness of action, of a progressive disinvestment from collective spaces.

This fatigue can be the result of continuous affective labor: the labor of holding on in situations that no longer hold. Hannah Proctor draws on the testimonies of activists, caregivers, survivors of conflict – all confronting the same tension: the need to go on, but without the conviction of moving forward.

What she calls ‘political burnout’ does not only mean collapse. It also means the slow exhaustion of fire for lack of oxygen. In this sense, fatigue is a product of the political environment, of the manufactured helplessness in which everything seems already to have been tried.

This feeling is familiar to many of us. It does not say, ‘I don’t want to fight anymore.’ It says, ‘I no longer know how to.’ In this fatigue lies the fear of struggling in vain, but also the implicit pressure of a world that would like resistance to stop.

As Ukrainian intellectual Tatyana Ogarkova observed about resistance to the Russian invasion: ‘When I’m asked, “are you tired?”, what I hear behind it is: “When will you finally stop?’”

The same issue appears in the testimonies of activists from recent uprisings: the physical fatigue of constantly having to produce an image of oneself, of one’s struggle, of one’s pain. Time stolen from the struggle itself, to prove that there is indeed a struggle.

Hannah Proctor does not propose overcoming fatigue through sheer willpower or a discipline of hope. She invites us instead to recognize fatigue as a political affect in its own right, and to make it a ground for reflection.

How to remain politically alive without being constantly on the frontline? How to hold on without illusions?

Her reflection shifts the focus toward temporality, which underlies the very experience of exhaustion. If holding on is the task, one possible path lies beyond urgency – urgency so often tied to necessity – by inscribing action in a longer time, less pressed by the desire to reach an end.

In this case, the question is not so much about opposing a counter-affect to fatigue, but about opening a temporality in which the stakes of exhaustion diminish – no longer polarized by the endpoint of ‘after’.

This article is based on the author’s essay: ‘Résistances affectives. Les politiques de l’attachement face aux politiques de la cruauté’ (La Découverte, 2025). The text was delivered as a lecture on 11 September 2025 during Planetary Peasants, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle, Germany.