The Coming Insurrection (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)

Occupation of the Casbah in Tunis and of the Sigtagma Square in Athens. Siege of Westminster in London during the student movement of 2011. Encirclement of the Parliament in Madrid on September 25th, 2012 or in Barcelona on June 5th, 2011. Riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, December 14th, 2010. Attempt on October 15th, 2011 in Lisbon to invade the Assemblea de la Repubblica. Birding of the Bosnian presidential residence in February of 2014. The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents managed to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces and other headquarters of institutions as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places that is empty of power and furnished without any taste. It's not to prevent the people from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets, real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there. The truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us.