Introduction
Suely Rolnick's Untimely Insurgency
Stefano Harney

When he was in prison on charges that were later to be thrown out, then former President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva gave an interview to the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald asks what could be interpreted as a question critical of Lula and his time in government. He asks why, given how well big business fared under his administration, capitalists both big and small in Brazil seemed to despise him so much. Lula does not appear to take the question as a criticism, or rather perhaps he does not react to it because he has come to realize the criticism is somehow beside the point. In any case, Lula gives what Suely Rolnick might call, in the vital essays that follow, a micropolitical answer. Lula says that the only way he can explain this hostility is by way of the changes in Brazilian society that took place during his eight years in office (and during President Dilma Rousseff's truncated continuation of Worker's Party rule after him). Through the introduction of family support, affirmative action, employment law, and a host of other measures, Lula and his party greatly enlarged the number of people who participated in Brazil's official economy. And Lula says of those who nonetheless hate him, that they hate him simply because of who now stands next to them in the line at the cinema, the airport and the supermarket. Lula, the embodiment of a macropolitical energy, then as now, perhaps reflecting in his imposed otium, gives us a micropolitical response.

What Lula is able to see is how these changes, attributed to him, activated into vicious reaction the settler colonial desire for the slave and servant society that as Suely Rolnick will tell us, Brazil in large part remains. She writes that the viciousness toward Lula and the rise of now-former President Jair Bolsonaro 'really reveals . that the visceral presence of the colonial and slave-holding tradition in Brazil never ceased to exist in the subjectivity of its middle and elite classes.' This presence is somehow out-of-history as Brazil concludes its 200th year anniversary as a republic. The time of Brazil that accompanies this crucial publication - making Suely Rolnick's seminal essays available to English-speaking readers - is a time of relief. It is a time of the return to power of President Lula, after five years of environmental, social, and economic nihilistic mismanagement under the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. For Lula himself it is a time marked by his path from jail to the presidency. It is a return. But this time is also full with what is out of this time. Returns that never seem to stop. The last five years have brought memories and fears of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship to the surface where they linger still, peddling the reactive desires of Ordem e Progresso, the motto of the Brazilian republic. The phrase itself is cut out from the time of the French sociologist August Comte who said 'love as a principle, the order as a foundation, progress as a goal.' In the last five years love seemed to have returned from its excising, but as love for the leader, life-killing love. More untimely still was the nearly half of the population who voted to continue the ghoulish settler colonial performance as Brazil under Bolsonaro renewed its desire to 'open' its interior and build its national destiny, by the violent imposition of property, labour, and profit in the Amazon. Suely Rolnick concludes of the swing of support behind Bolsonaro that 'what the elites behind these operations did not consider was that the high degree of morbidity in the subjectivity of Bolsonaro (a morbidity easily detectable in his personal and political history) would lead him to become the leader of a fascist form of populism.' But perhaps they should have known better.

***

Another way to look at this renewed settler desire is to ask what kind of decolonizing is called for in Brazil today? The answer is that the kind of decolonizing Brazil requires is the anti-colonial kind. As in the United States, we must say that the anti-colonial movement has yet to succeed in Brazil. This is true at the level of desire as much as at the level of property and profit. Anti-colonialism remains the demand of the day. Decolonizing these societies is therefore always an untimely project. And this is precisely why we need Suely Rolnick's work now more than ever, even if now is ever. Because as Lula's answer reveals the struggle to decolonize the colony that Brazil remains, that the US remains, that Israel remains, that Australia remains, that Chile remains and so on, this struggle must take place at the molecular level and not just the molar level. The one continues because the other continues, but the other continues because the one continues. Thus, so too, the two struggles continue.

But in making this statement about micropolitical and macropolitical struggles confronting us, two problems immediately arise, problems with which Suely Rolnick will help us. The first of these problems is that these two forms of struggle do not work in harmony. They do not mirror each other. They do not facilitate a common topography. The insubordination of micropolitics, as Suely Rolnick calls it, provokes not just settler colonial rule, but also something in macropolitical struggle. The macropolitical struggle, the forces of the Left, react to the micropolitical announcements with a strategy of containment. Thus, the first problem we are confronted with is a problem for the Left. The reason for this is that the macropolitical struggle in most historical instances chooses a pragmatic path. The Left often does so sincerely. It often achieves gains by doing so. But what it does not reckon with is that what has been presented as the pragmatic path is in fact a road to absolutism. Because pragmatism is an absolutist ideology. I do not mean this in the anti-communist way such charges are often levelled. In fact, it is not even a charge. It is simply to say that in order for the macropolitical Left to fight at the level of rights, democracy, and sovereignty, as it often must, it is necessary for it to take on the language and the logic of the one. Or as Suely Rolnick calls it, the logic of identitarian politics. Far from being reasonable or moderate, when the Left takes a pragmatic position, it opens micropolitical struggles to great danger.

Because pragmatism of this kind always reinstalls the language and logic of the one, the individual, as the foundation for politics. This reduction to the one individual, and the many individuals, forecloses the collective enunciations of desire. It spurs the very individuation upon which settler colonialism thrives. The subject, the citizen, the voter, the party, the nation, one nation indivisible, as the American like to say. This is the one who may stand before the law, who may represent others, who may make policy, and who may own property. This is the one who is sovereign, powered by the delusion of self-sufficiency, self-authorship, and self-development. This is the one who holds and enacts this delusion and appoints himself to diagnose the incompleteness of the others not by denying their individuality but by forcing upon them only enough oneness to bring them into the world, the rapacious world of property, finance, labour, and sexual demand. This is the one who says he's the one. And although the exception is going on all around him, he can only see it in his own violation. As Cedric Robinson argues in his classic Terms of Order, all Western macropolitics from Right to Left is based on the completeness of the one as the unit of politics. And a pragmatic politics demands completeness.

It is this complete one that allows us to make what at first may seem to be a needlessly provocative statement: that representative democracy, one man-one vote democracy is not the opposite of settler colonialism but a tool of its imposition and rule. Indeed, politics in its reductive, reactive emplotment of the one is at base a tool of white supremacism. It is hard for the Left to admit these metaphysical foundations of politics. Though white people seem to know this perfectly well. Because whenever democracy does not result in white supremacist rule, as in the exceptional years of PT government then and now, it is deemed not be democracy but to be instead a stolen election. The history of US coup-mongering against elected governments in the wider region, including the tacit support of President Barack Obama and Secretary Hilary Clinton's for the 'slow motion' coup against Dilma Rousseff, should be enough to state the point. (Then Vice President Joe Biden was the point man on that one by the way.) And here again is indispensability of Suely Rolnick's thought. The pragmatism of the Left - heightened in moments of self-defense against 'the coup' - leads it to ask, and then soon to demand, the same of its micropolitical surrounds, and this must be resisted. This pragmatic demand, which uses the love we retain for those who ask, uses them against our mutual love, to hide its ultimately absolutist white supremacy. This corrosive demand comes in a number of forms: a call for unity, an exhortation to scale-up, a plea to be strategic, or a return to 'class analysis.' But in order for us to answer this demand, micropolitics must give up its insurgent project of total disorder and identify itself, identify with itself, realize itself and become one completely. As Rolnick writes 'the...