“Language has monopolized and reduced to concepts the multifariousness of signs. Our semiotic stock does not sing anymore, does not dance, does not greet, does not recognize companions, it just says something way up beyond the ground, our common ground, it only qualifies and quantifies what it has learned to name, see, appropriate. I came back home to Italy and started reading again Étienne De La Boétie, those brief beautiful and breathtaking passages on companionship in his Discours. I read Michel de Montaigne’s essay on Étienne, On friendship. I read again passages of a transcription of a video where José Regalado, a Mexican indigenous, states that matter when transformed is shared among companions—referring to maize, because they are thankful for harvesting. I read again Kiado Cruz that narrates about his ancestor’s love for maize, how they were eager to go and greet their cornfield each morning. I read again Prince Kropotkin stating that it was not Darwin’s universal law of survival of the fittest, but that of mutual aid that had preserved the species. I read again a passage of Graeber’s Debt that tells to whom we are really in debt with. My friend Michel Blancsubé told me about a book on friendship by the French philosopher Gilles Tiberghien. I tried to find a translation to English of Amitier. The title is a neologism, a verb for “amiti é”. Instead I found an essay by Cole Swensen where she writes about the difficulty of translating the word amitier to English. Friendship has different etymologies— she proposes “friendling”, although the different etymological background changes nuances. And lastly, I read again John Zerzan that reminds us that verbs declined to approximately half of all words of a language; in modern English, verbs account for less than 10% of words. Verbs denote an action that puts us on the world, on the ground, on Dionysus’ ground. Nouns just name.”
(from: Editoral Note, TIEMPO MUERTES #6)