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“History, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have to go through and beyond in order to think what we are.”

—Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

To launch this new venture, Liaisons, we propose to share a series of local hypotheses from a transnational, revolutionary perspective. It has been said of the global era that it has allowed us to see “the entire world in a fragment.” Every corner of the earth takes on an exemplary significance, which communicates a situated instantiation—and yet virtually universal—of the same world system. Even so, if the evolution of the system matters to us, it is less so for us to understand the system itself, but rather to understand what it seeks to attack. Ultimately, this enemy can only be explained by what it can’t keep from destroying in order to grow. Partisan research thus must start by collecting from the rubble of the ruins of history, the living—friend and revolutionary alike—who never cease to resist their own unmaking. This foreclosure forces us to confront the most monstrous entanglements in order to find who, exactly, are our historical friends. Let us hope that by trying to unravel the ones that ensnare Quebec, others may be inspired to attack their own “national” demons, knowing that it is there where the critical details are hidden.

The situation in our corner of the world is indissociable from its history, invisible and yet so present. Crucially, “our” territory was the theater of the inaugural conflict of modernity, in the catastrophic meeting of foreign worlds. It was this shock, and the ensuing genocide, that illuminated the Enlightenment, which has never ceased to infiltrate the crooks and crannies of the globe. The clash between indigeneity and immigration has ravaged every part of the world, which further fuels the fire of current populist tensions. But the form it took here—that of the colonized colonizer—has produced a discontinuity between two secession movements: Quebecois and Indigenous. It is from this disconnect, from its separation between different separatisms on the same territory, that we wish to explore.