What in the hell …

It’s a Maoist slogan in French. The English version is “it is right to rebel.” I don’t know any Chinese so I don’t know what Mao actually said. The phrase dates from the mid 1960s (some details here). The phrase is translated into Spanish as “rebelarse es bueno” (viahere). These translations may be forced or really just be mistranslations but that doesn’t bother me much, as it’s part of the idea in a way. A power to skew things, to take an existing field of stuff and re-arrange it or produce from within it something that one couldn’t see in it - which in a way didn’t exist in it - prior to that action of taking. (Another nice French word play - Althusser uses the term ‘prise’ a lot in his late work, translated into English as ‘take’, in the sense in which, say, a transplanted organ ‘takes’ or ‘doesn’t take.’ ‘Sur’ means ‘on’ or ‘over’ or ‘about’. Althusser’s later writings might be said to be about whether or not things gel, set up, take. They are in a sense about the take, ’sur le prise.’ ‘Surprise’ of course is a cognate with the English word of the same spelling.) I think this activity of re-arrangement of a field from within a field, but in a way which wasn’t foreseeable from within that field, recurs in Althusser’s writings. I would at some point like to make an argument about a similar relationship between hymn songs and labor and protest songs back in the day, a sort of detourning of one set of music with another set of concepts. In that case, though, the language of fields and being in a field makes less sense, because it’s more a matter of knitting together different locations, putting new experiences and ideas and words to old tunes.