Chapter 2: Friendship, Freedom, Ethics, Affinity

To become what we need to each other, and to find power in friendship, is to become dangerous.

—anonymous[41]

I have a circle of friends and family with whom I am radically vulnerable and trust deeply—we call it coevolution through friendship.

—adrienne maree brown[42]

The urgency of making kin[43]

Empire works in part by constantly attenuating and poisoning relationships. Kinship has been enclosed within the nuclear family, freedom within the individual, and values within morality. Together, these enclosures sap relationships of their intensity and their transformative potential. If relationships are what compose the world and our lives, then the “free individual” of modern, Western capitalism (an implicitly straight, white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, property-owning man) is a sad and lonely vision: a strange fiction invented by a violent and fearful society, walled in by morality and self-interest. This is an uprooted being who sees his rootlessness—his very incapacity to make and sustain transformative connections—as a feat of excellence.

We suggest that Empire’s grip on relationships is being broken by new and resurgent forms of intimacy through which people come to depend on each other, defend each other, and become dangerous together. Friendship as freedom, in this story, names interdependent relationships as a source of collective power, a dangerous closeness that Empire works to eradicate through relentless violence, division, competition, management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or nuclear family units.

Spinoza helps us dissolve the fiction of the modern Western individual—and its oscillation between self-interest and morality—into a relational ethics. A lot of people already navigate their everyday lives in this way, attuned and responsive to their own situations and relationships. Along these lines, we draw on a minor current of anarchism associated with Gustav Landauer and others that centers relationships as the basis of resistance and movement. We bring these currents into conversation with Indigenous worldviews and practices, along with the ethical questions that are being asked and answered in a multiplicity of ways, in different places, around decolonizing relationships between settlers and Indigenous people. This conversation always includes questions of how to sever harmful relationships. Freedom, in this sense, is not just the capacity to generate “good” relationships, but also to draw lines in the sand and fight.

Friendship is the root of freedom

These are not just words; they are clues and prods to earthquakes in kin making that are not limited to Western family apparatuses, heteronormative or not.

—Donna Haraway[44]

Freedom and friendship used to mean the same thing: intimate, interdependent relationships and the commitment to face the world together. At its root, relational freedom isn’t about being unrestricted: it might mean the capacity for interconnectedness and attachment. Or mutual support and care. Or shared gratitude and openness to an uncertain world. Or a new capacity to fight alongside others. But this is not what freedom has come to mean under Empire.

Look for the dictionary definition of “freedom” today and you’ll find rights, absences and lack of restrictions at the core, applied to an isolated individual. Here are some of its definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary:

The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants:

“we do have some freedom of choice”

The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved:

“the shark thrashed its way to freedom”

The state of not being subject to or affected by (something undesirable):

“government policies to achieve freedom from want”[45]

At bottom, all of these definitions are about getting away from external restriction or influence: being unhindered, unaffected, independent. Under capitalism, freedom is especially associated with free markets and the free agent who chooses based on individual preferences. In spite of colonization and capitalism, this vapid form of freedom still can’t get a foothold in many parts of the world. Even in Europe, where so many tools of colonization were refined, the roots of freedom were different. Centuries ago, some Europeans had a more relational conception of freedom, which wasn’t just about the absence of external constraints, but also about our immersion in the relationships that sustain us and make us thrive.

“Freedom” and “friend” share the same early Indo-European root: fri-, or pri-, meaning “love.”[46] This root made its way into Gothic, Norse, Celtic, Hindi, Russian, and German.[47] A thousand years ago, the Germanic word for “friend” was the present participle of the verb freon, “to love.” This language also had an adjective, *frija-. It meant “free” as in “not in slavery,” where the reason to avoid slavery was to be among loved ones. Frija meant “beloved, belonging to the circle of one’s beloved friends and family.”[48] As the Invisible Committee writes in To Our Friends,

“Friend” and “free” in English … come from the same Indo-European root, which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me.”[49]

A few centuries later, freedom became untied from connectedness. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined freedom as nothing more than an “absence of opposition” possessed by isolated, selfish individuals. For Hobbes, the free man is constantly armed and on guard: “When going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests.”[50] The free individual lives in fear, and can only feel secure when he knows there are laws and police to protect him and his possessions. He is definitely he, because this individual is also founded on patriarchal male supremacy and its associated divisions of mind/body, aggression/submission, rationality/emotion, and so on. His so-called autonomy is inseparable from his exploitation of others.

When peasants were “freed,” during this period, it often meant that they had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving them “free” to sell their labor for a wage in the factories, or starve. It is no coincidence that these lonely conceptions of freedom arose at the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom was divorced from friendship and connection, the lived connections between people and places were being dismembered.

As Empire was enclosing lands and bodies, it was overseeing the enclosure of thought as well. The Age of Reason was marked by a new kind of knowledge that could subdue and control nature and the human body, enabling capitalist rationalization and work discipline.[51] Time and space would become measurable, stable, and fixed. Bodies were no longer conduits for magical forces, but machines to be harnessed for production. Plants, animals, and other non-human creatures were no longer kin, but objects to be dissected and consumed.

Even among intellectuals in Europe, not everyone agreed with Hobbes’s fearful vision of freedom and the divisions imposed by Cartesian thought. Descartes’s contemporary, Baruch Spinoza, articulated a philosophy in which people were inherently intertwined with their world. Spinoza left instructions for his most important work, the Ethics, to be published after his death, because he knew he would likely face torture and execution for the ways his relational worldview undermined both monotheistic religion and the dualistic philosophy that was emerging during his own time. Instead of a passive Nature on one hand and an active, supernatural God on the other, Spinoza envisioned a holistic reality in which God is present in all things, and in which all things are active and dynamic processes. Everything is alive and connected. Mind and body, human and non-human, joy and sadness, are intertwined with one another.

We do not mean to present Spinoza’s philosophy as a handbook for living in today’s world. In many ways, Spinoza remained a product of his time and place: he used the geometric method to create proofs for his philosophical claims, he couldn’t overcome patriarchal divisions, and he remained wedded to the state as a vehicle for security. Our interest is not in Spinoza himself, or even his philosophy as a whole, but in the way that his ideas are part of a minor current in Western thought that is more relational, holistic, and dynamic. Spinoza’s work remains marginal compared to that of Descartes and Hobbes, but his relational worldview has nevertheless been taken up by radicals at the margins of philosophy, ecology, feminism, marxism and anarchism.[52]

Most importantly, for us, Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded in affect.[53] Things are not defined by what they are, but by what they do: how they affect and are affected by the forces of the world. In this way, capabilities are not fixed for all time, but are constantly shifting. This is a fundamental departure from the inherently ableist and ageist perspective that measures all bodies in relation to the norm of a “healthy,” “mature,” or “able” body. When starting right from a body’s material specificity, without any intervening “should,” learning becomes fundamentally different: rather than detached categorization or observation of stable properties, it happens through active experimentation in shared, ever-changing situations.

From morality to ethics

By creating a philosophy based in affect, Spinoza initiated a radical critique of ruling institutions and authorities and the ways they exercise control through subjection, including toxic morality inherited from centuries of Christianity, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and the state. But Spinoza’s philosophy did not just undermine Empire’s dominant morality in order to replace it with a different one; it undermined morality itself. His worldview was at odds with any notion of an ultimate ground of right and wrong that was uniform for everyone, abstracted from the lively flux of relationships and situations. For Spinoza, life was an exploration of the forces of the world, not conformity to a fixed ideal.

For moralists this is dangerous because there’s no guarantee against evil, and no ultimate foundation for moral judgment. Yet the Spinozan lineage is not about everyone doing whatever they please, according to isolated interests and preferences. On the contrary, recognizing our interconnectedness means becoming capable of more fidelity to our web of relations and our situations, not less. This fidelity is not moral; it is ethical.

Ethics is often spoken of colloquially as an individual morality: a static set of principles held by individuals (ethical consumption, codes of ethics, and so on). In fact, dictionary definitions conflate ethics with the “moral principles that govern a person’s behavior.”[54] But as Deleuze explains, a Spinozan conception of ethics results in a completely different set of questions:

There’s a fundamental difference between Ethics and Morality. Spinoza doesn’t make up a morality, for a very simple reason: he never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. In this sense Spinoza is profoundly immoral. Regarding the moral problem, good and evil, he has a happy nature because he doesn’t even comprehend what this means. What he comprehends are good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. Thus he makes an ethics and not at all a morality.[55]

Whereas morality asks and answers the question: “what should one do?” a Spinozan ethics asks: “what is one capable of?” Unlike the cold abstraction of morality, a body’s capacities can only be discovered through attunement and experimentation, starting right where you are. You never know until you try. In trying, whether you “succeed” or “fail,” you will have learned and changed, and the situation will have changed, even if only slightly. This sounds simple, and in many ways it is. It speaks to the ways that many of us already try to navigate our everyday lives: not by adhering to fixed commandments, but by learning to inhabit our own situations in ways that make us more capable and more jointly alive.

Someone gets in touch with bird migrations, insects, weather patterns: they affect her more and more deeply as she tunes into their rhythms, over months and years. They begin to make her up. The loss is palpable as fewer return each year, and her hatred of the destruction grows alongside her love of the few remaining refuges for non-human creatures where she lives. Her rage and despair finds resonance with others, similarly entwined, and they figure out how to fight together. This is neither individual self-interest, nor moral altruism. It is relational ethics: the willingness to nurture and defend relationships.[56]

Two friends fold their lives together; they draw new capacities out of each other. They hurt each other, and they work through it, emerging more intertwined than before. They are no longer sure which ideas and mannerisms were “their own” and which belonged to the friend. They know each other’s triggers and tendencies, intimately. One finds himself in trouble, and the other drops everything to help, at great personal risk. But this risk and sacrifice is not because it is morally right, or because they have calculated that it is in their own self-interest. It is not even felt as a choice; it is something drawn out of them.

Ethics is the dynamic space beyond static morality and vapid self-interest: it is the capacity to be responsive to the relationships that make us up. Whether consciously or not, our desires and choices are the product of everything that affects us. While this kind of thinking and practice may be intuitive, it runs against dominant strands of both Western knowledge and morality, which strive for universalism and generalizability: they tend towards pinning things down, dictating how we should act, or predicting what is likely. They ask what humans are and always will be, what we should always do, or what we usually do (and how we can be controlled). In contrast, a Spinozan ethics is attuned to the singularity and openness of each situation: what are we capable of here and now, together, at this time, in this place, amid the relations in which we are embedded?

From this perspective, it is not about creating self-contained units, but about participating in complex, shifting, relational processes. We always begin in the middle: amid our situations, in our neighborhoods, with our own penchants, habits, loves, complicities, and connections. There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations in which we’re embedded. This relational space eludes the traps of individual self-interest and moral duty. It is a space beyond isolated individuals and altruistic saviors. We are always participating in the making of our worlds, and being made by them. From this perspective, freedom can mean nothing other than the ethical expansion of what we’re capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together. In this vein, the Invisible Committee writes,

Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them … the freedom to uproot oneself has always been a fantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.[57]

Freedom here is not the absence of restriction or attachment, but the capacity to become more active in shaping our attachments. This becoming-active is not about controlling things, but about learning to participate in their flow, forming intense bonds through which we become implicated in each other’s struggles and capacities. Within the Spinozan current, friendship is being revalued: not as a bond between individuals, but as an ethical relation that remakes us, together, in an ongoing process of becoming otherwise. Similarly, feminist philosopher Donna Haraway has argued that “making kin” across divides of species, nation, gender, and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today.[58] Through friendship or kinship we undo ourselves and become new, in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, friendship is at the root of freedom.

What can friendship do?

Friendship will be the soil from which a new politics will emerge.

—Ivan Illich[59]

Can friendship be revalued as a radical, transformative form of kinship? We are not sure, but we want to try. Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable, rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button.[60] This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: “just friends” implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless; only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination. Perhaps friendship can be revalued in an expansive but specific way: friends, chosen family, and other kin, intimately connected in a web of mutual support.

Intersecting currents of disability justice, youth liberation, queer movements, feminism, ecology, anarchism, Indigenous resurgence, and Black liberation have all emphasized the centrality of nurturing strong relationships. In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he emphasized that joyful militancy can never be an individual choice, because transformation happens in and through relationships:

The first move toward some sort of self-affirmation or resurgence is often registered in a very negative reaction: hate, envy, these sorts of things … This complicates the story a bit. In order to have a kind of joyful militant positionality or whatever, it requires a whole lot of other overwhelming positions on the world. And that is where I think relationships are crucial. I don’t think that this is even possible to come to on your own. Am I going to respond to this oppressive situation through a form of self-destruction, or am I going to try and live with it, or am I going to channel it into more community-building efforts? And I don’t think that’s ever done in a silo. Those are comrades that are working together in order to achieve that position. Those are through the hard conversations ranging from interventions to who-knows-what, just recognizing that some relationships seem to be more empowering than others. So getting to be the joyful militant is complicated. It’s a product of relationships. It’s not the effect of doing relationships well; it’s because we’re already in relationships of solidarity. We’re helping each other out, we’re drawing people out of the negative into more positive relationships. Joyful militants aren’t choosing and saying “oh, I’m going to do this.”

It’s because I’m being interpellated into more positive relationships which provide me with different perspectives on the world, that draw me away from what would be entirely acceptable and rational, and that’s despair. How do we not have despair in these situations that we’re in? It’s because relationships are drawing us away from that to the extent that they can, to the extent that they’re successful. A joyful militant is less a product of a will to do so; there’s a work, we’re constantly working on each other. I’m not gonna blame the individual person if they’re in a situation that is clearly miserable.[61]

In these times, feelings of despair, rage, and hatred make sense. Maybe they even indicate a healthy receptivity to what is taking place; a refusal to numb ourselves to the pain and violence of Empire. To shame people for being in touch with all this, or to tell them to pull themselves out of it, simply individualizes suffering. Change comes not from individuals, but from this “constant working on each other,” which we have called ethics and relational freedom. It might entail supporting each other to become more present with despair, guilt, resentment, fear, or grief. It might include channeling anger into attacking Empire, blocking its flows, or breaking its hold, at least in part. Freedom is the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are suspended. It is the parent learning to trust their kid. It is the teen who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom, gentleness, and militancy always come from—and feed back into—the web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed.

By creating relational webs that reinforce the values we aspire to, relationships can help undo patterns that Empire has ingrained. Loving relationships can be what allow us to face the things we fear about ourselves. They can help undo the ways that we have internalized notions that we are not good enough, not worthy of love, or that we have to put up with things that deplete us and those we care about. Relationships of mutual love and support can enable us to see and feel the toxicity of some of our attachments. They can help us to look at our patterns of addiction or depression without shame. Those we love can be our reasons to stay alive when we aren’t sure that we want to. They can help us leave miserable situations by leaping with us into the unknown. Friendships can be the source of our capacity to take risks and get in the way of violence and exploitation. They can be what make us dangerous and capable of fighting in new ways. This might be something like what “friend” meant to some of our European ancestors before the witch trials: not just someone to hang out with, but someone whose existence is inseparable from one’s own. A relationship crucial to life, worth fighting for.

A persnickety linguist or historian might object that there is no unbroken line of insurgent friendship that lies hidden in history. These critics are right: it is a zigzagging, disjointed line, always being broken and reassembled, a story among other stories, resonant with many other non-European genealogies of relational freedom. But this elusiveness is what makes it precious and powerful: it is people’s capacity to constantly form new complicities amid terror and violence.

Solidarity begins at home

I don’t need to be empowered by adults; I need them to stop having power over me.

—Lilah Joy Bergman, age 9

While friendship is made vapid by Empire, coupledom and the nuclear family become the container for all other forms of intimacy. As anti-racist, Indigenous, and autonomist feminists have shown, the nuclear family—where one generation of parents lives with one generation of children, separated from everyone else—is a recent invention of Empire.[62] It was (and is) a crucial institution for the privatization and enclosure of life. It is also central to the maintenance of a culture of authoritarianism, abuse, and neglect that underpins heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. It evolved as a way of reproducing wage-laboring men through the unpaid labor of women. Violence against women and children within the family was condoned as part of a civilizing process, and it became a conduit for intergenerational violence, and for the accumulation of white wealth and property through inheritance.

Through feminist struggle, some of the most brutal, state-sanctioned violences of the nuclear family (such as legalized rape and abuse) have been challenged, but it remains a site of isolation and violence, for children in particular. One of its most brutal effects is that it makes other forms of intimacy difficult or unthinkable for many of us. Through suburbs and apartments designed for a privatized existence, the nuclear family is even coded into the built environment.

At the same time, people are constantly inventing and recovering other kinds of belonging and intimacy. They are creatively collectivizing and communalizing life, sharing income, food, and housing in ways that break down privatization and segregation. As Silvia Federici writes,

We also have a return to more extended types of families, built not on blood ties but on friendship relations. This, I think, is a model to follow. We are obviously in a period of transition and a great deal of experimentation, but opening up the family – hetero or gay – to a broader community, breaking down the walls that increasingly isolated it and prevented it from confronting its problems in a collective way is the path we must take not to be suffocated by it, and instead strengthen our resistance to exploitation. The denuclearization of the family is the path to the construction of communities of resistance.[63]

Many Indigenous people, people of color, and queer folks have never been invited into the structure of the nuclear family, and they have always made kin in other ways. Queer chosen families have created intimate, intergenerational webs of support, and these radical ties remain alive in spite of new forms of homonormative capture. As Dean Spade writes,

In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal, often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support, and build deep supportive structures with other queers. We are interested in resisting the heteronormative family structure in which people are expected to form a dyad, marry, have kids, and get all their needs met within that family structure. A lot of us see that as unhealthy, as a new technology of post-industrial late capitalism that is connected to alienating people from community and training them to think in terms of individuality, to value the smaller unit of the nuclear family rather than the extended family.[64]

Similarly, bell hooks points to traditions of informal adoption in Black communities, in which people adopted and cared for children in ways that were communally recognized but never sanctioned by the state:

Let’s say you didn’t have any children and your neighbor had eight kids. You might negotiate with her to adopt a child, who would then come live with you, but there would never be any kind of formal adoption, yet everybody would recognize her as your “play daughter.” My community was unusual in that gay black men were also able to informally adopt children. And in this case there was a kinship structure in the community where people would go home and visit their folks if they wanted to, stay with them (or what have you), but they would also be able to stay with the person who was loving and parenting them.[65]

Leanne Simpson, writing on Indigenous nationhood, notes how resurgence entails displacing settler colonialism and the nuclear family with “big, beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and friends that care very deeply for each other.”[66] In many ways, these kinds of relationships make possible and sustain the creation of intergenerational forms of organizing that include kids and elders, and break down divides between public and private. Simpson spoke to the importance of this when we interviewed her:

How change happens matters to me, which is why I don’t spend much time lobbying the state. I believe in creating the change on the ground, and creating and living the alternatives. In my nation, children and Elders are critical, and it means we organize differently. You can’t invite kids to a twelve-hour, boring meeting and then get frustrated because they are bored or frustrated because they won’t stay with the childcare worker they’ve never met. You can’t invite the Elders to welcome people to the territory and then not speak to the issues. I think we actually need to do less organizing and more movement building. Right now, we have activists, not leaders. We have actions, not community. My kids are also fundamentally not interested in “the movement.” They are, however, fundamentally interested in doing things.[67]

These kinds of non-nuclear kinship networks have been sustained in the face of state terrorism and incarceration, residential and boarding schools, and Empire’s ongoing attempts to privatize and destroy non-nuclear kinship networks, extended families, and webs of relationships that include non-human kin. Nourishing and sustaining these communal forms of life throws into question some of the dominant ideas about what counts as political work, about separation of activism or organizing from everyday life. They challenge the segregation of kids from the rest of the world (and from organizing and politics in particular) and the ways that elders are isolated and intergenerational connections are lost.

Creating intergenerational webs of intimacy and support is a radical act in a world that has privatized child-rearing, housing, subsistence and decision-making. Challenging the nuclear family is not about a puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social relations, to the spatial division of people through suburbanization, incarceration, schooling, dispossession, and displacement. This entails the proliferation of relationships that may or may not be based on blood but are built on care and love. The Latin American political theorist Raúl Zibechi argues that non-nuclear family and kinship networks are at the heart of Latin America’s most transformative and militant movements, including those of Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, landless and homeless movements, piqueteros, and women’s and youth movements.[68] These collective forms of life are based in new forms of dwelling, subsistence, and resistance. At the same time, Zibechi is clear that these are “only tendencies, aspirations, or attempts in the midst of social struggles.”[69] Relationships of mutual support are not a destination but a continual process of struggle.

As people renew intergenerational relationships and bring their whole lives into struggle, new forms of politics emerge. In this context, Silvia Federici argues,

This is why the idea of creating “self-reproducing” movements has been so powerful. It means creating a certain social fabric and forms of cooperative reproduction that can give continuity and strength to our struggles, and a more solid base to our solidarity. We need to create forms of life in which political activism is not separated from the task of our daily reproduction, so that relations of trust and commitment can develop that today remain on the horizon. We need to put our lives in common with the lives of other people to have movements that are solid and do not rise up and then dissipate. Sharing reproduction, this is what began to happen within the Occupy Movement and what usually happens when a struggle reaches a moment of almost insurrectional power. For example, when a strike goes on for several months, people begin to put their lives in common because they have to mobilize all their resources not to be defeated.[70]

Federici here gets at the way in which care is not only a means of maintaining struggles, but a transformative part of struggle itself. While Empire works to privatize and individualize our daily lives, many movements are reproducing themselves more autonomously by collectivizing care: from cooking to cohabitation to learning to just being present with each other.

Friendship, kinship, and communalization have also been at the heart of working across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have taught us to enact violence on each other and internalize oppressive ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and radical act. Everyone knows how difficult this can be, and how people fuck up, hurt each other, and blame each other. Those conscripted into oppressive roles can always fall back into old habits. In some cases, people are able to talk about all this in ways that are subtle, gentle, and more attuned to each other’s tendencies, triggers, and gifts, and genuine relations of support emerge. In the context of queer, anti-racist disability justice, Mia Mingus speaks to the centrality of strong relationships for undoing oppression:

Any kind of systematic change we want to make will require us to work together to do it. And we have to have relationships strong enough to hold us as we go up against something as powerful as the state, the medical industrial complex, the prison system, the gender binary system, the church, immigration system, the war machine, global capitalism.

Because we’re going to mess up. Of that I am sure. We cannot, on the one hand have sharp analysis about how pervasive systems of oppression and violence are and then on the other hand, expect people to act like that’s not the world we exist in. Of course there are times we are going to do and say oppressive things, of course we are going to hurt each other, of course we are going to be violent, collude in violence or accept violence as normal.

We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it—because they do.[71]

Between the authors of this book, friendship has required us to negotiate divisions ingrained in our bodies by ageism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism. Sometimes these divisions get in the way of our capacity to connect in ways that are enabling and transformative. Patriarchy has socialized Nick, as a man, to be self-assured, (over)confident, rational, and individualistic. carla has been socialized to be submissive, caring, diffident, and to put others before herself. Even as we worked against some of these tendencies, carla ended up doing more emotional and caring labor for this project and Nick ended up doing more labor when it came to writing and editing. We have also been learning to challenge these divisions, always partially and inconsistently, through processes of mutual growth, support, and (un)learning. In part because of our very different life experiences, skill sets, and perspectives, our collaborative process has enabled us to produce something new together and made us both more capable in new ways. Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it, alone.

The ethics of affinity in anarchism

Ultimately, nourishing these kinds of intimacies means putting relationships before abstract political commitments and ideologies. At the same time, we think it is possible to recover relational currents within anti-authoritarian political traditions without appropriating the ideas and struggles of others. Within anarchism, the Spinozan current flows through Gustav Landauer’s relational conception of anarchism. Landauer’s philosophy ran against the grain of the dominant strands of revolutionary Marxism and anarchism of his time, which conceived revolution as a dramatic event that would take place in the future. Instead of envisioning a future event of transformation in which capitalism and the state would be destroyed and all of humanity could be liberated, Landauer insisted on the importance of a living, present anarchism, and on transforming our relationships here and now.

Landauer also argued that the state’s power lies not only with armies or police, but in its capacity to get us to govern ourselves and each other, and to recreate its hierarchical and divisive relationships through our conduct:

A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.[72]

The state and capitalism are systems designed to amass wealth for a tiny minority, and while Empire’s figureheads are people with names and addresses, others will replace them when they are gone. Instead of destroying Empire, Landauer raised the question of how to undo its hold on relationships, and how to generate new and different relations in its place. This is an ethical question, not a moral one. Like Spinoza, he suggested that that there was no single answer for everyone. He insisted that a notion of worldwide socialism or anarchism was too totalizing, and he recognized that other people and cultures would have different answers to the question of how to live:

We have long enough misunderstood socialism as a vague, general ideology, a magic wand that opens all doors and solves all problems. We should know by now that everything out in the world as well as within our souls is so jumbled that there will never be only one way to happiness. So what I am advocating here has nothing to do with a call on humanity. We have to realize that different cultures exist next to each other and that the dream that all should be the same cannot be sustained – in fact, it is not even a beautiful dream.[73]

In a way that resonates with many anti-authoritarian currents of today, Landauer refused to hold anarchism up as a single moral or ideological project that would free all of humanity from oppression. But while refusing this universalizing project, Landauer was also critical of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner, who also refused morality but rooted his philosophy in the liberation of the individual ego or desire.[74] In contrast, Landauer insisted that individual people could not be abstracted from their already existing relationships, values, and communities. Like the state, the self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire. “I” am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.

For Landauer then, transformation was an immediate, situated, ethical project that could only be based on transforming ourselves, collectively, starting from where we are, and seeking out affinities with others. “Only when anarchy becomes, for us, a dark, deep dream, not a vision attainable through concepts,” Landauer wrote, “can our ethics and our actions become one.”[75] Similarly, scott crow writes, “Anarchism is not rigid, it is flexible and fluid so cast aside your thoughts about the way it ‘should’ be and help make it what it ‘could be.’”[76] Freedom, in this sense, is not the absence of Empire, secured through a glorious future revolution or the triumph of an anarchist blueprint. Freedom is the capacity to grapple with some of the toxic habits and relationships fostered by Empire, and to recover other ways of relating. This anarchism can only be an action or a process.

Anarchist political theorist Richard Day has drawn on Landauer, Kropotkin, and others to reveal a current of anarchism that is about the capacity to create immediate, living alternatives to the state, capitalism, morality, and Empire’s oppressive divisions. There are always forms of alliance and mutual aid that exceed Empire, from the ways plants and animals support each other symbiotically, to everyday forms of cooperation and solidarity that crop up in spite of subjection. Day calls this the logic of affinity, which is “ever-present, even in the most advanced forms of (post)industrial bureaucratic control. It is not a dream, but an actuality; not something to be yearned for, but something to be noticed in operation everywhere, at every moment of every day.”[77] From this perspective, affinity can be discerned in every process of joyful transformation, large and small, in which people discover new capacities together, resist, invent, or activate something that is already in play. The capacity to carve out autonomous forms of life is always under attack by Empire, and always resurfacing.

This concept of affinity is important to us because it gets at the way forms of life can connect based in shared commitments or desires without erasing differences. We follow Day in suggesting that there is an “affinity for affinity” among currents of Indigenous, anti-racist, anti-colonial, migrant justice, anarchist, feminist, ecological, queer, and autonomist currents of thought and practice: a penchant for linking up and supporting others based on shared values and commitments without trampling on each other’s autonomy.[78] It can be seen, for example, in the Zapatistas’ vision of “a world where many worlds fit.”[79] Similarly, affinity is resonant with what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “bridging” in This Bridge We Call Home:

Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded. Effective bridging comes from knowing when to close ranks to those outside our home, group, community, nation—and when to keep the gates open.[80]

These notions of affinity and bridging turn connection into an open-ended ethical question rather than an assumption, a goal, or a moral imperative. How do we relate? Who is this “we”? How do we affect each other? How and when to be open, selectively? How might we be able to work together? These questions can only be answered by people in their own situations, as relationships unfold.

Connecting Spinozan currents to Indigenous resurgence

While we hope some of the affinities between Spinozan currents and Indigenous worldviews are emergent throughout this chapter, we want to spend some time thinking about them directly, especially in light of the relational conceptions we have outlined above. We think the relational conceptions of anarchism and friendship are resonant with (though necessarily distinct from) the lifeways of Indigenous peoples and many other societies that ground their worlds in connectedness to each other and the places they inhabit. For instance, writer and facilitator Zainab Amadahy offers a “relationship framework” that sees all life as fundamentally interconnected:

We two-leggeds are inter-connected with each other and with other life on the planet -- indeed, even to the planet itself and beyond. What we think, say, and do impacts, directly and indirectly, everything and everyone else, which also affect us. We are further impacted by ancestors and will impact generations to come. Some of us even believe the reverse; that we can impact our ancestors and that our descendants impact us. In any case, we are clearly “in relationship” whether we acknowledge, fully understand and respect the concept or not.[81]

In our conversation with Glen Coulthard, he elaborated on his notion of place-based Indigenous ethics, which he calls “grounded normativity.” Coulthard shows how Indigenous resistance and values are literally grounded in the ongoing renewal of reciprocal relationships with land:

I don’t think you come to these things on your own. We’re always kind of embedded and constituted by what’s around us. The whole book I wrote [Red Skin, White Masks] is based on this. I’m nothing; I’m just a product of the messy relationships that have formed me over time. And the point about the book is, we’ve tended to think of these relationships as anthropocentric. But we’re also shaped by the other-than-human relations that we’re thrown into, including relationships to place and land itself, and that can have an effect on our perspective; it can shape our normativities, or what we think is right or wrong.[82]

Red Skin, White Masks shows how these relational webs have been foundational for Indigenous resurgence against settler colonialism, and inexorably connected to the struggle over land:

The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.[83]

From this perspective, settler colonialism is an attack on Indigenous bodies and lands, and on the grounded normativities that sustain them. It is an attack on Indigenous forms of life. For the same reason, Coulthard suggests that recovering, sustaining, and defending these forms of life becomes crucial to decolonization and resistance:

Repetition, doing things, shapes how you see things. And depending on what that practice is, it can double back and shape how you do things. And in a land-based context, that kind of cyclical, dual conditioning—how we produce the necessities of our lives shapes our spiritual understandings and those can, over time, double back and shape how we go about doing things in the material sense. What we’re seeing now to validate this is that Indigenous people have been dragged away from those practices violently, into other ones oriented around a different mode of production, a different way of producing the necessities of life, through resource extraction, and that is now shaping our normative worlds; what we see as right or wrong. And it’s because these long-standing practices are being disrupted. Now what we’re doing with Dechinta and other land-based practices is we’re reestablishing—in an impure form because we’re all learning again—these different normative practices and worlds. And an important part of that is our relationship with land and other-than-human kin. So prefiguration is that emphasis on the importance of practice, and shaping even what we think our ends should be … it’s a very practical ethics … That’s not to devalue it; I actually hold this more valuable than abstract normative traditions where you have to dissociate yourself from your relationships in order to come up with pure principles, and that just results in a never-ending, always-there gap between what our ideals are, and where our shitty world is at. It justifies that. In theory we have it nailed down, we just haven’t quite approximated that in our lives and institutions. In contrast, the grounded normativity, practical, prefigurative starting place is saying no, those ideals are formed by what we do with our lives—by the relationships that we sustain and renew.[84]

In a way that resonates with the relational conception of anarchism we explored above, Coulthard speaks to the importance of prefiguration: nurturing relationships informed by reciprocity with human and other-than-human kin. Similarly, in her book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Leanne Simpson writes that she is “not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house, or our own houses.[85]

Recovering forms of life that have been subjugated or ruled out entails resistance and transgressing of laws or norms, but these negations are only what is visible from the perspective of Empire. It is clear that this is not resistance for its own sake, or (only) because Empire is monstrous: resurgent forms of life are also about values and connections worth defending and nurturing.

While there may be resonances with anarchism, Coulthard and Simpson are speaking about the resurgence of specific, Indigenous forms of life. Where we live, resonances and affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous forms of life are always marked by the violence of settler colonialism. Our lives are inextricably linked to structures bent on the eradication of Indigenous life and the exploitation of Indigenous land. Navigating these uncertain connections requires dealing with difficult ethical questions.

In our part of the world, it is clear that we are living in the midst of Indigenous resurgence. All over Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples are reasserting their ties and responsibilities to their lands, refusing the racist and heteropatriarchal divisions imposed by Empire, and recovering relationships based in care and consent. This is an intensification of what has been happening since colonization began.

For non-Indigenous people—and for white, European-descended settlers who live on Indigenous land, specifically—this can be profoundly unsettling. Can non-Indigenous people support Indigenous resurgence? Can alliances productively stretch across the colonial divide? Through messy, uneven processes, settlers and Indigenous peoples are answering these questions together. Many non-Indigenous people are beginning to see themselves as settlers, complicit in ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous forms of life. Black and Indigenous communities are forging alliances to resist the intertwined violences of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. As Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau write,

These dreams of freedom mean that our acts of resistance are inextricably linked as Afrikan peoples and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. But fundamentally, what this means is that we need to seriously, purposefully and with urgency begin to look to each other—not to the state—for our self-determination.[86]

As Indigenous resurgence and Black uprising reshape life throughout North America, new affinities and new forms of co-resistance are emerging. It is increasingly clear that decolonization is fundamental to all struggles to dismantle Empire and live differently here and now in North America. Decolonization has fundamentally shifted the values, priorities, and organizing practices of many anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and other radicals. As Harsha Walia writes,

A growing number of social movements are recognizing that Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples in Canada are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, are overrepresented in statistics of missing and murdered women and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, Indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women and environmental justice.[87]

Indigenous people have forged alliances with ranchers and farmers resisting pipelines, with migrants resisting border imperialism, and with Black communities resisting criminalization and the prison industrial complex. They have linked up with anarchists while challenging them to rethink colonial conceptions of nation, territory, tradition, and authority. Some settlers are learning to take responsibility for developing relationships with the people whose land they are on, and learning to support Indigenous leadership. Indigenous resurgence has pushed non-Indigenous people to learn the histories and protocols of the lands where they live, to ask what it means to honor treaties, and what it means to live on land where treaties were never signed. In our conversation with Coulthard, he spoke to the potential of recovering Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjugated knowledges and forms of life, and exploring affinities between them:

Coulthard: If those [Indigenous] relationships to land and place and those sustaining connections are destroyed, then our views change on what’s good, what’s just. So what we’re trying to do in terms of land-based decolonizing education is to ensure that those practical relationships that inform our philosophical systems and vice versa are maintained to the best of our ability, and that requires a struggle and conflict with the forces that are trying to destroy it.

Nick and carla: It seems like white settlers are the ones who’ve allowed their own grounded normativities to be destroyed, or they have been destroyed, at least mostly. And we’ve been invited to participate in the destruction of Indigenous peoples’ grounded normativities.

Coulthard: I think the point that’s important here is that we’re talking about hegemonies. So grounded normativities are being wiped out by a hegemonic system—a system of dominance. So when you say “the problem with settler life is that it’s doing this,” I would say, in my more generous moments, that the hegemonic settler form of life is destroying Indigenous forms of life, but settlers have a whole host of other grounded normativities that have themselves been violently ruled out of existence. Whether that’s radical ecological stuff to anarchist stuff to Marxist stuff—whatever: they’re subaltern knowledges and practices. And there are affinities between those that we can map out and explore. There’s a lot within non-Indigenous settler traditions that have suffered their own erasure that might be brought back to the fore. And that’s way better than the alternative, which is stealing what we’ve got. So what Foucault would refer to as a resurgence of subaltern knowledges. There’s a rich history of overlap and affinities that I think need to be drawn on, and crucial to avoid the violences of cultural appropriation and “becoming Indigenous.”[88]

Exploring affinities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions and forms of life raises a lot of questions. There is a deep ambivalence to the recovery of non-Indigenous traditions, or the creation of new alternatives, especially those that involve direct connections to land. Deepening these relationships—with seasons, territories, plants, and other-than-human forces where we live—can end up entrenching dispossession and colonization.

From conservation to farming to fishing, many settler (especially European) traditions have evolved or been sustained through Indigenous dispossession and an attack on Indigenous forms of life. Settler colonialism has always included a project of attaching white bodies to Indigenous land, and attempts to “reclaim the commons” can erase Indigenous presence.

At the same time, there are emergent alliances and relationships between settlers and Indigenous people, based in consent and shared responsibility. Settlers are critically revaluing some of their own traditions in ways that enable new affinities and solidarities. Settlers have been able to offer their own practical land-connected skills and knowledge like herbalism, bioremediation, cooking, carpentry, ecological gardening and more, alongside the skills and knowledges held by Indigenous people.

In our experience, it has been settlers rooted in their own traditions and values who are most capable of building strong relationships with Indigenous peoples, showing up in meaningful ways, and decentering themselves and staying on the sidelines when it is appropriate. It is people with strong friendships—their own webs of care and support—who are able to consistently support decolonization, whether that means supporting frontline land defense struggles or urban Indigenous initiatives, or cultivating meaningful, long-term relationships with local Indigenous folks where they live.

These capacities are not based on abstract morality, nor are they about having the most bang-on anticolonial analysis. They are based on a web of connectivity that enables people to think and act differently. One thing that is clear to us about Indigenous resurgence is that it is driven and sustained by these deep connections and relationships that colonization seeks to destroy. Rebuilding and sustaining these connections is clearly at the root of decolonization—for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, differently.

How can settlers and Indigenous people explore affinities between autonomous forms of life? What are the potentials and pitfalls of revitalizing non-Indigenous traditions (or inventing new ones) on stolen ground? These questions cannot be answered in the abstract, but are already being asked and answered collectively, over and over again, in multiple ways, across different territories, movements, and struggles. Hanging onto these as ethical questions, we think, helps get beyond the shame and guilt of moralism that can be so immobilizing (and counterproductive) for settlers—especially white settlers. Instead of the narcissistic shame that impels settlers to ask for and demand absolution from Indigenous peoples, ethical questions can shift people towards active responsibility that is rooted in consent, as Indigenous people often emphasize. For us, this means finding the wiggle room of freedom—the capacity to work on our relationships—and participate in new and old forms of nurturance and resistance.

Friendship and freedom have sharp edges

If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.

—Friedrich Nietzsche[89]

Working on relationships also means the capacity to dissolve and sever them, and to block those which are harmful. Affinity and bridging require selective openness, with firm boundaries. In this sense, cultivating joyful militancy not only requires cultivating “good” relationships, but also severing those that are unhealthy and damaging. Coulthard drove this point home when we talked with him:

Part of the effect that you see in joyful militancy is an attentiveness to cultivating healthy relationships. And I think that that’s great; there is a productive line of flight … but sometimes—and this is kind of what I’ve been thinking a lot about since writing about reconciliation and resentment—is that the whole idea of a “good relationship”—a positive one instead of a negative one—is almost entirely co-opted by relationship-destroying structures that entrench violence, dispossession, disappearance, all these things, where we’re always compelled to be productive. It’s a compulsion that’s insisted on and that is done asymmetrically across certain bodies. So it’s a demand that’s placed on us as Indigenous peoples, even in terms of having a conversation. It can even be about tone: your tone is negative … Some relationships are just bullshit and we shouldn’t be in them. We should actually draw lines in the sand more willingly, in order to avoid the kind of status quo outcome that’s caused by the compulsion to always be in a positive relationship to others. Others might suck. We shouldn’t be relating to them; we should be fighting them; we should be seeking to destroy them in some circumstances. Because their whole identity, their whole form of life is predicated on our negation. So that’s why, in Canada, Canadians can’t cease to exist in the sense that they understand themselves, because it’s predicated on a genocidal relationship. And there can be no mutual recognition, there can be no mutual respect, because the relationship itself negates that possibility. And that’s a pretty somber situation. It’s not a joyful acknowledgment.[90]

Relational freedom necessarily includes undoing destructive relationships, dissolving or attacking depleting or harmful forces. Freedom is the capacity to make friends and enemies, to be open and to have firm boundaries. Joyful, deeply transformative relationships are only possible through vulnerability and trust, but they also entail the risk of being deeply hurt. In this context, Mia Mingus speaks to the importance of a kind of love that is assertive and accountable:

What I’m talking about is reinventing how we love each other and knowing that solidarity is love, collaboration is love. And really, isn’t that what queerness is about: loving? I am talking about growing and cultivating a deep love that starts with those closest to us and letting it permeate out. Starting with our own communities. Building strong foundations of love.

And I just want to be clear, I am not talking about love that isn’t accountable. I am not talking about staying in harmful and dangerous or abusive relationships. The kind of love I want us to grow is accountable and assertive. Really, I am talking about collective love, where we look out for each other.[91]

For this kind of collective love to exist, sometimes it is necessary to sever relationships. Sometimes friendship and close bonds are a messy mix of closeness, struggle, and distance. In this sense, Empire destroys our capacity to identify enemies, too: morality, policing, law, and prisons are all designed to monopolize the power to decide whose actions are right and wrong, and how they should be dealt with.

For the same reason, if reduced to an imperative to always have “good relationships” with everyone and everything, joyful militancy and friendship become simplistic, reactionary, and colonial in their erasure of power relations and systemic violence. This is the hegemonic morality of Empire—the notion that Indigenous people have to “get over” the past—and it plays itself out not only in state-based efforts at “reconciliation,” but also among everyday relationships between settlers and Indigenous people that reinscribe settler entitlement. Leanne Simpson spoke to this forcefully when we asked her to share her perspective on the potential of friendship between settlers and Indigenous people:

Nick and carla: One of the themes that emerged in a lot of our interviews is the importance of trust and friendship for creating and sustaining joyful militancy and transformative movement infused with love. Under conditions of settler colonialism, trust and friendship between settlers and Indigenous people seems especially difficult, because settlers and our governments have violated this trust over and over, and broken trust is the status quo. What makes trust and friendship possible? Do you see it as an important part of decolonization?

Leanne Simpson: My honest answer is no, I don’t. Friendship has been and is used by so-called white “allies” in pretty horrible ways—everything from “my friend is native and therefore …” to using friendship as a mechanism to protect against white guilt, to using friendship to appropriate. Friendship for me is a crazy-intimate, personal decision and it isn’t helpful for me to feel pressure to trust or be friends with people I don’t trust and don’t want to be friends with. The white allyship takes up a lot of space and it’s a lot of work for Indigenous peoples. White people love being friends with Indigenous peoples. For me, there is huge gap in our life experiences, often our interests and our politics. That doesn’t mean we can’t find useful and strategic ways of working together but don’t make me go to potlucks or backyard BBQs and make the assumption that my personal life is part of the movement. My personal life is not for the taking.

I also see that I have a responsibility to build trust and friendships within the Indigenous community. That is important work because the forces to divide us and make us hate each other are enormous. This does indeed make our movements strong because it’s community building.”[92]

For us, this gets at the danger of setting up friendship or affinity as an ideal, norm, or expectation, especially across the colonial divide and other hierarchical divisions created by Empire. While Simpson speaks to the importance of building trust and friendship among Indigenous people, she is clear that settlers (particularly white settlers seeking to be allies) often end up perpetuating extractive, entitled tendencies. For settlers, getting out of the way might be more important than seeking connection.

Just as intimacy and closeness can be enabling, they can also be sources of coercion, manipulation, and exploitation. To insist on, seek out, or use friendship—and to pathologize its refusal—tends to reinforce these divisions and hierarchies, rather than unravel them. It regenerates the worst of Empire, where oppressed people are expected to stay in oppressive relationships, and their refusal is dismissed as “counterproductive.”

Similar patterns arise to pathologize women and genderqueer folks who refuse to “get over” heteropatriarchy, Black folks and people of color who refuse to “get over” racism, and everyone else who has experienced the liberal trope of “let’s all get along.” Entitlement to others’ time, energy, and love can be an unconscious strategy that reproduces domination through intimacy. Love and friendship can be contorted to erase power and exploitation, enforcing obedience to oppressive norms of politeness or devotion.

Joyful militancy is not a way of dividing the world into “positive” and “negative” ways of being, or asking that we all get along and be happy together. Freedom always needs to retain the potential of refusal, negation, and resistance. To turn friendship into a solution or a goal is to erase the form of freedom we are getting at, which is the freedom to work at relationships—to participate more actively in the shaping of our worlds.

The active shaping of our worlds together

What makes people fight for each other, support each other in radical ways, and construct durable, loving bonds? What makes it possible for people to sever or dissolve stifling attachments or relationships? We do not think the answer is ideology; abstract political values might support short-term alliances, but we doubt their capacity to be the glue that holds people together in the long term. Instead, we suggest that strong relationships are the foundation of resistance. Recovering and sustaining deeper forms of friendship and kinship are indispensable for undoing Empire’s hold.

Sometimes divisions get in the way and people hurt each other too much, too often. Sedimented habits continue to grip us, closing off potentials for being otherwise together. Maintaining transformative relationships is not easy in a world full of violence, in which Empire continually induces us (especially white, cis-male settlers) to construct flimsy relationships based in leisure, and to abandon them if they are no longer pleasurable. For many who live in big cities, don’t have kids, and benefit from a lot of mobility, it is always possible to go somewhere else, to find another group of people to hang out with.

We can’t all be friends, and some forms of life will never be compatible. This is the ethical basis of the logic of affinity, as well: it can never be a totally inclusive, come-one-come-all process, because this would mean welcoming the worst of Empire, and all of its toxic ways of relating. Some differences might mean that people cannot work together. Maybe. Differences might also signal potential for practices, orientations, and priorities that are resonant and complementary without becoming the same. Differences might then become starting points for new complicities and the growth of shared power.

If relationships are what compose the world—and what shape our desires, values, and capacities—then freedom is the capacity to participate more actively in this process of composition. Friendship and resistance are interconnected: when we are supported, we are more willing to confront that which threatens to destroy our worlds. Friendship and affinity are not things but processes and open questions, which produce partial responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confidence, but never definitive answers.