Weak Thought

submission deadline: May 30 2018 Editors: Mateusz Janik and Ewa Majewska Cooperation: Mikołaj Ratajczak The concept of the common has inspired the radical imagination for many years. Discussed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt as an alternative to private property on one hand, and a narrow, state-oriented conception of public property on the other, the common transcends the capitalist horizon of determinism and separation. The common does not merely constitute another form of property, emphasizing the common good and the commons as its most important formats. The word " common " does not only point to a particular form of community, it also expresses the everyday commonality and perhaps even the triviality of a common form of life, the ordinary and the everyday. It is therefore a recollection of the community and common people, of the excluded and the exploited, of the wretched of the Earth and those who have nothing to lose but their chains. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's formulation in On The Concept of History of a " weak messianism " , we might consider the common as a form of " weak " subjectivity. Doing so would imply a reference both to contemporary theory and practice. Given the contemporary dominance of heroic political logics and discourses, it is only natural to look to theories and political and artistic representations of 'weakness' for alternatives and forms of resistance. Viewed as a central attribute of femininity, weakness is also a form of resignation, refusal or an incapacity for the use of force. It might also denote homelessness, poverty and experiences of exploitation in their most atrocious forms. Weakness is also a form of ontology in which political agency is not framed solely in the terms of a masculinized, individualized Western subjectivity nor the sociality that emerges from it. In this issue of the Praktyka Teoretyczna Journal we would like to examine the notion of weakness as it appears in various forms of political agency, community and the visions or forms of life they generate. In the political context, theories of weakness and weak resistance have held a marginal status. Yet they have influenced peripheral, decolonial, antiauthoritarian and feminist perspectives on resistance and protest. For instance, James Scott wrote of struggle and resistance in Weapons of the Weak; Vaclav Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless inspired a number of people to build structures of the " Solidarność " independent labor unions and to participate in grassroots, proletarian counterpublics. The practices of weak resistance have also been important for the constitution of alternatives to capitalist logics of accumulation and appropriation of the commons. As it is depicted in the ethnographies of capitalist peripheries and ruined social landscapes portrayed by Anna Tsing and Tomasz Rakowski, confronting capital's violence is always intertwined with the emergence of alternative forms of collectivity and survival which are the domain of the powerless. The political and economic creativity of life and survival strategies in the social landscapes devastated by capital is also connected to debt, among the key tools of control and normalization in the neoliberal arsenal. The community of the indebted and the forms of resistance they create suggest a