The Strategic Elaboration of SensePosted on July 13th, 2026

This text is a transcript of a talk I recently gave in Tokyo and Barcelona. It asks how making sense of the world might become part of how we break with the world, rehearsing a way of thinking about the mutual composition of experience and revolt.

The Strategic Elaboration of Sense, of Revolt, of Life

“Here is a key to the triumph of empire: managing to keep in the background, to surround with silence the very ground on which it manoeuvres, the front on which it fights the decisive battle – that of the shaping of the sensible, of the forming of sensibilities. In such a way it preventively paralyses any defence in the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive.”

Call, Invisible Committee

How do we make sense of our existence as it is assailed on each side, of an existence within which papers can be inspected, as easily as crowds can be fired upon, as easily as families can be evicted, as easily as people can be dragged away and disappeared? What are the forms through which we experience this administrated violence that aims only to seize and secure each and every thing for the state and for capital, and in so doing to subdue and silence the very last remnants of fragile poetry in our lives? Is it still possible to cultivate a sense of outrage that has in far too many places atrophied, to be in touch again with what is so evidently intolerable in an existence that is organized by policing, ruination, and abandonment? Can making sense of the world be part of how we break with this world?

How can we begin to unmoor ourselves from the sensual order that coldly reduces life to the way it has been made to appear within surveillance databases, balance sheets, and citizen registries, that oversees and rules over life so as to ensure that life’s existence and these appearances coincide ever more completely? Could we cultivate ways of seeing that have nothing to do with the perspectives of the smartphone, the state, the algorithm, and the economy, perspectives that are in the end inseparable from the forms of subjugation and death that underlie them? Do we still have the capacity to envision a life that is not so deeply impoverished, constrained, and exhausted of possibility, a life that remains vividly unruly, common, and free?

Which strategies could we adopt so as to reject the forms of distraction and indifference that have been made so cheap and abundant in our time, refusing to lose ourselves to detachment or cynicism, to numbness or paralysis, to apathy or defeat? How might we liberate our senses from the spectacle of state power, a spectacle that is also of our own powerlessness? To what degree have our senses already been severely dulled by the flattened view that is offered to us by this world, a view that takes all of existence to be similarly manageable and similarly disposable? How can we begin to trace and discern the battlelines that have already been drawn across each detail of our existence, to grasp the conflict that everywhere rages and yet still remains all too faintly felt?

What aesthetic means must we have at our disposal in order to become capable of replying to this relentless assault upon life with revolt, rather than retreat? Do we have methods of intensifying our sense of what sustains our lives as opposed to what suffocates them, of what enriches our lives as opposed to what only desolates the conditions of our existence? Can this sense clarify the contours of the terrain upon which we live, and thus the terrain upon which our struggles must necessarily unfold? And how could this sense be taken as a resource that we strive to give further substance to, and to share and spread? Does seeing the world together make it possible to act in new strategic ways together, to free ourselves from the debilitating confusion and disorientation that otherwise pervade our lives?

Can the essentially hostile atmosphere sustained by the economy and the police also be a situation within which we develop our sense of one another, of our different ways of thinking and existing, of what sets us apart and what ties us together? Might repeated encounters between us make it possible to bring an end to the heavily sedated and withdrawn condition that so widely prevails, a condition which leaves us essentially indifferent to the wealth of difference that is now being erased from our lives? How could the sense of our existence be cultivated and developed in common with others, and what might a common perspective be capable of carrying to the surface of our experience?

Can our senses be sharpened to the point that they are able to cut through the poverty of this world and glimpse the outlines of lives that are worth living, which are also lives that are worth defending and fighting for? In what moments do we still manage to encounter what is truly precious, singular, and irreplaceable in our lives, do we still manage to find value not in money, in status, or in authority but in a meal prepared with friends, in the gentle care we lend one another, in the unconstrained circulation of desires and ideas, or in an afternoon shared beneath the shade of a forest or beside the cool waters of a stream? Could we develop a lucid sense of an existence that has not submitted to the bleak order of this world, of a shared and poetic existence that remains irreducibly dangerous to domination and control?

How might we build up the sense we have of our interdependencies and vulnerabilities, of all of the ways we each irreducibly rely upon and remain bound to one another? Can we refuse to participate in the abysmal calculation of which life is of more worth than any other, of which life should live at the expense of any other, and instead proceed on the basis of apprehending that in each life something incalculably valuable always remains? Could developing this sense of what we need from one another be a way of separating ourselves from any need of the economy and the police, of becoming conscious of our own power that exists apart from them? How might we strengthen our capacity to find meaning and beauty in our existence, and in this way also to become sensitive to what threatens what we’ve found to be meaningful and beautiful in our lives, to become sensitive to what must ultimately be unraveled and undone?

Are we capable of shattering the common sense that asks us only to compromise with and reform what clearly must be abolished? Could we refuse to limit ourselves to the narrow horizon of building more comfortable detention camps or increasing funding for immigration courts, and instead find our bearings on the horizon of dismantling the capacity to police the line between citizen and noncitizen as such? How much has the sense of our own power been diminished by a world that determines what appears to be possible and impossible, by a world that has decided it is perfectly reasonable and responsible to indefinitely degrade our lives and desolate the Earth? Can we cut all ties with the screens, politicians, managers, police, and bureaucrats that only serve to corrode and deteriorate the imagination of all of the different ways we can live with one another, of all of the different ways we can collectively give form to the worlds within which we exist?

Just as ways of perceiving can awaken us to the possibility of revolting against this world, can revolts also enliven us to new ways of making sense of our existence? How does the defense of a neighborhood awaken our senses to the forms and forces that compose the places where we live, to the rhythms and relations which give each environment its shape? In what ways can we hone a tactical sense of our existence so that we can realize the full spectrum of our freedom, refining a sense of our power that arises in relation to the already existent forms and activities that populate the world? How can we develop our own sense of place so as to fight on our own terrain, and in this way to avoid the dead ends that are everywhere laid out like traps before us? How can we develop our own sense of time so as to fight in our own intervals and tempos, and in this way to resist the felt need to run towards or flee from the endless waves of crisis which crash again and again upon our lives?

What is experienced in a place when someone blocks the path of a police truck filled with people who have been detained, or when someone blows on a whistle to warn their neighbors of an immigration raid? Do we have a sense of how these individual rebellions can spread into collective ones, of how the gesture of one person can also help us to feel the possibility of more expansive and unrestrainable gestures? And do we have a sense of how collective rebellions can remain fluid and open, heightening the sense of those on the periphery that they too can participate and help shape them? Can we remember what it feels like to not only search for courage within ourselves alone, but also to find courage with friends or to cultivate it among a crowd? Might we become able to continuously develop a sense of the world without it hardening into an order, preserving its lightness and its incompleteness so that it does not become another rigid and deadened thing that heavily weighs upon the world?

How can we become studious of and attentive to the boldness and the inventiveness of the revolts in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, and in other cities against ICE? And how might we also become capable of seeing these revolts as existing alongside revolts in Ramallah, Hong Kong, Cairo, Athens, Santiago, and Calais? Could each of these points of light be seen as a particular revolt but also as part of a universe of revolts, grasping the richness of their particularity but also the richness of what connects each of them to others? Are we able to feel that the insurrection that resides within each of us is the same insurrection that desires to leap out into the world and circulate between us? Can our senses themselves rebel against the world that works ever harder to constrain and neutralize them, the world that aims to transform our existence into something we can only aimlessly drift through rather than live?

How might we not resign ourselves to an ever more subdued sense that one day we might be free, but rather inhabit a fidelity to the reality that we already are? Can the defense of our lives also be a form of offense, a communal secession which is also a communal gathering of sensitivity and of force? Can the destruction of what dominates life itself become sensible as a way of life? Is it already possible to glimpse the experiences of dignity and beauty, of commonality and meaning, and of pleasure and joy that await in the rebellion against the world that aims only to suppress them? What steps can we continue to take together in this common struggle for and creative unfolding of our existence, in this strategic elaboration of sense, of revolt, of life?