“Aleksandr Svyatogor (Aleksandr Fedorovich Agiyenko, 1889–1937) was a poet and an anarchist who was directly involved in the revolutionary events of 1917”
“He was the leader and mastermind of the short-lived anarcho-biocosmist movement (1920–1922)”
“He was arrested and convicted at the very outset of the Great Terror on charges of anti-revolutionary activities and sentenced to eight years in the camps, disappearing thereafter from the historical record”
“The anarcho-biocosmist movement first emerged in 1920, in the form of the Biocosmist Creatorium, a small club within the Moscow section of the anarcho-universalists”
“In 1922, it was reconfigured as the completely independent Creatorium of Russian and Moscow Anarchist Biocosmists”
“Abba Gordin (1887–1964), with a polemical challenge to which Svyatogor begins “Biocosmic Interindividualism,” was a prominent member of the anarchist movement of the 1910s and 1920s”
“Gordin and his older brother Wolf elaborated a theory of pan-anarchism that featured five ideals and their corresponding five liberations: anarchism, the liberation of the individual; communism, the liberation of the worker; cosmism, the liberation of oppressed nations; genianthropism, the liberation of women; and pedism, the liberation of children”
“After the Bolshevik authorities shut down the Moscow Anarchist Federation and the collaboration between the Gordin Brothers collapsed, in 1920, Abba refocused his efforts on elaborating the doctrine of anarchist universalism”
“advocating for universalist interindividualism. His doctrine called for the destruction of the “idol of society,” the abolition of sociability (organization), and its replacement by “self-organization minus society,” i.e., by interindividualism”
“Discussing interindividualism, Gordin argues that this new idea transcends the contradictions between individualism and collectivism, since the wills of the individual and the collective would overlap in interindividualism”
“It does not work that way. For all the “gordins” of this world don’t know what individuality is—nor do they know that supreme and only possible form of sociability is biocosmism”
“What is individuality? What Gordin proposes by this name is just pathetic petty bourgeois individuality, which can only be defined through property. I possess and have at my disposal certain traits, thoughts, and experiences. They are mine; they are my individuality. This is my property! says the interindividualist, and let all mankind be its reflection!”
“We have always spoken of individuality as supreme dynamism. We were not discussing identity but shapeshifting and bestialism”
“in biocosmism, even the earth is not equal to itself—it stirs and vulcanates”
“Hence shapeshifting and bestialism. We say that humanity is not the proprietor, but the power to shift shape—to get on all fours, to bark and crow, and thereby make matter itself, substance itself, rise up in revolt”
“For even matter gets tired—that’s how Gordinian petty bourgeois individualities appear—but it also explodes in hearty laughter, and biocosmism is on the side of this beastly guffawing”
“These convulsions cancel property; even the internal organs jump from biocosmic bodies and gain the freedom of individualization! There are always more organs than bodies, and the body is not the only possible organization of organs”
“That is why the Egyptian gods are so vital to us: because they have animal heads”
“But now, they shall say, the animal has been technically replaced in production. And many also imagine that we own equipment, that we possess technology”
“liberate technology, that technology is also life”
““We grow from iron!”—but iron also grows from us!”
“Now, if we recited our verses to machines and lathes at a factory, and they laughed, that would be news. We sing laughing machines! The biocosmist jumps and spins with laughing machines! The biocosmist is a laughing machine! Machines understand something about sociability, about communication—they establish the freedom of connection and disconnection. And we learn this sociability from machines.”
“Biocosmic interindividualism focuses not only on individuality (which is dynamic and explosive), but also on the “inter,” on the perineum and intermediateness”
“Our interindividualism should be called interinternism, in which there is a difference between the two “betweens,” a difference in the repetition between”
“Here, in these nether regions, the biocosmic heart beats! Here, in this perineum, our words turn ruddy”
“Everything about us is ruddy. Even our technology is ruddy. Only ruddy technology links life with the cosmos, links planet with planet. That’s why we rarely talk about interindividualism, saying instead: interplanetarianism”
“The planets were correctly named “wanderers.””
“Interplanetarianism returns the planets to their wanderings. It vulcanates them, tearing them from their dull monotonous routes and making them kissing, spawning suns. Now the wanderers wander not in the space of stable laws, but between stabilizations, vulcanating them”
“So, not interindividualism, but:”
“the freedom of organization of jumping organs”
“ruddy technology and the freedom of connections and disconnections”
“the interplanetarianism of kissing planets”