The Invisible Armada

By Alain Brossat

My minority destiny is, I am convinced, now that I have most of my life behind me, inseparable from my left-handed situation . For people of my generation, being in the minority as a left-hander was not quite an almost normal and banal, to be sure, situation - as it is supposed to be today ...

By Nguyen Thi Lan Hanh

Initially intended as a light-hearted documentary about the process of a girl growing up, Children of the Mist ultimately evolves into a compelling story of Di and her family’s struggle and negotiation with the event of Di being kidnapped to be a bride. ...

By Joachim Daniel Dupuis

Applied to cinema, the concept of minority opens the way to ... a story out of time (in french : «une histoire intempestive»), that of the “becomings” that snatch films from the domination of the studios, from their law and their storytelling...

By Manki Hon

One of the terms we often use in a conversation about Hong Kong is Hong Konger. In this presentation, I try to draw three functions of this identity which is part of an apparatus of what I will call identityism... 

By Alain Brossat

What makes Taiwan a marked singularity in the general picture of political and state entities making up the world today is essentially due to two things: on the one hand, the non-coincidence of sovereignty and independence; on the other, the uncertainty as to the form of the nation-state... 

By Weisyun Chen

"La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" (translated as "Tiger at the Gates" or "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place") is a play written by the French playwright and diplomat Jean Giraudoux. It was first published in 1935 and premiered on March 22, 1937, at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris... 

By Alain Brossat

Of all the fantasies produced by the imagination of the reconstructors of Taiwan's past, one of the most entertaining is undoubtedly this: the island as part and parcel, since time immemorial, of a spectral "Austronesian Empire" extending from Southeast Asia to Madagascar, including the vast maritime expanses of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, with their innumerable and diverse island and archipelagic populations... The metamorphosis of the notion of cultural area, understood here in its broadest sense, the most vague and foreign to any condition of historicity, in that of empire has, in this fable, a distinct vocation: to erase on the magic slate of History all that which, in a solid, massive and tangible way, links the past as well as the present of Taiwan to the Chinese world... 

By Alain Brossat

I can't see in the future, so I can't tell you if there will be a war between China and the US plus their followers. Besides, it's a too serious matter for playing guessing game. For this reason, the only thing I can do, in my position as a philosopher focused on the ontology of the present, is to draw your attention on a few methodological and analytical issues related to the subject... 

By Alain Brossat

In the history of political cartooning, as it appeared in France from the 17th century onwards, then experienced a fantastic boom during the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century, a fragile and shifting dividing line, but nonetheless decisive, separates two orientations: one, primordial, one would almost say, draws its inspiration from satire whose constant register is the mockery of those above (the masters, the powerful, the rulers) by those from below, those who embody the popular spirit... 

By Alain Brossat

I would like to begin by drawing your attention to the great variability of the vocabulary that I will use for this presentation, terms such as ethnicity, race, tribe, nation, people. This, of course, in European languages, it's up to you to see if what I say retains its relevance when you switch to Chinese. Until the Second World War, in France, the French were still quite commonly spoken of as a “race”, a use which, today, would immediately raise a storm; "tribe", despite all its ethnographic alibis, was interminably a notion belonging to the colonial vocabulary of the white powers, intended to designate the supposedly natural mode of organization of the colonized as uncivilized... 

By Alain Brossat

At the end of last October, five former European foreign ministers signed a column in Le Monde arguing that the policy practiced by the State of Israel in the occupied territories fell within the notion of "crime of apartheid". . Among them, Hubert Védrine, better inspired on this subject than on the Ruandan genocide . Already in February of this year, Amnesty International had joined other international humanitarian organizations (including Human Rights Watch) or Israeli organizations (B'Tselem) in affirming, likewise, that the segregationist and supremacist policy practiced by the Jewish State towards the Palestinians, in Israel as in the occupied territories, fell well within the notion of apartheid... 

阿蘭．布洛薩

　一如傅柯所強調，烏托邦跟異托邦不只是「不一樣」，而是特別在這一點形成對比：烏托邦是想像的果實，它沒有真正的、可抵達的地點；相反地，異托邦真實存在，它是一個能被命名、被造訪、被居住其中的空間或是地點。（布洛薩）

　　布洛薩在本書中追尋異托邦而開啟的批判旅程，確實有著鮮明立場，具現於：芒通墓園；盧梭《孤獨漫步者的遐想》在被逐離人類共同體後，萌生的「與自我的共同體」（落腳於聖皮耶島）；二戰太平洋戰役電影中以敘事想像力創造的小島異托邦；針對臺灣（又一座島嶼）宜居性災難的反思，以及串接異托邦、共同體和生命之所在的可能出路。（王志弘）

By Alain Brossat

That an infinitely ambitious book, claiming to be prophetic and visionary, sees some of its predictions flatly denied over the decades following its publication - I am talking here, of course, of Hardt and Negri's Empire - that does not bother me particularly and that does not seem to me a sufficient reason to throw away this work. What I expect in the first place from a book of this kind is that it makes me think... 

By Alain Brossat

Sinophobia is obviously a term that can have infinitely variable meanings, depending on the contexts in which it is used, both in spatial and temporal terms. It is, on the other hand, in its very scholarly structure (Latin and Greek, like genocide – well, well...), a recent term – Western languages and discourses have never lacked, I have just said, of terms and expressions intended to condense and designate negatively all that can be associated with the signifiers "China", "Chinese"...

By Alain Brossat

At the rate things are going with regard to the mental drift of the continents in Taiwan, there will soon no longer be a Taiwan Strait, but an island floating freely in the vast maritime expanses of the Pacific, ever more emancipated from terrestrial and human geography, ever further from the Chinese continent... 

By Maurizio Lazzarato

The slogans “No War,” “Peace Now,” “Not With Putin, Not With Biden” seem weak and powerless until they find strength in an “Against Putin and Against Biden.” Opposition to war must be rooted in a relentless struggle against the different forms of capitalism and sovereignty that are fighting each other to divide the “global market” and that have been mobilized to organize domination, exploitation, and war... 

By Alain Brossat

It is quite risky to talk about the island in general or, if you will, to make the island not just a place, but a concept. It is because there is such a great diversity of islands that it seems that we can only take note of their diversity: small and large, tiny islets and islands which form continents or almost, deserted islands and others densely populated, islands on which very advanced material civilizations thrive and others where populations dedicated to wild life prosper or wither – the paradise of anthropologists... 

An interview with Alain Brossat

Q: There is a lot of talk at the moment about Taiwan, in the French press, about the threats of an imminent Chinese invasion...

A: It has indeed become a haunting motif in mainstream "narratives" both on the island and in Cold War propaganda in the Global North - " the China's threat" or Chinese threat, in its original version... 

By Alain Brossat

The motif of tradition is to be handled like dynamite, because of its very ambivalence. In any case, it is not true that any reference to a tradition is by nature conservative or reactionary. When Walter Benjamin refers to the history of the oppressed and the tradition of the vanquished, it is all one and the horizon of his thought (of his messianism) is emancipation. A revolutionary thought is hardly conceivable in the absence of a reference to a tradition, which is neither an attic nor an antique store...

By Alain Brossat and Alain Naze

In the fascist or totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, surveillance, denunciation, terror are the elements that distinctly oppose freedom in its most elementary classical sense – Orwell does not stop drawing treats on this motif in his two dystopian novels – Animal farm and 1984. In democratic societies doped with the latest in computer and digital technologies, freedom finds its harmonious complement in the equipment of individual subjects with prostheses which they perceive first and foremost as means of increasing their performance and increasing their possibilities of life...

By Alain Brossat and Alain Naze

In Chapter 11 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Totalitarian Movement,” Hannah Arendt constantly puts forward the motive of flight from reality [1]. The characteristic of totalitarian movements and what sets them apart from authoritarian movements is their propensity to escape from reality, to produce a fictitious reality, to alienate the masses from the real world, to make a functional or operative reality (“functioning reality”) prevail, to create, through propaganda, the conditions under which lies replace reality and erase it...

By Alain Brossat 

Potemkin becomes a precursor of contemporary inventors of reality, at the crossroads of the sphere of communication and the political scene. In our societies, the real is no longer the given, it is a fabrication, a production... 

By José Ángel Ruiz Jiménez 

In this article I try to explain that, with respect to the war in Ukraine, we are living through a clash of self-interested policies, journalistic narratives and defence doctrines between the West, Russia and Ukraine that have gradually created the conditions for a war with very serious global consequences. I also try to propose some more rational, efficient and human rights-compliant alternatives for managing the conflict... 

By Alain Brossat 

Potemkin becomes a precursor of contemporary inventors of reality, at the crossroads of the sphere of communication and the political scene. In our societies, the real is no longer the given, it is a fabrication, a production... 

By Alain Brossat 

The more contemporary democracy advances in age, enters its late age, the more it resembles a Potemkin village. By restoring colors to the image of the Potemkin village, it would be a question of trying to break the conceptual lock that locks the reforming critique of contemporary democracy... 

By Alain Brossat

In The Crisis of Culture, Hannah Arendt draws our attention to the vulnerability of factual truths, subject to the constant pressure of opinion and the type of truth regime that prevails in it – that of the multiple and the changeable… 

By Alain Brossat

After the decisive victories of Stalingrad on the Russian front, Al Alamein in the desert war, in North Africa, and Guadalcanal and Midway on the Asian front, in the Pacific war, the Allies had good reasons for banking on a defeat of the Axis and to consider a future in the colors of victory...

By Alain Brossat

It was towards the end of the 1960s that the Chinese nationalist party—the Kuomintang, defeated in the civil war, having withdrawn to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) over which it exercised its sovereignty in the most despotic mode—lost all hope of regaining possession of mainland China by force...

By Alain Brossat

In the past two years we have seen countless alarming headlines about the repeated sorties by Chinese military aircraft that worry Taiwan. However, only a small number of such articles have stopped to explain that those flights took place over the Taiwanese “Air Defence Identification Zone” (ADIZ), while it is almost impossible to find publications that have make the effort to explain what this involves...

By Alain Brossat

It is understandable that the precipitous withdrawal of the United States from the Afghan quagmire produced on the Taiwanese ruling elites, engulfed in their mentality of protégées of the big brother from across the Pacific, the effect of an icy shower. Their eagerness to repeat over and over again that the respective situations of the two countries, Afghanistan and Taiwan, could not be compared...

By Alain Brossat

In a context of rampant war of the worlds, where the desires to cross swords are hidden less and less, words, certain words, tend to become weapons. In order to prepare them for this use, they should be subjected to reprocessing so that they become operational on the battlefield. The engineers and mercenaries of the new cold war are working it ardently and are rapidly acquiring expert knowledge in the field...

By Alain Brossat

Can one both drive unrelenting agitation around the motive of the "cultural genocide" in Xinjiang and play with the idea of a "disinicization" of Taiwan?...

By Alain Brossat

政治宣傳效果弔詭，本來想令我們警覺，反而就把我們麻醉。當有人很多年來都不停告訴你，你的鄰居、你旁邊的敵人快要侵略你，他很可能明天早上就會這樣做了，這種訊息無論多麼像警鐘也好，你聽了那麼多年，最後也會習慣，繼續平常過活，不會花功夫找人搭建一個屬於你自己和家人的防核武避難所……