Galewski, E. (2008). Foundering to me is sweet in this sea: Agamben’s theory of ethical life. Review: The Review of Communication, 8, 395-404.

In MLA Style:

Galewski, Elizabeth. “Foundering to Me is Sweet in this Sea: Agamben’s Theory of Ethical Life.”  Review: The Review of Communication 8.4 (2008): 395-404.

Foundering to Me is Sweet in this Sea:

Agamben’s Theory of Ethical Life

Elizabeth Galewski

Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben dedicates Language and Death (1991) to thinking the word’s peculiar relationship to the unspeakable – the realm of silence and the place of the negative.  To conceive the relation between the word and the unsaid, logos and its paradoxically fatal source, is to conceive movement, the means by which speech unfolds out of, against, and through its lack.  To investigate this relation, then, is also to raise the critical role of ethos, which Agamben defines as our habitual manner of speaking and standing in relation to others.

For the majority of Language and Death, therefore, Agamben explores the Western philosophical tradition – focusing on Hegel and Heidegger in particular – in order to articulate the limits of the “ethical” as this tradition has repeatedly conceived it.  In the course of his analysis, Agamben gradually presents Western philosophy’s formulation of ethics as an unfortunate and commonplace dwelling in an infantile state and illustrates how this conceptualization ultimately obliges philosophy to justify violence.  Agamben then sketches out the direction that a new ethics could take, a conception of ethics that would come to terms with the unspeakable and not end up trying to naturalize atrocity.  This new ethics hinges critically on gleaning both the instrumentality and the generative potential of the negative.

The idea that we can cultivate hope for humanity, paradoxically enough, by a recuperation of that which self-anointed representatives of the universal “human” take as their abjected remainder is far from new.  However, Agamben’s formulation of the problem, as well as his answer to it, departs from other lines of thinking in several provocative and important ways.

When we think of silence and the unsayable, we might immediately think of the desire of marginalized peoples to “break our silence” and “come to voice” as a political strategy and a means of therapeutic self-expression.  Alternatively, we might think of the mysterious realm of the ineffable that is commonly found in mysticism.  Agamben does not deny any of these silences, and adeptly shows how the latter (in terms of the Eleusinian mysteries) played a pivotal role in the evolution of Hegel’s thought on the negativity of the word.

However, these silences are not the main locus of Agamben’s attention; they are not the place of negativity that he has set his sights on elucidating in this investigation.  Rather, in the process of reading Language and Death, one begins to see these silences (the smothered voice of the Other and the ineffability of God) as the targets of a certain projection.  Employing these fantasized figures of difference and divinity, the Western philosophical tradition has been able to locate the unspeakable outside of itself, rather than recognizing silence as its own innermost, constitutive necessity.  Accordingly, Agamben’s particular interest here is thinking and writing about that topos of unspeakability that the Western philosophical tradition itself has repeatedly attempted to avoid, deny, overcome, and redeem, thereby allowing its own greatest fears to stretch ever longer.

Therefore, for Agamben, the unspeakable that would have to be acknowledged and spoken in order to inaugurate a new ethos for humanity is not primarily to be found in unleashing the thwarted voice of the Other.  Neither is it to be found in acknowledging the unspeakable pain that survivors of atrocity have endured, or that those stricken with terminal illness experience.  According to Agamben, the Western philosophical tradition already acknowledges the reality of pain, suffering and death.  For him, it is precisely due to the fear that these things often inspire in the human heart that the Western philosophical tradition exists and has taken the particular form of repeated attempts to “transcend” the human condition.

For Agamben, the unspeakable that must be spoken, in order to see the advent of new ethical life, also cannot be reduced to exposing the failures, arbitrariness, and hypocrisies of those who would affiliate themselves with sovereign authority (the pater) in hopes of ascending to a decision-making role within a given community, be it as large as a nation-state or as small as a graduate program.  A new way of speaking the unspeakable, he argues, does not emerge in Derridean deconstruction projects of the master narratives that provide structure for such pursuits (pp. 39-40).  Instead, Agamben suggests that the Western philosophical tradition is already well aware of its failure, arbitrariness, and hypocrisy, which it acutely perceives, for example, in its choice not to capture the complexities of sense-experience in words.  Indeed, Agamben points out, Hegel demonstrates this gap right in the beginning of The Phenomenology of the Spirit (pp. 5, 10-11).  Its own impotence is the very thing that Western philosophy considers its main problem; this is the guilty secret that philosophy seeks over and over again to absolve.  Therefore, poststructuralist observations that the Western philosophical tradition fails, that it is arbitrary and riddled with hypocrisy, simply restates the difficulty as the Western philosophical tradition itself understands it.  Such an approach, Agamben argues, does not succeed in escaping the sphere of Western philosophy’s dialectic.  As a result, philosophy has also neglected to question its problematization of the human condition, as well as failed to open up alternative possibilities for apprehending, constructing, and coping with the existential anxieties that have provoked its own panicked and self-defeating reaction.

Agamben therefore leads us through an in-depth study of Hegel and Heidegger, not to extend or even complicate their projects, but rather to find a point of departure from them and begin cultivating its possibilities.  Accordingly, he approaches Hegel and Heidegger’s conceptualizations of the negative as opportunities to think through the anxieties that the Western philosophical tradition has tried to quiet, even as the trajectory of its panicked flight continually betrays those same anxieties.  Coy, Agamben provides us with glimpses of this silence throughout Language and Death via unexpected detours, rhetorical questions, dramatic pauses, coded terminology, and just-in-the-nick-of-time backtracks.  Some of his most explicit formulations of this silence’s possible content only appear at the end of the book, where he discusses the “sacrificial mythogeme” and its subsequent cover-up (p. 105).

Agamben conceives the sacrificial mythogeme as a reactionary response to a dizzying glimpse into the existential abyss, where our human mortality and arbitrariness may be apprehended.  In the face of this screaming negativity, the sacrificial mythogeme seeks to construct a foundation for future human acts through panicked violence in the name of building a stable community.  This violent action, Agamben writes, “furnishes society and its ungrounded legislation with the fiction of a beginning: that which is excluded from the community is, in reality, that on which the entire life of the community is founded” (105).

The figure of homo sacer appears here as the target of this violence, the victim who is “sacrificed” in order to deliver others into an illusory sense of transcendence.  One of the most famous features of Agamben’s thought, homo sacer will become the subject of its own book in 1995 (translated into English in 1998).  In this later work, however, Agamben moves away from the language of “sacrifice,” noting that the targeted human being is considered worthless by those who perform and justify his expulsion.  Namely, the sovereign pater does not believe that he is making a sacrifice when people are killed, physically or symbolically, “as lice” (1998, p. 114).

Homo sacer may only make a brief appearance at the end of Language and Death, but the figure already appears here in its characteristically contradictory and ambivalent form.  Homo sacer is he who others have said to have broken the law and imagined into images of abjection and divinity at once.  [I use the pronoun “he,” because Agamben explicitly defines this figure as a free male citizen (1998, p. 88).]  In this way, homo sacer provides an external screen upon which the community’s own contradictory impulses (lawbreaking violence, guilty conscience, and aspirations to godhood) can be projected.  Visibly stripped of his dignity, he also presents the figure upon which those who would affiliate themselves with sovereign authority may hoist the appearance of human vulnerability and mortality, and against which they manufacture their own appearance of power and freedom.

For Agamben, this traumatized human being is not to be patronized as the object of pity.  Homo sacer might appear to be a humiliated victim from a certain perspective, but he does not actually require the acknowledgment of properly sovereign subjects (who have nothing but self-delusion and empty appearances on their side) in order to be restored to human dignity.  Indeed, in Agamben’s later work – namely, The Coming Community (1993) and Homo Sacer (1998) – the scapegoat emerges as he who has the personal strength and moral authority to serve as the political subject par excellence.  Indeed, in Agamben’s conceptualization, homo sacer can hardly avoid being political, simply by the fact of his survival.  In the eyes of the community who expelled him, homo sacer’s continued existence is supposed to be an impossible feat, a kind of living death.  Demonstrable proof that life is possible after this violence is unnerving to them in the extreme; they tend to regard the figure with horror, like a zombie who refuses to stay in the grave.  By recuperating homo sacer’s surprising potential in this way, Agamben’s work resonates with some post-Lacanian figurations of (non)subjectivity (Braidotti, 2002; Butler, 2004; MacCannell, 2000), and offers an important theoretical contribution to the emerging body of psychological research on healthy responses to trauma, variously named “posttraumatic growth,” “stress-related growth,” “adversarial growth,” “positive adaptation,” “thriving,” “flourishing,” and “blessings” (e.g. Carver, 1998; Linley & Joseph, 2004; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).  Significantly, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl has been named as an important forerunner to this latter line of inquiry (1959).

In Language and Death, we can also see the implicit beginnings of Agamben’s critique of commonplace notions of sovereignty, in which those who are supposed to be powerful paradoxically return as the weakest and most lifeless of beings; they habitually dwell in an infantile state.  The critical silence that Agamben thinks through in Language and Death, therefore, is to be found in the willful blindness and bad conscience of those who would align themselves with what is commonly perceived as the sovereign power of inclusion and exclusion, life and death over members of the community.  From this perspective, the silence that supports the present state of social disorder can be found not only in the empty words, faulty memories, bald denials, tortured rationalizations, and bilious lies of the perpetrators, but also in the fictions of unspeakability that the society at large develops in the process of its scapegoating.  The claim that this loss escapes comprehension and cannot be spoken serves as a speech-act that cleanses community members’ existences from the appearance of negativity and therefore supports the belief that they are substantively different from and superior to homo sacer. In other words, it is the possibility of the Same’s finally recognizing himself as the real zombie, having been enslaved by fear, pride, and cupidity, that terrifies him – not the recognition of the harm done to others, which the Same has routinely spoken as, quite precisely, an instrumentally unspeakable loss.

A new ethos, Agamben therefore suggests, would necessitate hearing and identifying the silences that promise to protect he-who-would-be-sovereign from the possibility of perceiving the lifelessness of his own existence.  It would also call us to find ways of speaking the possible content of these silences, albeit in terms of the “trite” words that are all we have.

We might speculate that, for those who do not identify with homo sacer, engaging in such speech, as feeble and partial and trivial as it might seem, could appear to perpetrate yet another crime.  This speech would mean giving shape to that which has gone unheard or unsaid, even though there is no actual way to do justice to this content with words.  By forwarding these claims of unspeakability, the sovereign-identified subject would therefore seem to suffer from a dose of rather uncharacteristic humility at precisely the wrong time.  Namely, the Same’s knowledge of the word’s limits suspiciously appears when ethics would call him to hear the suffering of which others have, in fact, long spoken and finally come to terms with evil, himself.

Similarly, Agamben posits that this silence is employed as a self-defeating means of self-preservation.  To this end, he takes his time reading Hegel, showing how the voice that Hegel conceives as emerging over the bodies of the dead is partially drained of meaning and riddled with silence (p. 45).  Agamben maps out this terrain in order to illustrate how Hegel’s attempt to preserve language from the abyss of ineffability ultimately betrays itself, forfeiting on its own promises and reproducing the very problems from which it flies.  In order to see how this might be so, it becomes helpful to interpret the beginning and middle of Language and Death in light of its end.  Agamben concludes that man may come into his own by facing the living death of his own existence, identifying with homo sacer, and thereby embracing the negativity of human mortality as the breath of life itself.  In order to lead up to these conclusions, Agamben takes the Hegelian system as a foil, explaining how Hegel pivots away from a confrontation with what he chooses to name ineffable in order to preserve man in his habitual sense of self.  Rather pointedly, Agamben then suggests that an analogy may be drawn between this Hegelian ethos that promises to preserve human consciousness and the “vanishing” enjoyment that results from the successful execution of the master’s bloodlust upon the slave (pp. 46-47).  With this gesture, Hegel himself concedes that he is harboring silence and the unspeakable verily within the heart of the word.

Tellingly, Agamben also outlines these attempts at self-preservation in his later work.  For instance, in Homo Sacer, Agamben famously discusses the self-defeating dynamic by which life as bios, the “good life,” has been constituted against and evaluated positively in relation to zoé, the “mere life” associated with human reproduction and the home.  Specifically, in Homo Sacer, we learn that man has tragically misplaced his happiness, such that even his attempts to pursue it through modern democracy have led to “unprecedented” slaughter (1998, p. 10).  Translating these ideas into a more explicitly psychoanalytic idiom, we might say that those who desire to ascend to the position of pater could actually be incapacitated by the desire to preserve their egos, which they confuse with their selfhood in general.  In this way, the sovereign-identified subject tends to perceive others’ departures from his ego demands as equivalent to violence and the destruction of the only life that matters.  Substituting self with the gratification of the paternal ego might promise to exalt the human, but ironically only serves to “imprison and immobilize” human thought and action, such that “the ‘beautiful day’ of life [zoé] will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it” (1998, p. 11).

The fruits of these silences therefore speak quite loudly all around us.  The sovereignty of the pater (one is tempted to read “patriarchy”) has come back to haunt the free male citizen with “violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways” (1998, p. 114).  (Agamben cites fatalities from traffic accidents during holiday weekends – we could easily add other examples, such as the slow suicide of cigarette smoking and the sudden heart attacks of overwork.)  However, those who do not identify with homo sacer imagine that they are safe on high ground, and that it would be speaking the content of these silences that would entail a substantial amount of risk.  From where they stand, a difficult problem of motivation appears.  If the world is arranged to their liking, then why should they change?  To the extent that they even question what they see as the benefits of their position, they may try to convince themselves that the shiny lures that distract them from destructive fruits of their precocious sport are actually “gifts” bestowed upon them courtesy of homo sacer.

According to Language and Death, since beings such as this habitually dwell in an infantile state, they repeatedly and predictably substitute their preferred means of keeping up appearances – silence and obfuscation – for a substantive experience of self-knowledge and the possibility of personal and ethical growth.  Moreover, since the current state of social disorder founds itself upon these silences, conflating a fall into the realities of the human condition with the complete collapse of (what passes as) civilization, the speech that this new ethics proposes also appears to threaten the seemingly rarefied life of the commons.

This, therefore, is the point of departure from the Western philosophical tradition that Agamben has located: Language and Death suggests that we may slip free of the Hegelian and Heideggerian systems by facing and working through the apparent abyss of the negative.  If the path that has exalted life in the public sphere has finally exhausted itself in continual cycles of meaningless violence, then at least the path through blood and death is currently open.  In the context of a tradition that synecdochically replaces being with being recognized as properly human by the pater, it is primarily through an experience of loss that the limits of this recognition may be appreciated, and that being can reveal itself in greater fullness.

Notably, and perhaps surprisingly, this is the same gateway that Slavoj Žižek, one of Agamben’s vocal critics, has also located and suggested that we traverse.  For Žižek, moving beyond the limits of the Western philosophical tradition entails a fatal encounter with the real, figured in Looking Awry (1991) (citing Lacan) as the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, and articulated in The Parallax View as the lethal gaze of the radical object that objects (2006, p. 17).  This negativity, according to Žižek, is the means by which we can burst the bubble of the subject’s “imaginary, narcissistic identity” (1991, p. 66).

Although Agamben and Žižek point toward and attempt to step through the same dark gateway, the two thinkers cultivate very different possibilities on the other side.  Žižek takes us on a guided tour of the sovereign-identified ego’s most paranoid delusions about himself, presenting them as the very content of the real.  In this way, he (rather ironically) treats us to the most pious cynicism possible.  In contrast, Agamben engages with the reality of death and the terrifying materiality of human existence in order to nurture the possibility of developing a new level of personal and ethical life.  Agamben’s turn toward the material suggests that his work could be considered as an extension of, complication of, and counterpoint to Lucretius (2001), Spinoza (1951a, 1951b; see Deleuze 1990; Negri 2004), Bergson (1975), and Thoreau (1942, 2002a, 2002b), as well as set into a productive relation with more recent thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), Elizabeth Grosz (1987, 1999), Donna Haraway (1990), and Rosi Braidotti (2002).

For Agamben, therefore, a new approach to ethics may be invented by those who know their failures only too well, who have justified violence in the past to escape from what they misperceive as a disintegrating abyss, and who have thereby created the illusion of a foundation for their culture, their discourse, and their sense of community.  Accordingly, a new ethos would entail a turn by which those who have tried to affiliate themselves with the “sovereign” begin to admit their impotence, examine the self-defeat that they have mistaken for “power,” question the “benefits” of their supposedly dignified position, and back out of their self-deceptions into “bare life” – the full terror of humanity, exposed as limited and humiliated, vulnerable and mortal.  In other words, Agamben’s new ethos opens up the possibility of understanding the fall as an opportunity, rather than as a problem.  Conceiving this possibility entails a passage through loss, negativity, and death, instead of necessarily and inevitably panicking in the face of these fearsome future certainties.  This ethics takes the chance for new life through a personal and ethical reorientation whereby the precipitous drop into the existential abyss becomes an uncertain, surprising, paradoxical, but acutely lived experience of coming into one’s own.  Importantly, aspects of this conceptualization resonate with Judith Butler’s recent theory of political and ethical subjectivity as dispossession and her exploration of anxiety as a “sign of life” (2004, pp. 19, 34-5, 39).

As one figuration of the peculiar reorientation of this ethos in Language and Death, Agamben reads the poem L’infinito by Giacomo Leopardi (twice) and (doubling back, after having taxed us with a thorough demonstration of logical analysis) raises the possibility of death as a potentially positive experience.  The poem is worth quoting in its entirety here, both in the original Italian and its English translation.

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,

e questa siepe, che da tanta parte

dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati

spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani

silenzi, e profondissima quiete

io nel peniser mi fingo; ove per poco

il cor non si spaura.  E come il vento

odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

infinito silenzio a questa voce

vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,

e le morte stagioni, e la presente

e viva, e il suon di lei.  Cosi tra questa

immensità s’annega il pensier mio:

e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.  (pp. 74-75)

Translated by Jean-Pierre Barricelli:

This lonely knoll was ever dear to me,

and this hedgerow that hides from view

so large a part of the remote horizon.

But as I sit and gaze my thought conceives

interminable spaces lying beyond that

and supernatural silences

and profoundest calm, until my heart

almost becomes dismayed.  And I hear

the wind come rustling through these leaves,

I find myself comparing to this voice

that infinite silence: and I recall eternity

and all the ages that are dead

and the living presence and its sounds.  And so

in this immensity my thought is drowned:

and in this sea is foundering sweet to me.  (p. 75)

In his first reading, Agamben ignores the last few lines and focuses on the tension between the present and the eternal that plays out in the middle of the poem.  This analysis concludes that poetry does not necessarily constitute a departure from the commonplace voice of the Western philosophical tradition.  Rather, both poetry and philosophy can affirm the unattainability of the originary event of the word’s taking place.  In this first interpretation, Agamben also suggests that, if philosophy does differ from poetry, the distinction might lie in philosophy’s “attempt to liberate poetry from its ‘inspiration,’ ” a move that “finally manages to grasp the Muse and transform it, as ‘Spirit,’ into its own subject.”  Hence, Agamben parenthetically suggests that, ideally, poetry and philosophy might operate together, such that philosophy “breaks up” the poetic word and poetry “bends” philosophy “into a ring” (p. 78).  It is only after this protracted discussion that Agamben observes that a turn is taking place in the final lines that would suggest a different interpretation.

We therefore begin again on the top of page 79, where Agamben (coyly) asks whether the last lines of the poem might constitute an inversion by which an experience of death – here, as the drowning of thought – could not be characterized as partially positive.  He now begins a new reading that concentrates on the way in which the last line, which refers to sweetness, gestures back to the first line, with the “dear” knoll.  He spends some time considering the first line and its first word – Sempre (Always).  “Always,” he suggests, indicates a “habit.”  The poem therefore may be interpreted as an “attempt to seize a habit” and “experience the meaning of the word always.”  But this attempt to seize the moment soon goes awry, stumbling upon the abyss of the eternal, which “jolts the poet into the interminable space ‘until my heart almost becomes dismayed’ ” (p. 79).

Attempting to seize the habit, the poet is instead the one who is seized.  Agamben points out the surprise that the poet undergoes, whereby the comparison drawn between infinity and the here-and-now undergoes a reversal.  Thought – the ever-measuring and analyzing processes of consciousness – is drowned in that which it is attempting to think – immensity, or “the unattainable taking-place of language” (p. 80).  This death, however, is sweet, and it permits a circular motion to the “ever dear” of the first line (Sempre, Always); suggesting a return to habit.  The poem takes us on a “voyage,” Agamben suggests, in which “the experience of the event of the word, which opened its unheard silence and interminable spaces in thought, ceases to be a negative experience” (p. 81).

Here we are given a glimpse of Agamben’s alternative conception of ethos, in which the traumatic experience of drowning (the surrender of thought to being over-ridden) reverses its negativity and becomes a “sweet foundering.”  He concludes his reading of L’infinito by positing that “In its drowning, thought compared, that is, led back toward the Same, the negative dimensions of the event of language, its having-been and its coming to be, its silence and its voice, being and nothingness: and in the extinguishing of thought, in the exhaustion of the dimension of being, the figure of humanity’s having emerges for the first time in its simple clarity: “to have always dear as one’s habitual dwelling place, as the ethos of humanity” (p. 81).  From this, we understand that Agamben sees hope in the first line of the poem for a new human ethos in which “the place of language” as uncut negativity is “lost” and love can be positively felt: “to have always dear.”  Yet I would also add that the last line – “foundering to me is sweet in this sea” – raises this possibility as well, insofar as love constitutes a struggle in relation to oneself in which the experience of foundering itself can be exquisite, enjoyable.

This idea bears a resemblance to the surprising “ease” that, in The Coming Community, becomes possible, paradoxically enough, only after being traumatically thrown outside of oneself.  Passing through ek-stasis and “pure exteriority,” the “pure exposure” of our humanity in its nakedness, we are stripped of our illusory sense of dignity and drenched in terrifying reality, but we are also enabled to shudder our way into a peculiar kind of peace (1993, p. 68).  It is through this wrenching experience of negativity that the human being emerges from the confines of his ego and begins to claim his freedom.  New life blooms forth like the strange flower of a candlewick – on fire, but not consumed by the flames.

In conclusion, Language and Death launches a powerful challenge both to academic orthodoxies that presuppose the centrality of the subject and to contemporary trends that call for the recognition of the other.  As such, his theory of ethical life points us toward fertile terrain in which we can cultivate new critiques of violence, prompted by wars waging across the globe.  Agamben’s book is as timely now as ever before, as the hopeful dawning of the twenty-first century seems to be turning, all too quickly, into the harsh light of just another day.

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Dear Thay,

My fingertips hit each key on my keyboard in turn.  The tops of the keys are smooth and slightly concave, like nests for my fingertips to land on.  With the depression of each button, a click sounds.

Once I have formed a word in my mind, I tend to want to type it all in a rush, clustering the clicks together in rapid succession, which results in a drum-like percussion.  This is the impulse.  But the impulse does not have to be followed.

I pause.

Slowing down and typing more deliberately, I enjoy the feeling of movement.  I take pleasure in the graceful arch of hands moving across space.  I delight in the smooth functioning of the keys.  I also make fewer mistakes.

I give thanks and praise!  This is but one gift that the practice has given to me.

I credit the practice also with saving my life.  When I was suicidal, after separating from my doctoral program, it was the practice that enabled me to heal and start anew.  It was the practice that taught me that life wasn’t over.  It was the practice that showed me what life actually is and opened the door on all it can be.

That was about six years ago.

Today, the practice continues to teach me.  I am learning how to cope with joy.  I am training in happiness.  I am practicing the integration of rapture.  In short, I am learning how to love, and I am coming ever more alive.

Before I left my Ph.D. program, it never occurred to me that conscious training would be necessary in order to be able to experience positive emotions.  It also never occurred to me that neutral emotional states might have a lot to offer.  At that time, I assumed that I would become happy as if by magic at a future point in time, when I finally got everything I wanted (i.e., when I had successfully achieved tenure at a Research 1 University and been established as a leader in my discipline nationwide.)  At that time, when I experienced neutral emotional states, I became restless.  I became bored.

Now I realize that, in some ways, being able to experience positive emotions almost requires more advanced training than experiencing negative ones!  Also, I have come to learn that neutral emotional states constitute the gateway to enduring calm and contentment.  Accustomed from long years of unmitigated grasping, aversion, and delusion, my mind still tries to substitute cynicism and despair – its habitual grooves – in the place of this contentment and in the place of joy.  But I continue to train.  With great confidence, I know you will join me in giving thanks.  What great gifts the practice has given me, indeed!

I wish you a very happy birthday, beloved.  I am overjoyed to have this opportunity to write to you.  I am a fountain of light; joy bubbles through me and then cascades up and over.  I do not try to contain it.

I send this joy to you in waves.  I have no fear – I know that you have enough training.  You will know what to do with it.

All my best,

Elizabeth Galewski

Madison, WI

Oct. 7, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 30, 2011  

RECALL LAZICH PETITIONS TO BE AVAILABLE AT POLLS TUESDAY

Greenfield, WI: Voters in the 28^th State Senate District are likely to be greeted by volunteers with recall petitions when they arrive at the polls on Tuesday. The petitioners are among hundreds of local residents who are gathering signatures aimed at recalling State Senator Mary Lazich (R).  The Recall Lazich drive is an entirely citizen-run effort affiliated with Recalls United Wisconsin.

“Tuesday’s election provides us with an excellent opportunity to touch base with the district’s voters,” said Elizabeth Galewski, a Franklin native and graduate of Whitnall High School who serves as spokesperson for the self-organized group of volunteers.  “We’re headed toward crunch time.  There are just a few weeks to go before the petitions must be filed, and our volunteers are committed to completing the effort as quickly as possible.”

The state Elections Board has found that collecting signatures for recalls outside of polling places is legally permitted as long as it doesn’t relate to the items on the ballot inside.

In the past, however, confusion about the law has resulted in police officers being summoned to a polling place and recall petitioners being asked to move 100 feet away.  To prevent this from happening again, the Government Accountability Board (GAB) published a memo on the matter in 2008.  It concludes that “circulating a petition within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place, per se, would NOT constitute a violation of §12.035, Stats. Persons engaged in the activity of petitioning for an election, and nothing more, are not engaged in the display or distribution of literature relating to voting or registering to vote.” The GAB’s memo is available online at http://gab.wi.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/29/07_01_opelbd_pdf_16820.pdf.

Yesterday, Director and General Counsel of the GAB Kevin J. Kennedy reaffirmed this decision in a public statement that issues more explicit instructions for poll workers about the rights and responsibilities of recall petitioners.  This document can also be found online at http://gab.wi.gov/node/1689.

“Ours is a neighbor-to-neighbor effort,” said Galewski, “so our volunteers are being trained in what the law does and does not permit. Our intent is to be visible so that those voters who wish to do so can sign the recall petition at this convenient time. Of course, if others do not wish to sign the petition, it is their right to refrain as well.”

The Recall Lazich drive will be notifying the relevant local election officials of these plans. Polls will be open on Tuesday from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.

 #  #  #

                I was visiting my mother at my childhood home on the border of Hales Corners and Franklin, in the 28^th State Senate District, yesterday morning.  I had come home for a short daytrip to eat corned beef and cabbage together with a few other relatives in belated honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

                My mother paused and looked at me.  “While I’m making dinner, why don’t you go canvassing?  You could print the petitions downstairs and I could loan you a clipboard.”

                Now, I was raised to listen to my mother.  My mother often has very good ideas.  Twenty minutes later, therefore, I headed out the door with a clipboard, a handful of pens, and a completely empty petition.   

                An hour later, I had filled up my very first recall petition.  I like to think that I learned some valuable lessons about canvassing along the way.

1. Some people will be unaware that they live in the Senator’s district.  It is advisable to take a map of the District in order to be able to show them that they are indeed her constituents.
2. People will ask you if the Senator is a Republican or a Democrat.  When you tell them that she’s a Republican, they generally feel that they have enough information to decide one way or the other.  In my experience, it never became necessary to get drawn into a lengthy conversation.
3. Once I already had a few names down on my petition, people were even more eager to sign it.  This was encouraging while I was working through the midsection of a petition, but was kind of a drag when I had to start working on a new one.  In order to ensure that someone doesn’t try to seize the finished petitions and tear them up, it is advisable to keep them in a secure location and out of view.
4. People who were circulating petitions of their own would ask me when it was due or where I should send it.  (The mailing deadline is April 19^th.  You can drop it off at Kingstad Law in Greenfield.)
5. Happily, people who sign the petition can often tell you which houses to avoid in the immediate vicinity.
6. People often want to take the petition away from you in order to get someone else in the household to sign it.  Don’t let them!  First of all, you don’t want them to be able to destroy it.  Second of all, you need to witness the signing.  I find that people understood if I just explained to them that I needed to certify that I had witnessed it.
7. Sometimes one spouse will be at home, but the other will be out.  It helps to take along a pad of paper and a pen in order to record down the address so that you or another canvasser can stop by again later. 
8. After awhile, houses have the tendency to look the same.  I used the driveways in order to work my way down a block.  I would always go up the closest driveway, no matter which side of the street it was on.  That way, I knew which houses I had already visited and which ones I still needed to try.  Alternatively, you could do one side of the road and then do the other, on your way back home.
9. It helps if you tell people the date while they are filling out the petition.  You don’t want them to put an earlier date, since that could invalidate the rest of the signatures.  You also don’t want them to put a later date, since then you have to start a whole new petition.  (Having a later date in the middle of a group of signatures with an earlier date would invalidate the petition.)
10. Canvassing may take a little courage in order to get started, but it often proves to be very rewarding work in the end.  When my first recall petition was filled with signatures, I was just bursting with pride!

Happy canvassing, everyone!

Want to get involved, yourself?  Visit www.RecallLazich.com for all the latest news.  Also, please fill out the form on that website and submit it so that we can get in contact with you.

Already know that you want to volunteer?  Please e-mail volunteer@recalllazich.com.  The following positions are already filled, but we can always use more help.  Thank you!

Main Recall Lazich Organizer: Our main organizer on the ground in the 28th District is Emily Simonis.

Website Administrator: Keeps www.RecallLazich.com up to date and develops its interactive capabilities with a team of public relations professionals.

Volunteer Coordinator: Organizes volunteers into teams, orients them to the recall drive, and answers their questions.

Canvassing Coordinator: Organizes efforts to canvas whole neighborhoods door-to-door.

Events Coordinator: Organizes meetings and other events for the Recall Mary Lazich drive; also researches upcoming meetings in the District and coordinates with the Volunteer Coordinator in order to deploy teams to them in order to collect signatures.

Numbers Coordinator: Maintains a spreadsheet in order to keep track of how many signatures we have successfully gathered.

Election Day Coordinators: These two coordinators plan our recall efforts for April 5th, a large task that includes identifying and training volunteers about the law for collecting signatures at such times, deploying teams to specific polling locations, and otherwise ensuring that our recall drive advances substantially on April 5th.

Research Division: Researches the Senator (especially her voting record and public statements) and raises awareness of where the Senator stands on key issues.

“Lakes” of E-mail: These volunteers answer the E-mails from www.RecallLazich.com.  This task has been broken down into five time slots, each of which has been named after a lake in the 28^th District.

Media Relations Team: This team is in charge of communicating with the press.

Press Secretary: Sends out press releases and media advisories, acts as the primary contact person for members of the media.

Spokesperson: Messaging and strategy; gives interviews to members of the media.

Twitter Queen: Keeps the public up-to-date with the latest news through Twitter

News Analysis: Searches published material in order to generate a summary of how the Recall Mary Lazich drive is being covered in the media.

Wisconsin Progress Liaisons: These two coordinators are paid staff members of the Wisconsin Progress organization.  They are not assigned to us specifically, but they have been helping us nonetheless.

#  #  #

Please drop off your recall petitions to lawyer David Kingstad, who has kindly agreed to collect them, by Wednesday, April 6th.  He will then forward them on to the Committee to Recall Lazich.   Special envelopes will be used in order to ensure that the petitions reach their destination.

Kingstad Law Firm, LLC

8081 W Layton Avenue

Greenfield, WI. 

Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

To see this location on a map, please visit: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Kingstad.Law.Firm.LLC.414-281-5500

David Kingstad may be reached at (414) 281-5500.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 21, 2011

RECALL LAZICH TEAM COMBATS MISINFORMATION FROM WASHINGTON-DC BASED SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP

Greenfield, WI: The Recall Mary Lazich drive has proven so successful in recent weeks that opposition has started to rise up against it.  On Friday, March 18^th, residents of the 28^th State Senate District began to report receiving robotic phone calls from a special interest group based in Washington, DC.  The calls, which are sponsored by the American Federation for Children, spread misinformation about the recall process.

According to the “robo calls,” residents of the district shouldn’t sign the recall petition unless the public official has committed a crime.  However, this is misleading.  According to Article XIII Section 12 of the Wisconsin State Constitution, eligible electors do not need a reason in order to petition for the recall of a State Senator.  The will of the people suffices, since it is representatives’ job to represent the will of the people.

“Residents of the 28^th District may not need a reason to recall Senator Lazich, but we do indeed have one,” stated community organizer Elizabeth Galewski, a native of Franklin and graduate of Whitnall High School.  “Such elections are the only means currently available to the public to express a clear mandate on Governor Walker’s infamous ‘Budget Repair’ bill and budget plan.  In a democracy, power ultimately comes from the people.  Allowing the people to vote, therefore, is the only way to grant legitimacy to the novel legislation that the Governor and Republican majority in the State Legislature are attempting to impose.  Holding recall elections are presently necessary in order to restore legitimacy to the decisions that the executive and legislative branches of our state government are currently trying to make.

“Admittedly, recall elections are somewhat unwieldy and indirect means for the citizens of Wisconsin to advise their government officials in how to steer the ship of state,” Galewski commented.  “However, we believe that the public should have the opportunity to vote either in opposition or support of our representatives’ current proposals.  If Senator Lazich is interested in governing from a position of strength and legitimacy, then she should join us in calling for a recall election.  If she believes that she is truly representing the people in her district, then she would have nothing to fear from such an election.”

 The “robo calls” also erroneously maintain that the recall efforts are motivated by greed, stating that these senators are being targeted for trying to make government workers contribute towards their own pensions and health care.  This is also misleading.  Wisconsin’s public employees historically have worked for and contributed to their pensions and health care, and in February, their unions made further financial concessions, agreeing to pay for a larger slice of these benefits.  The recall effort only began to pick up steam after the Governor spurned the unions’ offers.  When it became clear that the Republicans’ deeds were not in alignment with their words about balancing the budget, recall efforts gave citizens a way of transforming their sense of betrayal into meaningful action.  In consequence, a historic display of democracy has surged up from within the 28^th District.

The Recall Mary Lazich drive has gathered momentum in the past few weeks, holding organizational meetings, appointing leaders to handle specific tasks, and self-organizing into teams.  In the meantime, volunteers have been gathering signatures to recall State Senator Mary Lazich (R-28) from across the district.

#  #  #

• The exact location of your event.
• The start time and end time.  (Please be realistic about how long you will be there!  It is important to commit to stay there throughout the entire time period that you have specified.)
• Some distinguishing characteristics for people to look for (the make of your car, some balloons, a poster, etc.)

Please do NOT e-mail this address with any inquiries that are unrelated to future signature signings.  We are trying to streamline the process as much as possible in order to keep everyone informed with the latest information.

Thank you for any and all help that you can give!

Approximately 70 people showed up to our organizational meeting at Greenfield Public Library on Wednesday night.  Please keep in mind that this meeting was scheduled with only a few days’ notice, and many interested parties couldn’t make it.

The level of excitement was palpable from the second you stepped through the door.  By the end of the meeting, volunteers had stepped up to take on a whole list of specific tasks: keeping track of the number of signatures that we have been collecting, coordinating the canvassing efforts, coordinating incoming volunteers, keeping the website up-to-date, putting together a media list, creating a communications strategy, researching Senator Lazich’s voting record, and answering the messages that continue to pour through our website, www.RecallLazich.com.  We also had teams of volunteers come together in order to plan future opportunities for residents to sign the recall petition.

The fruits of these efforts are now obvious – the “Events” page on the RecallLazich.com website now lists 10 upcoming events, as well as a lawyer’s office where people can stop by and sign the petition at any time during business hours.

The 28^th District is not a swing district.  It is a solidly Republican district.  Many political insiders didn’t think that we would be able to do anything in these areas.  But they were wrong.  Many of the people who are signing the recall petition voted for Senator Lazich in the last election.  I’ve even been told that one of our petition circulators has been a lifelong Republican.  This isn’t about political party – this is about taking a stand to protect our communities.

Almost incidentally, we’ve been making history along the way.  I just got off of the phone with a reporter from USA Today.  That our efforts have come to the attention of the national press is just one indication of how unprecedented this recall drive is.  With every signature that we collect, we make a statement.  With every signature that we collect, we win a victory.

Office #1:

Kingstad Law Firm, LLC

8081 W Layton Avenue

Greenfield, WI. 

Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

To see this location on a map, please visit: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Kingstad.Law.Firm.LLC.414-281-5500

Lawyer David Kingstad has kindly agreed not only to make petitions available for people to sign, but also to receive completed petitions that will be forwarded to the Committee to Recall Lazich.  He  may be reached at (414) 281-5500.

Office #2:

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)

 Union Hall

3303  S.  103rd Street
(103rd and Oklahoma)

Milwaukee, WI  53227 

Hours: Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.

To see a map where the IBEW Union Hall is located, please visit: http://ibew494.com/contact-IBEW.php.

The URL for the IBEW website is: http://ibew494.com/.

Can’t make it to either of these offices?  No worries.  The Recall Mary Lazich drive continues to set up staging areas throughout the 28th District.  Check out the “Events” page of www.RecallLazich.com for the latest information.

The citizens of the 28th District are standing up for their right to be accurately represented!  Please join our recall efforts.  Thank you!