Word and Silence: the ambulatory word-diagram of Zapatismo

Abstract (English)

This paper seeks to explore the potentiality of mapping new worlds by recreating relations and knowledge. For this task, it proposes diagram as the wayward tracing of knowledge as opposed to the hegemonic thought-image and grammaticality. Diagram itself is hardly a force of transgression and has many a time been subjected to the service of colonisation in anthropological research (Partridge 2024). However, what it is not is a stasis. It offers is the release of the faculty of senses from the faculty of recognition. That is, to liberate thinking, sensibility and affect from representation (for instance, common sense). Diagram is something to work with, not a pre-determined solution to a problem. It is a perpetual state of composing, always forcing our senses to travel and accumulate. The research will explore this operationality of diagram in the function of 'the word and the silence' in Subcommandante Marcos' writings. We call it the 'word-diagram of Zapatismo'. In Marcos, 'word is the bridge to cross' worlds, creating new worlds. It also crosses temporal extensions: comes from the ancestors. Word is a weapon to work with; it is necessarily a projectile to forge new alliances in strange places and unseen ways. Words accumulate the relations. For Zapatismo, words break the silence of power and heal.