While stranded in Dublin, Ohio on September 13th 2001 due to the grounding of all flights in the US, the editors visited the local library. Thumbing through the card catalog, they found a reference to “Other Possibilities,” by Indira Sylvia (I.S.) Belissop assigned the Dewey Decimal call number 125.20. Let alone the book, even this curious number inserted between “Teleology” (124) and “The Self” (126) has since been impossible to find in major libraries around the world. The card, in classic Courier font, stated simply, "Collected philosophical writings of Mozambique-born philosopher." When the shelves were checked, only three torn out pages were found with an anonymously penned biography of Belissop, which we have reproduced in its entirety below the call. The biography, needless to say, testified to the remarkable significance of a thinker who seems never to have existed…

Shifter's 13th issue will focus on the importance and impact of this philosopher, who, though unknown, seems to have been one of the most important thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Belissop's thought has been instrumental in changing the entire terrain of intellectual, artistic and activist practice over the past seven decades of her immense production. Her revolutionary work in activist "interventionism," and her Marxist, materialist commitment never seemed to conflict with her important contribution to experimental poetry. Her philosophical treatises managed to comfortably accommodate both psychoanalysis and neuro-psychology while simultaneously problematizing both disciplines. Her expertise and influence in so many varied disciplines made her something of an Aristotle of our age. Of course, like Aristotle, she was not right in everything she said, but that she said it made so much of our own work possible.

Belissop was an untimely thinker – indeed a thinker whose true time has not come and perhaps never will. We are using this occasion as an opportunity to reflect on critical practice at the present time. The invention of Belissop (and her inventiveness) gives us the opportunity to explore concepts that have yet to be named or written, to test out ideas, to question the history of critical theory that has swept all fields of practice, to engage in a dialog with someone so capacious, so brilliant, that they could never really exist.
 
We are looking for aphorisms, essays, interviews, letters of friendship or admiration and poems. We also seek visual art, performance and writing practices that grow out of the possibilities opened by her analyses. In fact, personal anecdotes, new insights inspired by her work, hybrid and impossible forms (which, as ISB said, "make the possible possible") are all welcome. The aim of the issue is simply to continue Belissop's legacy – to explore the multifaceted themes that her work touches on and helps animate within our own lives.
 
Bellisop's Biography from "Other Possibilities"

It would be wrong to say that Belissop was secretive about her past, but it would be equally incorrect to say she divulged more than she had to. Her exact date of birth is of course well known – June 28, 1914, the infamous day when Archduke Ferdinand was shot and WWI exploded. It was a date of immense significance for Belissop, but one whose importance she tried to unhinge throughout her storied career. As early as 1933, at the tender age of 19 and some 70 years before Lindqvist's "History of Bombing", Belissop published her revolutionary essay, "The Colonial Footprint and the First World War," where she polemically stated, "To say the Great War started in Eastern Europe in 1914 and not Isabella's court in 1491 is tantamount to saying human life begins the year before death and not at birth."
She was born in a Danish embassy in Mozambique. Not the daughter of an ambassador, but of an illicit liaison between her mother who cleaned the embassy and a gentleman whose name was known but never released to the public. She never claimed to be African, nor European, nor something in between. She only claimed, perhaps too high-mindedly, to be what justice demanded of her at a given moment. When, in 1987, Gayatri Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism," Belissop wrote in an oft-cited letter, "You have spoken my life," and added, echoing Wallace Stevens, "You have described me without place…Thank you."
Belissop was educated internationally, beginning at a Portuguese mission and slowly making her way to the University of Porto, then the Ecole Normale Supérieure. She excelled in languages and literature, philosophy and science, and further maintained a keen sensibility for art and politics. Paris in the 30's provided her with a space of intellectual and political ferment that would always follow her. As a student of Merleau-Ponty, she formed a life-long friendship with the Marxist-phenomenologist Trần Đức Thảo, whose work she continued to advocate long after he left Paris for the fields of Vietnam.

Her extremely controversial essay, published shortly after Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961 entitled "Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh," articulated, within the context of an almost obscene philosophical rigor, the extremely close – though never sexual – relationship she had with the great phenomenologist. "For Merleau-Ponty, the flesh tethered being, in an ontological sense, to the matrices of the world. For Maurice, the flesh was the unbearably soft moment of touch when our thoughts were interrupted and we remembered to smile at the simple pleasures of life."

Her intricate analyses of Merleau-Ponty are often forgotten in the pioneering work she would later do with post-structural thought. Always attuned to colonial histories, she of course gave us magnificent readings of Levinas, Derrida, and Badiou that grounded their work in French history better than anyone ever could. "How could we have ever thought that the Other, rather than an abstract or localized subject, implied anything but the vexing colonial relationship that has haunted philosophy since Rousseau's 'Noble Savage'."
There is much more to say about Belissop's philosophy than we can point to here – her recuperation of the Weberian notion of probability from "Economy and Society", her ingenious combining of Levinas and Lacan with the notion of the "mirror face," her revolutionary distinction between micro and macro phenomenology, and her close textual readings that will always seem so clear and yet always be saying something more than we can immediately grasp. As Levinas is reported to have said after meeting her for the first time, "I am not sure what she knows, but I know that she knows everything I do."

If France was her philosophical mainstay, then America was where she would take up the interdisciplinary practices that have made her so well-known outside the academy. She joined in New York a number of significant European exiles, including Duchamp, Arendt, Adorno, Brecht and Breton. As throughout her career, there were always rumors of amorous liaisons with any number of these figures (including even Arendt) but none have been borne out through evidence. More important than this, however, was the output she began to produce, in drama, in artistic practice, in activism.
Perhaps most well-known and most important of these was the 1944 play, co-written with Brecht, entitled "Falling after Those Who Have Not Seen". The play, unusually poetic for Brecht, crystallized the feelings of an entire "lost generation." As in the play's opening lines of dactylic hexamater, echoing Wordsworth and undoubtedly penned by Belissop: "This is the hardest movement, in the perturbing times and the long nights / Ensnared in fear, and in the torn guise of dead dreams. Slowly, we begin." Those last words – slowly, we begin – poetic yet potent, became the rallying cry of New York artists. Although the work and the pace of life was fast and frenetic, the context Belissop outlined with those words ring true to this day.

Belissop's impact on the art world is perhaps best known through this oft-told anecdote: A few pieces of Duchamp's came on the market in 1949 at a small New York gallery, long closed. Belissop, speaking to a confidant in French, remarked on the bricolages bizarres de sa ouevre – the strange combinations of Duchamp's work. An aspiring artist standing nearby, and recognizing Belissop, asked her if she could translate what she had just said to his young American ears. Forgetting her own English, Belissop said, "The man makes great combines," and this word set off a chain reaction in the young man's mind that made him the Robert Rauschenberg we know today.

But Belissop was also an artist in her own right as one of the first to use performance art as activist politics. In an essay outlining her practice from 1956, "After Adorno's Auschwitz," she argued that the there had to be a form of political engagement for art beyond what Adorno had theorized in "Commitment." In that essay, Adorno polemically stated that art could not be committed or engaged in the Sartrean sense, for in such engagement it tacitly gave meaning to a fractured and meaningless world. Adorno turned instead to works by authors like Kafka and Beckett who denied the world, affirmed their autonomy, and in so doing made the only truly political art.
While Belissop was always appreciative of Adorno, she believed that this turning away from the world was too limited a practice. In searching for a place between the tragic authenticity of Sartre and the tragic inauthenticity of Adorno, Belissop found in a humorous artistic politics a way to remain engaged in a meaningless world. "After Adorno's Auschwitz," opens with a joke from Freud's "On Humour": A man on his way to the guillotine looks at up at the sunny sky and states, "Well, the day is beginning nicely." That ability to laugh in the face of death, to find beauty in the mangled world through a humorous incantation, was at the heart of her work.
The most famous instance of this occurred in her controversial return to Portugal in 1974, at the height of the Colonial War. She quietly crossed the Pyrenees and then entered Northern Portugal and made her way to Lisbon. With incredible organizing capacity, she proceeded to organize Africans and liberal sympathizers to march on the Ave. de Liberdade to the Terreiro do Paço, the seat of the dictatorship, as she proclaimed on a blowhorn, "We are Africans for colonization. We LOVE You! We want to be you! We hate everything about ourselves! We love brutal oppression; we love the destruction of our culture! We hate having mineral resources, peace and charity! Please take them from us! Please! Please! Please!" Like "Slowly, we begin," "Please! Please! Please!" become an activist rallying cry for mocking the powers-that-be who claim to know us better than we do ourselves.
For me, Belissop was most important for the unbelievable courage she showed on September 12, 2001. No other intellectual was brave enough to write what she did, nor were they well-respected enough to have the New York Times give them the entire op-ed page. I quote here just a few paragraphs of that revolutionary essay:

Today we will be called upon to become bellicose yet again. We will be told that there is a sickness in the world, a sickness we must eradicate through war and our own form of terror. We will all fall in line, even the strongest of us, we will. We will forget the lessons of history and plunge ourselves into a fight we know we cannot win. Vietnam will pale in comparison. We will lose our selves, our souls, our reason, everything we hold dear.
You will not listen to me, no matter how impassioned I write these words. You will not see out to five, ten, fifteen years from now, the world you will be making, the terror you will be making. That is okay. It allows me to be as polemical as I need to be…So let me say this, let me say this though you will hate me for it. I would rather die, I would rather give my life without having put up a fight, than to live in a world of fear, than to live in a world where I suspect instead of love my neighbor, than to live in a world where death and destruction will be infinitely multiplied instead of heroically ended.
You will not agree with me. Indeed, you cannot agree with me. But if you learn to live, if you learn your own desire to live, you will             someday have to agree. You cannot live when you kill; you cannot live when you are in fear. You do not know this, but you must know             this. You cannot continue, but you must continue. You cannot love, but you must love. You cannot live, but you must live.

In the context of the war fever that gripped the United States, Belissop lost all clout there. She remained popular – and increasingly popular – abroad, but in New York, her adopted home, she would never feel comfortable again. Even after public opinion turned against the wars, the city's ego kept it from admitting that she was right all along.
Aristotle's formulation in the Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know," became, in Belissop's subtle hands, "All of us, for some unknown reason, desire to live." All disciplines were inflected with this idea for Belissop – whether they were researching particles or syllables or philosophical memes – they all were inspired by a desire to live in the Nietzschean sense of affirmation, in a world without fear, in a world where we were willing to die before we were willing to give way on our desire to live justly, respectfully, and lovingly.