To find out that David Graeber died yesterday on my brother’s 13th birthday is really chilling.

He didn’t care who paid him he stood with people everywhere. I want to share his words from when he visited Rojava in the very last part of my undergrad thesis at Yale where he once taught. here’s to every eye roll I got when I mentioned “anarchist anthropology.”

— When the group of researchers from various academic institutions was leaving, David Graeber and others apologized to their hosts that there was not more that they could bring them.

“They were under embargo, almost everything was in short supply. One woman answered, speaking, she said, only for herself. ‘Don’t worry about that too much,’ she said. ‘I have something that no one can give me. I have my freedom. In a day or two, you have to go back to a place where you don’t have that. I only wish there was some way I could give what I have to you’” (Knapp et al. 2016, 81). Her definition of freedom is an allegory for Benjamin’s divine violence, “the expiating moment in them that strikes without bloodshed, and finally, by the absence of all lawmaking”

(Benjamin 1996, 250)