* BETRAYAL

My notion of Betrayal is informed by continuous work in the field of curating for contemporary art museums and other spaces and with publishing literary work and organizing film screenings and poetry demonstration. Betrayal is a proposal for a fully engaged political action. It offers imagining from a vantage point that is unimaginable. Betrayal differs from treason or desertion which refer to a change of sides within an antagonistic situation or conflict, in that it betrays the trust that this antagonistic situation asks from those on conflicted sides. Following Chantal Mouffe's notions of antagonism and agonism, we realize how antagonisms are the axises by which our identities and political realities are structured. As treason offers a change of sides, it is still embedded within the conflict. But Betrayal enables a new way to enter the conflict - beyond the antagonisms it offers itself through. As the conflict/antagonism constitutes our identities – treason stays faithful to the conflict, while Betrayal moves beyond the antagonism and betrays it.

Using the story of 5th Century BC Athenian politician and pupil of Socrates Alcibiades, I see Betrayal as a loyalty that isn't expedient. If loyalty has a protocol, or better still, is a protocol, than treason would be its opposite. Treason breaks each rule in the protocol of loyalty but not the protocol itself. While loyalty-treason follow a set of protocols that maintain the status-quo - Betrayal is a de-stabilizing of this status-quo. Betrayal is the constitutive component of loyalty. It is a loyalty to the horizon, a real loyalty - beyond protocol. For this political action one can define three main strategies: Exhaustion, Anachronism and Fictionalism. The story of Alcibiades is one of Exhaustion. Alcibiades committed a series of treasons - changing sides from the Athenian camp to the Spartan to the Persian and back to the Athenian, all in one conflict - the Peloponnesian War. His actions have exhausted treason to the extant that they offered a Betrayal - a new formation of the alliances and antagonisms; Anachronism, another strategy for Betrayal, offers a re-entry into the political through the surfacing of a no longer available 'outside' by which leaps to the unimaginable are offered. This is a very different notion from "retro" - with its sentimental appropriation and historical re-stagings. In a way Anachronism is a re-constitution of horizons that have been forgotten and seemed unavailable for us. The most evident of these is Communism beyond Historical Communism; The third strategy I find for Betrayal is that of Fictionalism - this is mainly an artistic practice of injecting inhabited fictions and embodied narratives (the EU, Zionism, etc.) with speculation, invention and plots as critical tactics for destabilizing identities aligned along an antagonism while suggesting new alliances.

The most prominent manifestation of Fictionalism in contemporary art is the different models of reenactment we have been faced with especially since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The performative aspect of Betrayal is related both to Action and to acting - positioning oneself in the world as a political actor. Fictionalism, Anachronism and Exhaustion provide us with ways to encounter the status-quo through the secret-agency of potentiality. (Joshua Simon, 2010)