10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4875
application/pdf
2239-625X
4875
1
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-27475
Nika Dubrovsky
Anuac
It has been almost a year
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
In memoriam
2021-07-06
2021-07-06
2021-07-23
2021-07-23
45-48
1
Nika Dubrovsky
2021/07/06
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4875
45
Artist and writer, United Kingdom
2239-625X
1
48
urn:nbn:it:unica-27475
It has been almost a year
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4875/4876
10
                                           2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 45-48




It has been almost a year*
Nika DUBROVSKY
Artist and writer

   It has been almost a year since David died, and it is still hard to believe it.
   For the last five months of his life, he had been ill and complained of
several strange symptoms, but nothing significant or life-threatening had
been found by the doctors he had been seeing about it.
   The shock I felt when within hours of feeling ill that fateful аfternoon, on
the beach in Venice, on the Lido, where Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice
was filmed, where I watched my husband collapse, still hasn’t faded.
   Before David’s, I had never seen a corpse. My grandparents died, but for
all sorts of reasons, I never saw their dead bodies. A childhood friend of mine
died in a car accident, but when he was buried, I stood far away and tried not
to look at his corpse.
   So in that hospital in Venice, my husband’s was the first corpse I had
ever seen. To me, he looked as though he had just fallen asleep, calm and
even smiling a little.
   I remember how I met David, years ago, long before we married. It was in
downtown New York. We went out for coffee at noon and walked the city
around all day, talking for hours.
   We were so different, he and I: I was born in the Soviet Union, and he was
raised in the “enemy’s heart” of New York City. But I immediately had the
feeling upon meeting David that I had known this man all along, that
despite the distance between us, he was now my brother, an old friend, a
comrade. Many who knew David personally described him having made a
similar impression. Most people usually don’t open themselves up so fully
and quickly to strangers. David almost always did.
   When I lived for a time in Jerusalem, I was surprised to learn that what
Jesus refers to as hell in the Gospels is not some underground S&M dungeon
staffed by devils and full of horrors. Christ was instead referring to a very
* With kind permission of Nika Dubrovsky, we publish an excerpt from her upcoming longer text
about her late husband David Graeber [N.d.R].


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Nika Dubrovsky
It has been almost a year
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 45-48.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/ANUAC2239-625X-4875
46                                                                NIKA DUBROVSKY


specific place known to all during his time in Jerusalem: the garbage dump,
where the corpses of the poor, the homeless, and the criminals were burned
and their bones left to be scavenged away by dogs and other animals. When
Christ warned sinners, “you will burn in hell”, he was issuing to those who
stray from the light a very specific warning: if you do not invest your life
with the living, you will die unloved and your corpse will be abandoned, fed
to wild dogs.
   As an anthropologist, David knew that societies are largely defined by
their relationship towards the dead. Our rituals of caring for the dead, the
celebration of their life, and the management of grief that follows loss, this
is culture, this is what makes us human.
   David Graeber was my husband, but he was also an amateur guitar player,
a lover of Japanese and Kurdish food, an anarchist, a science fiction
enthusiast, a professor, a writer, and, in a seemingly impossible way, a
kismet friend to hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world.
Given the outpouring of condolences that I have received since his passing, I
have never once in this past year feared that David was at risk of going to
hell, of being left forgotten among the bodies of so many others. Not with
him living on in the hearts and spirit of so many people.
   Shortly after his death, my friend Simona Ferlini explained to me the
etymology of the word “corpse”. It refers to a body of laws or a collection of
works. That I would soon after our marriage find myself dealing with both
David’s corpus as well as his actual corpse is, of course, a great personal
tragedy. I have to go through and probably will have to spend the rest of my
life experiencing the destruction of most of what was dear, familiar, and
precious to me. Locked as I was for an entire year in a small studio in the
middle of pandemic-stricken London, I spent most of my time going through
David’s archives, the writings he did not have time to publish, his diaries, his
correspondence. The effluvia of any great thinker like David.
   And even here I can see he lives on, I find as I am continually unable to
contain my admiration to David Graeber and my joy of looking through what
had made him who he was, what he laughed at, what fueled his courage, and
how curious and unexpected it all seems in aggregate, on this side of his
death.
   Actually, it is a perversely happy feeling.
   David Graeber was what the French might have called a homme de lettres.
He lived to share his ideas and experimented with as many ways of
expressing them as he could. Much like other noted anarchist scholar, Noam
Chomsky, David made himself available to those outside of the academy and
would speak almost everywhere he was asked. He poured over his lectures


2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 45-48
IT HAS BEEN ALMOST A YEAR                                                            47


and was writing virtually all the time. Anyone who knew David, who under-
stood what motivated him knew that this was not out of vanity. Rather, it
was a project to change the world, as well as change himself and the others,
through ideas, texts, lectures, and speeches.
   I believe his project is quite a success. He indeed made our world a slightly
better place.
   After David’s death, this process must continue. Especially today, when
changing the world is not a matter of ideological design, but of direct
survival for everyone on earth.
   David left an enormous archive – more than 100 notebooks, many notes,
letters, unpublished texts.
   But how do I do this correctly in a digital age?
   There are many different traditions of how to treat the corpse. Unfortunately
we live in a late capitalism with its brutal structures of symbolic powers and
dominations.
   Partly it connected to the old catholic way of “caring” for their dead saints.
Endless body: bones, fingers, and so on, would be dragged around to various
churches and put on display. Like always with the church, money and profit
get involved. In our time, all this could be briefly called dismemberment and
privatization of corpses.
   I truly hope that this can be avoided with David Graeber’s body of work.
   So I plan to split David’s archive into two parts: a physical one and a virtual
one. The physical documents, along with his symbolic academic capital,
should be kept (and protected) by a meaningful academic institution. After
all, David’s life has always been very much connected to academia.
   But there must yet be another part – the non-academic one. David and I
have written several essays called Art Communism1. In particular, it describes
the concept of “culture and the reproduction of culture” introduced by
Alexander Bogdanov, the founder of the “Proletkult”. “Proletkult” worked to
create horizontal links, interdependent relationships between teachers and
students, and most importantly, a new ways of knowledge production and
reproduction. The future free humans would be understood not as romantic
creators, not as professional-intellectuals, but as amateur (or DIY,
samodeyatelnostl in Russian) proletariat. Much of what Bogdanov and his
allies described was later realized in the best part of the Wikipedia project.
   I am looking at David’s texts – his archive – as a very generous framework
that provides space for horizontal connections, with open questions, doubts,
unexpected links to different thoughts, with entry points for the reader-
commentator almost anywhere.
1. Cfr. www.e-flux.com/journal/102/284624/another-art-world-part-1-art-communism-and-ar-
tificial-scarcity/

                                         2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 45-48
48                                                                 NIKA DUBROVSKY


   I am thinking about creating a wiki environment for all who would be
interested to join, including and above all non-academics, so that we can not
just read his texts or look at scans of David’s (very beautiful) diaries, but
have a space to complete, rewrite, compose and develop his works, and
thereby create our own.
   In other words to set up some version of the “International Proletkult”,
using David’s texts as a basis.
   Perhaps this will continue the space of sharing content, creating
conditions for working together that David was arranging all his life. Through
his texts David’s magical power to form direct emotional and intellectual
connections with people, in person or through his texts, will make his legacy
a living and constantly evolving project in which all of us, his readers, will be
involved. By commenting, thinking about and developing his projects, his
thoughts, we will constantly shift the boundaries of public and private using
our own experiences, our bodies and minds.
   I would like to believe this kind an open to collectivity body of David’s
work is most consistent with the type of care he would practice and approve.




2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 45-48
