Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Amit S. Rai

Thesis: prints – imprints – fingerprints: towards an anarchist phenomenology of the self

July 2025

Abstract

These words are a whispered invitation to action. Whispered, so that we may have to come close, and feel the charge of our bodies, as well as their charges of disturbance, dissidence, dislocation. With them, I aim for us to collectively think and act and feel towards an anarchist phenomenology of our collective self, to embrace the transiency of our being and our continuous morphing and becoming. By acknowledging both the destruction and creation necessary to facilitate this shift in being, this text works through how the state aims to construct and bureaucratize our sense of self in order to map us, cement us, and control us. By using the knowledge it gathers about us through continuous surveillance, in which our bodies are increasingly becoming the tools of observation themselves, a knowledge that is actually a misunderstanding as it is produced by removing nuance and texture in order to make intelligible, it tries to construct shallow, immutable identities (which I analyze through the examples of gender and nationality) around our body-minds. These are then explicated on our identification documents and used to separate and individualize us, by prohibiting exploration into different ways of forming relations between people, as well as with other living beings or things or places, by prohibiting movement, and, by further putting us under continuous and sinister surveillance. In the process of shedding this entrapping skin layer by practicing collective dis-indentification and anonymity, we might surely come across more playful, honest, and felt ways of knowing each other. By resisting, we might just start actually existing.

Author: Ivčo Ružić