Edwin Nasr ~ To Persons Unknown

A recent Guardian open letter addressed to Iran’s political prisoners, who are described as caught “between two blades of a scissors,” offers a particularly revealing instance of the Left’s present contradiction: a gesture of solidarity that seeks to hold state repression and imperial aggression together, while leaving unresolved the question of the political subject to whom, and through whom, such solidarity can become collective action. This exhaustion of the epistolary form points to a deeper political crisis: a Left that can no longer locate the revolutionary subject in whose name it speaks. Tracing the schisms opened by the Syrian civil and proxy wars of 2011–2024 through the ongoing US-Zionist genocide in Palestine and imperial aggression against Iran, the lecture examines how our present juncture has fractured the terms of solidarity, exposing an increasingly irreconcilable antagonism between national sovereignty and collective self-determination. Against the moralizing abstractions and “neither/nor”-isms that substitute for strategy, it asks: if sovereignty is once again the primary object of struggle, where is the subject capable of struggling for it?

About: Edwin Nasr 

To Persons Unknown will be presented on the 3rd of October in the context of 

APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle