Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the affective and generative dimensions of a dialectics between trust, distrust, and mistrust, this paper examines the nightmares pro-independence Left Basque activists face by performing everyday political work.

Paper long abstract:

Although the Basque Country has undergone a peace process in the last decade and ETA no longer exists since 2018, Left independentist are haunted by two interrelated nightmares. One has to do with the scales of political imagination, namely, how to deal with a state fetishism that impregnates their project of an independence from Spain and France. The other has to do with their egalitarian project of both, macropolitics and treatment of people, under conditions of accusations of exaltation of terrorism. Such nightmares underpin their everyday politics in explicit and subtle ways. While they might help activists to maintain productive dynamics of social creativity, political autonomy, and mutuality, they do not prevent the emergence of commensuration and totalising notions of society. The conundrum of self-determination faces them with the complexities of nightmarish questions: How to avoid - in Clastrean terms-the cold monster they question? How to deal with the harming consequences of performing political work under siege -within institutional conditions derived from the legal and sociopolitical doctrine of "all is ETA". The paper seeks to explore these two nightmares and the ways they relate to each other focusing on the affective and generative dimensions of a dialectics between trust, distrust, and mistrust within everyday independence political practices.