Left-handed blows: towards a technique of incognito Bruce Russell This essay served as the introduction to my collection of essays Left-handed Blows (Clouds, 2009). A full text of that book is available from my Bandcamp page https://brucerussell.bandcamp.com/album/left-handed-blows-access-to-evil These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence’. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left- handed. 1 As for the anthropologists, they would have been less inclined to use the language of the mechanical model if… they had set aside the exchange of gifts and words and considered exchanges in which hermeneutic errors are paid for instantly, such as the exchange of blows… in which each stance of the opponent’s body contains cues which the fighter has to grasp while they are still incipient, reading in the hint of a blow or a sidestep the future it contains… 2 Just give me one hand loose, to swing by my side, just give me one hand loose and I’ll be satisfied. 3 Introduction This book is not an attempt at a coherent totalising theory. These are no longer the times for that, and I am not the writer. What this does amount to is a settling of accounts, and a clearing of the decks. Some readers may be wondering what moves me to write a book at all, as this is evidently a kind of theoretical work. Yet my sound practice, as anyone with 1 W. Benjamin, Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings, Schocken Books, New York, 1978. p.68 2 P. Bourdieu, The logic of practice, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990. p.80 3 C. Feathers, One hand loose, King Records, 1956