Who Has the Right to Write a Manifesto?

This is the third and final essay in a three-part series on the manifesto, both as a form of writing and as a way of intervening in the world. The first returned to the history of proclamation and to the authority it grants the person who speaks. The second lingered on the tensions carried by the pronoun “we,” and on what is at stake when a manifesto speaks in the name of a group. This third essay returns to the question that set the whole journey in motion, and to Irene Vallejo’s book, to ask something else: what does a text do when it calls itself a manifesto, and how far can the gestures held within that word reach?

Irene Vallejo’s Manifesto for Reading is still the book that disappointed a reader who had expected its title to promise something more theoretical, more serious, perhaps even something genuinely new about books, libraries, and reading.

And it remains the starting point of this series.

This time, though, we return to it with a different question.

After Tzara, it becomes difficult to treat seriousness or argumentative rigour as a condition of the manifesto. The Combahee River Collective Statement did much of what manifestos do without ever carrying the word in its title. Donna Haraway, meanwhile, pushed the form toward a theoretical density that some texts confidently calling themselves manifestos never come close to reaching.

Each time we have tried to pin the manifesto down by one defining feature, we have watched its boundaries shift a little further away.

The manifesto has changed enormously: in length, in theoretical ambition, and in the place it gives to a programme, sometimes clearly stated, sometimes barely there. Even the name itself seems unable to settle the matter. Some texts announce themselves as manifestos from the title onward, then take considerable liberties with everything we associate with the term. Others perform the work of a manifesto without ever claiming the name.

Perhaps the question becomes clearer if we step back, for a moment, from trying to define the form and turn instead to what a manifesto does.

What Do Words Do?

In 1955, the British philosopher J. L. Austin delivered the Harvard lectures that would be published after his death, in 1962, as How to Do Things with Words. Austin was interested in those moments when words themselves enter into action. Under certain conditions, a promise happens through speech. So do an apology, a warning, or an act of naming. Words derive their force, then, from what they accomplish in the world.

This does not mean that the manifesto should be treated as a “speech act” in Austin’s strict sense, or made to fit a theory developed to answer different questions. What matters here is simpler: to read the manifesto through the effect it seeks to produce, rather than through the qualities it is supposed to possess before we allow it the name.

Since the first essay, we have encountered texts whose very appearance formed part of what they were trying to accomplish. We have seen a group declare itself and, through that gesture, acquire a new presence. We have seen a name taken from an adversary and made to mean something else. We have also seen how the pronoun “we,” simply by entering a sentence, invites a group to begin imagining itself through it.

In such cases, the manifesto acts in public space. It makes something visible, gives it a name, or shifts its position, drawing toward the centre what had until then remained at the margins.

And on the other side of the text, there is always someone being asked to do something: to listen, reconsider, join, refuse, become angry, or stop before something they had grown used to passing by without noticing.

Another gesture appears here, quieter perhaps, but no less important: attention.

The things that need to be proclaimed are not necessarily unknown. They may be so familiar that they gradually recede into the background of our lives. Everyone knows them, and almost no one sees them anymore.

Perhaps one of the manifesto’s functions lies precisely here: in taking what has become familiar and turning it into a question that demands a position.

For a long time, we knew the manifesto through the group's voice, the programme, the grand declaration. Yet the word has also begun appearing in books rooted in autobiography, memory, and personal experience.

In Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, published in 2021, Bernardine Evaristo returns to her life and her experience as a writer, to creativity, racism, representation, and cultural institutions. She describes the book as her first work of non-fiction, a revisiting of her own trajectory through her relationship to creativity. And yet she chose to place the word “manifesto” in the title.

In 2025 came Ian Patterson’s Books: A Manifesto, Or, How to Build a Library. Here too, the book begins from a long personal relationship with books before opening onto a defence of reading, libraries, and the forms of knowledge books make possible.

At first glance, one might think that the contemporary “I” has begun to take the place long occupied by “we.” Feminist history, though, asks us to look at the matter differently.

The phrase “the personal is political” is closely tied to the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In February 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote the text that would later become known by that title, defending consciousness-raising groups at a time when they were being accused of dwelling on “personal” problems at the expense of politics.

For Hanisch, the issue lies precisely in the relations of power that run through the most intimate parts of life. What one-woman experiences as a problem belonging to her alone begins to look different when she hears other women describe experiences that overlap with her own.

We return here to the room where, in the previous essay, we sat with the Redstockings. Each woman enters with her own story. Then the stories are placed alongside one another, and something emerges from their proximity that remained invisible within each experience taken on its own.

The “I” can thus become the beginning of a path toward what is shared, when an individual experience reveals conditions and relations that extend beyond the person living them and opens the way to understanding them within a broader political and collective frame.

When Caring Becomes a Position

Manifiesto por la lectura. Caligrafías del cuidado appeared in 2020 in a specific context. Irene Vallejo wrote it at the request of the Federation of Publishers’ Guilds of Spain, which presented it at the Liber book fair as a text intended to foreground the public value of reading and defend it within society. It also formed part of a broader effort toward a national pact on books and reading in Spain.

That detail changes quite a lot about how we read this small book.

Vallejo did not begin by writing a few reflections on her personal relationship with books and only later decide to call them a manifesto. From the outset, she was given a task: to write a text that could carry reading into a broader public space and assert its value before society and policymakers.

She chose to fulfil that task through personal and literary writing, drawing on her memories, on schools, libraries, and first books. She moves between history and experience, between impressions and the traces reading leaves in the lives of people and generations.

Perhaps it was precisely this personal and affective quality that made the reader from whom this series began feel “misled” by the word manifesto. He found himself facing an intimate, poetic text when he had expected an argument, a programme, or a theoretical construction.

Yet the book’s subtitle places beside the word “manifesto” an expression worth pausing over: Caligrafías del cuidado, which might be rendered as “writings of care” or “calligraphies of care.”

The logic of care seems, at first, rather distant from what we have grown accustomed to finding in a manifesto.

The form has long been at home with heightened emotion and raised voices. And now care enters that history in a lower register.

Feminist ethics of care give us a more precise language for understanding this shift. The French word soin captures only part of the much broader semantic range of the English word care, which came into circulation in France some fifteen years ago. Joan Tronto, with Berenice Fisher, proposed a broad definition of care, encompassing everything we do to maintain our world, sustain it, and repair it so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes bodies, relationships, the environment, and the things that make life itself possible. Tronto then gave the concept a political reach, moving it out of the private or feminine sphere to which it had long been confined and thinking it instead through the ways responsibility and power are distributed.

Caring begins with noticing a need, then recognising that this need calls for a response. From there comes the responsibility we assume toward something we want to see continue.

There is something strikingly close here to certain gestures a manifesto can make. Something fragile must first enter our field of vision. And when its continuity is threatened, the question can move beyond those living closest to it and into a wider space, where others begin to feel that its fate concerns them too.

We encountered something similar in Cairo in 1938, when the artists of Art and Liberty used the manifesto to defend an art made vulnerable to repression, categorisation, and exclusion.

With Vallejo, both the tone and the object change.

Manifesto for Reading takes up a value its reader already knows, then places before us the conditions that allow it to endure. Near the end of the book, Vallejo writes that “reading will continue to care for us if we care for it.”

The sentence shifts the reader’s place within the relationship. Reading becomes a form of reciprocal care: what it continues to give us also depends on what we do for it. And that attention extends across an entire network of people, places, and practices, from schools and libraries to publishing houses and shared spaces of reading.

What began as an individual relationship thus leads us toward a larger question: what kind of society do we want reading to remain possible within, and what structures are needed to sustain it?

Vallejo begins from a singular experience, then places reading before others as something worthy of their attention. As others draw closer and begin to feel that its survival concerns them too, the possibility of another kind of collective starts to take shape.

Perhaps “we,” then, can emerge as an effect of caring, rather than as something that must already exist before care becomes possible.

And perhaps the phrase “the future that unites us,” which also appears near the end of Vallejo’s book, becomes more interesting still when placed within this trajectory. A shared future may take shape around what we decide to protect together, and around the relationships that form through that choice.

When the Manifesto Leaves the Page

From September 15 to 20, Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Alfred Tarazi presents the second part of his project A Lover’s Manifesto, titled The Lebanese Experiment 1920-1958. (1)

The work forms part of a larger project tracing the history of Beirut from 1860 to 1982 through thousands of images and archival documents. In Tarazi’s conception of the project, images move from being witnesses to historical events to becoming actors within history itself, taking part in the production of political consciousness and in shaping a collective imagination.

With Tarazi, the manifesto leaves the page, and the word itself ceases to be its central tool. Image, sound, collage, montage, and archive enter the act of proclamation. “Writing” a manifesto becomes possible through materials we would not instinctively place under the sign of writing at all.

Tarazi explains that the project rests on years spent tracing the remains of Lebanese cultural institutions, their publications, and their visual and sonic productions. Some of what he collected, paper and celluloid film, was literally rescued from the trash. This work of gathering also confronts another problem: the interruption of memory across generations, and whole stretches of Lebanese history that remain unresolved or insufficiently understood.

In describing his method, Tarazi calls collage and montage the tools of his own “revolution,” and presents the project as a manifesto for remembrance and a call to act.

His work thus meets the questions opened by Vallejo, though by an entirely different route.

What does it mean to care for something threatened with disappearance?

With Vallejo, reading becomes an object of care once we stop treating its continuation as something guaranteed. With Tarazi, it is images, magazines, films, and archival materials that face the risk of physical disappearance, forgetting, and a break in transmission to those who come after.

Tarazi’s title, A Lover’s Manifesto, brings together a form historically associated with proclamation and confrontation and a relationship grounded in proximity, attachment, and concern for the fate of something. Here, the lover acts by gathering, preserving, rescuing, and rearranging fragments before returning them to public space in a new form.

With Tarazi, caring becomes an archival and political practice at once. It takes shape in gathering materials, preserving what risks disappearing, returning it to circulation, and in asking another question: who will inherit these images and stories if their transmission breaks from one generation to the next?

We began this series with a question: who has the right to write a manifesto?

By now, the verb “to write” itself seems narrower than the form we are trying to understand.

A manifesto can be written. It can be spoken. It can take shape through scattered images, sound, archives, and montage. It can begin with the declaration of an angry group, with a woman recounting her experience, with a reader speaking about the books that accompanied her, or with an artist gathering the fragments of a city and bringing them back into view.

Perhaps, at the end of this journey, the better question is this: what is this manifesto trying to do when it enters the world?

(1) https://www.beirutspringfestival.org/a-lovers-manifesto-p2-the-lebanese-experiment