‘How can we fearlessly acknowledge weakness as an animate and constructive content of collectivity?’ Can we become people who need less, consume less, people who reject expansionism? It’s almost too obvious. And yet changing what we need at the psychic level is the long query of psychoanalysis and spiritual self-questioning. There is some sort of retreat involved, cognitive or actual, a retreat involving a softer, non-commanding unit of shelter, where, apart from built form, shelter also means a collective gestural repertoire, which permits both solitude and coming together. I think of Roland Barthes’ anchorites in How to Live Together (his lecture course from 1976-77). This brings me to the idea of weakness, which I’ve continued to circle and revisit in my thinking and writing. There is a gendered aspect to my interest – clearly the social category ‘women’ has been assigned and held to the weak role, historically and politically. Other social categories are constrained to this margin too, whether they are racialised, class-based, or sexually oriented towards a supposed deviance. So what’s the content of this weakness? What are the acts and agencies of weakness? Its history? Rather than fearing weakness, is it possible to choose to deviate, to align with it, tarry there? Then what? What could weak thinking do? What are its techniques and potentials?