I was thinking today how we'd spend David's birthday if he had been around. We probably would have had some great party or we would have wandered into some unexpected place. For one of his birthdays, we went to a small Berlin restaurant with only a few tables, served by a gorgeous Japanese chef. The menu consisted of an endless number of infinitesimal dishes. 10 appetizers, 10 "main courses," 10 desserts, and more. All dishes on teeny tiny plates.
The meal turned into an endless discussion about the dishes: their taste, their smell, and the way they look.
Also I think about the war. About the horror that everyone in the war zone is feeling right now, including residents and soldiers on both sides. I think of the despair of those who have lost loved ones.
And I think about the degree to which all of these calamities are unavoidable or now, and how much of them are part of our choices and our responsibility.
I obsessively think back to six months of David's illness before he died.
He complained every day about his health, but every morning he woke up saying, "I feel so much better. It's almost gone."
It was hard to know how seriously he was suffering and how dangerous his condition was. David was a very gentle but also very stubborn man.
I still think his death could have been prevented.
While sick, David complained of a strange tingling sensation in his fingers and toes that seemed to move through his body. He also had digestive problems and a strange soapy taste in his mouth from time to time.
Doctors with whom I continue to speak say, that these symptoms are indicative of the damage to the sensory nerve and blood circulatory system that has now been documented in many covid patients and is associated with changes in blood clotting and numerous internal inflammations.
If David had been sick today, when we already know much more about covid, he might have been rescued. Now his six-month complaints would be seen as the standard "long covid" rather than the whining of a spoiled professor who can't quite articulate where, how or what he's suffering from.
If we had left England immediately after the epidemic was announced for some backwoods place, he would not have contracted Covid and there would have been no problem at all.
We didn't know how serious covid was. We didn't know how to react to it.
That's why it turned out like this. And there's no need to complain now.
We need to think about the future.
However, it's difficult.
So I think, what if the war, which is already in full force right on our doorstep, in Europe, spills over, will we be able to say that it's a surprise?
If inhuman horrors reach us, will we be able to say that we are prepared to sacrifice our loved ones, suffer ourselves, because it is more important to "win" than to negotiate?
Maybe now is the moment when we can still come to our senses and stop it all at once.
Unfortunately, things move very quickly, and there is no going back.
Many people asked me what the reason for David's death was. The Venetian hospital stated in autopsy's results that the cause of death is massive internal bleeding caused by pancreatitis necrosis. I want to add my own conspiracy theory: I firmly believe it is related to Сovid.
Recently I watched the news for the first time in weeks and found out that a million people have died from Covid worldwide, and it's assumed that the second wave will cost another million lives.
I want to tell you about how David and I spent our first lockdown. Despite being disorganized and a bit of a punk at heart, I've had to master some critical homemaking skills over the years. I've raised two kids by myself, after all.
At the very start of lockdown, I diligently bought masks, gloves, medicines, ointments, sanitizers, and having grown up in the USSR and being familiar with the economy of scarcity – I got double quantities. I mastered the art of online shopping for EVERYTHING and was determined to stick to a strict quarantine. My projects have not been successful. David and I lived on Portobello Road in the heart of London.
Boris Johnson - the new UK prime minister, a Trump's doppelganger, regularly gave conflicting advice regarding the pandemic. In general, his line was, "those who die would have died anyway, so don't bother us with such trivialities."
Eventually, he caught Covid himself and shut up for a while.
He recovered, thanked the NHS's doctors and nurses for their help and sacrifice, and continued with the UK's medical system's privatization and clownish speeches.
The Portobello market remained open as usual for a long time. Most Londoners did not wear masks or gloves. The general attitude towards the pandemic was, with few exceptions, condescending.
I want to express my respect and send rays of love to women: girlfriends, mothers and grandmothers. In most families, they are responsible for the well-being, safety, hygiene, and shopping – all the mundane housekeeping protocols.
It was tough for David to abide by the rules of isolation, not go to the cafes, not meet with neighbors; he hated masks and continuously tried to reuse single-use gloves.
David (gently) complained about me to his friends, telling them how I "torture" him. In general, David was a heartfelt person, and his whining was in many ways boasting: "Look how Nika takes care and worries about me! "
However, I send rays of hatred to the careless idiots who giggled at my efforts to isolate and advised David to ignore my demands.
Of course, I know that I am the one to blame. David was an obedient Jewish husband. I could have put my foot down and demanded we leave immediately and spend the entire lockdown self-isolating in a remote village somewhere. But I didn't. I don't know why. I didn't want to be a control freak or a "strict wife."
We both started having strange symptoms in March. About once a week, we'd get headaches, felt muscle pain, tingling in the lungs, extreme tiredness (to the point of not being able to talk on the phone). Just continually wanting to sleep.
Then everything would go away, but after 5-8 days, the symptoms would repeat. We cared for each other tenderly: we brought tea with ginger and lemon and vitamins to each other. I mostly slept all day, and David took hot baths.
Later I recovered completely, while David developed strange new symptoms. It all started with a peculiar soapy taste in his mouth. He felt it after meals and said it continued throughout the day. We stopped using washing liquid on our dishes. David went to the dentist and had his gums deep cleaned several times to prevent inflammation. He got (several!) root canal treatments. We didn't know what else we could do.
He got an antibody test. The result was negative.
A while later, he began feeling a tingling sensation in his fingertips. He attributed this to practicing too much guitar playing. Then the tingling began in his toes and legs too. Fatigue. Mild but persistent abdominal pain; digestive disorders. But primarily constant fatigue. We consulted various doctors. We did various tests. First, in London, then in Berlin.
All the doctors said the same thing: there are no obvious symptoms, but you have "post-viral syndrome, wait, and everything will pass."
And we waited.
David was tested for Covid at clinics in Venice, with negative results. When I asked if his death could be related to Covid, the doctor replied, "if you test positive for Covid, then you have Covid. A negative test does not mean that you do not have it." And I feel the same way as his doctor. I feel that Covid was a reason why he developed this strange and bizarre illness so rapidly. I blame for this the joke-government of Boris Johnson and general human stupidity and self-reliance.
David died of necrotic pancreatitis and internal bleeding, but why suddenly the healthy, totally never-drinking-alcohol David would develop this disease. Why would it be so sudden and quick? Why did such strange symptoms accompany it? Why did it start right after we thought we had Covid?
Based on the provided search results, pancreatic necrosis can be caused by organophosphate poisoning, which is a type of slow poisoning. Organophosphates are a class of chemicals that inhibit cholinesterase, leading to a range of symptoms including pancreatitis. In some cases, this can progress to necrotizing pancreatitis, where pancreatic tissue dies due to lack of blood flow and oxygen.
For example, one study mentioned in the search results describes a patient who developed severe acute pancreatitis and total pancreatic necrosis after organophosphate intoxication. Another study notes that organophosphate poisoning can cause pancreatitis, and that necrotizing pancreatitis is a possible complication.
Additionally, the search results highlight the importance of early detection and treatment in preventing complications, including necrotizing pancreatitis, in cases of organophosphate poisoning.
In summary, while pancreatic necrosis is typically associated with acute pancreatitis, the search results suggest that slow poisoning with organophosphates can also cause pancreatic necrosis as a complication of pancreatitis.
Key points:
Organophosphate poisoning can cause pancreatitis.
Necrotizing pancreatitis is a possible complication of pancreatitis in organophosphate poisoning cases.
Early detection and treatment are crucial in preventing complications, including necrotizing pancreatitis.
Organophosphates (OPs) are a class of chemical compounds formed through the esterification process involving phosphoric acid and an alcohol. They are widely used as:
Insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides in agriculture and pest control
Neurotoxins, originally developed by the German military during World War II
It has been almost a year since David died and it is still hard to believe it.
For the last five months of his life, he had been ill, complaining of several strange symptoms, but the doctors he had been seeing about it found nothing significant or life threatening.
The shock I felt that fateful afternoon, when within hours of David feeling ill on the beach in Venice, on the Lido, where Luchino Visconti shot his Death in Venice and I watched my husband collapse, still hasn’t faded.
Before David died, I had never seen a corpse. When my grandparents died, for all sorts of reasons, I never saw their dead bodies. A childhood friend died in a car accident, but when he was buried I stood far away and managed not to look at his corpse.
So in that hospital in Venice, my husband’s corpse was the first I had ever seen. He looked to me as though he had just fallen asleep, calm and even smiling a little.
I remember meeting David years ago, long before we married. It was in downtown New York. We went out for coffee at noon and walked around the city all day, talking for hours.
We were so different, he and I. I was born in the Soviet Union and he was raised in New York City, the “enemy’s heart.” Yet, immediately upon meeting David, I had the feeling I had always known this man, that despite the distance between us he was now my brother, an old friend, a comrade. Many people who knew David personally described him as having made a similar impression. Most people don’t open themselves up so fully and quickly to strangers. David almost always did.
When I lived for a time in Jerusalem, I was surprised to learn that what Jesus refers to as hell in the Gospels is not some underground S&M dungeon staffed by devils and full of horrors. Christ was instead referring to a very specific place known to all during his time in Jerusalem: the garbage dump, where the corpses of the poor, the homeless, and criminals were burned, their bones left to be scavenged by wild dogs and other animals. When Christ warned that sinners “will burn in hell,” he was issuing to those who stray from the light a very specific warning: if you do not invest your life with the living, you will die unloved and your corpse will be abandoned, fed to the dogs.
As an anthropologist, David knew that societies are largely defined by their relationship toward the dead. Our rituals of caring for the dead, celebrating their life and managing the grief that follows loss—this is culture, this is what makes us human.
David Graeber was my husband, but he was also an amateur guitar player, a lover of Japanese and Kurdish food, an anarchist, a science fiction enthusiast, a professor, a writer, and in a seemingly impossible way a kismet friend to hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world. Given the outpouring of condolences that I have received since his passing, I have never once feared that David was at risk of going to hell, of being left forgotten among the bodies of so many others. Not with him living on in the hearts and spirit of so many people.
Shortly after his death, my friend Simona Ferlini explained that the word “corpse” shares its etymology with corpus, referring to a body of laws or, in particular, a collection of works. That I would soon after our marriage find myself dealing with both David’s corpus as well as his corpse is, of course, a great personal tragedy. I will have to spend the rest of my life going through his corpus, experiencing the destruction of most of what was so dear, familiar, and precious to me. Locked as I was for an entire year in a small studio in the middle of pandemic-stricken London, I spent most of my time sifting through David’s archives, the writings he did not have time to publish, his diaries, his correspondence. The effluvia of any great thinker like David.
And even here I can see that he lives on, as I find myself continually unable to contain my admiration for David Graeber and my joy of looking through what made him who he was, what he laughed at, what fueled his courage, and how curious and unexpected it all seems in aggregate, on this side of his death.
Actually, it is a perversely happy feeling.
David Graeber was what the French call an homme de lettres. He lived to share his ideas, experimenting with as many ways of expressing them as he could. Much like Noam Chomsky, another noted anarchist-scholar, David made himself available to those outside of the academy and would speak almost everywhere he was invited. He poured over his lectures preparing them, writing virtually all the time. Anyone who knew David, who understood what motivated him, was aware that his dedication was not out of vanity. Rather, it was a project to change the world, as well as change himself and others, through ideas, texts, lectures, and speeches.
I believe his project is quite a success. He indeed made our world a slightly better place.
After David’s death, this process must continue. Especially today, when changing the world is a matter not of ideological design but of the sheer survival of everyone on earth.
David left an enormous archive—more than a hundred notebooks, as well as incidental jottings, many letters, and unpublished texts.
But how do I deal with it correctly in a digital age?
There are many different traditions of how to treat a corpus. Unfortunately, we live in conditions of late capitalism, with its brutal structures of symbolic powers and dominations.
Partly, the task is connected to the old Catholic way of “caring” for dead saints, involving endless body: bones, fingers, and so on, that would be dragged around to the various churches and put on display. As always with the church, money and profit get involved. In our time, all this could be succinctly termed the dismemberment and privatization of corpses.
I truly hope that this can be avoided with David Graeber’s body of work.
So, I plan to split David’s archive into two parts: a physical one and a virtual one. The physical documents, along with his symbolic academic capital, should be kept (and protected) by a meaningful academic institution. After all, David’s life was always very much connected to academia.
But there must yet be another part—the non-academic one. David and I wrote several essays in this vein, under the rubric of Art Communism.
In particular, we describe the concept of “culture and the reproduction of culture” introduced by Alexander Bogdanov, the founder of the early Soviet Proletkult.
Proletkult worked to create horizontal links, interdependent relationships between teachers and students, and most importantly, new modes of knowledge production and reproduction. The future free humans envisioned in the project would be understood not as romantic creators, not as professional-intellectuals, but as an amateur (or DIY, samodeyatelnost’in Russian) proletariat. Much of what Bogdanov and his allies described has now been realized in the best aspects of the Wikipedia project.
I am looking at David’s texts—his archive—as a very generous framework providing space for these horizontal connections, replete with open questions, doubts, and unexpected links to different thoughts, with entry points for reader-commentators almost anywhere.
I am thinking of creating a wiki environment for all who would be interested to join, including and above all non-academics, so that we are able not only to read his texts or examine scans of David’s (very beautiful) diaries but to have a space to complete, rewrite, compose and develop his works, thereby creating our own.
In other words, to set up some version of the International Proletkult, using David’s texts as a basis.
Perhaps this will continue the space of sharing content, creating conditions for working together, that David was arranging all his life. Through his corpus, David’s magical power to form direct emotional and intellectual connections with people, in person or through his texts, will make his legacy a living and constantly evolving project in which all of us, his readers and fellow writers, will be involved. By commenting on, thinking about and developing his projects, his thoughts, we will constantly shift the boundaries of the public and private, using our own experiences, our bodies and minds.
I would like to believe that this opening to a collective body of work is most consistent with the type of care David would practice and approve.
Noteworthy fact: The Dawn of Everything was meant to precede a trilogy of books (co-written with David Wengrow) meant to change the course of human history.
He compared The Dawn of Everything to The Hobbit and this unwritten trilogy as his "Lord of the Rings".
There is apparently a vast amount of unpublished material that David Wengrow is presumably sitting on top of. If he doesn't publish any of it I think that will confirm my theory. I'm guessing he's scared. I haven't seen him say much on the subject of Graeber's death.
He was re-writing history in a more accurate way, and getting close to some special beliefs that, maybe the power wish very much to remain unquestioned.
I'm in 100% agreement that David's pancreatic necrosis was neither natural nor caused by 'Covid.' Your points are well researched and solidly argued. I have no particular regard for Nika but I'd throw out some counterpoints:
In a search on her, I came on this photo that she says was around the time she met David. She's an attractive dissident intellectual with two young kids whose childhood she says was 'difficult.' The son who looks no more than 1 here turned 18 in 2020: https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1333047723054993409.
That seems like a very long game if she had been recruited to kill David. And for the sake of his money, it seems like she already had him wrapped around her finger. He would have continued to bring in income and write new books. There's definitely something 'off' about her. She seems quite burdened by his 'corpus' for considering him 'the best man in the world.' But blaming her for wanting his money lets larger forces off the hook.
My guess du jour for what was touted as long Covid was something parasitic or bacterial, which is why HCQ and ivermectin worked. It's too soon for him to have gotten the vaccine, I think. But he could have been targeted individually or part of a random attack to keep the psyops going.
I remember reading that David was angry that his signature on a BDS petition was mentioned in their campaign without his permission. Nika mentions going to Jerusalem and says he's 'a good Jewish husband.' I think the PBI (powers behind Israel) are the ones engineering everything. I can see why they'd want to get him out of the way, as perhaps the clearest thinker of our generation.
Yet David had an interesting blend of socialism with his anarchy, as does Chomsky: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-is-the-problem. So I could see him swallowing the NHS line, hook and sinker, along with Nika. I'm reading your translation of his Kandioronk article now, thanks so much for that monumental addition to my knowledge and for this thought-provoking research. It's definitely a possibility I'd consider.
Thanks, Tereza! You make some good points - I hadn't considered the possibility that something parasitic or bacterial could have caused "long COVID", I explained it away by 1) the effects of isolation, 2) overuse of antibacterial soap, hand sanitizer, etc, 3) hyperchondria, 4) the power of suggestion. But tbh, I didn't give a lot of thought. If other people are sick, I don't generally regard it as my problem (unless it's a family member or close friend).
You make an interesting point about Nika and David meeting 15-20 years before he died. I don't have a good answer to that one other than to say that they didn't start dating until much, much later. Also, she could be lying. Are you able to find a photo of her and David together prior to, say, 2015?
I've made it my mission to read all of Graeber's books and explore the rabbit hole as deeply as possible because I'm convinced I'm onto something. I have a pretty elaborate theory that remains a work in progress.
Nika Dubrovsky - Feb 12, 2023
I was thinking today how we'd spend David's birthday if he had been around. We probably would have had some great party or we would have wandered into some unexpected place. For one of his birthdays, we went to a small Berlin restaurant with only a few tables, served by a gorgeous Japanese chef. The menu consisted of an endless number of infinitesimal dishes. 10 appetizers, 10 "main courses," 10 desserts, and more. All dishes on teeny tiny plates.
The meal turned into an endless discussion about the dishes: their taste, their smell, and the way they look.
Also I think about the war. About the horror that everyone in the war zone is feeling right now, including residents and soldiers on both sides. I think of the despair of those who have lost loved ones.
And I think about the degree to which all of these calamities are unavoidable or now, and how much of them are part of our choices and our responsibility.
I obsessively think back to six months of David's illness before he died.
He complained every day about his health, but every morning he woke up saying, "I feel so much better. It's almost gone."
It was hard to know how seriously he was suffering and how dangerous his condition was. David was a very gentle but also very stubborn man.
I still think his death could have been prevented.
While sick, David complained of a strange tingling sensation in his fingers and toes that seemed to move through his body. He also had digestive problems and a strange soapy taste in his mouth from time to time.
Doctors with whom I continue to speak say, that these symptoms are indicative of the damage to the sensory nerve and blood circulatory system that has now been documented in many covid patients and is associated with changes in blood clotting and numerous internal inflammations.
If David had been sick today, when we already know much more about covid, he might have been rescued. Now his six-month complaints would be seen as the standard "long covid" rather than the whining of a spoiled professor who can't quite articulate where, how or what he's suffering from.
If we had left England immediately after the epidemic was announced for some backwoods place, he would not have contracted Covid and there would have been no problem at all.
We didn't know how serious covid was. We didn't know how to react to it.
That's why it turned out like this. And there's no need to complain now.
We need to think about the future.
However, it's difficult.
So I think, what if the war, which is already in full force right on our doorstep, in Europe, spills over, will we be able to say that it's a surprise?
If inhuman horrors reach us, will we be able to say that we are prepared to sacrifice our loved ones, suffer ourselves, because it is more important to "win" than to negotiate?
Maybe now is the moment when we can still come to our senses and stop it all at once.
Unfortunately, things move very quickly, and there is no going back.
My opinion on David's cause of death
New
Oct 16, 2020
Many people asked me what the reason for David's death was. The Venetian hospital stated in autopsy's results that the cause of death is massive internal bleeding caused by pancreatitis necrosis. I want to add my own conspiracy theory: I firmly believe it is related to Сovid.
Recently I watched the news for the first time in weeks and found out that a million people have died from Covid worldwide, and it's assumed that the second wave will cost another million lives.
I want to tell you about how David and I spent our first lockdown. Despite being disorganized and a bit of a punk at heart, I've had to master some critical homemaking skills over the years. I've raised two kids by myself, after all.
At the very start of lockdown, I diligently bought masks, gloves, medicines, ointments, sanitizers, and having grown up in the USSR and being familiar with the economy of scarcity – I got double quantities. I mastered the art of online shopping for EVERYTHING and was determined to stick to a strict quarantine. My projects have not been successful. David and I lived on Portobello Road in the heart of London.
Boris Johnson - the new UK prime minister, a Trump's doppelganger, regularly gave conflicting advice regarding the pandemic. In general, his line was, "those who die would have died anyway, so don't bother us with such trivialities."
Eventually, he caught Covid himself and shut up for a while.
He recovered, thanked the NHS's doctors and nurses for their help and sacrifice, and continued with the UK's medical system's privatization and clownish speeches.
The Portobello market remained open as usual for a long time. Most Londoners did not wear masks or gloves. The general attitude towards the pandemic was, with few exceptions, condescending.
I want to express my respect and send rays of love to women: girlfriends, mothers and grandmothers. In most families, they are responsible for the well-being, safety, hygiene, and shopping – all the mundane housekeeping protocols.
It was tough for David to abide by the rules of isolation, not go to the cafes, not meet with neighbors; he hated masks and continuously tried to reuse single-use gloves.
David (gently) complained about me to his friends, telling them how I "torture" him. In general, David was a heartfelt person, and his whining was in many ways boasting: "Look how Nika takes care and worries about me! "
However, I send rays of hatred to the careless idiots who giggled at my efforts to isolate and advised David to ignore my demands.
Of course, I know that I am the one to blame. David was an obedient Jewish husband. I could have put my foot down and demanded we leave immediately and spend the entire lockdown self-isolating in a remote village somewhere. But I didn't. I don't know why. I didn't want to be a control freak or a "strict wife."
We both started having strange symptoms in March. About once a week, we'd get headaches, felt muscle pain, tingling in the lungs, extreme tiredness (to the point of not being able to talk on the phone). Just continually wanting to sleep.
Then everything would go away, but after 5-8 days, the symptoms would repeat. We cared for each other tenderly: we brought tea with ginger and lemon and vitamins to each other. I mostly slept all day, and David took hot baths.
Later I recovered completely, while David developed strange new symptoms. It all started with a peculiar soapy taste in his mouth. He felt it after meals and said it continued throughout the day. We stopped using washing liquid on our dishes. David went to the dentist and had his gums deep cleaned several times to prevent inflammation. He got (several!) root canal treatments. We didn't know what else we could do.
He got an antibody test. The result was negative.
A while later, he began feeling a tingling sensation in his fingertips. He attributed this to practicing too much guitar playing. Then the tingling began in his toes and legs too. Fatigue. Mild but persistent abdominal pain; digestive disorders. But primarily constant fatigue. We consulted various doctors. We did various tests. First, in London, then in Berlin.
All the doctors said the same thing: there are no obvious symptoms, but you have "post-viral syndrome, wait, and everything will pass."
And we waited.
David was tested for Covid at clinics in Venice, with negative results. When I asked if his death could be related to Covid, the doctor replied, "if you test positive for Covid, then you have Covid. A negative test does not mean that you do not have it." And I feel the same way as his doctor. I feel that Covid was a reason why he developed this strange and bizarre illness so rapidly. I blame for this the joke-government of Boris Johnson and general human stupidity and self-reliance.
David died of necrotic pancreatitis and internal bleeding, but why suddenly the healthy, totally never-drinking-alcohol David would develop this disease. Why would it be so sudden and quick? Why did such strange symptoms accompany it? Why did it start right after we thought we had Covid?
Brave AI
Pancreatic Necrosis via Poisoning
Based on the provided search results, pancreatic necrosis can be caused by organophosphate poisoning, which is a type of slow poisoning. Organophosphates are a class of chemicals that inhibit cholinesterase, leading to a range of symptoms including pancreatitis. In some cases, this can progress to necrotizing pancreatitis, where pancreatic tissue dies due to lack of blood flow and oxygen.
For example, one study mentioned in the search results describes a patient who developed severe acute pancreatitis and total pancreatic necrosis after organophosphate intoxication. Another study notes that organophosphate poisoning can cause pancreatitis, and that necrotizing pancreatitis is a possible complication.
Additionally, the search results highlight the importance of early detection and treatment in preventing complications, including necrotizing pancreatitis, in cases of organophosphate poisoning.
In summary, while pancreatic necrosis is typically associated with acute pancreatitis, the search results suggest that slow poisoning with organophosphates can also cause pancreatic necrosis as a complication of pancreatitis.
Key points:
Organophosphate poisoning can cause pancreatitis.
Necrotizing pancreatitis is a possible complication of pancreatitis in organophosphate poisoning cases.
Early detection and treatment are crucial in preventing complications, including necrotizing pancreatitis.
Organophosphate Definition
Organophosphates (OPs) are a class of chemical compounds formed through the esterification process involving phosphoric acid and an alcohol. They are widely used as:
Insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides in agriculture and pest control
Neurotoxins, originally developed by the German military during World War II
Components in manufacturing plastics and solvents
Nika Dubrovsky - July 17, 2021
It has been almost a year since David died and it is still hard to believe it.
For the last five months of his life, he had been ill, complaining of several strange symptoms, but the doctors he had been seeing about it found nothing significant or life threatening.
The shock I felt that fateful afternoon, when within hours of David feeling ill on the beach in Venice, on the Lido, where Luchino Visconti shot his Death in Venice and I watched my husband collapse, still hasn’t faded.
Before David died, I had never seen a corpse. When my grandparents died, for all sorts of reasons, I never saw their dead bodies. A childhood friend died in a car accident, but when he was buried I stood far away and managed not to look at his corpse.
So in that hospital in Venice, my husband’s corpse was the first I had ever seen. He looked to me as though he had just fallen asleep, calm and even smiling a little.
I remember meeting David years ago, long before we married. It was in downtown New York. We went out for coffee at noon and walked around the city all day, talking for hours.
We were so different, he and I. I was born in the Soviet Union and he was raised in New York City, the “enemy’s heart.” Yet, immediately upon meeting David, I had the feeling I had always known this man, that despite the distance between us he was now my brother, an old friend, a comrade. Many people who knew David personally described him as having made a similar impression. Most people don’t open themselves up so fully and quickly to strangers. David almost always did.
When I lived for a time in Jerusalem, I was surprised to learn that what Jesus refers to as hell in the Gospels is not some underground S&M dungeon staffed by devils and full of horrors. Christ was instead referring to a very specific place known to all during his time in Jerusalem: the garbage dump, where the corpses of the poor, the homeless, and criminals were burned, their bones left to be scavenged by wild dogs and other animals. When Christ warned that sinners “will burn in hell,” he was issuing to those who stray from the light a very specific warning: if you do not invest your life with the living, you will die unloved and your corpse will be abandoned, fed to the dogs.
As an anthropologist, David knew that societies are largely defined by their relationship toward the dead. Our rituals of caring for the dead, celebrating their life and managing the grief that follows loss—this is culture, this is what makes us human.
David Graeber was my husband, but he was also an amateur guitar player, a lover of Japanese and Kurdish food, an anarchist, a science fiction enthusiast, a professor, a writer, and in a seemingly impossible way a kismet friend to hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world. Given the outpouring of condolences that I have received since his passing, I have never once feared that David was at risk of going to hell, of being left forgotten among the bodies of so many others. Not with him living on in the hearts and spirit of so many people.
Shortly after his death, my friend Simona Ferlini explained that the word “corpse” shares its etymology with corpus, referring to a body of laws or, in particular, a collection of works. That I would soon after our marriage find myself dealing with both David’s corpus as well as his corpse is, of course, a great personal tragedy. I will have to spend the rest of my life going through his corpus, experiencing the destruction of most of what was so dear, familiar, and precious to me. Locked as I was for an entire year in a small studio in the middle of pandemic-stricken London, I spent most of my time sifting through David’s archives, the writings he did not have time to publish, his diaries, his correspondence. The effluvia of any great thinker like David.
And even here I can see that he lives on, as I find myself continually unable to contain my admiration for David Graeber and my joy of looking through what made him who he was, what he laughed at, what fueled his courage, and how curious and unexpected it all seems in aggregate, on this side of his death.
Actually, it is a perversely happy feeling.
David Graeber was what the French call an homme de lettres. He lived to share his ideas, experimenting with as many ways of expressing them as he could. Much like Noam Chomsky, another noted anarchist-scholar, David made himself available to those outside of the academy and would speak almost everywhere he was invited. He poured over his lectures preparing them, writing virtually all the time. Anyone who knew David, who understood what motivated him, was aware that his dedication was not out of vanity. Rather, it was a project to change the world, as well as change himself and others, through ideas, texts, lectures, and speeches.
I believe his project is quite a success. He indeed made our world a slightly better place.
After David’s death, this process must continue. Especially today, when changing the world is a matter not of ideological design but of the sheer survival of everyone on earth.
David left an enormous archive—more than a hundred notebooks, as well as incidental jottings, many letters, and unpublished texts.
But how do I deal with it correctly in a digital age?
There are many different traditions of how to treat a corpus. Unfortunately, we live in conditions of late capitalism, with its brutal structures of symbolic powers and dominations.
Partly, the task is connected to the old Catholic way of “caring” for dead saints, involving endless body: bones, fingers, and so on, that would be dragged around to the various churches and put on display. As always with the church, money and profit get involved. In our time, all this could be succinctly termed the dismemberment and privatization of corpses.
I truly hope that this can be avoided with David Graeber’s body of work.
So, I plan to split David’s archive into two parts: a physical one and a virtual one. The physical documents, along with his symbolic academic capital, should be kept (and protected) by a meaningful academic institution. After all, David’s life was always very much connected to academia.
But there must yet be another part—the non-academic one. David and I wrote several essays in this vein, under the rubric of Art Communism.
In particular, we describe the concept of “culture and the reproduction of culture” introduced by Alexander Bogdanov, the founder of the early Soviet Proletkult.
Proletkult worked to create horizontal links, interdependent relationships between teachers and students, and most importantly, new modes of knowledge production and reproduction. The future free humans envisioned in the project would be understood not as romantic creators, not as professional-intellectuals, but as an amateur (or DIY, samodeyatelnost’in Russian) proletariat. Much of what Bogdanov and his allies described has now been realized in the best aspects of the Wikipedia project.
I am looking at David’s texts—his archive—as a very generous framework providing space for these horizontal connections, replete with open questions, doubts, and unexpected links to different thoughts, with entry points for reader-commentators almost anywhere.
I am thinking of creating a wiki environment for all who would be interested to join, including and above all non-academics, so that we are able not only to read his texts or examine scans of David’s (very beautiful) diaries but to have a space to complete, rewrite, compose and develop his works, thereby creating our own.
In other words, to set up some version of the International Proletkult, using David’s texts as a basis.
Perhaps this will continue the space of sharing content, creating conditions for working together, that David was arranging all his life. Through his corpus, David’s magical power to form direct emotional and intellectual connections with people, in person or through his texts, will make his legacy a living and constantly evolving project in which all of us, his readers and fellow writers, will be involved. By commenting on, thinking about and developing his projects, his thoughts, we will constantly shift the boundaries of the public and private, using our own experiences, our bodies and minds.
I would like to believe that this opening to a collective body of work is most consistent with the type of care David would practice and approve.
Just throwing ideas out there. Facts are he's gone, she's not.
If she didn't do it, then the search for the perps continues.
If she did do it, then the search, for the perps who enabled her, continues.
Her actions in the coming years, may shed some light on the matter.
Noteworthy fact: The Dawn of Everything was meant to precede a trilogy of books (co-written with David Wengrow) meant to change the course of human history.
He compared The Dawn of Everything to The Hobbit and this unwritten trilogy as his "Lord of the Rings".
There is apparently a vast amount of unpublished material that David Wengrow is presumably sitting on top of. If he doesn't publish any of it I think that will confirm my theory. I'm guessing he's scared. I haven't seen him say much on the subject of Graeber's death.
That was a massively great book, and i hope the other david has notes for the other books...
He was re-writing history in a more accurate way, and getting close to some special beliefs that, maybe the power wish very much to remain unquestioned.
I'm in 100% agreement that David's pancreatic necrosis was neither natural nor caused by 'Covid.' Your points are well researched and solidly argued. I have no particular regard for Nika but I'd throw out some counterpoints:
In a search on her, I came on this photo that she says was around the time she met David. She's an attractive dissident intellectual with two young kids whose childhood she says was 'difficult.' The son who looks no more than 1 here turned 18 in 2020: https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1333047723054993409.
That seems like a very long game if she had been recruited to kill David. And for the sake of his money, it seems like she already had him wrapped around her finger. He would have continued to bring in income and write new books. There's definitely something 'off' about her. She seems quite burdened by his 'corpus' for considering him 'the best man in the world.' But blaming her for wanting his money lets larger forces off the hook.
My guess du jour for what was touted as long Covid was something parasitic or bacterial, which is why HCQ and ivermectin worked. It's too soon for him to have gotten the vaccine, I think. But he could have been targeted individually or part of a random attack to keep the psyops going.
I remember reading that David was angry that his signature on a BDS petition was mentioned in their campaign without his permission. Nika mentions going to Jerusalem and says he's 'a good Jewish husband.' I think the PBI (powers behind Israel) are the ones engineering everything. I can see why they'd want to get him out of the way, as perhaps the clearest thinker of our generation.
Yet David had an interesting blend of socialism with his anarchy, as does Chomsky: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-is-the-problem. So I could see him swallowing the NHS line, hook and sinker, along with Nika. I'm reading your translation of his Kandioronk article now, thanks so much for that monumental addition to my knowledge and for this thought-provoking research. It's definitely a possibility I'd consider.
Thanks, Tereza! You make some good points - I hadn't considered the possibility that something parasitic or bacterial could have caused "long COVID", I explained it away by 1) the effects of isolation, 2) overuse of antibacterial soap, hand sanitizer, etc, 3) hyperchondria, 4) the power of suggestion. But tbh, I didn't give a lot of thought. If other people are sick, I don't generally regard it as my problem (unless it's a family member or close friend).
You make an interesting point about Nika and David meeting 15-20 years before he died. I don't have a good answer to that one other than to say that they didn't start dating until much, much later. Also, she could be lying. Are you able to find a photo of her and David together prior to, say, 2015?
I've made it my mission to read all of Graeber's books and explore the rabbit hole as deeply as possible because I'm convinced I'm onto something. I have a pretty elaborate theory that remains a work in progress.
You might be interested in this series also: https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/doe2-did-the-jesuits-unintentionally?utm_source=publication-search
Long Covid and monkey pox are smoke screens for Poison-19 injections