[ACAB] - 1312 - The Year of the Great Erasures.

Quimper, stencil - anno 1312 — (c) Fabrice Laudrin 2025

[French]

1312, as everyone knows, encodes ACAB. But it is not merely four digits sprayed onto a brick; it is an entire year carrying within itself a particular way of making things disappear.

When one pronounces “thirteen twelve,” something resonates — not a precise event, but a tone, the vibration of a world deciding that certain forms must cease to exist.1312 is not an isolated historical date; it is a conjunction.

A year in which erasure becomes a method, a logic, an administrative way of managing the real — deployed across the planet with uncanny synchrony.

One abolishes, dissolves, prohibits, encloses.What disturbs must be silenced.What lived too freely must be brought back into a controllable perimeter.

1312: the great erasure.

The year functions as a vast administrative threshold, a moment when institutions declare that the world must lose some of its thickness. And so, it erases not only bodies but ideas.

In the West, the gesture is the most spectacular: a religious, military, financial, intellectual order — one that shaped two centuries — is declared inadmissible.The official act is not condemnation but disappearance. One does not kill; one dissolves. What is suppressed is the possibility of continuing to think or act in a certain form.

What is targeted is autonomy, independence, internal sovereignty.

1312 marks the victory of a vertical architecture of power over a structure that had become too transversal. Erasure stabilizes.

Yet the same movement crosses other zones.

In Anatolia, in 1312, local logics of knowledge are crushed by imperial recompositions absorbing rival schools.

In Persia, 1312 sees religious authorities brutally imposing an orthodoxy by eliminating confraternities deemed too mobile.

In Andalusia, 1312 tightens the harshest juridical controls of the period, withdrawing from Jewish, Muslim, and philosophical minorities the possibility of transmitting certain forms of teaching.

Each time, it is not an army that is erased — it is an idea.

1312: the year of vertical power.

Thus, 1312 operates as a matrix of erasure. A year in which worlds retract.A year in which power reclaims what had been allowed to grow too freely. A year in which certain forms are forbidden from circulating. And whatever continues to circulate — ideas, memories, traces — becomes an anomaly. Erasure always fails, but it wounds.1312 is a year of wounds.

And this is precisely where “1312” painted today on a brick finds its echo. It does not refer only to ACAB; it resonates with a date when power attempted to erase what threatened to think otherwise. It is not a historical reference — often unconscious — but a symbolic structure.

Jung

The link between the number and the year is not historical; it is psychic.

Jung would have said: the symbol falls upon what resembles it.1312 calls 1312.

A buried cry meets a buried year.A porous brick meets a porous memory.

And contemporary erasure — too diluted, too rapid, too confident — repeats the ancient gesture: attempting to suppress what disturbs.

The failure is identical.The apparition as well.

1312 is a year in which the world wanted to become smoother. It never did.

No erasure has ever succeeded fully.What has been repressed continues to breathe in the margins of time.And graffiti today carries its involuntary signature.

Jungian Bibliography

• Jung, C. G. (1990). Synchronicité et Paracelsica. Albin Michel. → The theoretical foundation for understanding why the sign 1312 meets the year 1312 through psychic necessity, not historical causality.

• Jung, C. G. (1983). Aïon : Études sur la phénoménologie du Soi. Albin Michel. → Key text explaining how symbols possess an autonomy allowing them to reappear despite attempts at erasure.

• Jung, C. G. (1971). Les racines de la conscience. Buchet-Chastel. → Source for the idea that archaic contents can resurface in contemporary contexts without direct historical links.

• Jung, C. G. (1970). Psychologie et alchimie. Buchet-Chastel. → Describes how repression generates distorted reappearance — like 1312 returning under whitewash.

• Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychologie du symbole. Gallimard. → Shows how one symbol “calls” another, supporting your sentence: “1312 calls 1312.”

• Jung, C. G. (1953). L’âme et la vie. Buchet-Chastel. → Analyzes the persistence of rejected contents; crucial for understanding that apparition follows the failure of repression.

• Jung, C. G. (1980). Psychologie du transfert. Buchet-Chastel. → Essential for thinking of the brick as a projection surface where the city’s repressed material reappears.

• Jung, C. G. (1943). L’homme à la découverte de son âme. Georg. → Develops the idea that symbols reorganize themselves, explaining the involuntary convergence between the number and the year.

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