I am inspired by the remarkable similarities between Robert B. Pippin’s book Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1991, 2nd edition 1999, Blackwell) and my book-length scholarly project-in-progress, Tragedy of Revolution. Here are the basic ones. Both Pippin and I focus on the “paradox of autonomy” in Modernity: Pippin discusses (the ideal of) autonomy (in pursuit…
Category: defeat
Dylan Riley: “Reflections on an Inverted Revolution”
“We are living through an inverted revolution. The political heirs of Lenin and Gramsci are leading a right-wing transformation from the White House rather than a left-wing one from the streets. It is not the campus Marxists, but the thought leaders of the nativist right, who turned out to be the real followers of the…
Bernard Harcourt: “A Modern Counterrevolution”
First, a “counterrevolution” has been underway since the invention of counterinsurgency warfare in the 1950s and ’60s by French, British, and American commanders during the wars of independence in Algeria, Indochina, Malaya, Vietnam, and other former colonies. Those campaigns gave birth to counterinsurgency warfare logics and strategies—also known as unconventional or antiguerrilla warfare, or, as…
James Livingston: “Zizek Sends In The Clowns”
“How to conceive of revolution under the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves? Does radical pessimism allow us to see that our ethical principles are actually inscribed and faintly legible in those circumstances, so that our project need not be plotted as an escape—a prison break—from the benighted past? A better way to put…
Michele Garau: “The Strategy of Separation”
‘Beyond an idea of Revolution that would condemn us to be its Subjects, and in the meantime to administer the political misery that our great anticipation has in store for us. Instead, a revolutionary dynamic is something else, which we can imagine only in flashes. The cycle of riots and occupied squares that marked the…
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “From Revolution to Destitution”
“We have escaped the grip of the workers’ movement, but are struggling to move forward. We are in a situation where successful uprisings only produce failed revolutions. Practically and theoretically, we keep hitting our heads against a wall; many are recoiling, political horror vacui, and there is not a lot to learn from history, least of…
Peter Gelderloos: “Geopolitics for 2024 on the probabilities of state power or revolution”
“We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our…
Sahar Delijani on the Legacies of the Arab Spring
“The revolution in Tunisia was born on the ashes of Mohammad Bouazizi’s body. The revolution in Egypt on the broken face of the 28-year-old Khaleh Said beaten to death by security forces for posting a photo on social media. The revolts in Syria erupted when little boys were arrested and tortured by the police for…
Gerardo Munoz: “Mario Tronti: Revolutionary Adventurer in the Interregnum”
“It’s hard to think of another European intellectual who has gone from the communist party culture and the horizon of revolutionary politics (he was cofounder of the influential journal Classe Operaia) to parliamentary participation (as senator of the Italian left Partito Democratico) and, finally, to a thorough engagement with the theological-political vocabulary of Western Christianity, going as…
Mario Tronti interviewed: “I am defeated”
Nostalgia for revolutions?“No, if anything the twentieth century was the century of revolutions. But not only that. Where are the grand ideas, the great literature, the grand politics or the great art? I don’t seen anything like what the first half of the twentieth century produced.”