Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune - Softcover

Kristin Ross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784780545 ISBN 13: 9781784780548

Publisher: Verso, 2016

Synopsis

Kristin Ross's new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today's concerns - internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice - frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection's survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own 'working existence.' Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

About this title

Review:

'No work specifies more fully Marx's claim that, the greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its actual working existence.'' --Jacobin

'In Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune Kristin Ross argues that the spirit of the Commune is alive today among ... the Indignados in Spain and inside the Occupy movement. Ross discusses the 'political imaginary' that fuelled and outlived the Commune.' --London Review of Books

'In recent years, the Paris Commune has again moved to the center of political thinking. Kristin Ross's new book now, virtually for the first time, gives us an account of the intellectual antecedents of the Commune as well as its contemporary impact. This is an indispensable text for all current left theory!' - Fredric Jameson 'Ross evokes the exhilaration of art freed from the museum and being lived as something 'vital and indispensable to the community'' --Marx & Philosophy

About the Author:

Kristin Ross is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1784780545
• ISBN 13: 9781784780548
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 156