Wow! eBook
The Actuality of Communism
Author(s): Bruno Bosteels (Author)
- Publisher: Verso
- Publication Date: June 1, 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 296 pages
- ISBN-10: 1844676951
- ISBN-13: 9781844676958
Book Description
One of the rising stars of contemporary critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought generated by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj iek, who are spearheading the revival of interest in communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of communist thought through the prism of “speculative leftism” – an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker Álvaro García Linera.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The Actuality of Communism is a remarkable achievement. Critically engaging some of the most prominent thinkers in contemporary left political theory, it moves beyond them, resetting the agenda for communism as not only a hypothesis and not only a struggle, but more vitally as the affirmation of the engaged, organized, political movement for emancipation and equality." - Jodi Dean, Theory & Event
"The book does what interventions must, namely draw a line of demarcation, in this case between communism as a real overdetermined process that must engage with the question of power and recent philosophical attempts to resuscitate the term as a pure, invariant kernel of sheer potentiality that exceeds any constitute power or historical actuality--an actuality which always amounts, in this instance, to the questions of state power and of socialism, as a certain modelling and management of the production of social wealth." - Jason E. Smith,
Radical PhilosophyAbout the Author
Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of Badiou and Politics and Marx and Freud in Latin America. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject, The Adventure of French Philosophy, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy, and Philosophy for Militants. Between 2005 and 2011 he served as the General Editor of diacritics.
