Communal Luxury

The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune

by Kristin Ross

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.

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Pub Date Apr 07 2015 | Archive Date Apr 07 2015

Description

Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century

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.

Advance Praise

“Communal Luxury is a rich and complex book. It is an inspired rereading of the Paris Commune. It is a critique of historical accounts that ignore the ways in which the practices of insurrectionary movements generate their own theory. It is a call to historians to attend to the alternatives offered at decisive moments of political and economic consolidation. It is, as well, Ross’s own manifesto about how we might think our futures differently. This is a history with enormous relevance for our contemporary political moment.”
—Joan W. Scott, Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton

“May ’68 and Its Afterlives dismantles every cliché we have about the uprisings in Paris. But in a deeper sense, it is about what has been made of May. Kristin Ross is, to my knowledge, the first person working either here or in France to take on the complexity of thirty years of ideological discourse about May ’68. We can’t underestimate the importance of this book, not just for studying France, but for understanding political experience anywhere in the world.”
—Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (in praise of May ’68 and Its Afterlives)

“A rare example of cultural studies done with zest as well as depth...this must be the first book to make a firm link between [Jacques Tati’s] Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and [Roland Barthe’s] Mythologies.”
—New Statesman & Society (in praise of Fast Cars, Clean Bodies)