There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution - Softcover

Tarì, Marcello

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942173164 ISBN 13: 9781942173168

Publisher: Common Notions, 2021

Synopsis

"A powerful case for the persistent questioning and existential interruption that accompanies that pursuit of [happiness and revolution], and fuels it, and constitutes and ruptures its vagrant, open end."—Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"It is hard today to escape the perception that financial violence and fascism are suffocating every possibility of happiness…There Is No Unhappy Revolution shows a possible way out from this despair."—Franco "Bifo" Berardi, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility.

In a time of ongoing political, economic, and climate crisis can we afford our collective unhappiness any longer? There Is No Unhappy Revolution gives expression to the age of revolution unfolding before us. With equal parts sophistication and raw urgency, Marcello Tarì identifies the original moments as well as the powerful disruptive and creative content haunting our times like a specter.

The age of revolution is back, and with it, instability and uncertainty as major markers of our times. There is a renewed faith in popular rebellion as a means to enact sorely needed systemic change. At the heart of these dynamics rests a new theory of social change and societal well-being. Happiness is collective, not individual, as Marcello Tarì explains, and our collective desire for happiness is a revolutionary force that cannot and should not be contained.

One hundred years after the October Revolution, amidst our current civilizational crisis, is it still possible to think and build communism? Yes, Tarì responds, provided we radically rethink the tradition of revolutionary movements that have followed one century to another. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, he deftly confronts the different contemporary movements from the Argentinean insurrection of 2001 to Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the French movement against the labor law, and the Arab Spring, resurrecting and renewing a lineage of revolutionary thought, from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, that promises to make life livable.

About this title

About the Author

Marcello Tarì is an independent researcher. He is author of numerous essays and books in French and Italian, including Il ghiaccio era sottile: Per una storia dell’autonomia (Derive Approdi, 2012) and Non esiste la rivoluzione infelice: Il comunismo della destituzione (Derive Approdi, 2017); as well as Autonomie!: Italie, les années 1970 (La Fabrique, 2011) and Il n y a pas de révolution malheureuse: Le communisme de la destitution (Editions Divergences, 2019). Tarì has lived in the last few years between France and Italy. There Is No Unhappy Revolution is his first book in English.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“How does an epoch become an era, and thereby allow a new eon to be born?

Or, how does a revolt turn into an insurrection, and this into a revolution? For centuries, every generation finds itself thrust against this unsolved, and always imperative, question. It could be said that revolutionaries come into the world at the very moment when individuals pose these questions to themselves and begin, together with others, to elaborate answers. A social and spiritual battle, one that has given rise to daring experiments and amazing adventures which, it is true, have more often than not been defeated. Yet it often happened that the fight ended by the abandonment of the questioner. The tricks of History have always prevailed over the scandal of truth. Franz Kafka said that of revolutionary spiritual movements, which are always movements against history, it is as if nothing had happened yet. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, the question continues to surface from the ruins of time, undiminished.

Arriving now at the end of a civilization―ours, of course― the question finds itself urgently charged, carrying an unavoidable character, becoming even more precise, the silent reflection of an increasingly widespread disquiet. These are simple questions after all, repeated several times and from distant places. How to put an end to a dominion that does not want to end? How to put an end to the misery of an existence whose meaning escapes it from all sides? How to put an end to this present, whose architectural plan resembles that of a cell large enough to contain an entire population? How to put an end to a catastrophe that can no longer spread, since it is already everywhere, and has begun to dig under the feet of the Angel of history? Finally, and above all: how can we shift the axis of the world, orienting it along the abscissa of happiness? The answer is inseparable from the question, which, for this reason, must remain motionless but open to the use of whoever feels it emerge within itself. A historian of the Kabbala once remarked that the true doctrine consists entirely of questions. The answer then enters into existence, when it comes to completely coincide with the question.

These days, however, it seems it is the world itself, being now exhausted, that poses the question, before leaving the stage exhausted, because it has consumed all its possibilities. From now on, only the impossible counts. History, when it approaches the end, becomes enormously heavy to bear, and it’s been a long time that its ‘progress’ has signaled only the intensification of its catastrophe. The truth, buried under the immense heaps of progress’ debris, is that there has never been a single world that would be that of our present, enclosed in the quaternary ‘West- Modernity-Democracy-Capitalism’, but only an Earth that has never stopped transforming into a multiplicity of worlds. Worlds that appear unified in their separation and hierarchization by cybernetics, capital, metaphysics, and the spectacle.

Until not long ago, there existed a possibility, albeit a subaltern one, of naming the plurality of the worlds. But the present world, which is represented as the one and only unity of meaning, has also eliminated from the dominant discursive regime the modern political definitions of the ‘second’, ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ world, just as it did ‘classes’: one world, that of capital, and one class, the planetary bourgeoisie. This one world, this concrete abstraction that denies existence to all the other worlds―in a word, “civilization”― is precisely what is collapsing under the weight of its catastrophic triumph. Turning this collapse, this triumphal catastrophe, this impossibility, into the redemption of all the various worlds is the wager of today’s revolutionaries. To triumph against this unitary world before it collapses upon mankind would, in the end, be the only reasonable way to confront the West’s frantic will to apocalypse.

Revolutionaries are the militants of the time of the end, and within this temporality they work for the realization of a profane happiness. But we must bear in mind that the exhaustion of the possibilities of this world also includes the forms of political action that accompanied it. Unless we wish to persist in the mode of the undead, as zombies, a political identity that (like this world) has exhausted every possibility can only be laid to rest. If we are to seize upon the impossible, therefore, we are left with no choice but to modify this special form of life, this mask that modern revolutionary militancy was, and of which only fragments and ruins remain in memory (its historical ontology remains to be written). It is perhaps for this reason that the prevailing relationship to it has become one an unresolved mourning. The black North Face jacket, which has become a constant presence in every demonstration in which anything happens, seems to be there to remind each of us of the wider procession.

Edition details

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942173164
• ISBN 13: 9781942173168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224