In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of international banking has alerted exploited populations the world over to the unsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetual growth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodation with capitalism.
In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organize on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.
An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.
Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.
On November 2nd, Cornell University is hosting an all-day symposium on Communist Currents. Panelists will put forward radical interventions on a range of issues from governance in Venezuela to the salience of BRICS rhetoric.
In addition, Verso authors Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels, will be chairing panels, and Alberto Toscano is set to present a paper.
The event is sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, with additional support from the Department of Government, Department of History, and the Program in French Studies.
Check out the full schedule here.
In addition, Verso authors Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels, will be chairing panels, and Alberto Toscano is set to present a paper.
The event is sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, with additional support from the Department of Government, Department of History, and the Program in French Studies.
Check out the full schedule here.
Read more @ Verso about Jodi Dean
The Communist Horizon
Jodi Dean
The Second Former-West Research Congress invites us to think with the idea of horizon. In keeping with its provocative temporalization of the West—rather than present the West, too, passes in 1989—the invitation construes our horizon as a temporal one, a future toward which we once aspired. This lost horizon, then, connotes privation, depletion, the loss of projects, goals, and utopias that oriented us toward the future. In the wake of this loss, we are asked to consider whether another world is possible, another horizon imaginable.
I initially understood the term “horizon” in a more mundane, spatial fashion, as the line dividing the visible, separating earth from sky. I like to pretend that I had in mind the cool, astro- physics notion of an event horizon. The event horizon surrounds a black hole, a singularity—it’s the boundary beyond which events cannot escape. While the event horizon denotes the curvature in space/time effected by a singularity, it’s not that much different from the spatial horizon: both evoke a line demarcating a fundamental division, that we experience as impossible to reach, and thus that we can neither escape nor cross (although an external observer could see us cross it). “Horizon,” then, tags not a lost future but a dimension of experience we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. The horizon is Real not just in the sense of impossible—we can never reach it—but also in the sense of the actual format, condition, and shape of our setting (and I take both these senses of Real to Lacanian). We can lose our bearings, but the horizon is a necessary condition or shaping of our actuality. Whether the effect of a singularity or the meeting of earth and sky, the horizon is the fundamental division establishing where we are. (...)
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Jodi Dean
The Second Former-West Research Congress invites us to think with the idea of horizon. In keeping with its provocative temporalization of the West—rather than present the West, too, passes in 1989—the invitation construes our horizon as a temporal one, a future toward which we once aspired. This lost horizon, then, connotes privation, depletion, the loss of projects, goals, and utopias that oriented us toward the future. In the wake of this loss, we are asked to consider whether another world is possible, another horizon imaginable.
I initially understood the term “horizon” in a more mundane, spatial fashion, as the line dividing the visible, separating earth from sky. I like to pretend that I had in mind the cool, astro- physics notion of an event horizon. The event horizon surrounds a black hole, a singularity—it’s the boundary beyond which events cannot escape. While the event horizon denotes the curvature in space/time effected by a singularity, it’s not that much different from the spatial horizon: both evoke a line demarcating a fundamental division, that we experience as impossible to reach, and thus that we can neither escape nor cross (although an external observer could see us cross it). “Horizon,” then, tags not a lost future but a dimension of experience we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. The horizon is Real not just in the sense of impossible—we can never reach it—but also in the sense of the actual format, condition, and shape of our setting (and I take both these senses of Real to Lacanian). We can lose our bearings, but the horizon is a necessary condition or shaping of our actuality. Whether the effect of a singularity or the meeting of earth and sky, the horizon is the fundamental division establishing where we are. (...)
Read the complete PDF
