The Communist Horizon
Jodi Dean and Bruno Bosteels with Astra Taylor
Thursday 18 October, 2012
8pm, $6/Rsvp
Brecht Forum
451 West Street
Join Verso Books, Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels (The Actuality of Communism), and Astra Taylor (ed. Occupy!) in celebrating the launch of Jodi Dean's new book, The Communist Horizon, and Verso's continuing Pocket Communism series. Dean and Bosteels, with Taylor as moderator, will examine new manifestations of the idea of communism, especially in light of the Occupy movement and other forms of anti-capitalist uprising that spanned the globe in 2011 and 2012.
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.
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.
Bruno Bosteels is currently a professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has translated several texts by Alain Badiou and has published widely on modern Latin American literature and culture, on contemporary European philosophy and political theory, and on art and aesthetic theory. His books include Badiou and Politics (2011) and Marx and Freud in Latin America (2012
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.
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.
Bruno Bosteels is currently a professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has translated several texts by Alain Badiou and has published widely on modern Latin American literature and culture, on contemporary European philosophy and political theory, and on art and aesthetic theory. His books include Badiou and Politics (2011) and Marx and Freud in Latin America (2012