Author: Revolutionary Initiative

The “Anarcho-Liberal”
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The “Anarcho-Liberal”

[From Dissent Magazine.]

“Its representatives had the modest ambitions of the social liberals of the center Left, but the flair for the dramatic associated with the most militant anarchists of the far Left.”

by Bhaskar Sunkara

Mark Engler’s commentary on my symposium entry and the “legacy of anti-globalization” more generally is appreciated. I don’t disagree with him on the specifics. “Anti-globalization” had its genesis before Seattle, rattled on after 9/11, and left behind a tangible legacy. But was this legacy an unambiguously positive one? The diversity of the global justice movement is undeniable, but to the extent its prominent intellectual voices represented broader trends, we can see the crystallization of a new type of radical that would come to prominence on the Left. The reconfiguration of the Left at the end of the twentieth century created a void. The “anarcho-liberal” filled it. Continue reading “The “Anarcho-Liberal””

The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean
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The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean

[This text comes from a talk given by Jodi Dean at the Brecht Forum in New York.  A video of the talk is available here.  Reposted from Kasama Project.]

The term “horizon” marks a division.

Understood spatially, the horizon is the line dividing the visible, separating earth from sky. Understood temporally, the horizon converges with loss in a metaphor for privation and depletion. The “lost horizon” suggests abandoned projects, prior hopes that have now passed away. Astrophysics offers a thrilling, even uncanny, horizon: the “event horizon” surrounding a black hole. The event horizon is the boundary beyond which events cannot escape. Although “event horizon” denotes the curvature in space/time effected by a singularity, it’s not much different from the spatial horizon. Both evoke a fundamental division, that we experience as impossible to reach, and that we can neither escape nor cross.

I use “horizon” not to recall a forgotten future but to designate a dimension of experience that we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. Continue reading “The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean”